Modeling Person-Situation Correspondence over Time: A Study of 103 Evangelical Disciple-Makers

ABSTRACT Recent Studies of person-situation correspondence demonstrate that people actively select environments that are congruent with their personality, attitudes, motives, and goals (cf. Emmons, Diener, & Larsen, 1986). But do these individual difference variables also influence a person's propensity to remain in an environment over time? To answer this question, we administered the Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire (MPQ; Tellegen, 1982; Tellegen & Waller, 1990) and the Age Universal I-E scale (Gorsuch & Venable, 1983) to a sample of 103 lay-ministers from a large, evangelical church in the upper Midwest. Subjects were participants in a church-sponsored disciple-making program, and our dependent variable was length of involvement as a disciple-maker. Results indicated that the lay-ministers endorsed an intrinsic religious orientation and had high scores on the MPQ dimensions of Control, Harmavoidance, and Traditionalism. Using survival analysis, a statistical technique for modeling event durations, we found that disciple-makers who were both low on Aggression and Harmavoidance remained in the program for the longest period. Our findings are discussed in terms of a temporally oriented model of person-situation correspondence.     

Can humans perceive their brain states?

Although the brain enables us to perceive the external world and our body, it remains unknown whether brain processes themselves can be perceived. Brain tissue does not have receptors for its own activity. However, the ability of humans to acquire self-control of brain processes indicates that the perception of these processes may also be achieved by learning. In this study patients learned to control low-frequency components of their EEG: the so-called slow cortical potentials (SCPs). In particular "probe" sessions, the patients estimated the quality of the SCP shift they had produced in the preceding trial. The correspondence between the recorded SCP amplitudes and the subjective estimates increased with training. The ability to perceive the SCPs was related to the ability to control them; this perception was not mediated by peripheral variables such as changes in muscle tonus and cannot be reduced to simple vigilance monitoring. These data provide evidence that humans can learn to perceive the neural activity of their brain. Alternative interpretations are discussed.     

Brain-computer communication: unlocking the locked in

With the increasing efficiency of life-support systems and better intensive care, more patients survive severe injuries of the brain and spinal cord. Many of these patients experience locked-in syndrome: The active mind is locked in a paralyzed body. Consequently, communication is extremely restricted or impossible. A muscle-independent communication channel overcomes this problem and is realized through a brain-computer interface, a direct connection between brain and computer. The number of technically elaborated brain-computer interfaces is in contrast with the number of systems used in the daily life of locked-in patients. It is hypothesized that a profound knowledge and consideration of psychological principles are necessary to make brain-computer interfaces feasible for locked-in patients.     

Alcohol Affects Emotion Through Cognition

Determining how cognition and emotion interact is pivotal to an understanding of human behavior and its disorders. Available data suggest that changes in emotional reactivity and behavior associated with drinking are intertwined with alcohol's effects on cognitive processing. In the study reported here, we demonstrated that alcohol dampens anticipatory fear and response inhibition in human participants not by directly suppressing subcortical emotion centers, as posited by traditional tension-reduction theories, but instead by impairing cognitive-processing capacity. During intoxication, reductions in fear response (assessed via startle potentiation) occurred only under dual-stimulus conditions, and coincided with reduced attentional processing of threat cues as evidenced by brain response (assessed via P3 event-related potentials). The results are consistent with higher cortical mediation of alcohol's effects on fear, and illustrate more broadly how disruption of a cognitive process can lead to alterations in emotional reactivity and adaptive behavior.     

The Recaptured Scale Technique: A Method for Testing the Structural Robustness of Personality Scales

Tellegen and Waller advocated a complex and time-consuming scale construction method that they called “exploratory test construction.” Scales that are constructed by this method—such as the Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire (MPQ)—are presumed to be more “psychologically coherent” and “robust” than scales constructed by other means. Using a novel procedure that we call the “recaptured scale technique,” we tested this conjecture by conducting a megafactor analysis on data from the 411 adult participants of the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart who completed the MPQ, the MMPI, and the CPI. We extracted and obliquely rotated 21 factors from a matrix of gender-corrected tetrachoric correlations for the 1,102 nonredundant items of the three omnibus inventories. Robustness of the 11 MPQ scales was assessed by the degree to which these factors recaptured the MPQ item groupings. Our results showed that nine factors were clearly recognizable as MPQ scales and two additional factors represented a bifurcation of an MPQ scale. A higher-order factor analysis of all 21 factor scales yielded five factors that clearly resembled the Big Five. Our results provide strong support for (a) the method of exploratory test construction, (b) the structural robustness of most MPQ scales, and (c) the utility of the recaptured scale technique.     

Envy and Its Consequences: Why It Is Useful to Distinguish between Benign and Malicious Envy

Envy is the pain that arises from the good fortune of others. Recent research identified two subtypes of envy, benign and malicious envy. Malicious envy is the envy subtype with action tendencies aimed to pull down the envied person from their superior position. Benign envy is also a frustrating experience, but activates action tendencies aimed at improving oneself. This article provides an overview of the empirical support for making this distinction in envy subtypes. It then discusses the benefits of a subtype approach to envy, with the main advantages of distinguishing benign and malicious envy being that it (a) provides researchers with the language to be clear in how they conceptualize envy and (b) allows novel predictions. A next section provides a response to some criticism on making this distinction. Finally, I conclude with a section on how envy in general, and benign and malicious envy in particular, could be measured.     

The (un)detectability of absolute Newtonian masses

Synthese - Absolutism about mass claims that mass ratios obtain in virtue of absolute masses. Comparativism denies this. Dasgupta (in: Bennett, Zimmerman (eds), Oxford studies in metaphysics,...     

Ideomotor silence: the case of complete paralysis and brain–computer interfaces (BCI)

The paper presents some speculations on the loss of voluntary responses and operant learning in long-term paralysis in human patients and curarized rats. Based on a reformulation of the ideomotor thinking hypothesis already described in the 19th century, we present evidence that instrumentally learned responses and intentional cognitive processes extinguish as a consequence of long-term complete paralysis in patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Preliminary data collected with ALS patients during extended and complete paralysis suggest semantic classical conditioning of brain activity as the only remaining communication possibility in those states.     

Heroic or hubristic? A componential approach to the relationship between perceived transformational leadership and leader–member exchanges

Using an interpersonal approach to self-perceptions, we broke down leaders’ self-perceptions of their transformational leadership behaviour into three components: a target effect (i.e., how leaders are perceived by followers), a perceiver effect (i.e., how leaders perceive followers), and a self-enhancement effect (i.e., idiosyncratic positivity bias in how leaders perceive themselves), and then examined the relationships between these components and the quality of exchanges between leaders and followers (LMX). In a survey study among 60 leaders with 286 followers, we found the target effect in leaders’ self-perceptions of their transformational leadership to be positively related to the quality of LMX, whereas the perceiver effect and self-enhancement effects were negatively associated with LMX. Follower extraversion intensified the positive role of the target effect and the negative role of the self-enhancement effect in the leader–follower exchanges.