Possible barnum effect in the five factor model: do respondents accept random neo personality inventory-revised scores as their actual trait profile?

This study investigated a possible Barnum effect in personality traits, i.e., that persons accept a false trait profile as correct. Having answered the Norwegian translation of the NEO Personality Inventory-Revised, a group of 75 students, 56 (five women military aviation cadets and 19 (10 women) graduate students, received a random T-score profile and were asked to rate their agreement on a 7-point scale. For all personality traits, i.e., facets and domains measured by the NEO Personality Inventory-Revised, positive correlations ranging from .08 to .64 were found between the agreement ratings and the similarity between the random false scores and the actual scores. The respondents identified and rejected random T scores that deviated far from their actual scores, which works against the Barnum effect. Correct identification correlated negatively with Neuroticism r = -.41) and positively (r = .53) with Conscientiousness.     

Executive Functioning and Non-Verbal Intelligence as Predictors of Bullying in Early Elementary School

Executive function and intelligence are negatively associated with aggression, yet the role of executive function has rarely been examined in the context of school bullying. We studied whether different domains of executive function and non-verbal intelligence are associated with bullying involvement in early elementary school. The association was examined in a population-based sample of 1,377 children. At age 4 years we assessed problems in inhibition, shifting, emotional control, working memory and planning/organization, using a validated parental questionnaire (the BRIEF-P). Additionally, we determined child non-verbal IQ at age 6 years. Bullying involvement as a bully, victim or a bully-victim in grades 1–2 of elementary school (mean age 7.7 years) was measured using a peer-nomination procedure. Individual bullying scores were based on the ratings by multiple peers (on average 20 classmates). Analyses were adjusted for various child and maternal socio-demographic and psychosocial covariates. Child score for inhibition problems was associated with the risk of being a bully (OR per SD?=?1.35, 95%CI: 1.09–1.66), victim (OR per SD?=?1.21, 95%CI: 1.00–1.45) and a bully-victim (OR per SD?=?1.55, 95%CI: 1.10–2.17). Children with higher non-verbal IQ were less likely to be victims (OR?=?0.99, 95%CI: 0.98–1.00) and bully-victims (OR?=?95%CI: 0.93–0.98, respectively). In conclusion, our study showed that peer interactions may be to some extent influenced by children’s executive function and non-verbal intelligence. Future studies should examine whether training executive function skills can reduce bullying involvement and improve the quality of peer relationships.     

Justice as a Family Value: How a Commitment to Fairness is Compatible with Love

Many discussions of love and the family treat issues of justice as something alien. On this view, concerns about whether one's family is internally just are in tension with the modes of interaction that are characteristic of loving families. In this essay, we challenge this widespread view. We argue that once justice becomes a shared family concern, its pursuit is compatible with loving familial relations. We examine four arguments for the thesis that a concern with justice is not at home within a loving family, and we explain why these arguments fail. We develop and defend an alternative conception of the justice‐oriented loving family, arguing that justice can—and, for the sake of justice, should—be seen as a family value.     

The development of morphological representations in young readers: a cross‐modal priming study

The way children organize words in their memory has intrigued many researchers in the past 20 years. Given the large number of morphologically complex words in many languages, the influence of morphemes on this organization is being increasingly examined. The aim of this study was to understand how morphemic information influences English‐speaking children's word recognition. Children in grades 3 and 5 were asked to complete a lexical decision priming task. Prime‐target pairs varied in semantic similarity, with low (e.g., belly‐bell), moderate (e.g., lately‐late), and high similarity relations (e.g., boldly‐bold). There were also word pairs similar in form only (e.g., spinach‐spin) and in semantics only (e.g., garbage‐trash). Primes were auditory and targets were presented visually. Analyses of children's lexical decision times revealed graded priming effects as a function of the convergence of form and meaning. These results indicate that developing readers do not necessarily need to lexicalize morphological units to facilitate word recognition. Their ability to process the morphological structure of words depends on their ability to develop connections between form and meaning.     

Children's judgments about their own self‐knowledge: The role of disclosure to other

Previous research has suggested that children of 5/6 years fail to understand that they are the authority on their own self‐knowledge. That is, when asked questions like, ‘Who knows best when you are feeling tired?’, they tend to cite their mother rather than themselves. Here we report a study that, rather than asking about generalities (‘Who knows best what you are thinking?’), presented 5‐, 7‐ 9‐ and 11‐year‐children with hypothetical vignettes about specific circumstances in which they were described as either disclosing or not disclosing a specified state to their mother. Children were subsequently asked to judge who would best know the state. Over all age groups children were significantly more likely to identify themselves as authorities on their own self‐knowledge when states had not been disclosed to mother than when they had. However, in the case of disclosed states, young children (though not older ones) asserted that, ‘mum knows best’. These findings are interpreted as suggesting not that young children entirely fail to understand first person authority, but instead that they make the relatively sophisticated assumption that mothers' interpretive competence is greater than their own.