Longitudinal Associations Between Personality Profile Stability and Adjustment in College Students: Distinguishing Among Overall Stability,Distinctive Stability,and Within‐Time Normativeness

ABSTRACT In the present study, longitudinal associations of 3 aspects of personality profile stability (i.e., overall stability, distinctive stability, and within‐time normativeness) with 3 adjustment measures (i.e., depressive symptoms, self‐esteem, and delinquency) were examined, using 4 waves of longitudinal data on a Belgian college sample (N=565). Longitudinal path models revealed strong longitudinal associations between adjustment and overall stability. Subsequent analyses showed that it is not the degree to which one's personality profile consistently diverges from the average personality profile within a population (i.e., distinctive stability) that is related to adjustment but the degree to which a personality profile of an individual matches the average personality profile within the sample at a certain point in time (i.e., within‐time normativeness). The current study thereby underscores the importance of distinguishing normativeness and distinctiveness when examining personality profile stability.     

Why professional athletes need a prolonged period of warm-up and other peculiarities of human motor learning

Professional athletes involved in sports that require the execution of fine motor skills must practice for a considerable length of time before competing in an event. Why is such practice necessary? Is it merely to warm-up the muscles, tendons, and ligaments, or does the athlete's sensorimotor network need to be constantly recalibrated? In this article, the authors present a point of view in which the human sensorimotor system is characterized by: (a) a high noise level and (b) a high learning rate at the synaptic level (which, because of the noise, does not equate to a high learning rate at the behavioral level). They argue that many heuristics of human skill learning, including the need for a prolonged period of warm-up in experts, follow from these assumptions.     

Processing approaches to cognition: The impetus from the levels-of-processing framework

Processing approaches to cognition have a long history, from act psychology to the present, but perhaps their greatest boost was given by the success and dominance of the levels-of-processing framework. We review the history of processing approaches, and explore the influence of the levels-of-processing approach, the procedural approach advocated by Paul Kolers, and the transfer-appropriate processing framework. Processing approaches emphasise the procedures of mind and the idea that memory storage can be usefully conceptualised as residing in the same neural units that originally processed information at the time of encoding. Processing approaches emphasise the unity and interrelatedness of cognitive processes and maintain that they can be dissected into separate faculties only by neglecting the richness of mental life. We end by pointing to future directions for processing approaches.     

Enthusiasm Versus Self-Possession: The Art of Psychological Science

In this article, I propose that psychology is an art, and that it can be so without forfeiting its identity as a developing science. In support of this proposal, I outline the ways in which art and science unnecessarily have become dichotomized, and I suggest a framework for integrating art and science. This integration is based on reframing the art versus science tension as a vehicle through which the basic human dynamic of "enthusiasm versus self-possession" is expressed. I apply this new framework to the field of psychology and outline ways in which research and practice in psychology can be unified to produce an integrated, dynamic, and creative field.     

Maternal teaching techniques and preschool children's ideational fluency

As a counterpart to research showing relationships between parental behaviors and attitudes and children's divergent thinking, this study investigated mothers’ teaching techniques and preschool children's ideational fluency, one aspect of creativity. Twenty mother‐child dyads were videotaped interacting in both a warm‐up and structured teaching session. Mothers’ teaching behaviors were assessed with the Maternal Teaching Observation Technique (MTOT) and children's ideational fluency was measured with the Multidimensional Stimulus Fluency Measure (MSFM). Correlational analyses indicated relationships between children's divergent thinking and mothers’ use of verbal negative feedback (r = .51), physical control (r = ‐.40), and visual cues (r = ‐.44).     

Adult Attachment and Exploration: Linking Attachment Style to Motivation and Perceptions of Support in Adult Exploration

Taking an attachment theory perspective, the present studies investigated partner-related motives for exploration and perceptions of romantic partners as persons who might provide support for exploration. We argue, from an attachment theory perspective, that more avoidant persons may use exploration as a way to distance themselves from their partners, whereas more anxious persons may use exploration as a means of getting closer to or depending on their partners. Attachment theory also suggests that more insecure individuals will tend to see their partners as providing less support and less effective support for exploration. Our research found support for both of these hypotheses. In this article we also investigate potential mediating models for linking attachment style to motives for exploration and perceptions of partner support.     

The demotion of alpha‐homo sapiens: Consciousness,punctuated equilibrium,and the laws of the game

The result of using Eigen and Winkler's LIFE/DEATH GAME to integrate Rashevksy's social physics and Rapoport's mathematical game theory, synchrony removes the arbitrariness from problems of ethics. It focuses on the primary conflicts between strategies that optimize individual survival and those that optimize survival of groups. According to synchrony, cooperation is an optimal strategy, not because cooperation conforms to some ethical pattern, but because the evolution of our technical societies has made the alternatives to cooperation potentially lethal at all levels of human interaction. Eigen and Winkler offer hypercycles as a possible method of resolving problems that conventional wisdom has labeled “irreconcilable differences.”

Combined with the findings of clinical psychologist Paul Meehl and cultural anthropologist Magoroh Maruyama, Eigen and Winkler's LIFE/ DEATH GAME indicates that a pattern of reasoning, called Alpha‐H, is not only a formidable obstacle to cooperation, it threatens contemporary societies with extinction through violent conflicts, social upheavals economic collapse or all three together.

The Demotion of Alpha‐H argues that an inability to deal constructively with change and/or diversity is Alpha‐H's fatal flaw. And the removal of gender bias toward opponent processes reasoning is a crucial step toward correcting it. The key concept is the LIFE/DEATH GAME.     

Latent Differential Equation Modeling of Self-Regulatory and Coregulatory Affective Processes

We examine emotion self-regulation and coregulation in romantic couples using daily self-reports of positive and negative affect. We fit these data using a damped linear oscillator model specified as a latent differential equation to investigate affect dynamics at the individual level and coupled influences for the 2 partners in each couple. Results indicate an absence of damping of relationship-specific affect within individuals in the sample. When both positive and negative affect are modeled at the individual level, the influence of positive affect is greater than that of negative affect. At the dyad level, the findings indicate coupled influences in both positive and negative affect between partners. With regard to positive affect, females are sensitive to their partners' overall displacement from average as well as their rate of change; males are sensitive only to their partners' displacement from average. For negative affect both partners are sensitive to each other's displacement from average, yet there are no coupled influences for rates of change in this dimension. We interpret the influence of the parameters on the system by examining the expected behavior of the system as a function of varying parameter values.     

An Unscented Kalman Filter Approach to the Estimation of Nonlinear Dynamical Systems Models

In the past several decades, methodologies used to estimate nonlinear relationships among latent variables have been developed almost exclusively to fit cross-sectional models. We present a relatively new estimation approach, the unscented Kalman filter (UKF), and illustrate its potential as a tool for fitting nonlinear dynamic models in two ways: (1) as a building block for approximating the log–likelihood of nonlinear state–space models and (2) to fit time-varying dynamic models wherein parameters are represented and estimated online as other latent variables. Furthermore, the substantive utility of the UKF is demonstrated using simulated examples of (1) the classical predator-prey model with time series and multiple–subject data, (2) the chaotic Lorenz system and (3) an empirical example of dyadic interaction.     

Does response mode affect amount recalled or the magnitude of the testing effect?

The testing effect is the finding that retrieval practice can enhance recall on future tests. One unanswered question is whether first-test response mode (writing or speaking the answer) affects final-test performance (and whether final-test response mode itself matters). An additional unsettled issue is whether written and oral recall lead to differences in the amount recalled. In three experiments, we examined these issues: whether subjects can recall more via typing or speaking; whether typing or speaking answers on a first test can lead to better final-test performance (and whether an interaction occurs with final-test response mode) and whether any form of overt response leads to better final-test performance as compared to covert retrieval (thinking of the answer but not producing it). Subjects studied paired associates; took a first test by typing, speaking, or thinking about responses; and then took a second test in which the answers were either spoken or typed. The results revealed few differences between typing and speaking during recall, and no difference in the size of the testing effect on the second test. Furthermore, an initial covert retrieval yielded roughly the same benefit to future test performance as did overt retrieval. Thus, the testing effect was quite robust across these manipulations. The practical implication for learning is that covert retrieval provides as much benefit to later retention as does overt retrieval and that both can be effective study strategies.