Measuring Big-Five personality dimensions with the implicit association test – Implicit personality traits or self-esteem?

We examined whether the implicit association test (IAT) could serve as an implicit measure of the dimensions of the Five-Factor Model of Personality. In the first study (N = 84) IAT-effects of the Big-Five (Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism and Openness) were found and the IAT showed good internal consistencies and convergent validity with an explicit Big-Five questionnaire (NEO-FFI-30). In a second study (N = 50), conducted to determine the overlap of the personality-IATs with implicit self-esteem, the Extraversion and the Neuroticism-IAT were shown to correlate with a self-esteem-IAT only moderately.     

Clergymen and clergywomen: the same inclusive gospel?

Some commentators suggest that clergywomen bring a different perspective to ministry in comparison with that brought by clergymen. This paper explores the extent to which clergywomen bring a more inclusive set of values and beliefs to the pulpit. Data from the Church Times Survey conducted in April 2001 enable this question to be examined across four main areas: inclusive beliefs, pastoral inclusivity, inclusive views on ordained ministry, and social inclusivity. The analysis suggests that clergywomen do bring a more inclusive perspective to ministry than clergymen across the four areas explored in this study.     

Local pragmatics in a Gricean framework

The pragmatic framework developed by H.P. Grice in “Logic and Conversation” explains how a speaker can mean something more than, or different from, the conventional meaning of the sentence she utters. But it has been argued that the framework cannot give a similar explanation for cases where these pragmatic effects impact the understood content of an embedded clause, such as the antecedent of a conditional, a clausal disjunct, or the clausal complement of a verb. In this paper, I show that such an explanation is available. One of the central arguments of the paper (Section 2) is that in a significant subset of cases, local pragmatic effects are a consequence of a global (utterance-level) pragmatic requirement. In these cases, local pragmatic effects are a consequence of ‘acting locally’ to resolve a potential global pragmatic violation. These cases do not require us to posit application of pragmatic principles (Maxims of Conversation) to the contents of embedded clauses. The account does, though, require the assumption that interpreters can identify and reason about the contents of unasserted sub-parts of sentences, an assumption that I motivate in section 3. Building on this, in section 4 of the paper, I argue that once we have recognized that interpreters can, and do, reason independently about the contents of non-asserted clauses, it becomes unproblematic to assume that in some cases, Gricean conversational principles do apply directly to these contents, providing an alternative route to account for local pragmatic effects. In revisiting the ideas of this paper in my response to the commentaries, I consider in more detail the revisions to Grice’s broader program that are necessitated by these moves, in particular acknowledging the problematicity of Grice’s notion of what is said. I argue that the starting point for Gricean reconstructions should instead be merely what is expressed, which carries no pragmatic commitments regarding what is speaker meant.     

Local pragmatics in a Gricean framework,revisited: response to three commentaries

There are two central themes that occupy the commentaries, and hence this response. The first is the character and role of what is said, both in my account, and in pragmatic theory in general. In response, I lay out in more detail the proposal from my original paper that the starting point for Gricean reasoning should be not what is said, but the pragmatically uncommitted what is expressed. As part of this argument, I restate and provide further arguments for my claim that global and local pragmatic effects are continuous. The second central theme of the commentaries concerns the value of a Gricean account, which is not intended to model the psychological processes of interpretation. I respond to this concern in Section 5, ‘Pragmatics, psychology and processing’.     

Dual-earner couples’ willingness to relocate abroad: the reciprocal influence of both partners’ career role salience and partner role salience

Successful international assignments are important for international organizations. Research has shown that employee willingness to relocate internationally strongly depends on spouse’s willingness to follow. However, the mechanisms driving these effects are not thoroughly investigated. This study gives more insight into the processes that explain both partners’ willingness to (co-)relocate internationally. We examine the influence of both partners’ career role and partner role salience on each other’s (co-)relocation willingness. On the basis of Identity theory, Interdependency theory, and Attachment theory, we hypothesize combined interaction effects of career and partner role salience. Data were collected from 226 couples (professional employees and their spouses) working in a multinational Anglo-Dutch company. Results show that, in particular, spouses’ willingness to follow their partners abroad is determined by both career importance and partner role salience. We conclude that, for theory and for organizational practice, it is indeed crucial to involve both the employees and their spouses in the decision-making for an international relocation.     

Age of acquisition and the cumulative-frequency hypothesis: a review of the literature and a new multi-task investigation

Early-acquired words are processed faster than late-acquired words. This is a well-accepted effect within the word recognition literature. Different explanations have been proposed, either localizing the effect of age of acquisition (AoA) in a particular substage of word processing or seeing it as the result of the way in which information is stored and accessed in the brain in general. The cumulative-frequency hypothesis is an example of the latter type of explanation: it states that the total number of times a system has come across a particular stimulus will determine the speed with which the stimulus can be recognized. The present multi-task investigation provides a critical test of the different explanations. Results show that in a variety of word processing tasks the effects of frequency and AoA are highly correlated, and that the impact of AoA is consistently higher than would be expected on the basis of the cumulative-frequency hypothesis. The findings are interpreted as evidence for recent demonstrations of a loss of plasticity in neural networks due to training and/or for mathematical models that describe the growth of the lexico-semantic network as the attachment of new nodes to existing nodes.     

Correlations between attitude toward Christianity, prayer, and church attendance among 9- to 11-yr.-olds

Data provided by 150 9- to 11-yr.-old primary school pupils in England showed scores on the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christianity more highly correlated with (personal) prayer (r = .57) than with (public) church attendance (r = .23), providing support for the view that attitude scales access a deeper level of religiosity less contaminated by those contextual and social factors which may influence public church attendance more than personal prayer.     

An evaluation of in vivo desensitization and video modeling to increase compliance with dental procedures in persons with mental retardation

Fear of dental procedures deters many individuals with mental retardation from accepting dental treatment. This study was conducted to assess the effectiveness of two procedures, in vivo desensitization and video modeling, for increasing compliance with dental procedures in participants with severe or profound mental retardation. Desensitization increased compliance for all 5 participants, whereas video modeling increased compliance for only 1 of 3 participants.     

Happiness as Stable Extraversion: Internal Consistency Reliability and Construct Validity of the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire Among Undergraduate Students

The Oxford Happiness Questionnaire (OHQ) was developed by Hills and Argyle (2002) to provide a more accessible equivalent measure of the Oxford Happiness Inventory (OHI). The aim of the present study was to examine the internal consistency reliability, and construct validity of this new instrument alongside the Eysenckian dimensional model of personality. The Oxford Happiness Questionnaire was completed by a sample of 131 undergraduate students together with the abbreviated form of the Revised Eysenck Personality Questionnaire. The data demonstrated good internal consistency reliability (alpha = .92) and good construct validity in terms of positive association with extraversion (r = .38 p < .001) and negative association with neuroticism (r = −.57 p < .001). The kind of happiness measured by the OHQ is clearly associated with stable extraversion.     

Metacognitive myopia and the overutilization of misleading advice

Previous research on advice taking has explained the failure to exploit collective wisdom in terms of the egocentric underweighting of advice provided by independent others. The present research is concerned with an opposite and more radical source of irrational advice taking, namely, the failure to critically assess the validity of advice due to metacognitive myopia. Participants could use the advice of one or two experts when estimating health risks. They read sketches of the study samples that experts had drawn to estimate conditional probabilities (e.g., of HIV‐given drug addiction). Whether samples were valid or seriously biased, subsequent judgments were strongly affected by any advice (Experiment 1). Uncritical reliance on any advice persisted when participants were sensitized to the contrast of valid and invalid advice in a repeated measures design (Experiment 2), when participants themselves believed advice not to be valid (Experiment 3), and even after full debriefing about invalid advice (Experiment 4). Lay advice exerted a similar influence as expert advice (Experiment 5). Although these provocative results are independent of numeracy and consensus (Experiment 6), they highlight the impact of metacognitive myopia as an impediment of social rationality.