Are cross-cultural comparisons of personality profiles meaningful? Differential item and facet functioning in the Revised NEO Personality Inventory

Measurement invariance is a prerequisite for confident cross-cultural comparisons of personality profiles. Multigroup confirmatory factor analysis was used to detect differential item functioning (DIF) in factor loadings and intercepts for the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (P. T. Costa, Jr., & R. R. McCrae, 1992) in comparisons of college students in the United States (N = 261), Philippines (N = 268), and Mexico (N = 775). About 40%-50% of the items exhibited some form of DIF and item-level noninvariance often carried forward to the facet level at which scores are compared. After excluding DIF items, some facet scales were too short or unreliable for cross-cultural comparisons, and for some other facets, cultural mean differences were reduced or eliminated. The results indicate that considerable caution is warranted in cross-cultural comparisons of personality profiles.     

Authentic leadership. Concept and validation of the ALQ in Spain

This study presents the validation of the Authentic Leadership Questionnaire (ALQ) in a sample of more than 600 Spanish employees. This questionnaire measures four distinct but related substantive components of authentic leadership. These components are: self-awareness, relational transparency, balanced processing, and internalized moral perspective. Structural equation modeling confirmed that the Spanish version of ALQ has high reliability and predictive validity for important leadership outputs such as perceived effectiveness of leadership, followers' extra effort and satisfaction with the leader.     

Effects of the psycholinguistic variables on the lexical decision task in Spanish: A study with 2,765 words

In order to explore the role of the main psycholinguistic variables on visual word recognition, several mega-studies have been conducted in English in recent years. Nevertheless, because the effects of these variables depend on the regularity of the orthographic system, studies must also be done in other languages with different characteristics. The goal of this work was to conduct a lexical decision study in Spanish, a language with a shallow orthography and a high number of words. The influence of psycholinguistic variables on latencies corresponding to 2,765 words was assessed by means of linear mixed-effects modeling. The results show that some variables, such as frequency or age of acquisition, have significant effects on reaction times regardless of the type of words used. Other variables, such as orthographic neighborhood or imageability, were significant only in specific groups of words. Our results highlight the importance of taking into account the peculiarities of each spelling system in the development of reading models.     

I don't get you. Action observation effects inverted by kinematic variation

Recent studies have reported an intricate interplay between affordance and mirror effects (the imitation of another agent) when participants attend to the concurrent presentation of an object and another agent interacting with it. In the present paper, we compare two experimental settings in which an observed action was presented as a prime for a task involving the categorization of a graspable object. In experiment 1a, the action depicted a reach and grasp gesture whereas in experiment 1b, only the reach phase was presented. This modification led to very different outcomes. Experiment 1a reflected the traditional imitation effect elicited by human motion. Conversely, experiment 1b showed the facilitation of contralateral responses. Affordance effects were found in experiment 1a only for the RVF. Our results support the view that motor simulation processes underlying imitation or joint actions are extremely sensitive to specific phase kinematics.     

The power within: Mass media,scientific entertainment,and the introduction of psychical research into China, 1900–1920

How did a new science initially promoted by only a few individuals eventually become a widespread cultural phenomenon practiced and known by thousands of people? Following a transnational approach, this article traces the introduction of psychical research into China during the first two decades of the 20th century. Known in the Republican period (1912–1949) as Spiritual Science (xinling kexue or xinling yanjiu), psychical research flourished between the 1920s and 1930s, playing a key role in the popularization of applied psychology and mind-cure across China. This article takes a step back from the heyday of Spiritual Science by looking at the period that immediately preceded and helped define it. Focused on wide-circulation newspapers, popular manuals, and stage performances, it teases out the ways in which Chinese popular culture translated European, American, and Japanese psychical research to local Chinese audiences in the midst of China's search for modernity. By naturalizing the reality of psychic powers, spiritual scientists blurred the boundaries between science and superstition in a period when these were posited as diametrically opposed.