Cluster Analysis for Cognitive Diagnosis: Theory and Applications

Latent class models for cognitive diagnosis often begin with specification of a matrix that indicates which attributes or skills are needed for each item. Then by imposing restrictions that take this into account, along with a theory governing how subjects interact with items, parametric formulations of item response functions are derived and fitted. Cluster analysis provides an alternative approach that does not require specifying an item response model, but does require an item-by-attribute matrix. After summarizing the data with a particular vector of sum-scores, K-means cluster analysis or hierarchical agglomerative cluster analysis can be applied with the purpose of clustering subjects who possess the same skills. Asymptotic classification accuracy results are given, along with simulations comparing effects of test length and method of clustering. An application to a language examination is provided to illustrate how the methods can be implemented in practice.     

Mechanisms of deficit of visuospatial attention shift in children with developmental coordination disorder: A neurophysiological measure of the endogenous Posner paradigm

The purpose of this study was to investigate and compare the mechanisms of brain activity, as revealed by a combination of the visuospatial attention shifting paradigm and event-related potentials (ERP) in children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD) and typically developing children. Twenty-eight DCD children and 26 typically developing children were recorded with regard to their behavioral performance and ERP measures during a variant of the endogenous Posner paradigm, in which they should react to visual targets preceded by spatial cues or presented uncued. Children with DCD showed longer reaction time and a deficit in inhibitory response capacity when compared to typically developing children. The electrophysiological characteristics also showed distinct modulatory effects upon attentional orienting, anticipatory mechanisms, and cognitive-to-motor transfer in children with DCD: longer cue-P3 and target-N1 latency, smaller target-P3 amplitude, an elongated interval between N2 and the motor response (N2-RT), and small areas on contingent negative variation (CNV). The combined analysis of behavioral performance and ERP data suggested that children with DCD had deficits of slower target identification (N1), less ability in interhemispheric (P3) and cognitive-to-motor transfer speed (N2-RT), as well as a less mature anticipatory and executive process (CNV).     

Cultural variations in pre-emptive effort downplaying

Pre-emptive effort downplaying (PED) occurs when people publicly downplay their effort expenditure on test preparation prior to taking a test for the sake of managing the social evaluation of the self in the face of a challenging performance task. Thirty Asian Americans and 29 European Americans had two opportunities to publicly report their effort expenditure on a practice exercise. They also completed measures of self-evaluations and concern for performance before working on the practice exercise, and the self-evaluation measure again at the completion of the actual test. Only European Americans showed PED. Additionally, concern for performance was positively associated with and mediated cultural variations in PED. The implications of these results are discussed.     

Business or pleasure? Utilitarian versus hedonic considerations in emotion regulation

It is widely accepted that emotions have utilitarian as well as hedonic consequences. Nevertheless, it is typically assumed that individuals regulate emotions to obtain hedonic, rather than utilitarian, benefits. In this study, the authors tested whether individuals represent the utility of pleasant and unpleasant emotions and whether they would be motivated to experience unpleasant emotions if they believed they could be useful. First, findings revealed that participants explicitly viewed approach emotions (e.g., excitement) as useful for obtaining rewards, but viewed avoidance emotions (e.g., worry) as useful for avoiding threats. Second, this pattern was replicated in implicit representations of emotional utility, which were dissociated from explicit ones. Third, implicit, but not explicit, representations of emotional utility predicted motives for emotion regulation. When anticipating a threatening task, participants who viewed emotions such as worry and fear as useful for avoiding threats preferred to engage in activities that were likely to increase worry and fear (vs. excitement) before the task. These findings demonstrate that utilitarian considerations play an important, if underappreciated, role in emotion regulation.     

Suicidal ideation,parenting style,and family climate among Hong Kong adolescents

The prevalence of suicidal ideation and its relations with perceived parenting treatment and family climate was examined in 120 Hong Kong students aged 15–19 years. Fifty‐two per cent of the participants reported suicide ideation. Suicide ideation was found to be significantly associated with perceived authoritarian parenting, low parental warmth, high maternal over‐control, negative child‐rearing practices, and a negative family climate. A positive family climate may act as a buffer against developing suicide ideation in adolescents.     

Do Additional Features Help or Hurt Category Learning? The Curse of Dimensionality in Human Learners

The curse of dimensionality, which has been widely studied in statistics and machine learning, occurs when additional features cause the size of the feature space to grow so quickly that learning classification rules becomes increasingly difficult. How do people overcome the curse of dimensionality when acquiring real‐world categories that have many different features? Here we investigate the possibility that the structure of categories can help. We show that when categories follow a family resemblance structure, people are unaffected by the presence of additional features in learning. However, when categories are based on a single feature, they fall prey to the curse, and having additional irrelevant features hurts performance. We compare and contrast these results to three different computational models to show that a model with limited computational capacity best captures human performance across almost all of the conditions in both experiments.     

A microcomputer package for real-time skin conductance response analysis

A suite of programs has been developed to acquire data from a commercially available, highquality skin conductance meter, via a standard IEEE bus, on an Apple II or Apple lie microcomputer. These programs score and analyze stimulus-evoked skin conductance responses in a preset time window, and store the resultant data on disk, if required. Facilities for a manual override of the automatic scoring routine are available. The setup offers a method of scoring data as they are acquired; it uses currently recommended standards for skin conductance analysis and allows a high magnification of responses, without any need for continual monitoring, because of hardware facilities that automatically “back-off” a subject’s tonic skin conductance level.     

How can Asian social psychology succeed globally?†

The present article is inspired by the provocative ideas of Atsumi, Hofstede, Leung, and Ward expressed in this Special Issue on the past achievements, current status, and future opportunities and challenges of Asian social psychology as an international (vs a regional) endeavour. I believe that the success of Asian social psychology as a new voice and emerging perspective in social psychology hinges upon several factors: (i) adoption of an international (vs regional) outlook; (ii) not letting arbitrary geographical or intellectual boundaries restrict creative expansion of research ideas; and (iii) striving to craft a global identity with an Asian character by developing communicable theories that describe and explain important Asian social psychological phenomena for the benefits of Asia and beyond.     

When Moral Personality and Moral Ideology Meet Ethical Leadership: A Three-Way Interaction Model

We propose a three-way interaction model based on substitutes for leadership theory to explore the relationship among ethical leadership, moral personality, and moral ideology (i.e., idealism and relativism) on two types of employee voluntary behaviors (i.e., organizational citizenship behavior and workplace deviant behavior). Results from a sample of 218 supervisor–subordinate dyads indicate that moral personality attenuates the relationship between ethical leadership and employee voluntary behaviors. Idealism serves as the boundary condition for the moderating effect of moral personality. However, relativism only serves as the boundary condition for the moderating effect of moral personality when predicting workplace deviant behavior.