Listeners influence speakers’ perceived communication effectiveness

People have an exaggerated sense of self-efficacy. This paper investigates the mechanism behind speakers’ tendency to overestimate their communication efficacy. Two competing mechanisms were tested: intrapersonal and interpersonal. Speakers communicated a series of ambiguous statements to a co-present or absent listener and then estimated their success. Speakers overestimated their ability to communicate their intended message (relative to listeners’ actual comprehension of their message) when a listener was co-present, but not when a listener was absent. Our findings support an interpersonal explanation of speakers’ perceived communication efficacy.     

From the Work One Knows the Worker: A Systematic Review of the Challenges,Solutions, and Steps to Creating Synthetic Validity

Synthetic validity has been promised as the future for selection, providing an inexpensive, fast, high‐quality, legally defensible, and easily administered process. Despite 50 years of development, this promise has yet to be realized. However, recent advances in areas such as validity generalization indicate that synthetic validity is technically feasible and practically achievable. Consolidating new and previous work carried out on two synthetic validity strategies, the job‐requirement matrix and job component validity, we review the methodological steps required to build them and provide working examples. Although the resources required for full realization of synthetic validity are large, similar, although larger, projects have been undertaken in the past and in the present, and there is increasing infrastructure to facilitate them in the future.     

Developmental changes in automatic rule‐learning mechanisms across early childhood

Infants’ ability to learn complex linguistic regularities from early on has been revealed by electrophysiological studies indicating that 3‐month‐olds, but not adults, can automatically detect non‐adjacent dependencies between syllables. While different ERP responses in adults and infants suggest that both linguistic rule learning and its link to basic auditory processing undergo developmental changes, systematic investigations of the developmental trajectories are scarce. In the present study, we assessed 2‐ and 4‐year‐olds’ ERP indicators of pitch discrimination and linguistic rule learning in a syllable‐based oddball design. To test for the relation between auditory discrimination and rule learning, ERP responses to pitch changes were used as predictor for potential linguistic rule‐learning effects. Results revealed that 2‐year‐olds, but not 4‐year‐olds, showed ERP markers of rule learning. Although, 2‐year‐olds’ rule learning was not dependent on differences in pitch perception, 4‐year‐old children demonstrated a dependency, such that those children who showed more pronounced responses to pitch changes still showed an effect of rule learning. These results narrow down the developmental decline of the ability for automatic linguistic rule learning to the age between 2 and 4 years, and, moreover, point towards a strong modification of this change by auditory processes. At an age when the ability of automatic linguistic rule learning phases out, rule learning can still be observed in children with enhanced auditory responses. The observed interrelations are plausible causes for age‐of‐acquisition effects and inter‐individual differences in language learning.     

Self-regulation and STEM persistence in minority and non-minority students across the first year of college

Social Psychology of Education - Psychological factors have been implicated in STEM persistence but remain poorly understood. In particular, the role of self-regulation—the cognitive,...     

Multidimensional Perfectionism and Ruminative Brooding in Current Dysphoria,Anxiety, Worry,and Anger

The current study examined links between dimensions of perfectionism, ruminative and distractive coping, and multiple measures of current distress (dysphoria, anxiety, worry, and anger) in 205 university students. A main goal was to test the hypothesis that perfectionism is related to a new measure of the critical maladaptive component of rumination (i.e., ruminative brooding) that is not confounded with symptoms and confirm that both constructs function as non-specific vulnerabilities for emotional distress. Our study revealed numerous significant findings, including: (1) socially prescribed perfectionism (SPP) was the dimension most strongly related to brooding in response to depression and anxiety; (2) SPP, self-oriented perfectionism (SOP), and brooding predicted various indices of distress; (3) SOP predicted anxiety and worry in women, and it predicted dysphoria and anger in men; (4) despite the strong associations between ruminative brooding and distress, perfectionism still accounted for unique variance in distress, and vice-versa. Implications for the issue of the adaptiveness versus maladaptiveness of perfectionism and for counseling perfectionists who fall into the “brooding trap” are discussed.

Correlates of Academic Procrastination and Students’ Grade Goals

This study examined correlates of academic procrastination and students’ grade goals in a sample of 226 undergraduates from Singapore. Findings indicated that self-efficacy for self-regulated learning was significantly and negatively related to procrastination. High self-efficacy for self-regulated learning also predicted students’ expectations of doing well and low self-efficacy for self-regulated learning predicted students’ expectations of not doing well academically. Additionally, help-seeking predicted students’ expectations of doing well academically while academic stress predicted students’ expectations of not doing well academically. Implications for education and educational practice were discussed. This project was partially supported by the Undergraduate Research Experience on Campus (URECA) program from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.     

Decision noise: An explanation for observed violations of signal detection theory

In signal detection theory (SDT), responses are governed by perceptual noise and a flexible decision criterion. Recent criticisms of SDT (see, e.g., Balakrishnan, 1999) have identified violations of its assumptions, and researchers have suggested that SDT fundamentally misrepresents perceptual and decision processes. We hypothesize that, instead, these violations of SDT stem from decision noise: the inability to use deterministic response criteria. In order to investigate this hypothesis, we present a simple extension of SDT—the decision noise model—with which we demonstrate that shifts in a decision criterion can be masked by decision noise. In addition, we propose a new statistic that can help identify whether the violations of SDT stem from perceptual or from decision processes. The results of a stimulus classification experiment—together with model fits to past experiments—show that decision noise substantially affects performance. These findings suggest that decision noise is important across a wide range of tasks and needs to be better understood in order to accurately measure perceptual processes.     

Psychometric properties of scores on three Black racial identity scales

In this study, we examined the internal consistency and the structural validity of scores on the African Self-Consciousness Scale (ASCS), the Multidimensional Inventory of Black Identity (MIBI), and the Cross Racial Identity Scale (CRIS). Participants consisted of 225 African American college students--75 attending predominantly White institutions (PWIs) and 150 attending historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Internal consistency estimates were above .60 for scores on one ASCS subscale, six MIBI subscales, and six CRIS subscales. Exploratory factor analytic procedures supported a two-factor structure for ASCS scores, a five-factor structure for MIBI scores, and a six-factor structure for CRIS scores. Implications for Black racial identity and scale development are discussed.     

The Effects of Adult Suggestion and Child Consistency on Young Children's Reports1

The purpose of the present study was to contrast the effects of children's response consistency and adult leading questions in a structured memory interview. Children (N = 70) who viewed a 2‐min video clip were asked 3 questions (leading, misleading, and neutral) related to the video. Children's responses (assent vs. deny) were predicted by the type of question asked by the adult (neutral, leading, and misleading), but not by the previous response given by the child or the child's age in months. Specifically, children assented the least often to misleading questions. Accuracy was predicted by both question type and in the last question–answer pair, children's previous response accuracy. These findings are discussed with relation to interview dynamics.