QUAID: A questionnaire evaluation aid for survey methodologists

QUAID (question-understanding aid) is a software tool that assists survey methodologists, social scientists, and designers of questionnaires in improving the wording, syntax, and semantics of questions. The tool identifies potential problems that respondents might have in comprehending the meaning of questions on questionnaires. These problems can be scrutinized by researchers when they revise questions to improve question comprehension and, thereby, enhance the reliability and validity of answers. QUAID was designed to identify nine classes of problems, but only five of these problems are addressed in this article: unfamiliar technical term, vague or imprecise relative term, vague or ambiguous noun phrase, complex syntax, and working memory overload. We compared the output of QUAID with ratings of language experts who evaluated a corpus of questions on the five classes of problems. The corpus consisted of 505 questions on 11 surveys developed by the U.S. Census Bureau. Analyses of hit rates, false alarm rates,d′ scores, recall scores, and precision scores revealed that QUAID was able to identify these five problems with questions, although improvements in QUAID’s performance are anticipated in future research and development.     

Differential effects of the menstrual cycle on reactive and proactive aggression in borderline personality disorder

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is characterized by rapidly shifting symptoms, including intense anger and aggressive behavior. Understanding how fluctuations in ovarian hormones across the menstrual cycle may contribute to symptom instability is key for accurate assessment of BPD symptoms and effective interventions. Reactive and proactive aggression, as well as anger-in and anger-out, were assessed daily in 15 physically healthy, unmedicated naturally cycling female individuals meeting criteria for BPD across 35 days. Urine luteinizing hormone surge and salivary progesterone were used to confirm ovulation and verify the cycle phase. Multilevel models evaluated cyclical differences of symptoms between cycle phases. Both forms of aggressive behavior demonstrated marked cycle effects, with reactive aggression highest during the midluteal cycle phase, co-occurring with initial increases in anger and irritability and followed by perimenstrual peaks in anger and anger-in. In contrast, highest levels of proactive aggression were observed during the follicular and ovulatory phases, when emotional symptoms and anger were otherwise at lowest levels. These findings highlight the importance of identifying the function of aggression when considering potential psychological and biological influences. Naturally cycling individuals with BPD may be at elevated risk for luteal worsening of a range of interpersonally reactive symptoms, including reactive aggression, whereas proactive aggression may occur more in phases characterized by less emotional and cognitive vulnerability and greater reward sensitivity. Research on aggression in this population should consider cycle effects. Cycling individuals with BPD attempting to reduce aggressive behavior may benefit from cycle-tracking to increase awareness of these effects and to develop appropriate strategies.     

Components of events and processes

Rips and Estin (1998) provided evidence that mental events such as dreaming are more homogeneous than physical events such as checking out a book; that is, their parts are more difficult to distinguish. In their experiment, participants listed more distinctive properties for the parts of physical events than for the parts of mental events. However, the physicality of stimuli was confounded with temporal aspects. Mental stimuli tended to be processes, and physical stimuli, events. This study tested homogeneity with new stimuli separating out the factors of physicality and aspect. Consistently, both physicality and aspect had significant effects on the perceived homogeneity of activities, as measured by the number of listed parts, the number of distinctive properties of each part, and homogeneity ratings. The study shows that homogeneity is strongly influenced by aspect but that physicality remains a robust factor for homogeneity, even after taking aspect into account.     

Effectiveness of Dialectical Behavior Therapy for Treating Eating Disorders

This study evaluated the effectiveness of dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) for treating eating disorder episodes and co‐occurring depression symptoms among individuals diagnosed with eating disorders. Separate meta‐analytic procedures for between‐groups and single‐group studies were conducted and yielded large effect sizes, indicating that DBT may be efficacious for decreasing disordered episodes among women diagnosed with eating disorders; medium to large effect sizes were noted for treating depression symptoms. Implications for evidence‐supported practice and study limitations are discussed.     

Auditory distractor processing in sequential selection tasks

In this review, we analyze the cognitive processes contributing to selection in audition. In particular, we focus on the processing of auditory distractors in sequential selection paradigms in which target stimuli are accompanied by distractors. We review the evidence from two established tasks, namely the auditory negative priming and the auditory distractor–response binding task, and discuss the cognitive mechanisms contributing to the results typically observed in these tasks. In fact, several processes have been suggested as to explain how distractors are processed and handled in audition; that is, auditory distractors can be inhibited, encoded with a do-not-respond-tag, integrated into a stimulus–response episode containing the response to the target, or upheld in working memory and matched/mismatched with the following distractor. In addition, variables possibly modulating these cognitive processes are discussed. Finally, auditory distractor processing is compared with distractor processing in vision.     

Evidence for Relationships Between Hope,Resilience, and Mental Health Among Youth

Predictive modeling was used to evaluate the associations between hope, resilience, happiness, and mental health in 449 middle and high school students. Model results indicated large effect sizes for middle school (R² = .28) and high school (R² = .36) participants, with hope and resilience tending to predict self‐reported mental health symptoms. These findings and their application to counseling practice are explained.     

Efficacy of Dialectical Behavior Therapy for Adolescents in a Partial Hospitalization Program

This study evaluated dialectical behavior therapy for adolescents (DBT‐A) vs. treatment as usual within a 6‐week partial hospitalization program. The 103 adolescent participants (mean age = 15.27 years) were predominantly girls (n = 63, 61%) with a variety of primary mental health diagnoses. Results indicated that DBT‐A was superior for decreasing symptoms of depression and interpersonal sensitivity, but no statistically significant difference was detected for anxiety or hostility. Implications for treating youth with transdiagnostic identities are discussed.     

Do Smarter People Employ Better Decision Strategies? The Influence of Intelligence on Adaptive Use of the Recognition Heuristic

Within the adaptive toolbox approach, it has repeatedly been shown that, on average, people tend to adapt their decision strategies to the decision context. Building upon these results, we investigated whether individuals systematically differ in their ability to successfully adapt to the situation when applying the fast‐and‐frugal recognition heuristic (RH). In decisions between recognized and unrecognized choice objects, individuals can base their choices solely on recognition, as predicted by the RH, or they can use further knowledge retrieved from memory. Since intelligence has been conceived as the ability to successfully adapt to different situations, we expected intelligence to influence the degree of adaptive use of the RH. To test this hypothesis, we first re‐analyzed data that referred to a decision domain for which RH‐use is known to perform well. As expected, individual RH‐use increased with general intelligence. Next, we designed an experiment addressing individual RH‐use in two new decision domains, one domain for which RH‐use was less effective than knowledge‐use and another domain for which both strategies were about equally effective. In addition, we tested whether fluid or crystallized intelligence best predicts adaptive use of the RH. RH‐use was found to decrease with fluid but not crystallized intelligence when RH‐use was less effective than use of further knowledge. In contrast, there was no significant association between either type of intelligence and RH‐use when none of the two strategies was optimal. We conclude that adaptive use versus non‐use of the RH is moderated by fluid intelligence. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.