Evidence for the Big Five in analyses of familiar English personality adjectives

Studies of the natural language are a prime source of the Big-Five model, yet the factor analysis of a large, representative, and non-clustered set of English-language personality adjectives in a large sample has not yet been published. In order to test the hypothesis that finding the Big Five depends on biasing the variable selection with an investigator's preferred non-familiar terms, we present the factor analysis of 435 familiar adjectives in a combined sample (N=899) of 507 self- and 392 peer ratings. The five-factor solution reproduced the Big Five with high clarity, demonstrating generally very high correlations with Goldberg's adjective markers of the Big Five. The Intellect factor had a more moderate correlation, due to its de-emphasis of the creativity components of Factor V, a phenomenon that may occur commonly with the lexical Intellect factor.     

Parental Involvement and Adolescents’ Academic Achievement: Latent Profiles of Mother and Father Warmth as a Moderating Influence

Parental involvement in their adolescents’ education plays an important role in promoting their children's academic outcomes. Yet, more research is needed to examine the relationship between parenting practices and parental warmth as well as to consider the potential joint contribution of warmth from both fathers and mothers. Thus, the primary purpose of the current study is to examine the extent to which patterns of parental warmth across fathers and mothers moderate the association between parental involvement and adolescents’ grade point average (GPA) and school engagement behaviors. Latent profile analysis was conducted to identify disparate profiles of fathers’ and mothers’ warmth within a nationally representative sample of 2,306 youths (51% male; mean age = 15.31 years, SD = 1.50; 77% non-Hispanic White) residing in opposite-sex, two-parent families from Wave I and II of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. Latent-class enumeration processes support a five-profile solution characterized by differences in levels of parental warmth and congruency across parents: (a) Congruent High Warmth, (b) Congruent Moderate Warmth, (c) Congruent Low Warmth, (d) Incongruent High Mother/Low Father Warmth, and (e) Incongruent Low Father/Lower Mother Warmth. Subsequent multiple linear regression analyses reveal a moderating effect for Congruent Low Warmth on the relationship between parental involvement and adolescents’ GPA. Ultimately, the results show that variation in parental warmth exists across fathers and mothers with differing impact on adolescents’ outcomes. Excluding one parent without considering the joint effects of both parents will not produce an accurate and precise understanding of parenting in research or practice.     

Atypical depression: enhanced right hemispheric dominance for perceiving emotional chimeric faces

Two studies compared hemispatial bias for perceiving chimeric faces in patients having either atypical or typical depression and healthy controls. A total of 245 patients having major depressive disorder (MDD) or dysthymia (164 with atypical features) and 115 controls were tested on the Chimeric Faces Test. Atypical depression differed from typical depression and controls in showing abnormally large right hemisphere bias. This was present in patients having either MDD or dysthymia and was not related to anxiety, physical anhedonia, or vegetative symptoms. In contrast, patients having MDD with melancholia showed essentially no right hemisphere bias. This is further evidence that atypical depression is a biologically distinct subtype and underscores the importance of this diagnostic distinction for neurophysiologic studies.     

Psychometric Modeling of response speed and accuracy with mixed and conditional regression

Human performance in cognitive testing and experimental psychology is expressed in terms of response speed and accuracy. Data analysis is often limited to either speed or accuracy, and/or to crude summary measures like mean response time (RT) or the percentage correct responses. This paper proposes the use of mixed regression for the psychometric modeling of response speed and accuracy in testing and experiments. Mixed logistic regression of response accuracy extends logistic item response theory modeling to multidimensional models with covariates and interactions. Mixed linear regression of response time extends mixed ANOVA to unbalanced designs with covariates and heterogeneity of variance. Related to mixed regression is conditional regression, which requires no normality assumption, but is limited to unidimensional models. Mixed and conditional methods are both applied to an experimental study of mental rotation. Univariate and bivariate analyzes show how within-subject correlation between response and RT can be distinguished from between-subject correlation, and how latent traits can be detected, given careful item design or content analysis. It is concluded that both response and RT must be recorded in cognitive testing, and that mixed regression is a versatile method for analyzing test data.I am grateful to Rogier Donders for putting his data at my disposal.     

Assessment of executive function in preschool-aged children

Assessment of the overarching self-regulatory mechanisms, or executive functions, in any age group is challenging, in part due to the complexity of this domain, in part due to their dynamic essence, and in part due to the inextricable links between these central processes and the associated domain-specific processes, such as language, motor function, and attention, over which they preside. While much progress has been made in clinical assessment approaches for measuring executive functions in adults and to some extent in adolescents and school-aged children, the toolkit for the preschool evaluator remains sparse. The past decade, however, has seen a substantial increase in attention to executive functions in very young children from a developmental neuropsychological perspective. With this has come a necessity for better, more specific, and more internally valid performance measures, many of which are now described in the experimental literature. Few such tasks, however, have adequately demonstrated psychometric properties for clinical application. We present two performance tasks designed to tap selective aspects of executive function in preschoolers that are emerging from the experimental laboratory and hold promise of appropriate reliability and validity for the clinical laboratory. Performance tests alone, however, are insufficient to develop a comprehensive picture of a child's executive functioning. Thus, we present a rating scale of preschoolers' executive function in the everyday context, and advocate a model of executive function assessment that incorporates both controlled performance tasks that target specific aspects of executive function and parent/teacher ratings that target more global aspects of self-regulation in the everyday context.     

The paradox of quetiapine in obsessive-compulsive disorder

Schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) have historical, clinical, and epidemiological links. The clinical use of atypical neuroleptics (ie, dual serotonin-dopamine antagonists) to treat both conditions sheds a new light on them. We report the first two cases of obsessive-compulsive symptoms (OCS) induced by quetiapine in schizophrenia patients. A case of successful augmentation by quetiapine in refractory OCD is also presented. A review of the literature on OCS induced by atypical neuroleptics follows. This paradoxically induced OCD symptomology in schizophrenia patients administered atypical neuroleptics is discussed from new pathophysiological and clinical perspectives. The discussion emphasizes the prognostic implications of OCS in schizophrenia and available therapies for this comorbidity.     

Development of subtype selective GABAA modulators

Drugs modulating gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) transmission via the benzodiazepine (BZ) site on the gamma-aminobutyric acid type A (GABAA) receptor have been in widespread use for more than 40 years to treat anxiety, epilepsy, and sleep disorders. These drugs have been shown to be safe, well tolerated, and effective although the mechanism by they produce a myriad of pharmacologic effects remains elusive. In recent years it has been discovered that, although the GABAA receptor is widely distributed in the brain, the substructure and composition of the receptor differs from between brain regions. Termed "GABAA receptor subtypes" their discovery leads to speculation that different subtypes may mediate specific effects of BZs such as anxiety or sedation. The phenotypic analysis of transgenic knock-in and knock-out mice in which particular GABAA receptors were rendered insensitive to the effects of BZ while others were unaffected confirmed this speculation. Subsequently, subtype-specific GABAA ligands were developed that, for example, retained the anxiolytic effects of BZs but were devoid of their sedative effects. Therefore, it may be possible to develop effective anxiolytic compounds that have a much reduced side-effect profile compared with existing drugs.     

Recognizing a plane-misoriented view of a familiar object is not influenced by the ease of specifying the main axis of elongation of that object

Participants saw three versions of pictures of familiar objects: the original unaltered (axis-normal) pictures, axis-extended pictures in which the main axes of the axis-normal pictures were elongated, and axis-switched pictures in which objects that were originally horizontally elongated were depicted as vertically elongated and vice versa. Relative to axis-normal pictures, axis extension aided decisions about whether the picture of the object was wide or tall, and axis switching hindered these decisions for both upright and plane-misoriented views. Nevertheless, although these axis manipulations clearly influenced decisions about the location of the object's main axis of elongation, axis-switched pictures were no harder to name than axis-extended pictures. Changing the depicted main axis of elongation by axis switching and axis extension did not influence object recognition in itself, whether for upright or for plane-misoriented views. This suggests that specifying the main axis of elongation of an object does not play an important role in the orientation-sensitive processes involved in identifying plane-misoriented views of that object.