Exploring issues of personality measurement and structure through the development of a short form of the Eysenck Personality Profiler

In this article, we develop a revised short form of the original Eysenck Personality Profiler (EPP; H. J. Eysenck & Wilson, 1991). In addition, we address topics of broad theoretical importance such as the recurrent empirical finding of correlations between conceptually orthogonal personality dimensions and the possibility that gender differences in these dimensions are partly spurious. In Study 1 (N = 227), we demonstrate that the existing short form of the EPP (EPP-SF; H. J. Eysenck, Wilson, & Jackson, 1996) provides a poor fit to the data and we develop a revised well-fitting version. In Study 2, we retest this version on an independent new sample (N = 3,374) where it is again found to fit the data well. We show that most of the structural and measurement parameters of the revised EPP-SF are invariant across genders. Structured means analysis indicated a significant gender difference in Psychoticism, with men scoring higher than women, but no differences in Extraversion or Neuroticism. Our discussion focuses on issues concerning personality measurement and structure, including an examination of the role of confirmatory factor analysis in personality research.     

Behavioral and cognitive correlates of exercise self-schemata

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship of exercise self-schemata to both cognitive and behavioral concomitants including exercise self-efficacy, attitudes toward fitness, self-perceptions of fitness, and self-report of exercise behavior. Participants were 161 undergraduate students who subsequently were categorized into groups defined by the authors as "exercise schematics," "nonexercise schematics," "aschematics," and unclassified. Results indicated that exercise schematics reported greater total caloric expenditure, higher frequency of exercise behavior in the past as well as future expectations to exercise, greater self-perceptions of physical fitness, and more favorable attitudes toward fitness than either nonexercise schematics or aschematics. Furthermore, exercise schematics expressed higher levels of exercise self-efficacy than did nonexercise schematics. The results clearly support earlier findings concerning exercise self-schemata and exercise behavior and further indicate that schematics also differ from others in important cognitive-motivational determinants of exercise such as self-efficacy and perceptions of physical fitness. Future research should define the role of exercise self-schemata both theoretically and practically in order to enrich our understanding of and facilitate the enhancement of exercise adherence.     

The functions of aggression by male teenagers

A selectionist theory states that violence by males toward male peers originally served specific functions and violence to female peers served others. Differences in self-reported victimization and perpetration in studies of 1.452 high school students were hypothesized. In Study 1, male-to-male aggression was reported to be more prevalent than male-to-female aggression. For male-to-male aggression, perpetrator reports agreed with or exceeded victim reports, and victims were more often strangers than close friends, In contrast, for male-to-female aggression, there were consistently fewer reports from perpetrators than from victims, and victims were less often strangers than girlfriends. Study 2 obtained similar findings for reported frequency, number of victims and perpetrators, and sexual aggression. Study 3 showed that girls' aggression contrasted with that by boys with respect to intra- versus intersex aggression and perpetrator victim agreement.     

Acute effects of triazolam on false recognition

Neuropsychological, neuroimaging, and electrophysiological techniques have been applied to the study of false recognition; however, psychopharmacological techniques have not been applied. Benzodiazepine sedative/anxiolytic drugs produce memory deficits similar to those observed in organic amnesia and may be useful tools for studying normal and abnormal memory mechanisms. The present double-blind, placebo-controlled repeated measures study examined the acute effects of orally administered triazolam (Halcion; 0.125 and 0.25 mg/70 kg), a benzodiazepine hypnotic, on performance in the Deese (1959)/Roediger-McDermott (1995) false recognition paradigm in 24 healthy volunteers. Paralleling previous demonstrations in amnesic patients, triazolam produced significant dose-related reductions in false recognition rates to nonstudied words associatively related to studied words, suggesting that false recognition relies on normal memory mechanisms impaired in benzodiazepine-induced amnesia. The results also suggested that relative to placebo, triazolam reduced participants' reliance on memory for item-specific versus list-common semantic information and reduced participants' use of remember versus know responses.     

The persistence of structural priming: transient activation or implicit learning?

Structural priming in language production is a tendency to recreate a recently uttered syntactic structure in different words. This tendency can be seen independent of specific lexical items, thematic roles, or word sequences. Two alternative proposals about the mechanism behind structural priming include (a) short-term activation from a memory representation of a priming structure and (b) longer term adaptation within the cognitive mechanisms for creating sentences, as a form of procedural learning. Two experiments evaluated these hypotheses, focusing on the persistence of structural priming. Both experiments yielded priming that endured beyond adjacent sentences, persisting over 2 intervening sentences in Experiment 1 and over 10 in Experiment 2. Although memory may have short-term consequences for some components of this kind of priming, the persisting effects are more compatible with a learning account than a transient memory account.     

Spatial attention: different mechanisms for central and peripheral temporal precues?

The external noise paradigm (Z.-L. Lu & B. A. Dosher, 1998) was applied to investigate mechanisms of spatial attention in location precuing. Observers were precued or simultaneously cued to identify 1 of 4 pseudocharacters embedded in various amounts of external noise. The cues were either central or peripheral. Both central and peripheral precuing significantly reduced threshold in the presence of high external noise (16% and 17.5%). Only peripheral precuing significantly reduced threshold in the presence of low, or no, external noise (11%). A perceptual template model identified different mechanisms of attention for central and peripheral precuing, external noise exclusion for central precuing, and a combination of external noise exclusion and stimulus enhancement (or equivalently, internal additive noise reduction) for peripheral cuing.     

Use of number by crows: investigation by matching and oddity learning

Hooded crows were trained in two-alternative simultaneous matching and oddity tasks with stimulus sets of three different categories: color (black and white), shape (Arabic Numerals 1 and 2, which were used as visual shapes only), and number of elements (arrays of one and two items). These three sets were used for training successively and repeatedly; the stimulus set was changed to the next one after the criterion (80% correct or better over 30 consecutive trials) was reached with the previous one. Training was continued until the criterion could be reached within the first 30 to 50 trials for each of the three training sets. During partial transfer tests, familiar stimuli (numerals and arrays in the range from 1 to 2) were paired with novel ones (numerals and arrays in the range from 3 to 4). At the final stage of testing only novel stimuli were presented (numerals and arrays in the range from 5 to 8). Four of 6 birds were able to transfer in these tests, and their performance was significantly above chance. Moreover, performance of the birds on the array stimuli did not differ from their performance on the color or shape stimuli. They were capable of recognizing the number of elements in arrays and comparing the stimuli by this attribute. It was concluded that crows were able to apply the matching (or oddity) concept to stimuli of numerical category.     

Effects of escape to alone versus escape to enriched environments on adaptive and aberrant behavior

Escape-maintained aberrant behavior may be influenced by two outcomes: (a) a break from the activity and (b) subsequent access to preferred activities. To assess this hypothesis, a treatment was developed that analyzed response allocation across two break options: break alone and break with access to preferred social activities. The break with preferred activities decreased aberrant behavior and increased appropriate behavior.