Effect of symptom information and intelligence in dissimulation: an examination of faking response styles by inmates on the Basic Personality Inventory

This study employed the Basic Personality Inventory (BPI) to differentiate various types of dis-simulation, including malingered psychopathology and faking good, by inmates. In particular, the role of intelligence in utilizing symptom information to successfully malinger was examined. On admission to a correctional facility, 161 inmates completed the BPI under standard instructions and then again under instructions to fake good (n = 55) or to malinger psychotic (n = 35), posttraumatic stress disorder (n = 36), or somatoform (n = 35) psychopathology. Unlike symptom information, intelligence evidenced some support for increasing inmates' effectiveness in malingering, although there was no relationship between higher intelligence and using symptom information to successfully evade detection. Overall, the BPI was more effective in detecting malingered psychopathology than faking good. Implications for the detection of dissimulation in correctional and forensic settings are discussed.     

Nonspecific verbal cues alleviate forgetting by young children

Verbal reminders play a pervasive role in memory retrieval by human adults. In fact, relatively nonspecific verbal information (e.g. ‘Remember the last time we ate at that restaurant?’) will often cue vivid recollections of a past event even when presented outside the original encoding context. Although research has shown that memory retrieval by young children can be initiated by physical cues and by highly specific verbal cues, the effect of less specific verbal cues is not known. Using a Visual Recognition Memory (VRM) procedure, we examined the effect of nonspecific verbal cues on memory retrieval by 4‐year‐old children. Our findings showed that nonspecific verbal cues were as effective as highly specific nonverbal cues in facilitating memory retrieval after a 2‐week delay. We conclude that, at least by 4 years of age, children are able to use nonspecific verbal reminders to cue memory retrieval, and that the VRM paradigm may be particularly valuable in examining the age at which this initially occurs.     

Twenty-two-month-olds discriminate fluent from disfluent adult-directed speech

Deviation of real speech from grammatical ideals due to disfluency and other speech errors presents potentially serious problems for the language learner. While infants may initially benefit from attending primarily or solely to infant-directed speech, which contains few grammatical errors, older infants may listen more to adult-directed speech. In a first experiment, Post-verbal infants preferred fluent speech to disfluent speech, while Pre-verbal infants showed no preference. In a second experiment, Post-verbal infants discriminated disfluent and fluent speech even when lexical information was removed, showing that they make use of prosodic properties of the speech stream to detect disfluency. Because disfluencies are highly correlated with grammatical errors, this sensitivity provides infants with a means of filtering ungrammaticality from their input.     

The Role of Interest in Understanding the Career Choices of Female and Male College Students

Mismatch between college students' work goals and perceived goal affordances of physical/mathematical science careers may help explain gender differences in interest and career choice. In Study 1, the desire for interesting work was cited by most students in the sample (89% White, 6% Asian, 5% other). Compared to men, women reported interpersonal work goals more and high pay and status work goals less frequently. In Study 2, students (79% White, 12% Latino, 5% Asian, 4% other, predominantly middle class) perceived physical/mathematical science careers as less likely to afford interpersonal goals and more likely to afford high pay and status goals compared to other careers. Interpersonal goal affordances predicted greater interestingness for all careers, whereas high pay and status goal affordances predicted greater interestingness only for physical/mathematical sciences. Interestingness positively predicted likelihood of career choice.     

Self-notions and top-down distortion

Abstract

John Perry offers an unusually substantive, and initially plausible, account of the conceptual role of first-person thought. This paper critiques Perry’s account, particularly in what it says about action explanation, and offers a partial alternative. It also identifies three high-level assumptions about what accounts of conceptual roles should look like that plausibly explain why Perry’s account goes off track in the ways that it does – this is the top-down distortion of the title. Identifying and arguing against the three assumptions helps point in the direction of a better account.     

Influence of Motor Cortex Stimulation During Motor Training on Neuroplasticity as a Potential Therapeutic Intervention

Rehabilitation options to promote neuroplasticity may be enhanced when patients are engaged in motor practice during repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS). Twelve participants completed 3 separate sessions: motor practice, motor practice with rTMS, and rTMS only: motor practice consisted of 30 isometric contractions and subthreshold rTMS was 30, 3-s trains at 10 Hz. Assessments included the Box and Block Test (BBT), force steadiness (10% of the maximum voluntary contraction), and TMS (cortical excitability, intracortical inhibition, and intracortical facilitation). Participants significantly increased BBT scores following the combined condition. Force steadiness improved after all 3 conditions (p < .05). TMS outcomes depended on intervention condition with significant increases in facilitation following the motor practice plus rTMS condition. All interventions influenced motor control, yet are likely modulated differently when combining motor practice plus rTMS. These results help guide the clinical utility of rTMS as an intervention to influence motor control.     

Finding Spirits in Spirituality: What are We Measuring in Spirituality and Health Research?

Journal of Religion and Health - What are we asking when we ask about spirituality? When research subjects check survey boxes for “religiosity” and “spirituality” measures...     

A Reanalysis of Occupation and Suicide: Negative Perceptions of the Workplace Linked to Suicide Attempts

Suicide is the ultimate outcome of poor psychological well-being; however, there is a paucity of research examining the link between occupation and suicide, despite early academic interest and the known importance of work to our everyday lives. We propose that this body of research was abandoned prematurely, and we provide a reanalysis by integrating the Job Characteristics Model and the Conservation of Resources model with extant suicide research. Specifically, we hypothesize that work design characteristics (job autonomy, task variety, physical demands) and threats to personal resources (absence of viewing work-as-career, work-family conflict, family-work conflict, job dissatisfaction) are linked to suicide attempts via depression and suicidal ideation. Utilizing three measurement occasions and 2,855 participants from the AddHealth database, our findings indicate that job autonomy, task variety, work-family conflict, family-work conflict, and job dissatisfaction all indirectly contribute to employees' suicide attempts via depression and suicidal ideation. Thus, negative employee perceptions of the workplace environment have much more severe consequences than is typically examined. Based on these results, we provide recommendations for developing a theoretically derived nomological net around suicidal behavior in an organizational context, and offer strategies for managers and employees to construct a work environment that is conducive to employee well-being.     

Stigma of mental and physical illness and the use of mobile technology

Research has shown the stigma attached to mental disabilities, yet little research has directly compared the experiences of people with physical disabilities and those with mental disabilities. Not only are both conditions likely perceived as stigmatizing, but the pervasive use of mobile technology may be one means by which people with disabilities can manage and understand their disability. Four hundred and eighty-seven individuals with physical and/or psychological disabilities completed a survey examining whether they would be willing to use mobile technology to manage their disability and how stigmatizing they perceived their disability to be. Willingness to use mobile technology was related to the age of the sample as well as the type of disability. Individuals with psychological disabilities were more likely to use certain forms of mobile technology relative to those with physical disabilities. Observed differences between physical and psychological disabilities are discussed in terms of the symbolic interaction stigma model.     

Components of competitor priming in task switching

Executing an action in response to a stimulus is thought to result in the creation of an event code that integrates stimulus and action features (Allport, 1987; Hommel in Visual Cognition 5: 183-216, 1998). When switching between tasks, competitor priming occurs if a distractor stimulus cues the retrieval of a previously established event code in which that distractor is bound to a competing task, creating a source of interference with the current task whereby the observer is encouraged to apply the competing task to the distractor. We propose a second aspect of competitor priming: the misapplication of the retrieved competing task to the target stimulus. We report two task-switching experiments in which tasks applied to picture-word compound stimuli were manipulated to create conditions in which this second aspect of competitor priming could be revealed and distinguished from other sources of task- and stimulus-based priming. A substantial increase in competitor priming was observed when subjects switched between tasks that required very different processing operations and the competing task was highly relevant to the target stimulus. These results are consistent with our claim that competitor priming can result from applying the competing task either to the distractor that cued it or to the target stimulus.