Elucidating the Construct Validity of the Psychopathic Personality Inventory Triarchic Scales

This study sought to replicate and extend Hall and colleagues’ (2014) work on developing and validating scales from the Psychopathic Personality Inventory (PPI) to index the triarchic psychopathy constructs of boldness, meanness, and disinhibition. This study also extended Hall et al.'s initial findings by including the PPI Revised (PPI–R). A community sample (n = 240) weighted toward subclinical psychopathy traits and a male prison sample (n = 160) were used for this study. Results indicated that PPI–Boldness, PPI–Meanness, and PPI–Disinhibition converged with other psychopathy, personality, and behavioral criteria in ways conceptually expected from the perspective of the triarchic psychopathy model, including showing very strong convergent and discriminant validity with their Triarchic Psychopathy Measure counterparts. These findings further enhance the utility of the PPI and PPI–R in measuring these constructs.     

Social Problems in ADHD: Is it a Skills Acquisition or Performance Problem?

Recent models suggest that social skills training’s inefficacy for children with ADHD may be due to target misspecification, such that their social problems reflect inconsistent performance rather than knowledge/skill gaps. No study to date, however, has disentangled social skills acquisition from performance deficits in children with ADHD. Children ages 8–12 with ADHD (n?=?47) and without ADHD (n?=?23) were assessed using the well-validated social behavioral analysis framework to quantify cross-informant social skills acquisition deficits, performance deficits, and strengths. Results provided support for the construct and predictive validities of this Social Skills Improvement System (SSIS) alternate scoring method, including expected magnitude and valence relations with BASC-2 social skills and ADHD symptoms based on both parent and teacher report. Acquisition deficits were relatively rare and idiosyncratic for both the ADHD and Non-ADHD groups, whereas children with ADHD demonstrated cross-informant social performance deficits (d?= 0.82–0.99) on several specific behaviors involving attention to peer directives, emotion regulation, and social reciprocity. Relative to themselves, children with ADHD were perceived by parents and teachers as exhibiting more social strengths than social acquisition deficits; however, they demonstrated significantly fewer social strengths than the Non-ADHD group (d?=??0.71 to ?0.89). These findings are consistent with recent conceptualizations suggesting that social problems in ADHD primarily reflect inconsistent performance rather than a lack of social knowledge/skills. Implications for refining social skills interventions for ADHD are discussed.     

The Interactive Influence of Prosocial Places,Youth Population,and Poverty on Incidents of Violent Assault

The article builds on previous work by Roman and colleagues in order to specify the potential causes for increased incidents of violent assault in areas featuring a high number of prosocial institutions (i.e., schools, recreation centers). Utilizing aspects of routine activity theory and crime pattern theory, the argument is presented that both poverty and youth population will have a conditioning impact on the relationship between the presence of prosocial places and incidence of violent assault. Least squares regression was utilized in order to show that such institutions can serve as generators for offending and/or victimization, and that their location in lower income areas may magnify the problem.     

Sleep Increases Susceptibility to the Misinformation Effect

When individuals witness an event and are exposed to misleading postevent information, they often incorporate the misleading information into their memory for the original event, a phenomenon known as the misinformation effect. The present study examined the role of sleep in the misinformation effect. Participants (N = 177) witnessed two events; were exposed to misleading postevent information immediately, 12 hours later the same day, 12 hours later the next day, or 24 hours later; and then took a recognition test. All groups demonstrated the misinformation effect, and this effect was larger in groups with an overnight retention interval. Signal detection analyses revealed that sleep decreased sensitivity. These results suggest that sleep increases susceptibility to the misinformation effect, which may occur because sleep results in gist‐based representations of original events or because sleep improves learning of postevent information. Implications for interviewing eyewitnesses are discussed. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The misinformation effect is unrelated to the DRM effect with and without a DRM warning

The misinformation and Deese–Roediger–McDermott (DRM) paradigms are used to study forms of false memories. Despite the abundance of research using these two paradigms, few studies have examined the relationship between the errors that arise from them. In the present study, 160 participants completed a misinformation task and two DRM tasks, receiving a warning about the effect before the second DRM task. Participants demonstrated misinformation and DRM effects (with and without the warning), but susceptibility to these forms of false memory were not significantly related across individuals. The DRM warning reduced the DRM effect, and signal detection analysis revealed that the DRM warning reduced a liberal response bias in this task. Sensitivity and response bias in both DRM tasks were not significantly related to these measures in the misinformation task. These findings suggest that these two forms of false memories are not interchangeable and they appear to be the result of different cognitive processes.     

Freedom,Firearms, and Civil Resistance

The claim that guns can safeguard freedom is common in US political discourse. In light of a broadly republican understanding of freedom, I evaluate this claim and its implications. The idea is usually that firearms would enable citizens to engage in revolutionary violence against a tyrannical government. I argue that some of the most common objections to this argument fail, but that the argument is fairly weak in light of other objections. I then defend a different argument for the claim that guns can safeguard freedom. I claim that firearm ownership among members of oppressed groups can hinder the use of systematic violence aimed at preventing them from exercising their basic liberties. I show how a commitment to armed self-defense is compatible with non-violent civil resistance as a tool of political change, and show how the former facilitated the latter during the Civil Rights Movement. Finally, I consider the policy implications of my argument. I don’t think it vindicates lax gun control policies. However, it may vindicate some individuals acquiring guns and learning how to use them, and some organizations aiding them in doing so.

     

Attention and the Cognitive Penetrability of Perception

One sceptical rejoinder to those who claim that sensory perception is cognitively penetrable is to appeal to the involvement of spatial attention. While the sceptic is correct that some putative cases are accurately deflected in this way, the rejoinder oversimplifies the possible roles that attention might play in relevant contexts. This paper identifies alternative ways that selective attention might play a role in cognitive effects on perception. What emerges is a plausible and well-evidenced mental schema that describes attention-mediated cognitive penetration.     

Trait means and desirabilities as artifactual and real sources of differential stability of personality traits

Using data from 3 personality trait inventories and 7 samples, we show that trait items that have means near the scale midpoint and that vary more in their perceived desirability (e.g., items related to dominance, creativity, traditionalism, and organization) tend to be more stable over time, whereas items with means near the scale maximum or minimum and that vary less in their perceived desirability (e.g., items related to agreeableness, intellect, and reliability) tend to be less stable. Our findings indicate that items with means near the scale maximum or minimum have lower stabilities primarily due to having lower measurement dependability (i.e., short-term stabilities unlikely to reflect true change). However, items varying more in their desirability are more stable even after accounting for measurement dependability, consistent with the view that trait stability is facilitated in part by individuals actively working to develop in the direction they find desirable.     

New considerations for the cognitive locus of impairment in the irrelevant-sound effect

The finding that serial recall performance for visually presented items is impaired by concurrently presented task-irrelevant speech or sounds is referred to as the irrelevant-speech/-sound effect (ISE). Substantial evidence has indicated that the impairment of serial rehearsal can result in an ISE, and this may be explained by several models. The present series of experiments has demonstrated an ISE in surprise nonserial recognition tasks in which participants were unaware of the need to maintain a large number of visual items for a later memory test, suggesting that neither the rehearsal nor maintenance of order information is necessary for observing the ISE. This effect was observed for both steady-state and changing-state irrelevant sounds, suggesting that the present results do not derive from a confusion of order information, but instead provide evidence that identity representations can also be impaired by irrelevant sound.