Reliability of a Longitudinal Sequence of Scale Ratings

Reliability captures the influence of error on a measurement and, in the classical setting, is defined as one minus the ratio of the error variance to the total variance. Laenen, Alonso, and Molenberghs (Psychometrika 73:443–448, 2007) proposed an axiomatic definition of reliability and introduced the R _T coefficient, a measure of reliability extending the classical approach to a more general longitudinal scenario. The R _T coefficient can be interpreted as the average reliability over different time points and can also be calculated for each time point separately. In this paper, we introduce a new and complementary measure, the so-called R _Λ , which implies a new way of thinking about reliability. In a longitudinal context, each measurement brings additional knowledge and leads to more reliable information. The R _Λ captures this intuitive idea and expresses the reliability of the entire longitudinal sequence, in contrast to an average or occasion-specific measure. We study the measure’s properties using both theoretical arguments and simulations, establish its connections with previous proposals, and elucidate its performance in a real case study. The authors are grateful to J&J PRD for kind permission to use their data. We gratefully acknowledge support from Belgian IUAP/PAI network “Statistical Techniques and Modeling for Complex Substantive Questions with Complex Data.”     

Physical Abuse Victimization and Violence in the Transition to Adulthood: The Mediating Role of Alcohol and Drug Use

In the present paper we examine the association between physical abuse victimization in childhood and violent criminal behavior in the transition from adolescence to adulthood (TAA). Of central interest is whether that association is indirect, through the impact of abuse victimization on alcohol and drug use. We employ a statistical test for indirect effects, using a design that also applies Savage and Wozniak’s (2016) “differential etiology of violence” standard. The data suggest that the effect of physical abuse on violence in the TAA is partially indirect, mediated by alcohol and drug use. A control for nonviolent offending is applied to build confidence that the dynamic between abuse victimization and substance use is a differential predictor of violence.     

Visual search and autism symptoms: What young children search for and co‐occurring ADHD matter

Superior visual search is one of the most common findings in the autism spectrum disorder (ASD) literature. Here, we ascertain how generalizable these findings are across task and participant characteristics, in light of recent replication failures. We tested 106 3‐year‐old children at familial risk for ASD, a sample that presents high ASD and ADHD symptoms, and 25 control participants, in three multi‐target search conditions: easy exemplar search (look for cats amongst artefacts), difficult exemplar search (look for dogs amongst chairs/tables perceptually similar to dogs), and categorical search (look for animals amongst artefacts). Performance was related to dimensional measures of ASD and ADHD, in agreement with current research domain criteria (RDoC). We found that ASD symptom severity did not associate with enhanced performance in search, but did associate with poorer categorical search in particular, consistent with literature describing impairments in categorical knowledge in ASD. Furthermore, ASD and ADHD symptoms were both associated with more disorganized search paths across all conditions. Thus, ASD traits do not always convey an advantage in visual search; on the contrary, ASD traits may be associated with difficulties in search depending upon the nature of the stimuli (e.g., exemplar vs. categorical search) and the presence of co‐occurring symptoms.     

Only “efficient” emotional stimuli affect the content of working memory during free-recollection from natural scenes

Emotional events are thought to have privileged access to attention and memory, consuming resources needed to encode competing emotionally neutral stimuli. However, it is not clear whether this detrimental effect is automatic or depends on the successful maintenance of the specific emotional object within working memory. Here, participants viewed everyday scenes including an emotional object among other neutral objects followed by a free-recollection task. Results showed that emotional objects—irrespective of their perceptual saliency—were recollected more often than neutral objects. The probability of being recollected increased as a function of the arousal of the emotional objects, specifically for negative objects. Successful recollection of emotional objects (positive or negative) from a scene reduced the overall number of recollected neutral objects from the same scene. This indicates that only emotional stimuli that are efficient in grabbing (and then consuming) available attentional resources play a crucial role during the encoding of competing information, with a subsequent bias in the recollection of neutral representations.     

Food preferences before and during treatment for a pediatric feeding disorder

Little is known about the food preferences of children with a feeding disorder and medical diagnoses. Therefore, we conducted repeated paired-stimulus-preference assessments with foods to which we either exposed or did not expose 3 children with a feeding disorder and medical diagnoses during clinical treatment. Responding was relatively equivalent for exposure and nonexposure foods throughout the preference assessments, suggesting that preferences for foods did not change due to exposure during treatment.     

Book and Website Reviews

Using practicing sales managers as subjects, the results indicate that personal characteristics of gender and weight may be used in making disciplinary judgments following episodes of a particular type of unacceptable work behavior, an unethical selling act. As hypothesized, saleswomen were disciplined less severely while overweight salespeople were disciplined more severely. However, being overweight produced harsher discipline for saleswomen but had no effect on salesmen. A stated organizational policy about the particular type of unacceptable behavior used did bring about more equal treatment for those described as overweight but did not even out the discipline administered to men and women.