Socially desirable responding and its elusive effects on the validity of personality assessments

Past studies of socially desirable self-reports on the items of personality measures have found inconsistent effects of the response bias on the measures' predictive validities, with some studies reporting small effects and other studies reporting large effects. Using Monte Carlo methods, we evaluated various models of socially desirable responding by systematically adding predetermined amounts of the bias to the simulated personality trait scores of hypothetical test respondents before computing test-criterion validity correlations. Our study generally supported previous findings that have reported relatively minor decrements in criterion prediction, even with personality scores that were massively infused with desirability bias. Furthermore, the response bias failed to reveal itself as a statistical moderator of test validity or as a suppressor of validity. Large differences between some respondents' obtained test scores and their true trait scores, however, meant that the personality measure's construct validity would be severely compromised and, more specifically, that estimates of those individuals' criterion performance would be grossly in error. Our discussion focuses on reasons for the discrepant results reported in the literature pertaining to the effect of socially desirable responding on criterion validity. More important, we explain why the lack of effects of desirability bias on the usual indicators of validity, moderation, and suppression should not be surprising.     

Construction and validation of the South African version of the Fear Survey Schedule for Children: an exploratory factor analysis

The Fear Survey Schedule for Children-Revised (Ollendick, 1983) is an 80-item self-report instrument that has been used internationally to asses the number of fears and general level of fearfulness among children. Despite its widespread use, this instrument has not been adapted to the South African context. The present study addressed this gap by means of a 2-phase investigation aimed at developing a South African version of the instrument. In Phase 1, semistructured interviews were conducted with 40 children (7 to 13 years of age). Qualitative data obtained from these interviews were used to construct additional items for inclusion in the South African Fear Survey Schedule for Children-Revised. The modified scale, consisting of 97 items, was then administered to a sample of 646 children between the ages of 7 and 13 years. Further psychometric considerations resulted in the final version of the scale consisting of 74 items with high internal consistency (α=.97). The factor structure was explored by means of principal component analysis with varimax rotation and a 5-factor solution was found to provide the best conceptual fit. The factors identified were as follows: Fear of Death and Danger; Fear of the Unknown; Fear of Small Animals and Minor Threats to Self; Large Animal Fears; and Situational Fears. Differences between the South African version and the original Fear Survey Schedule for Children-Revised are noted and implications for the study of fear in South Africa and other countries are discussed.     

Subliminal priming and effects of hand dominance

In the masked priming paradigm, motor responses to targets are influenced by previously presented subliminal primes, and are guided by facilitatory and inhibitory mechanisms that depend on prime-target compatibility/duration. In this study, we evaluate subliminal-driven priming in right- and left-handers during unimanual as well as bimanual tasks. The data from the unimanual tasks confirmed that prime-target compatibility affects performance as a function of prime-target duration. In a bimanual setting, the preferred hand benefitted from facilitation in both handedness groups whereas the non-preferred hand showed a positive priming effect only in left-handers. This denotes that left-handers are more susceptible to response activation of either hand. In addition, inhibitory priming had a stronger effect on the non-preferred than preferred hand, independent of handedness group. Overall, the findings suggest that subliminal-driven mechanisms that assist adaptive motor behavior are sensitive not only to extrinsic (task-related) factors such as prime-target compatibility but also to intrinsic (performer-related) factors such as hand dominance. The data further provide support for handedness-specific effects in motor functions and underline a significant role of hand dominance in the control of bimanual actions.     

Neural functions of calcineurin in synaptic plasticity and memory

Major brain functions depend on neuronal processes that favor the plasticity of neuronal circuits while at the same time maintaining their stability. The mechanisms that regulate brain plasticity are complex and engage multiple cascades of molecular components that modulate synaptic efficacy. Protein kinases (PKs) and phosphatases (PPs) are among the most important of these components that act as positive and negative regulators of neuronal signaling and plasticity, respectively. In these cascades, the PP protein phosphatase 2B or calcineurin (CaN) is of particular interest because it is the only Ca(2+)-activated PP in the brain and a major regulator of key proteins essential for synaptic transmission and neuronal excitability. This review describes the primary properties of CaN and illustrates its functions and modes of action by focusing on several representative targets, in particular glutamate receptors, striatal enriched protein phosphatase (STEP), and neuromodulin (GAP43), and their functional significance for synaptic plasticity and memory.     

Modeling body state-dependent multisensory integration

The brain often integrates multisensory sources of information in a way that is close to the optimal according to Bayesian principles. Since sensory modalities are grounded in different, body-relative frames of reference, multisensory integration requires accurate transformations of information. We have shown experimentally, for example, that a rotating tactile stimulus on the palm of the right hand can influence the judgment of ambiguously rotating visual displays. Most significantly, this influence depended on the palm orientation: when facing upwards, a clockwise rotation on the palm yielded a clockwise visual judgment bias; when facing downwards, the same clockwise rotation yielded a counterclockwise bias. Thus, tactile rotation cues biased visual rotation judgment in a head-centered reference frame. Recently, we have generated a modular, multimodal arm model that is able to mimic aspects of such experiments. The model co-represents the state of an arm in several modalities, including a proprioceptive, joint angle modality as well as head-centered orientation and location modalities. Each modality represents each limb or joint separately. Sensory information from the different modalities is exchanged via local forward and inverse kinematic mappings. Also, re-afferent sensory feedback is anticipated and integrated via Kalman filtering. Information across modalities is integrated probabilistically via Bayesian-based plausibility estimates, continuously maintaining a consistent global arm state estimation. This architecture is thus able to model the described effect of posture-dependent motion cue integration: tactile and proprioceptive sensory information may yield top-down biases on visual processing. Equally, such information may influence top-down visual attention, expecting particular arm-dependent motion patterns. Current research implements such effects on visual processing and attention.     

Goal-relevant events need not be rare to boost memory for concurrent images

In the attentional boost effect, memory for images presented at the same time as unrelated targets (e.g., an orange square) is enhanced relative to images presented at the same time as distractors (e.g., a blue square). One difficulty in understanding the nature of this enhancement is that, in most experiments demonstrating the attentional boost effect, targets have been less common than distractors. As a result, the memory enhancement associated with target detection may have been driven by differences in the relative frequencies of targets and distractors. In four experiments, participants encoded images into memory at the same time that they monitored a second, unrelated stimulus stream for targets. In some conditions, targets were as common as distractors (1:1 ratio); in others, targets were rare (1:6 ratio). The attentional boost effect was present when the target and distractor frequencies were equated, ruling out oddball and distinctiveness effects as explanations. These effects were observed when targets required a buttonpress and when they were covertly counted. Memory enhancements were not observed for images presented at the same time as rare distractor stimuli. We concluded that selectively attending to events that require an overt or covert response enhances the processing of concurrent information.     

Neural control of voluntary eye closure: a case study and an fMRI investigation of blinking and winking

The current paper describes a rare case of a patient who suffered from unilateral apraxia of eye closure as a result of a bilateral stroke. Interestingly, the patient's ability to voluntarily close both eyelids (i.e. blinking) was not affected, indicating that different neural mechanisms control each type of eye closure. The stroke caused damage to a large part of the right frontal cortex, including the motor cortex, pre-motor cortex and the frontal eye field (FEF). The lesion in the left hemisphere was restricted to the FEF. In order to further study the neural mechanisms of eye closure, we conducted an fMRI study in a group of neurological healthy subjects. We found that all areas of the oculomotor cortex were activated by both left and right winking, including the FEF, supplementary eye field (SEF), and posterior parietal cortex (PPC). Blinking activated FEF and SEF, but not PPC. Both FEF and PPC were significantly more active during winking than blinking. Together, these results provide evidence for a critical role of the FEF in voluntary unilateral eye closure.     

Hesitancy to Return to the Pre-pandemic Routine

Journal of Rational-Emotive & Cognitive-Behavior Therapy - The goal of the present study was to explore COVID-19 related hesitancy, which represents the inability of people to return to...