Incremental Validity of Situational Judgment Tests for Task and Contextual Job Performance

This paper has three goals. First, it responds to calls for additional research on subgroup differences in situational judgment tests. Second, it expands the cumulative knowledge on the incremental validity of situational judgment tests beyond cognitive ability and personality. Third, it examines the validity and incremental validity of various predictors for both task and contextual performance.     

Heidegger’s Destruktion of Theology: ‘Primordial Faith’ and ‘Recognition’ of the Messiah

Heidegger’s phenomenology of religious life offers important insights by engaging Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, where he distinguishes ‘Paul the Pharisee’ from ‘Paul the Christian’ in order to explicate the nature of faith in contrast to systematic theology. Neither certitude in God’s existence is primordial to Christian faith, according to Heidegger, nor is rabbinic nor theological disputation concerning God’s existence or God’s nature. Instead, what is essential to Heidegger’s phenomenology of religious life are: (1) faith as lived experience and (2) recognition of ‘the Christ’ (ho christos/ha ma?ía?). This ‘recognition’, however, requires phenomenological clarification and not philosophy of religion as traditionally construed.     

The MMPI-2: A Contemporary Normative Study of Midwestern Family Medicine Outpatients

For more than 60 years it has been known that profiles from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), obtained from medical patients, are elevated when scores are plotted using general population norms. These elevations have been most apparent on the neurotic triad (NTd), the first 3 clinical scales on the MMPI profile. More than 45 years have passed since a nonreferred, normative sample of MMPIs was established from 50,000 consecutive medical outpatients. We present comparable but contemporary normative data for the revised MMPI (MMPI-2) based on a nonreferred sample of 1,243 family medicine outpatients (590 women; 653 men). As true for the original MMPI, contemporary medical outpatients have profiles that are significantly different, clinically and statistically, from the general population norms for the MMPI-2. This is particularly evident in elevations on the NTd. New normative tables of uniform medical T (UMT) scores were developed following the procedures used to create the uniform T scores for the MMPI-2. Measures of internal consistency are reported; test-retest reliability was established over a mean of 3.7 weeks, and results characterizing the stability of the validity and clinical scales are presented.     

Intrinsic array structure is neither necessary nor sufficient for nonegocentric coding of spatial layouts

Mou and McNamara (2002) have recently theorized that nonegocentric reference frames (viz., intrinsic reference frames, based on the spatial structure of a configuration of objects) are used to organize spatial relationships in memory. The theory has not made claims about whether the intrinsic structure of a stimulus array is necessary or sufficient for such nonegocentric coding. We demonstrate that salient intrinsic axes in a layout of objects are neither necessary nor sufficient for people to use a nonegocentric reference frame in organizing spatial memory. In Experiment 1, participants were successfully instructed to adopt a nonegocentric preferred direction in memory for an array of objects with no salient intrinsic reference axes. In Experiment 2, with no instructions, participants adopted an egocentric preferred direction for an array with a salient intrinsic axis. These results suggest that physically salient array structure exerts a minimal influence in the coding of spatial memory through nonegocentric reference frames.     

Factor structure and correlates of the dissociative experiences scale in a large offender sample

The authors examined the psychometric properties, factor structure, and construct validity of the Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES) in a large offender sample (N = 1,515). Although the DES is widely used with community and clinical samples, minimal work has examined offender samples. Participants were administered self-report and interview measures, and a subsample was followed longitudinally to determine criminal and violent recidivism. The DES exhibited good psychometric properties, but an identified three-factor structure was of questionable replicability. Moreover, the DES factors displayed no evidence of differential correlates. DES total scores were correlated with trauma-related variables even after controlling for negative affectivity. Total scores were related to measures of antisocial behavior and aggression but did not predict recidivism. These findings support the reliability and construct validity of the DES in offenders but raise questions regarding the clinical utility of the DES factor scores above and beyond that of the total score.     

Affective primes suppress attention bias to threat in socially anxious individuals

Anxious individuals show an attention bias towards threatening information. However, under conditions of sustained environmental threat this otherwise-present attention bias disappears. It remains unclear whether this suppression of attention bias can be caused by a transient activation of the fear system. In the present experiment, high socially anxious and low socially anxious individuals (HSA group, n=12; LSA group, n=12) performed a modified dot-probe task in which they were shown either a neutral or socially threatening prime word prior to each trial. EEG was collected and ERP components to the prime and faces displays were computed. HSA individuals showed an attention bias to threat after a neutral prime, but no attention bias after a threatening prime, demonstrating that suppression of attention bias can occur after a transient activation of the fear system. LSA individuals showed an opposite pattern: no evidence of a bias to threat with neutral primes but induction of an attention bias to threat following threatening primes. ERP results suggested differential processing of the prime and faces displays by HSA and LSA individuals. However, no group by prime interaction was found for any of ERP components.