Testing and Assessment Issues With Spanish‐English Bilingual Latinos

This article critically examines and integrates previous research in cross‐cultural and cross‐linguistic assessment. Issues that apply to the assessment of Latinos who speak both Spanish and English are examined. For ease of presentation, testing concerns with this population are divided into 3 broad areas: client issues, test issues, and clinician/assessor issues. Recommendations are made to assist in the provision of cross‐culturally and cross‐linguistically valid testing of Spanish‐English bilingual Latinos.     

Neurological malingering

The detection of malingering in terms of neurologic signs and symptoms is described, including malingered coma, simulated deafness, feigned blindness, feigned weakness, and diminished sensation. While neurologic malingering is not an actual diagnosis, it is best detected through medical procedures. To identify malingering, the physician must demonstrate that the malingered sign or symptom is not caused by a diagnosable order and is instead clearly a consequence of the subject's volition.     

Cognitive mediators of reactions to rape

Subjects were exposed to slides that primed different concepts associated with aggression, close personal interactions between men and women, and women as sex objects. Then, as part of an ostensibly unrelated study, they read the testimonies of several rape victims and made judgments concerning both the victim and the alleged rapist. Exposure to negative consequences of aggression apparently threatened subjects' beliefs in a just world, leading subjects to interpret rape incidents in ways that reaffirm this belief (i.e., it strengthened subjects' beliefs that the defendant should be punished, but it also caused them to attribute more responsibility for the incident to the victim). Portrayals of close personal relationships between men and women increased male subjects' beliefs that rape victims were responsible for the incident, but had the opposite effect on female subjects' beliefs. Portrayals of women as sex objects decreased male subjects' beliefs in the victim's credibility and increased their beliefs that she was responsible for the incident; however, it had the opposite effects on female subjects' judgments. Despite their effects on judgments of the rape victim, priming manipulations did not affect beliefs that the defendant should be convicted. Implications of these results for the effects of the public media on attitudes and beliefs about rape are discussed.     

Is EEG α a consistent measure of individual differences?

Integrated EEG activity in the 9–13 Hz band was recorded from 24 Ss under three experimental conditions (Relaxation, Attentive Listening and Mental Arithmetic) in two separate sessions. Analysis of components of variance due to persons and the interactions of persons with sessions and with conditions pointed to the importance of the persons × conditions interaction. It is concluded that under typically employed conditions of testing EEG α is not a consistent measure of individual differences.     

A meta-analysis of the regulatory focus nomological network: Work-related antecedents and consequences

Regulatory focus theory (Higgins, 1997, 1998) has received a great deal of recent attention in the organizational behavior literature. Despite the amount of new evidence surrounding regulatory focus and its relationships with other variables, a quantitative summary of this literature is lacking. The authors used meta-analysis to summarize correlations from 77 empirical studies that included self-report measures of promotion and prevention focus. Meta-analytic effect sizes between promotion and prevention focus and work-related variables are reported. In general, results indicated that promotion and prevention focus are orthogonal constructs and each construct is uniquely related to other theoretically relevant constructs. The results also demonstrate the importance of regulatory foci to organizational researchers as well as the need for a unified approach to their measurement.     

The expert advantage in dynamic pattern recall persists across both attended and unattended display elements

We examined how differences in attention influence how expert and novice basketball players encode into memory the specific structural information contained within patterns of play from their sport. Our participants were primed during a typical recall task to focus attention on either attacking or defending player formations before being asked to recall the attended or unattended portion of the pattern. Adherence to the instructional set was confirmed through an analysis of gaze distributions. Recall performance was superior for the experts relative to the novices across both the attended and unattended attacking and defensive pattern structures. Expert recall of attacker positions was unchanged with and without attention, whereas recall accuracy for the positions of defenders diminished without attention, as did the novices’ recall of both attack and defense formations. The findings suggest that experienced performers are better than novices at encoding the elements from a complex and dynamic pattern in the absence of focused attention, with this advantage being especially evident in relation to the recall of attacking structure. Some revision of long-term memory theories of expertise will be necessary to accommodate these findings.