Mapping symbols to response modalities: Interference effects on Stroop-like tasks

Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics - Response compatibility effects were assessed with a Stroop-like task which involved arrow and word stimuli. The subjects were required to respond to one...     

The Beck Anxiety Inventory–Trait (BAIT): A Measure of Dispositional Anxiety Not Contaminated by Dispositional Depression

If aesthetic aspects of art are objective and reside in the art. as Arnheim (1954) argues. then perceiving them may be akin to any other kind of reality testing. Further, if neurosis impairs reality testing, it would also impair aesthetic judgment, especially if aesthetic cues are vital and relevant to the human experience as Arnheim maintains. This hypothesis was investigated by administration of personality tests to measure neuroticism, especially Cattell's Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF), and art judgment tasks, especially Child's slide comparisons, to 105 University of Michigan undergraduates, The hypothesis was supported by a high negative correlation between the 16PF's neuroticism scale and art judgment, r = -.48; t (103) = -5.61 ,p < .0001. The results are discussed in terms of growth versus adjustment models of mental health, and the possible inhibiting role of verbalization over visualization in aesthetic perception.     

Stability of the MCMI Among Depressed Psychiatric Outpatients

The Milton Clinical Multiaxial Inventory (MCMI) is a promising, yet somewhat unproven psychometric inventory developed to identify clinical syndromes and personality traits consonant with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (3rd ed. [DSM-III]; American Psychiatric Association, 1980). The stability of its measures for both the theoretically more stable personality characteristics and the clinical syndromes was investigated in a group of depressed psychiatric outpatients. In this test-retest design with a 3-month interval between tests, clinical syndrome scales of relevance changed significantly as expected. However, many of the personality scales also changed significantly. Only four of the personality scales met a two-fold test of stability. Findings are discussed in terms of characteristics of self-report inventories such as the MCMI, the uniqueness of the depressed population, and characteristics of personality disorders.     

Trait anxiety and trait anger measured by ecological momentary assessment and their correspondence with traditional trait questionnaires

Ecological momentary assessments (EMA) of anxiety and anger/hostility were obtained every 25–30 min over two 24-h periods, separated by a median of 6 months, from 165 employees at a university in the Northeast. We used a multilevel trait-state-error structural equation model to estimate: (1) the proportion of variance in EMA anxiety and anger/hostility attributable to stable trait-like individual differences; (2) the correspondence between these trait-like components of EMA anxiety and anger/hostility and traditional questionnaire measures of each construct; and (3) the test–retest correlation between two 24-h averages obtained several months apart. After adjustment for measurement error, more than half the total variance in EMA reports of anxiety and anger/hostility is attributable to stable trait-like individual differences; however, the trait-like component of each construct is only modestly correlated with questionnaire measures of that construct. The 6-month “test–retest” correlations of latent variables representing the true 24-h EMA average anxiety and average anger are quite high (r ? 0.83). This study represents the longest follow-up period over which EMA-based estimates of traits have been examined. The results suggest that although the trait component (individual differences) of EMA momentary ratings of anxiety and anger is larger than the state component, traditional self-report questionnaires of trait anxiety and anger correspond only weakly with EMA-defined traits.     

Spatial interference between attended items engenders serial visual processing

A pair of experiments investigated the architecture of visual processing, parallel versus serial, across high and low levels of spatial interference in a divided attention task. Subjects made speeded judgments that required them to attend to a pair of color-cued objects among gray filler items, with the spatial proximity between the attended items varied to manipulate the strength of interference between attended items. Systems factorial analysis (Townsend & Nozawa, Journal of Mathematical Psychology 39:321-359, 1995) was used to identify processing architecture. Experiment 1, using moderately dense displays, found evidence of parallel processing whether attended objects were in low or high proximity to one another. Experiment 2, using higher-density displays, found evidence of parallel selection when attended stimuli were widely separated but serial processing when they were in high proximity. Divided visual attention can operate in parallel under conditions of low or moderate spatial interference between selected items, but strong interference engenders serial processing.