Face memory and hemispheric preference: Emotionality and extraversion

Subjects made arousing or nonarousing judgments about photographs of strangers, then had an unannounced recognition test over the photographs. Emotional orienting tasks led to better retention than nonemotional tasks. Assuming emotionality is predominantly a right-hemisphere activity, then this result is consistent with other research showing a right-hemisphere advantage in processing faces. This difference was most clear for subjects with a right-hemisphere cognitive style. Extraversion had no effect on face recognition, nor did a subject's cognitive style seem to be associated with extraversion or neuroticism scores.     

What happened to the Canada-United States brain drain of the 1990s? New evidence from the 2000 US census

This article uses the 2000 US Census to ascertain both quantitative and qualitative changes in Canadian immigrants to the United States through, the 1990s, and compares these to earlier migration cohorts from census data in 1980 and 1990. Canadians in the United States continue to have higher relative salaries and education levels vis-à-vis their American counterparts and this gap has widened in the 1990s, even when controlling for variety of labour market factors. A similar phenomenon occurred amongst immigrants from Britain and Ireland and suggests that US economic performance and immigration policy are the probable driving, force behind this migration.     

Two‐year‐old children but not domestic dogs understand communicative intentions without language,gestures, or gaze

Infants can see someone pointing to one of two buckets and infer that the toy they are seeking is hidden inside. Great apes do not succeed in this task, but, surprisingly, domestic dogs do. However, whether children and dogs understand these communicative acts in the same way is not yet known. To test this possibility, an experimenter did not point, look, or extend any part of her body towards either bucket, but instead lifted and shook one via a centrally pulled rope. She did this either intentionally or accidentally, and did or did not address her act to the subject using ostensive cues. Young 2‐year‐old children but not dogs understood the experimenter's act in intentional conditions. While ostensive pulling of the rope made no difference to children's success, it actually hindered dogs' performance. We conclude that while human children may be capable of inferring communicative intent from a wide variety actions, so long as these actions are performed intentionally, dogs are likely to be less flexible in this respect. Their understanding of communicative intention may be more dependent upon bodily markers of communicative intent, including gaze, orientation, extended limbs, and vocalizations. This may be because humans have come under selective pressure to develop skills for communicating with absent interlocutors – where bodily co‐presence is not possible.     

Effects of a Motivational Inducement on the Psychometric Properties of a Cognitive Ability Test

College students are often used in the development stages of cognitive ability tests that are designed to be used in business settings. One criticism of this strategy is that there are important motivational differences between these two settings that may limit generalization from one setting to the other. Research has not investigated the degree to which motivational inducements may enhance the psychometric properties of the tests with this population. In the present study, a 162-item cognitive ability test was administered to 320 undergraduate students, 160 of whom were given experimental credit for their participation (control group) and 160 of whom were given experimental credit but were also told that the top 25% of scorers each would receive $20 (experimental group). Results of differential item functioning and confirmatory analytic analyses suggested that the cognitive ability test was essentially equivalent across the two groups. Implications for cognitive ability test development and future research are discussed.     

To Balance or not to Balance: Confirmatory Factor Analysis of the Affect-Balance Scale

This study examined the psychometric quality of the Affect-Balance Scale (ABS) (Bradburn, 1969) using data collected from 292 middle-aged and older adults, living independently. The dimensionality of the scale was examined, the quality of individual items was tested, and the validity of the ABS was studied. Using a tetrachoric correlation matrix with the robust weighted least squares (WLSMV) estimation method of the Mplus program, we found that two moderately correlated (r = -0.37) constructs are needed to adequately account for the pattern of item scores in the ABS. Two of the 10 ABS items were found to be problematic. When raw sum scores were used in analysis, the correlation between the positive-affect and the negative-affect subscales was lower (r = -0.17), indicating that random and nonrandom measurement error masked the relationship between the two. While affect-balance correlated substantially with five criterion well-being measures, the negative-affect subscale (which constitutes half of the ABS) had a similar pattern of correlations, with only slightly lower magnitude. The theoretical construct of nobreak 'balance' is also questioned. The 'balance' scoring method (subtracting the negative-affect subscale score from the positive-affect subscale score) nets exactly the same score as does summing scores from both subscales together. Accordingly, the summed scores have the very same correlations with other variables as do the balance scores.