The predictive validity of subtle and obvious empirically derived psychological test items under faking conditions

The relative contributions of subtle and obvious item endorsements to the prediction of a relevant criterion were assessed under faking and control ("honest") conditions. The MMPI and a nonconformity questionnaire were first administered to 100 male college students. Items on the Pd scale and 101 additional MMPI items that correlated significantly with the nonconformity questionnaire were then rated by 38 other male college students for apparent relationship to psychopathology. From these ratings, a scale (designated PdX) was constructed, which consisted of 21 subtle and 21 obvious items. After a third group of 98 male college students completed the nonconformity questionnaire, they were asked to respond to the items of the Pd and PdX subscales under control, fake-good, and fake-bad instructions. Significant correlations between the nonconformity scale and certain PdX and Pd subscales were found only for the control group. Implications for test construction and for clinical interpretation under faking conditions are discussed.     

An information integration approach to phenomenal causality

Phenomenal causality was studied by using Michotte's launch event, in which successive motion of two objects evokes an immediate perception that the first motion causes the second. Information integration theory was used to address the complementary issues of invariant perceptual structure and individual differences in phenomenal causality. Three informational cues were varied conjointly: temporal and spatial contiguity of the two motions, and the ratio of their speeds. The dependent measure was a judgment of degree of causality or naturalness. The results showed that individual differences were related to these instruction conditions; the subjects showed five distinctive response patterns. Two were the modal patterns elicited by the instructions, and the others fell in between. The averaging model gave a good account of the data, with meaningful parameter estimates. Individual differences were localized in cueevaluation, whereas theirintegration into a unified judgment followed an invariant averaging rule. The results allow some reconciliation between Michotte and his critics.     

Validity of the MMPI subtle items

This article presents a review and critique of research on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) subtle items in regard to their validity as measures of their scales' characteristics. The main categories of focus are their convergent and discriminative validity, the paradoxical effect, and the issue of whether removing these items would improve MMPI validity. Important problems in the methodologies are noted and discussed in some detail. These methodological concerns and the conflicting results across studies obscure firm conclusions on the validity of the subtle items, although strong support is lacking. However, more evidence is needed before deciding to remove these items from the MMPI; therefore, this article provides recommendations for future research.     

Children's judgements of gambles: a disordinal violation of utility

Violations of utility are often attributed to people's differential reactions to risk versus certainty or uncertainty, or more generally to the way that people perceive outcomes and consequences. However, a core feature of utility is additivity, and violations may also occur because of averaging effects. Averaging is pervasive in intuitive riskless judgement throughout many domains, as shown with Anderson's Information Integration approach. The present study extends these findings to judgement under risk. Five‐ to 10‐year old children showed a disordinal violation of utility because they averaged the part worths of duplex gambles rather than add them, as adults do, and as normatively prescribed. Thus adults realized that two prizes are better than one, but children preferred a high chance to win one prize to the same gamble plus an additional small chance to win a second prize. This result suggests that an additive operator may not be a natural component of the intuitive psychological concept of expected value that emerges in childhood. The implications of a developmental perspective for the study of judgement and decision are discussed. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Perception Versus Knowledge of Cause and Effect in Children: When Seeing Is Believing

Recent research has shown that even infants have perceptual sensitivity to the causal structure of the world, and it is often claimed that causal knowledge supports many of preschoolers' impressive cognitive achievements. That older children nevertheless can encounter difficulties in causal-reasoning tasks is typically attributed to lack of domain knowledge. A different explanation, however, is that causal structure may appear at more than one level, in perception, as well as in underlying knowledge. Children may make some reasoning errors because they have difficulty coordinating these levels. This article reviews relevant evidence on physical causality: Even infants in their first year perceive the causal structure of simple collision events. This perceptual skill could support rapid causal learning without prior knowledge and thus helps us understand children's precocity preschoolers already reason with the assumption that causes and effects are linked by underlying physical mechanisms. However, what may promote early development may later become a hindrance: When perception and mechanism point to different causes, children may not realize that mechanism is superordinate. Although the components of competent causal reasoning are available early in development, much experience may be required before children learn how to integrate them.     

Causal perception of action-and-reaction sequences in 8- to 10-month-olds

Four experiments with 202 8- to 10-month-old infants studied their sensitivity to causation-at-a-distance in schematic events seen as goal-directed action and reaction by adults and whether this depends on attributes associated with animate agents. In Experiment 1, a red square moved toward a blue square without making contact; in “reaction” events blue moved away while red was approaching, whereas in “delay” events blue started after red stopped. Infants were habituated to one event and then tested on its reversal. Spatiotemporal features reversed for both events, but causal roles changed only in reversed reactions. Infants dishabituated more to reversed reaction events than to reversed delay events. Squares moved rigidly or in a nonrigid animal-like fashion. Infants discriminated these, but motion pattern did not affect responses to reversal. Infants also discriminated reactions from launching and dishabituated to reversed reactions lacking self-initiated motion. These results suggest that sensitivity to causation-at-a-distance depends on the event structure but not pattern or onset typical of animal motion.     

Mixed-valence impurity in a nanoscale particle

We consider a mixed-valence Anderson impurity with infinite U embedded into a small metallic particle. The nanosize of the system leads to discrete energy levels rather than to a continuum of energy eigenstates for the host. Using the Brillouin-Wigner approximation we show that the magnetic susceptibility, which arises from the van Vleck admixing of the magnetic configuration into the ground state, is only weakly affected by the finite spacing of energy levels, while the specific heat and the entropy display an exponential activation at low temperatures, that is have properties deviating from a Fermi liquid.