Social desirability in personality inventories: Symptoms,diagnosis and prescribed cure

An analysis of social desirability in personality assessment is presented. Starting with the symptoms, Study 1 showed that mean ratings of graded personality items are moderately to strongly linearly related to social desirability (Self Deception, Impression formation, and the first Principal Component), suggesting that item popularity may be a useful heuristic tool for identifying items which elicit socially desirable responding. We diagnose the cause of socially desirable responding as an interaction between the evaluative content of the item and enhancement motivation in the rater. Study 2 introduced a possible cure; evaluative neutralization of items. To test the feasibility of the method lay psychometricians (undergraduates) reformulated existing personality test items according to written instructions. The new items were indeed lower in social desirability while essentially retaining the five factor structure and reliability of the inventory. We conclude that although neutralization is no miracle cure, it is simple and has beneficial effects.     

Community implementation of PMTO™: Impacts on referrals to specialist services and schools

Sigmarsdóttir, M. & Björnsdóttir, A. (2012). Community implementation of PMTO?: Impacts on referrals to specialist services and schools. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 53, 506–511. In 2000, the city of Hafnarfjörður, Iceland, implemented Parent Management Training – Oregon Model (PMTO^?) to prevent and treat behavioral problems among children. This paper describes the implementation and findings regarding impacts in the community. As hypothesized, findings showed that the number of referrals to specialist services decreased in Hafnarfjörður following PMTO implementation and increased in two comparison communities not implementing the method. Within the Hafnarfjörður community, recorded instances of behavior problems reduced in elementary schools working in line with PMTO. The results presented are the first such findings in Iceland and suggest the kinds of systematic changes communities may experience following the implementation of an evidence‐based program.     

Prediction and diagnosis: An experimental comparison

Diagnostic tasks differ from predictive tasks in two respects (1) the direction of the inference in diagnosis (from effect to cause) is inverse to that in prediction (from cause to effect), and (2) the event to be inferred is more distal in diagnostic tasks than in predictive tasks. These task features led to the hypothesis that a diagnostic task would be harder to learn than a predictive task. This hypothesis was tested in an experimental situation in which the causal mechanism was random sampling with replacement. Five groups of subjects with 10 subjects in each (two predictive and three diagnostic groups) were run in individual sessions with 100 trials of feedback training. The two predictive groups learned more rapidly and to a higher level compared to the diagnostic groups. Conclusion: the present data support the hypothesis that predictive tasks are easier to learn than comparable diagnostic tasks.     

The influence of visual information on auditory lateralization

Sætrevik, B. (2010). The influence of visual information on auditory lateralization. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology. The classic McGurk study showed that presentation of one syllable in the visual modality simultaneous with a different syllable in the auditory modality creates the perception of a third, not presented syllable. The current study presented dichotic syllable pairs (one in each ear) simultaneously with video clips of a mouth pronouncing the syllables from one of the ears, or pronouncing a syllable that was not part of the dichotic pair. When asked to report the auditory stimuli, responses were shifted towards selecting the auditory stimulus from the side that matched the visual stimulus.