Passion for Driving and Aggressive Driving Behavior: A Look at Their Relationship

The purpose of the present research was to investigate the relationship between passion for driving and aggressive driving behavior in 3 studies. Study 1 examined the association between passion and aggressive driving behavior in a sample of undergraduate students. Results showed that an obsessive passion for driving was associated with aggressive driving behavior, while harmonious passion was not. Study 2 replicated these results with an ecologically valid sample of community‐dwelling drivers. Finally, Study 3 replicated the results obtained in Studies 1 and 2 in a laboratory setting using a driving simulator under controlled frustrating driving situations with judges' assessment of aggressive driving behavior. Study 3 also showed that the emotion of anger mediated the obsessive‐passion/aggressive‐driving‐behavior relationship.     

Adrenocortical Functioning in Boys with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: Examining Subtypes of ADHD and Associated Comorbid Conditions

Disruptions to hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis function have been associated with varying forms of psychopathology in children. Studies suggesting children with ADHD have blunted HPA function have been complicated by the prevalence of comorbid diagnoses and heterogeneity of ADHD. The goals of this research were to assess the relations between waking and stress–response salivary cortisol levels and comorbid disruptive behavior (DBD) and anxiety (AnxD) disorders and problems in boys with ADHD, and to examine whether cortisol levels varied across ADHD subtypes. One hundred seventy elementary school-age boys with ADHD provided salivary cortisol at waking and in reaction to venipuncture. Parent reports were used to assess boys’ psychiatric diagnoses and severity of behavioral problems. Boys’ comorbid AnxD and anxiety problems were associated with greater cortisol reactivity, whereas boys’ comorbid DBD and oppositional problems predicted diminished adrenocortical activity. Reactive cortisol increases were greatest in boys with ADHD and comorbid AnxD, but without DBD. ADHD subtypes were not differentially associated with waking, pre-stress baseline, or reactive cortisol levels. However, comorbid DBD predicted decreased cortisol reactivity in boys with inattentive and hyperactive subtypes of ADHD, but not in boys with combined subtype of ADHD. The results clarify previous patterns of distinct and divergent dysregulations of HPA function associated with boys’ varying kinds of psychopathology.

A General Factor of Personality in the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory-III, the Dimensional Assessment of Personality Pathology, and the Personality Assessment Inventory

A General Factor of Personality (GFP) occupies the apex of the hierarchy in three prominent personality disorder inventories. On the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory-III, a GFP accounted for 41% of the variance in two second-order factors, 31% of the variance in five first-order factors, and 26% of the variance in all 24 scales. On the Dimensional Assessment of Personality Pathology, a GFP accounted for 61% of the variance in six first-order factors and 36% of the variance in all 18 scales. In a cross-validation study of the Personality Assessment Inventory, a GFP accounted for 65% of the variance in two second-order factors, 47% of the variance in five first-order factors, and 27% of the variance in all 18 scales.     

Measuring fluid intelligence on a ratio scale: Evidence from nonverbal classification problems and information entropy

Drawing on the g factor and information theory literatures, the relationship between the four subtests of the Culture-Fair Intelligence Test (CFIT) and the entropy of the Ruiz Absolute Scale of Complexity Management (R-ASCM) was investigated. In results based on data collected from 186 university students, the entropy of the R-ASCM mostly loads the first principal component extracted from the CFIT subtests and shows a corresponding strong relationship with the item difficulty of the R-ASCM. Because entropy is a ratio scale of complexity— with a true zero and units called bits—these findings suggest that entropy is the right vehicle for measuring the information contained in nonverbal intelligence tests.     

How to eliminate self-reference: a précis

We provide a systematic recipe for eliminating self-reference from a simple language in which semantic paradoxes (whether purely logical or empirical) can be expressed. We start from a non-quantificational language L which contains a truth predicate and sentence names, and we associate to each sentence F of L an infinite series of translations h ₀(F), h ₁(F), ..., stated in a quantificational language L ^*. Under certain conditions, we show that none of the translations is self-referential, but that any one of them perfectly mirrors the semantic behavior of the original. The result, which can be seen as a generalization of recent work by Yablo (1993, Analysis, 53, 251–252; 2004, Self-reference, CSLI) and Cook (2004, Journal of Symbolic Logic, 69(3), 767–774), shows that under certain conditions self-reference is not essential to any of the semantic phenomena that can be obtained in a simple language.     

Individual differences in phonological learning and verbal STM span

A relationship between phonological short-term memory tasks (e.g., nonword repetition, digit span) and vocabulary learning in both experimental and real-life conditions has been reported in numerous studies. A mechanism that would explain this correlation is, however, not known. The present study explores the possibility that it is the quality of phonological representations that affects both short-term recall and long-term learning of novel wordlike items. In Experiment 1, groups with relatively good and poor span for pseudowords were established. The good group was found to perform better at explicit memory tasks tapping the incidental learning of a limited stimulus pool used in an auditory immediate serial pseudoword recall task. In Experiment 2, the results of Experiment 1 were replicated when experience of correct recall was controlled. In Experiment 3, the immediate recall performance of the good group was found to benefit more than that of the poor group from syllable repetition within stimulus pools. It is concluded that the efficiency of a process that creates phonological representations is related both to short-term capacity for verbal items, and to long-term phonological learning of the structure of novel phonological items.