Assessing the likelihood of reliable workplace behavior: further contributions to the validation of the Employee Reliability Inventory.

This paper summarizes a number of studies in which the validity of the Employee Reliability Inventory, a preemployment screening instrument designed to assess the likelihood of reliable and productive workplace behavior, was examined. Criterion-related studies compared the scores of a broadly diverse group of job applicants with those obtained from an array of criterion and comparison groups, for whom there was documented evidence of reliable or unreliable behavior. Criterion-related evidence indicates that the six scales are effective in differentiating a variety of criterion groups with unreliable behavior from a number of different job applicant comparison groups. Construct-related evidence for the validity of an emotional adjustment scale is reported as well. The issue of response distortion in preemployment inventories is discussed, and data are reported which indicate that scores on all six scales appear to be functionally free from the potentially confounding effects of response distortion. These results are consistent with the original validation and cross-validation findings, which supported the validity of the six scales when assessing the likelihood of reliable behavior in a population of job applicants.     

Impulsiveness, attitude to authority, and gender.

This article examined the relationship between impulsiveness and attitudes toward institutional authority among Australian secondary school students. Reliable questionnaire measures of these constructs were completed by 48 boys and 57 girls, about 14 years of age. Correlations between impulsiveness and attitude to authority differed between the sexes, with a significant negative correlation of -.43 being obtained for boys only.     

Reliability and validity of the Cognitive Slippage Scale in two populations.

Analyses of responses from a clinical sample of 120 patients (primarily schizophrenics) and from 158 college students to the Cognitive Slippage Scale, a scale designed by Miers and Raulin to identify speech deficits and confused thinking in schizophrenic and schizotypal personality disorders showed high internal reliability; Cronbach's coefficients alpha were .89 and .86 in the clinical and college student samples, respectively. The mean scale scores significantly differentiated the two samples. Also, change scores over 4 wk. showed adequate stability for both samples. Item analysis indicated Items 11, 20, 21, and 28 may not reliably discriminate between schizophrenic and college student samples. Over-all, these preliminary results are consistent with the reliability and validity of the scale.     

Demoralization and living alone: outcome from an urban community study.

The purpose of the present study was to investigate differences in demoralization between those who live in single-person households and those who live in households with others in a random sample of 8,634 urban adults. Responses to the 26-item Psychiatric Epidemiologic Research Interview did not substantiate that adults who live alone are more likely to be demoralized than those who live with others, until age and gender are considered. Men who live alone scored higher on demoralization than men who live with others, yet women who live with others scored higher on demoralization than those who live alone. An interaction for living arrangement and age group on demoralization was also observed.     

Regular and irregular inflection in the acquisition of German noun plurals.

In this paper we study the acquisition of German noun plurals in relation to the question of how children represent regular and irregular inflection. Pinker and Prince (1992) have demonstrated several dissociations between regular and irregular inflection in the English past tense system. However, in English, the default status of -ed is confounded with its high frequency; therefore inflectional systems other than English past tense formation must be examined. The noun plural system in German is particularly interesting, because most nouns have irregular plurals in German and the regular (default) plural is less frequent than several of the irregular plurals. Thus it is unclear how a language learner determines whether German even has a regular plural, and if so what form it takes. Based on longitudinal data from impaired and unimpaired monolingual German-speaking children, we find a striking, statistically significant correlation: plural affixes that are used in overregularizations, namely -n or -s, are left out within compounds. This correlation shows that even impaired children are sensitive to the distinction between regular and irregular morphology. We propose a linguistic analysis of the correlation in terms of Kiparsky's (1982, 1985) level-ordering model plus an additional ordering condition on affixes: default (regular) affixes cannot serve as input to compounding processes.     

No counterregulation after breaking the external restraint of children.

At the present, it is unknown how restraint and binge eating/counterregulation are exactly related. Earlier studies on this relationship suffer from two main shortcomings: the studies are all correlational in nature or could not rule out the contribution of confounding variables such as weight loss. The present study investigated whether a break of restraint is a sufficient condition for the occurrence of counterregulation by studying a restrained sample which is not liable to dieting practices and weight loss. The externally imposed restraint on children with regard to eating sweets was broken. However, after breaking their external restraint the children did not counterregulate. It is discussed whether restraint of food intake is really as important for binge eating as it is claimed to be or whether it is merely a consequence or an epiphenomenon of binge eating.     

Problems in recent tests of two cognitive theories of panic.

Four problems in five recent tests of two cognitive theories of panic are discussed: (a) the ambiguity and indistinguishability of the 'body sensations' and 'cognitions' concepts; (b) the uncertain meaning of 'meaningful relationships'; (c) problems arising from differences in Clark's (Behaviour Research and Therapy, 24, 461-470, 1986) theory and Goldstein and Chambless' (Behavior Therapy, 9, 47-59, 1978) theory; (d) the ambiguity of correlational data. Some desiderata for future research on these theories are proposed.     

Human evaluative conditioning: acquisition trials, presentation schedule, evaluative style and contingency awareness.

Two different processes may be operative in human Pavlovian conditioning: signal learning and evaluative learning. Whereas most studies on evaluative conditioning focused on a mere demonstration of the phenomenon or on a theoretical analysis of the underlying processes, some basic parameters of evaluative learning are still unexplored. Hence, using the standard neutral picture--(dis)liked picture pairing paradigm (Baeyens, Eelen & Van den Bergh, 1990), in this study the effect of two parameters of evaluative conditioning was assessed on a between-subjects base, namely the Number of Acquisition Trials (2/5/10/20) and the Presentation Schedule of the stimulus pairs (blockwise or random). Additionally, the study included an exploratory analysis of the potential effects of the Evaluative Style of subjects (Feelers vs Thinkers, operationalized in terms of speed of emitting evaluations). Finally, the relationship between contingency awareness and evaluative learning was reassessed. Neutral-liked conditioning was found to be quadratically related to the number of acquisition trials (increase in effect up to 10 trials, decrease from 10 to 20 trials), whereas neutral-disliked conditioning linearly increased with increasing numbers of trials. Randomized vs blockwise presentation schedules of the stimulus pairs did differentially affect the overall pattern of conditioning, but in a way which was both unexpected and difficult to account for theoretically. Both the Evaluative Style of subjects and contingency awareness were demonstrated to be generally orthogonal to conditioned shifts in CS valence. Based on these findings, some practical suggestions are provided for the application of evaluating conditioning based therapeutical interventions to affective-behavioral disorders which are centred around inappropriate (dis)likes.     

The role of neuropsychology in the assessment and treatment of persons with epilepsy.

Several areas of current interest in the neuropsychology of epilepsy are briefly reviewed in this article. These include variables pertaining to seizures, seizure history, antiepileptic drugs, and methods of neuropsychological evaluation. It is apparent that epilepsy is a multifaceted area: Psychologists not only can be of great assistance to patients with this condition, but may also learn a great deal from this complex disorder.