Personality judgment and personality pathology: self-other agreement in adolescents with conduct disorder

We examine two issues linking personality pathology and judgment of traits within the Five-Factor Model of personality. We hypothesize that pathology moderates self-other agreement--"target" participants with pathology should be less judgable than participants without pathology. In addition, we hypothesize that pathology could partially produce agreement across a variety of traits, particularly those traits fundamental to the pathology. In an adolescent sample including a group with Conduct Disorder (CD) and a Control group, we examine agreement between adolescents' self-reports and their mothers' informant reports. Using trait-centered and person-centered perspectives, we find support for both hypotheses. Results have implications for understanding the processes affecting personality judgment, for increasing integration of traditional personality research and personality pathology, and for personality assessment.     

Instability Of Ex Post Aggregation In The Bolker–Jeffrey Framework And Related Instability Phenomena

Suppose n Bayesian agents need to make a decision as a group. The groupas a whole is also supposed to be a Bayesian agent whose probabilities andutilities are derived or aggregated in reasonable ways from the probabilitiesand utilities of the group members. The aggregation could beex ante, i.e., interms of expected utilities, or it could be ex post, i.e., in terms of utilitiesonly, or in terms of utilities and probabilities separately. This study exploresthe ex post approach. Using the Bolker/Jeffrey framework, we show thatex post aggregation is subject to an instability phenomenon. That is, it mayhappen that the group preference between actions ``flips back and forth' dependingon the level of detail in which the decision problem is described. Structurally verysimilar phenomena also occur elsewhere in social choice theory, in statistics (Simpson'sParadox), and in voting theory (Ostrogorski's Paradox).     

Once More about Boesch’s Ontological Predication in Focus

In this article I address some more aspects regarding Boesch’s ontological predication aiming to clarify mistaken comprehensions as appeared in Perez-Campos” (2017) detailed work on my former paper about this issue (Simão 2016b). With this purpose, the following three aspects will be approached: the philosophical roots of my former proposal; the place of Boesch’s symbolic action theory in that proposal and the relevance of this discussion for the relationship between ontology and psychology.     

Characterizing aggressive behavior

In the research literature, aggressive behavior has traditionally been classified into two distinct subtypes, impulsive or premeditated. Impulsive aggression is defined as a hair-trigger aggressive response to provocation with loss of behavioral control. Premeditated aggression is defined as a planned or conscious aggressive act, not spontaneous or related to an agitated state. The present study outlines the development of a clinically useful self-report instrument, the Impulsive/Premeditated Aggression Scales (IPAS), designed to characterize aggressive behavior as predominately impulsive or predominately premeditated in nature. The IPAS showed strong reliability and validity. Analysis of the IPASscores demonstrated thepresence of two types of aggressive behavior, impulsive and premeditated, in men referred for anger problems. The aggression of most individuals in the present sample was characterized as predominately impulsive in nature (90%).     

Fostering understanding of multimedia messages through pre-training: evidence for a two-stage theory of mental model construction

Students received a narrated animation explaining the workings of a car's braking system (Experiments 1 and 2) or a bicycle tire pump (Experiment 3) and then took retention and transfer tests. Some students received pre-training concerning each of the components in the system before receiving the narrated animation (pre-training group), whereas others received no pre-training (no pre-training group) or--only in Experiment 3--training after the narrated animation (post-training group). The pre-training described or depicted the possible states of each part. Students in the pre-training group performed better than did students in other groups on tests of transfer (in all 3 experiments) and retention (in Experiments 1 and 2). Results are consistent with a 2-stage theory of mental model construction.     

Adaptation to a direction-dependent visuomotor gain in the young and elderly

Consistent with the widely accepted notion of separate specification of movement amplitude and direction, it has been argued that there is also a categorical difference between adaptation to novel visuomotor rotations and to novel visuomotor gains. In line with this view, ageing seems to affect rotation and gain adaptation differently in that age-related impairments are consistently found for the former, but not for the latter. In this study we ask whether the contrasting findings could also be ascribed to differences in the level of difficulty of gain and rotation adaptation tasks, respectively. In order to increase the difficulty of gain adaptation, younger and older participants had to adapt to a direction-dependent gain transformation. Results revealed direction-dependent adaptation in both groups. More importantly, we replicated the typical findings of age-related impairments of adaptation, but not of aftereffects, that were previously only reported for rotation adaptation. Younger participants also showed superior explicit knowledge regarding the novel visuomotor mapping as compared to the older participants. We show that this knowledge was used by younger participants to selectively augment adaptive shifts. Finally, our findings suggest that the difficulty of the novel visuomotor transformation and, related to this, the involvement of explicit knowledge in adaptation is critical for age-related changes to show up, but not the type of adaptation task, rotation and gain adaptation, respectively.     

Differential effects of cognitive inhibition and intelligence on creativity

There are different conceptions about how cognitive inhibition is related to creativity. Creativity has either been associated with effective inhibition, or with disinhibition, or with an adaptive engagement of inhibition. In this study, we examined the relationship of cognitive inhibition, assessed by means of the random motor generation task, with different measures of creativity. We also analyzed whether this relation is mediated by intelligence. We generally found a positive correlation of inhibition and creativity measures. Moreover, latent variable analyses indicate that inhibition may primarily promote the fluency of ideas, whereas intelligence specifically promotes the originality of ideas. These findings support the notion that creative thought involves executive processes and may help to better understand the differential role of inhibition and intelligence in creativity.