Do personality scale items function differently in people with high and low IQ?

Intelligence differences might contribute to true differences in personality traits. It is also possible that intelligence might contribute to differences in understanding and interpreting personality items. Previous studies have not distinguished clearly between these possibilities. Before it can be accepted that scale score differences actually reflect personality differences, personality items should show measurement invariance. The authors used item response theory to test measurement invariance in the five-factor model scales of the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP) and NEO-Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) across two groups of participants from the Lothian Birth Cohort 1936 with relatively low and high cognitive abilities. Each group consisted of 320 individuals, with equal numbers of men and women. The mean IQ difference of the groups was 21 points. It was found that the IPIP and NEO-FFI items were measurement invariant across all five scales, making it possible to conclude that any differences in IPIP and NEO-FFI scores between people with low and high cognitive abilities reflected personality trait differences.     

Treating disturbed emotional regulation in sexual offenders: The potential applications of mindful self-regulation and controlled breathing techniques

It has been noted that some offenders are characterized by problems in the appropriate regulation of emotional states. Deficits in emotional regulation are particularly pertinent in sexual offenders. Therefore, therapeutic programs should, in part, focus on the development of effective strategies for the control of emotional arousal. In this review, we will provide an outline of how anatomical structures including the amygdala and regions of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) are involved in the appropriate regulation of emotion. It is argued in this paper that the effective control of emotional states may be helped through the adoption of a group of meditational practices, known as mindfulness techniques, which have emerged from Buddhist philosophy. These techniques involve slow, deep breathing and have been shown to affect vagal modulation of the heart and the functioning of specific neural circuits which are critically involved in emotional regulation.     

A Critique of Giving Voice to Values Approach to Business Ethics Education

Mary Gentile’s Giving Voice to Values presents an approach to ethics training based on the idea that most people would like to provide input in times of ethical conflict using their own values. She maintains that people recognize the lapses in organizational ethical judgment and behavior, but they do not have the courage to step up and voice their values to prevent the misconduct. Gentile has developed a successful initiative and following based on encouraging students and employees to learn how to engage in communication or action to express their values within an organization’s formal and informal value system. The purpose of this analysis is to examine the Giving Voice to Values approach to empowering the individual to take action to deal with lapses in organizational ethics. We examine the role of Giving Voice to Values in business ethics education, considerations for implementing GVV, and recommendations for business educators and corporate ethics officers. We conclude that while GVV is an effective tool, it is not a comprehensive or holistic approach to ethics education and organizational ethics programs.     

Neural correlates of automatic mood regulation in girls at high risk for depression

Daughters of depressed mothers are at significantly elevated risk for developing a depressive disorder themselves. We have little understanding, however, of the specific factors that contribute to this risk. The ability to regulate negative affect effectively is critical to emotional and physical health and may play an important role in influencing risk for depression. We examined whether never-disordered daughters whose mothers have experienced recurrent episodes of depression during their daughters' lifetime differ from never-disordered daughters of never-disordered mothers in their patterns of neural activation during a negative mood induction and during automatic mood regulation. Sad mood was induced in daughters through the use of film clips; daughters then recalled positive autobiographical memories, a procedure shown previously to repair negative affect. During the mood induction, high-risk girls exhibited greater activation than did low-risk daughters in brain areas that have frequently been implicated in the experience of negative affect, including the amygdala and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. In contrast, during automatic mood regulation, low-risk daughters exhibited greater activation than did their high-risk counterparts in brain areas that have frequently been associated with top-down regulation of emotion, including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. These findings indicate that girls at high and low risk for depression differ in their patterns of neural activation both while experiencing, and while repairing negative affect, and suggest that anomalies in neural functioning precede the onset of a depressive episode.     

Unemployed Adults’ Career Thoughts,Career Self‐Efficacy,and Interest: Any Similarity to College Students?

Little empirical knowledge about unemployed adults exists during a time when this group needs substantial career assistance. Because there is greater empirical understanding of college student career development compared with what is known about unemployed adults, a chi square and analyses of covariance were used to compare the career thinking, self‐efficacy, and interests of 169 unemployed adults seeking public job center assistance with that of 200 college students. Additionally, a diverse sample of 2,444 unemployed adults is demographically reviewed. Unemployed adults reported a higher level of Realistic interests and similar levels of negative career thinking and career decision‐making self‐efficacy compared with college students.     

Mapping novel labels to actions: how the rhythm of words guides infants' learning

We investigated the effect of lexical stress on 16-month-olds' ability to form associations between labels and paths of motion. Disyllabic English nouns tend to have a strong-weak (trochaic) stress pattern, and verbs tend to have a weak-strong (iambic) pattern. We explored whether infants would use word stress information to guide word-action associations during learning. Infants heard two novel words with either verb-like iambic stress or noun-like trochaic stress. Each word was paired with a single novel object performing one of two path actions and was tested using path-switch trials. Only infants in the iambic stress condition learned the association between the novel words and the path actions. To further investigate infants' difficulty in mapping the trochaic labels to the actions, we conducted an additional study in which infants were given an object switch task using the trochaic labels. In this case, infants were able to associate the trochaic labels with the objects, providing further support that infants use lexical stress to guide label-referent associations. This study demonstrates that by 16months, English-learning infants have developed a bias to expect disyllabic action labels to have iambic stress patterns, consistent with native language stress patterns.     

How do alternative ways of responding influence 3- and 4-year-olds’ performance on tests of executive function and theory of mind?

A total of 69 preschool children were tested on measures of false belief understanding (the Unexpected Transfer task), inhibitory control (the Grass/Snow task), and strategic reasoning (the Windows task). For each task, children indicated their response either by pointing with their index finger or by using a nonstandard response mode (pointing with a rotating arrow). The means of responding had no effect on children's performance on the Grass/Snow task or on the Unexpected Transfer task, although children performed better on the Unexpected Transfer task when the key object in the story was removed. In contrast, performance on the Windows task was significantly better when children pointed with the rotating arrow. A follow-up experiment with 79 preschoolers found that this improved performance on the Windows task was sustained even after the nonstandard response mode was removed and children again pointed with their finger. These findings together suggest that nonstandard response modes do not help children to inhibit prepotent pointing responses but may help them to formulate response strategies on reasoning tasks by discouraging unreflective impulsive responding.