Structure of the Personality Beliefs Questionnaire-Short-Form: Smallest Space Analysis

Butler et al. (Cognitive Therapy and Research 31:357?C370, 2007) developed the Personality Beliefs Questionnaire-Short Form (PBQ-SF), from an earlier longer version (Beck and Beck 1991), to assess the types of schemata associated with different personality disorders. This study explored the structure of PBQ-SF using Guttman??s Smallest Space Analysis. Participants were 228 students who volunteered for the study. The two facets (each with two subsets) suggested by the analysis to characterize the structure of the personality disorder subscales were Ego Concerns (self-enhancement versus self-protection) and Control Concerns (feelings lack of control versus need for control). Clinical implications of the findings include targeting major dysfunctional thinking, as suggested by the aforementioned two facets and their subsets, in the treatment of personality disorders.     

On Some Aristotelian Sources of Modern Argumentation Theory

Although he does not provide a general analysis of argumentation, Aristotle is a highly influential source of modern argumentation theory. In his treatises the Topics, the Sophistical Refutations and the Rhetoric, Aristotle presents complementary aspects of a theory of sound arguments that are seen as the most effective means of persuasion. Aristotle’s central notion of a deductive argument (sullogismos) does not include references to an addressee, the situative context or non-verbal aspects of communication, and thus differs from some modern views on argumentation. A deductive argument in the Aristotelian sense is a sequence of intellectual steps where the conclusion follows of necessity from the premises. Aristotle does not relativize or relax this notion but takes other factors into account by providing supplementary theoretical elements. For example, he reflects on acceptable premises (endoxa), the adjustment of rhetorical arguments to the horizon of the audience, methods of finding premises on the basis of argumentative schemes (topoi), the use of non-argumentative means of persuasion, and a framework of implicit discourse rules. Many of these themes are, albeit under a different name, still discussed in modern argumentation theory.     

Switching binding states

Recently, we introduced two illusions: Feature inheritance and shine-through (Herzog & Koch, 2001). In both cases, a vernier precedes a grating for a short time. In feature inheritance the grating comprises a small number of elements to which properties of the foregoing vernier are bound. The vernier itself remains invisible. In shine-through, a grating comprising a larger number of elements follows the foregoing vernier. Surprisingly, the vernier becomes visible as an entity in its own right and does not bequeath its features to the grating. Two “objects” are perceived each preserving its properties. Therefore, each of the two illusions represents a different state of feature binding. Our results suggest that feature binding is based on an antecedent segmentation process that might be viewed as a binding process itself.     

Differentiation of Assaultive Delinquents with the Hand Test

The AOS score on the Hand Test significantly differentiated assaultive from non-assaultive delinquents, correctly categorizing 78 percent of the subjects.     

Differentiation of Aggressive Behavior of Institutionalized Schizophrenics with the Hand Test

Changes and trends in personality assessment documented through examination of the first issues of the Journal of Personality Assessment (JPA) for the years 1937 to 1997 revealed the following: (a) compared to the Journal of Personality and PsychologicalReview, JPA published more women first authors and coauthors in every issue except in 1987; (b) of the total 8,524 individuals whose assessment protocols comprised data sets in the 7 issues, l,6 15 (19%) were patients and 4,839 (57%) were undergraduate college students; (c) combining patients and nonpatients, the average age of children under 13 was 12.24 years, the average age of high school students was 15.28 years, and the average age of adults was 24.20 years; (d) only 6% of the participants were identified as African American, Mexican American, Asian Americans, or other; and (e) in the 74 articles examined, 98 different tests, techniques, or tasks to assess personality were discussed. We suggest that future research should include a more diverse group of participants that includes more older people and more people of color.     

Beyond “Objective” and “Projective”: A Logical System for Classifying Psychological Tests: Comment on Meyer and Kurtz (2006)

Using a diverse sample of 4,786 protocols obtained with the Rorschach Performance Assessment System (Meyer, Viglione, Mihura, Erard, &; Erdberg, 2011), we provide a contemporary overview of how people organize Rorschach's inkblots into identifiable regions while formulating responses. After examining how frequently each location was used across all cards in this sample, we examined the consistency of their use by computing parallel information in 17 samples (N = 4,701) obtained using the Comprehensive System (CS; Exner, 2003), including clinical, nonclinical, and adult, child, and adolescent data. Even though the CS data could only record a single location for each response, the average correlation of location use across samples was .96. The results also document continuous dimensionality in use rather than any discontinuities that would demarcate a boundary between common and uncommon locations. Implications of this notable reproducibility and dimensionality are discussed for future conceptualization of location typicality, including location coding considerations and possibilities for improved measures of perceptual fit.     

American Time-Styles: A Finite-Mixture Allocation Model for Time-Use Analysis

Time-use has already been the subject of numerous studies across multiple disciplines such as economics, marketing, sociology, transportation and urban planning. However, most of this research has focused on comparing demographic groups on a few broadly defined activities (e.g., work for pay, leisure, housework, etc.). In this study we take a holistic perspective, identifying a typology of latent “time-styles,” that defines the different ways people allocate the 24 hr in a day across multiple competing daily activities. We propose a finite-mixture time-allocation model that accounts for differences in life priorities across individuals, taking into consideration the fact that we all have the same “budget” of 24 hr to spend every day and that this allocation leads to highly sparse, truncated data. This model is then applied to time-use data from the American Time Use Survey collected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2006.     

The corroboration paradox

Evidentiary propositions E ₁ and E ₂, each p-positively relevant to some hypothesis H, are mutually corroborating if p(H|E ₁ ∩ E ₂) > p(H|E _i ), i = 1, 2. Failures of such mutual corroboration are instances of what may be called the corroboration paradox. This paper assesses two rather different analyses of the corroboration paradox due, respectively, to John Pollock and Jonathan Cohen. Pollock invokes a particular embodiment of the principle of insufficient reason to argue that instances of the corroboration paradox are of negligible probability, and that it is therefore defeasibly reasonable to assume that items of evidence positively relevant to some hypothesis are mutually corroborating. Taking a different approach, Cohen seeks to identify supplementary conditions that are sufficient to ensure that such items of evidence will be mutually corroborating, and claims to have identified conditions which account for most cases of mutual corroboration. Combining a proposed common framework for the general study of paradoxes of positive relevance with a simulation experiment, we conclude that neither Pollock’s nor Cohen’s claims stand up to detailed scrutiny. I am quite prepared to be told…”oh, that is an extreme case: it could never really happen!” Now I have observed that this answer is always given instantly, with perfect confidence, and without any examination of the proposed case. It must therefore rest on some general principle: the mental process being something like this—“I have formed a theory. This case contradicts my theory. Therefore, this is an extreme case, and would never occur in practice.” Rev. Charles L. Dodgson      

Sensory Discrimination,Working Memory and Intelligence in 9‐Year‐Old and 11‐Year‐Old Children

More than a century ago, Galton and Spearman suggested that there was a functional relationship between sensory discrimination ability and intelligence. Studies have since been able to confirm a close relationship between general discrimination ability (GDA) and IQ. The aim of the present study was to assess whether this strong relationship between GDA and IQ could be due to working memory (WM) demands of GDA tasks. A sample of 140 children (seventy 9‐year‐olds and seventy 11‐year‐olds) was studied. Results showed that there was a significant overlap between WM, GDA and fluid intelligence. Furthermore, results also revealed that WM could not explain the relationship between GDA and fluid intelligence as such, but that it acted as a bottleneck of information processing, limiting the influence of GDA on the prediction of fluid intelligence. Specifically, GDA's influence on the prediction of intelligence was only visible when WM capacity was above a certain level. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.