Psychometric Properties and Measurement Invariance of the Youth Psychopathic Traits Inventory - Short Version among Portuguese Youth

This study aimed to examine the psychometric properties of the Youth Psychopathic Traits Inventory - Short version (YPI-S) among a mixed-gender sample of 782 Portuguese youth (M = 15.87 years; SD = 1.72) collected in a school context. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis offered support for the expected 3-factor structure. Partial cross-gender measurement invariance and cross-sample measurement invariance of the YPI-S using a forensic sample of institutionalized males was established. The Portuguese version of the YPI-S showed adequate psychometric properties in terms of internal consistency, mean inter-item correlation, corrected item-total correlation, convergent validity, and discriminant validity. In support for criterion-related validity, the YPI-S also showed statistically significant associations with self-reported conduct disorder symptoms, alcohol abuse, and drug use. In terms of known-groups validity, males from the school sample scored lower than males from the forensic sample and higher than females from the school sample. The YPI-S seems to be a valuable brief and psychometrically reliable and valid self-report measure, which can be used to assess psychopathic traits in diverse samples of youth.     

Evaluating Amazon’s Mechanical Turk for psychological research on the symbolic control of attention

The use of online crowdsourcing services like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (AMT) as a method of collecting behavioral data online has become increasingly popular in recent years. A growing body of contemporary research has empirically validated the use of AMT as a tool in psychological research by replicating a wide range of well-established effects that have been previously reported in controlled laboratory studies. However, the potential for AMT to be used to conduct spatial cuing experiments has yet to be investigated in depth. Spatial cuing tasks are typically very basic in terms of their stimulus complexity and experimental testing procedures, thus making them ideal for remote testing online that requires minimal task instruction. Studies employing the spatial cuing paradigm are typically aimed at unveiling novel facets of the symbolic control of attention, which occurs whenever observers orient their attention through space in accordance with the meaning of a spatial cue. Ultimately, the present study empirically validated the use of AMT to study the symbolic control of attention by successfully replicating four hallmark effects reported throughout the visual attention literature: the left/right advantage, cue type effect, cued axis effect, and cued endpoint effect. Various recommendations for future endeavors using AMT as a means of remotely collecting behavioral data online are also provided. In sum, the present study provides a crucial first step toward establishing a novel tool for conducting psychological research that can be used to expedite not only our own scientific contributions, but also those of our colleagues.     

Interference between cues requires a causal scenario: Favorable evidence for causal reasoning models in learning processes

In an interference-between-cues design (IbC), the expression of a learned Cue A–Outcome 1 association has been shown to be impaired if another cue, B, is separately paired with the same outcome in a second learning phase. The present study examined whether IbC could be caused by associative mechanisms independent of causal reasoning processes. This was achieved by testing participants in two different learning situations. In the Causal Scenario condition, participants learned in a diagnostic situation in which a common cause (Outcome 1) caused two disjoint effects, namely Cues A and B. In the Non-Causal Scenario condition, the same IbC design and stimulus conditions were used. However, instructions provided no causal frame to make sense of how cues and outcomes were related. IbC was only found in the Causal Scenario condition. This result is consistent with Causal Reasoning Models of causal learning and raises important difficulties for associative explanations of IbC.     

Portuguese category norms for children

This study presents Portuguese category norms for children of three different age groups: preschoolers (3- to 4-year-olds), second graders (7- to 8-year-olds), and preadolescents (11- to 12-year-olds). Three hundred Portuguese children (100 in each group) completed an exemplar-generation task. Preschoolers generated exemplars for 13 categories, second graders generated exemplars for 17 categories, and preadolescents generated exemplars for 21 categories. For each group, responses within each category were organized according to frequency of production in order to derive exemplar-production norms for sets of tested categories. The results also included information about the number of responses and exemplars, idiosyncratic and inappropriate responses, and commonality and diversity indexes for all the categories. A comparison of these children's norms with the Portuguese adult norms was also presented. The full set of norms may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.     

What is behind a summary-evaluation decision?

Research in psychology has reported that, among the variety of possibilities for assessment methodologies, summary evaluation offers a particularly adequate context for inferring text comprehension and topic understanding. However, grades obtained in this methodology are hard to quantify objectively. Therefore, we carried out an empirical study to analyze the decisions underlying human summary-grading behavior. The task consisted of expert evaluation of summaries produced in critically relevant contexts of summarization development, and the resulting data were modeled by means of Bayesian networks using an application called Elvira, which allows for graphically observing the predictive power (if any) of the resultant variables. Thus, in this article, we analyzed summary-evaluation decision making in a computational framework.     

Interference between cues of the same outcome depends on the causal interpretation of the events

In an interference-between-cues design, the expression of a learned Cue A → Outcome 1 association has been shown to be impaired if another cue, B, is separately paired with the same outcome in a second learning phase. In the present study, we assessed whether this interference effect is mediated by participants' previous causal knowledge. This was achieved by having participants learn in a diagnostic situation in Experiment 1a, and then by manipulating the causal order of the learning task in Experiments 1b and 2. If participants use their previous causal knowledge during the learning process, interference should only be observed in the diagnostic situation because only there we have a common cause (Outcome 1) of two disjoint effects, namely cues A and B. Consistent with this prediction, interference between cues was only found in Experiment 1a and in the diagnostic conditions of Experiments 1b and 2.     

A new look at sensory attenuation. Action-effect anticipation affects sensitivity, not response bias

The systematic association of an action that a person performs with its sensory effects is thought to attenuate that person's perception of the effect of the action. However, whether learned sensorimotor contingencies truly affect perception, rather than just inducing a response bias, has yet to be determined. The experiment presented in this article comprised two parts: an action-effect association phase and a test phase, during which the actions' perceptual effects were tested. During the association phase, specific actions (left-key and right-key presses) were associated with specific visual effects (tilted Gabor patches). In the test phase, participants' left-key presses and right-key presses triggered the onset of a low-contrast tilted Gabor patch in 50% of trials (no stimulus was presented on the remaining 50% of trials). Participants were required to report the presence or absence of this tilted Gabor patch. Our results showed that participants' sensitivity (d') to the Gabor patches was reduced by 10% when the patches were triggered by the action they had previously been associated with. This finding indicates that a person's action does not induce a response bias (c), but changes the perception (d') of the learned action effect.     

Time course of inhibitory processes in bilingual language processing

This study examines the time course of inhibitory processes in Spanish–English bilinguals, using the procedure described in Macizo, Bajo, and Martín. Bilingual participants were required to decide whether pairs of English words were related. Critical word pairs contained a word that shared the same orthography across languages but differed in meaning (interlingual homographs such as pie, meaning foot in Spanish). In Expts 1 and 2, participants were slower to respond to homographs presented along with words related to the Spanish meaning of the homograph as compared to control words. This result agrees with the view that bilinguals non‐selectively activate their two languages irrespective of the language they are using. In addition, bilinguals also slowed their responses when the English translation of the Spanish homograph meaning was presented 500 ms after responding to homographs (Expt 1). This result suggests that bilinguals inhibited the irrelevant homograph meaning. However, the inhibitory effect was not observed in Expt 2 when the between‐trial interval was fixed to 750 ms which suggests that inhibition decayed over time.     

A Finer Grained Approach to Psychological Capital and Work Performance

Purpose

Psychological capital is a set of personal resources comprised by hope, efficacy, optimism, and resilience, which previous research has supported as being valuable for general work performance. However, in today’s organizations, a multidimensional approach is required to understanding work performance, thus, we aimed to determine whether psychological capital improves proficiency, adaptivity, and proactivity, and also whether hope, efficiency, resilience, and optimism have a differential contribution to the same outcomes. Analyzing the temporal meaning of each psychological capital dimension, this paper theorizes the relative weights of psychological capital dimensions on proficiency, adaptivity, and proactivity, proposing also that higher relative weight dimensions are helpful to cope with job demands and perform well.

Methodology

Two survey studies, the first based on cross-sectional data and the second on two waves of data, were conducted with employees from diverse organizations, who provided measures of their psychological capital, work performance, and job demands. Data was modeled with regression analysis together with relative weights analysis.

Findings

Relative weights for dimensions of psychological capital were supported as having remarkable unique contributions for proficient, adaptive, and proactive behavior, particularly when job demands were high.

Originality/Value

We concluded that organizations facing high job demands should implement actions to enhance psychological capital dimensions; however, those actions should focus on the specific criterion of performance of interest.

     

What Is the Model in Model-Based Planning?

Flexibility is one of the hallmarks of human problem-solving. In everyday life, people adapt to changes in common tasks with little to no additional training. Much of the existing work on flexibility in human problem-solving has focused on how people adapt to tasks in new domains by drawing on solutions from previously learned domains. In real-world tasks, however, humans must generalize across a wide range of within-domain variation. In this work we argue that representational abstraction plays an important role in such within-domain generalization. We then explore the nature of this representational abstraction in realistically complex tasks like video games by demonstrating how the same model-based planning framework produces distinct generalization behaviors under different classes of task representation. Finally, we compare the behavior of agents with these task representations to humans in a series of novel grid-based video game tasks. Our results provide evidence for the claim that within-domain flexibility in humans derives from task representations composed of propositional rules written in terms of objects and relational categories.