Towards a Pan‐cultural Personality Structure: Input from 11 Psycholexical Studies

The purpose of the present study is to find the common kernel of different trait taxonomic studies and find out how the individual structures relate to this common kernel. Trait terms from 11 psycholexically based taxonomies were all translated into English. On the basis of the commonalities in English, the 11 matrices were merged into a joint matrix with 7104 subjects and 1993 trait terms. Untranslatable terms produced large areas with missing data. To arrive at the kernel structure of the joint matrix, a simultaneous component analysis was applied. In addition, the kernel structures were compared with the individual taxonomy trait structures, obtained via principal component analysis. The findings provide evidence of a structure consisting of three components to stand out as the core of the taxonomies included in this study; those components were named dynamism, affiliation, and order. Moreover, the relations between these three kernel components and those of a six‐component solution (completing the six‐factor model) are provided. Copyright © 2014 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Truly intensive clinical ethics immersion at the Washington Hospital Center

Opportunities for practical, hospital-based training in those skills demanded by clinical ethics consultation (CEC) have been limited. Given the number of individuals who provide part-time CEC, greater access to condensed, practical training such as the clinical ethics immersion course offered by the Washington Hospital Center, is necessary. Two participants in the initial cohort evaluate their CE training at a busy, urban referral center, exploring prior expectations, perceptions of its utility and suggestions for improvement. Such training will prove valuable not only for bioethicists who lack practical CEC experience "at the bedside" but also for ethics consultants whose ethics services have a low consult volume who wish to sharpen their skills.     

Identification of Individuals at Risk for Lynch Syndrome Using Targeted Evaluations and Genetic Testing: National Society of Genetic Counselors and the Collaborative Group of the Americas on Inherited Colorectal Cancer Joint Practice Guideline

Identifying individuals who have Lynch syndrome (LS) involves a complex diagnostic work up that includes taking a detailed family history and a combination of various genetic and immunohistochemical tests. The National Society of Genetic Counselors (NSGC) and the Collaborative Group of the Americas on Inherited Colorectal Cancer (CGA-ICC) have come together to publish this clinical practice testing guideline for the evaluation of LS. The purpose of this practice guideline is to provide guidance and a testing algorithm for LS as well as recommendations on when to offer testing. This guideline does not replace a consultation with a genetics professional. This guideline includes explanations in support of this and a summary of background data. While this guideline is not intended to serve as a review of LS, it includes a discussion of background information on LS, and cites a number of key publications which should be reviewed for a more in-depth understanding of LS. These guidelines are intended for genetic counselors, geneticists, gastroenterologists, surgeons, medical oncologists, obstetricians and gynecologists, nurses and other healthcare providers who evaluate patients for LS.     

A randomized controlled trial of the impact of a teacher classroom management program on the classroom behavior of children with and without behavior problems

This randomized controlled trial (RCT) evaluated the efficacy of the Incredible Years (IY) Teacher Classroom Management (TCM; Webster-Stratton & Reid, 2002) program to assess whether training teachers in IY-TCM principles improve teacher behavior, whether any observed improvements impact pupil behavior classroom-wide, and whether these effects can be demonstrated with children at risk of developing conduct problems. Six intervention and six control classrooms comprising 12 teachers and 107 children (aged 3 to 7 years) were recruited. Children were screened for high or low behavior problems using the cut-off points of the teacher-rated Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (Goodman, 1997). The primary outcome measure was independent classroom observations using the Teacher–Pupil Observation Tool (Martin et al., 2010). Multilevel modeling analyses were conducted to examine the effect of the intervention on teacher, classroom, and child behavior. Results showed a significant reduction in classroom off-task behavior (d = 0.53), teacher negatives to target children (d = 0.36), target child negatives towards the teacher (d = 0.42), and target child off-task behavior (d = 0.48). These preliminary results demonstrate the potential impact of IY-TCM on both teacher and child behavior.     

Fading perceptual resemblance: A path for rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) to conceptual matching?

Cognitive, comparative, and developmental psychologists have long been intrigued by humans’ and animals’ capacity to respond to abstract relations like sameness and difference, because this capacity may underlie crucial aspects of cognition like analogical reasoning. Recently, this capacity has been explored in higher-order, relational matching-to-sample (RMTS) tasks in which humans and animals try to complete analogies of sameness and difference between disparate groups of items. The authors introduced a new paradigm to this area, by yoking the relational-matching cue to a perceptual-matching cue. Then, using established algorithms for shape distortion, the perceptual cue was weakened and eliminated. Humans’ RMTS performance easily transcended the elimination of perceptual support. In contrast, RMTS performance by six macaques faltered as they were weaned from perceptual support. No macaque showed evidence of mature RMTS performance, even given more than 260,000 training trials during which we tried to coax a relational-matching performance from them. It is an important species difference that macaques show so hesitant a response to conceptual relations when humans respond to them so effortlessly. It raises theoretical questions about the emergence of this crucial capacity during humans’ cognitive evolution and during humans’ cognitive development.     

MULTIPLE FRACTURES IN TIME: REFLECTIONS ON A CAR CRASH

This essay offers a story of a traumatic event experienced by the author on September 6, 1999. Presented here in autoethnographic and multivoiced form, the author narrates a fraction of time in her life that has left her forever changed: a near-death car crash. She uses literary mode in the crash story and recollected dialogue in the rescue story. In the effort to engage readers into the particulars of such a horrific experience, she seeks to connect with trauma survivors and perhaps offer illumination for those who (for their own reasons) seek further understanding in what will, hopefully for them, never be a first-order experience.     

Impression Management Use in Resumes and Cover Letters

Purpose

This study contributes to the ecological validity of resume research by systematically examining the impression management (IM) content of actual resumes and cover letters and empirically testing the effect on applicant evaluation.

Design/methodology/approach

A content analysis of the frequency and intensity of IM tactic use in 60 resumes and cover letters was completed (Study 1). Next, an experiment was conducted in which IM tactic use was manipulated and the effect on applicant evaluation examined, using a sample of MTurk workers as evaluators (Study 2).

Findings

In Study 1, four self-promotion categories, three ingratiation categories, and one hybrid category were delineated. In Study 2, ingratiation and lower intensity self-promotion were found to increase perceptions of job and organization fit.

Implications

Employers should be aware that resumes and cover letters contain IM tactics that may influence applicant evaluation. In addition, employment training programs might communicate the benefits of using ingratiation and lower intensity self-promotion, while emphasizing the importance of accurately conveying one’s qualifications. Furthermore, the present taxonomy of IM resume content might be applied to resume database search engines to identify and index IM tactic use.

Originality/value

This research is the first to develop a taxonomy of IM tactics based on actual resumes and cover letters and may facilitate more comprehensive manipulations of IM tactic use and better integration of IM research across the selection process.

     

A cross-cultural study of trait self-enhancement, explanatory variables, and adjustment

We investigated trait self-enhancement, explanatory variables, and adjustment in European American (n = 141), Asian American (n = 72), Mexican (n = 141), and Filipino (n = 174) college students. Consistent with trait perspectives, students in all cultural groups rated their traits with moderate to high accuracy, using peer ratings as a criterion. European Americans did not exhibit self-enhancement relative to peers, but both self and peer ratings were higher (i.e., more positive) for European Americans than for the other three groups. Support was found for some, but not all, cultural psychology explanations of self-enhancement. In all cultural groups, self-enhancement was more associated with personal (intrapsychic) adjustment than interpersonal adjustment, as judged by peers. The results provided support for an integration of trait and cultural psychology perspectives.     

Learning rule-described and non-rule-described categories: a comparison of children and adults

Three experiments investigated the ability of 3-, 5-, and 8-year-old children as well as adults to learn sets of perceptual categories. Adults and children performed comparably on categories that could be learned by either a single-dimensional rule or by associative learning mechanisms. However, children showed poorer performance relative to adults in learning categories defined by a disjunctive rule and categories that were nonlinearly separable. Increasing the task demands for adults resulted in child-like performance on the disjunctive categories. Decreasing the task demands for children resulted in more adult-like performance on the disjunctive categories. The authors interpret these results within a multiple-systems approach to category learning and suggest that children have not fully developed the same explicit category learning system as adults.