Assessing the adequacy of postexperimental inquiries in deception research and the factors that promote participant honesty

The primary aim of this research was to assess the adequacy of postexperimental inquiries (PEI) used in deception research, as well as to examine whether mood state, reward, or administering the PEI as a face-to-face interview or computer survey impacts participants’ willingness to divulge suspicion or knowledge about a study. We also sought to determine why participants are not always forthcoming on the PEI. Study 1 examined how frequently PEIs are included in research and found that most researchers employing deception do use a PEI. Studies 2 and 3 showed that participants are often unwilling to divulge suspicion or awareness of deception or to admit to having prior knowledge about a study, though offering a reward and completing the PEI on a computer modestly improved awareness and admission rates. Study 4 indicated several reasons why participants may not reveal suspicion or knowledge about a study on the PEI.     

The Five “A”s of Meaning Maintenance: Finding Meaning in the Theories of Sense-Making

Across eras and literatures, multiple theories have converged on a broad psychological phenomenon: the common compensation behaviors that follow from violations of our committed understandings. The meaning maintenance model (MMM) offers an integrated account of these behaviors, as well as the overlapping perspectives that address specific aspects of this inconsistency compensation process. According to the MMM, all meaning violations may bottleneck at neurocognitive and psychophysiological systems that detect and react to the experience of inconsistency, which in turn motivates compensatory behaviors. From this perspective, compensation behaviors are understood as palliative efforts to relieve the aversive arousal that follows from any experience that is inconsistent with expected relationships—whether the meaning violation involves a perceptual anomaly or an awareness of a finite human existence. In what follows, we summarize these efforts, the assimilation, accommodation, affirmation, abstraction and assembly behaviors that variously manifest in every corner of our discipline, and academics, more generally.     

Tremor Frequencies

In an attempt to improve logical reasoning performances, 64 introductory psychology students were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. The experimental condition involved solving logic syllogisms when the obvious “logical error” was not included as a possible answer. Control subjects solved the same problems with the “logical error” included as a choice. An analysis of variance procedure applied to the subjects' logic pretest-posttest gain scores indicated that the experimental group did significantly better than the control group on invalid principles. The results were discussed in terms of Piaget's theory of logical thinking and the possibility of performance rather than competence problems in adult reasoning. The need to develop more effective instructional techniques to enhance transfer of learning was underscored.     

Factor Structure and Incremental Validity of the Original and Modified Versions of the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale

This paper describes a human science approach to the delivery of the feedback component of assessment services. The feedback process is now central to a collaborative assessment that is integrated with intervention. Research has suggested that subject, situational, and assessor variables are relevant for feedback, but such research has been unsystematic. A servicedelivery paradigm for feedback of assessment findings is described that includes four levels of increasing client participation: information, emotional contingencies, transfer of power, and functioning of an assessment system. Communication of assessment findings has been incomplete historically because motivation for feedback, resource accessibility for feedback utilization, and criteria for adequate feedback have been considered as unrelated ingredients. The components of Antonovsky's Sense of Coherence construct – meaningfulness, manageability and comprehensibility – provide one conceptualization for interaction of these ingredients. It is now feasible to do systematic research on assessment that includes feedback of assessment findings and the service-delivery process.     

An Application of Generalizability Theory to the Consistency-Specificity Problem: The Transsituational Consistency of Behavioral Persistence

We assessed the behavioral persistence of 65 elementary school children in five situations to explore further the consistency-specificity, or trait-situation, issue. We predicted that the cross-situational consistency of persistence would co-vary with gender, socioeconomic status, and intelligence. The data were analyzed within the context of generalizability theory, and some of our predictions were supported by the results. We contend that the consistency-specificity issue can be profitably studied by direct behavioral assessments within the context of generalizability theory. The implications of the findings for the consistency-specificity issue, and for personality assessment in general, are discussed.     

Making Mayhew and Frisby effortlessly discriminable

Mayhew and Frisby (1978) demonstrated that patterns which differ markedly in their spatial-frequency content may be very hard to discriminate. This they took as evidence against any model which proposes that the processes underlying texture discrimination have direct access to some local piecewise Fourier analysis of the patterns performed by spatial-frequency channels. It is shown that Mayhew and Frisby's patterns can be discriminated easily if their components have been incorporated into a pattern-contingent colour aftereffect. This demonstration suggests that the location in the visual pathway for contingent aftereffect adaptation must lie before the construction of the raw primal sketch, to which, according to Marr, we have conscious access. This location must also allow the orientation specificity seen in the aftereffect. This points to a locus in the striate cortex.