Relationships between emotional intelligence,perceived and actual leadership effectiveness in the military context

Despite the importance of emotional intelligence and leadership effectiveness, few studies have been conducted in real-life contexts and few have distinguished between perceived and actual leadership effectiveness. This repeated-measures study involving 86 officer cadets from the Republic of Singapore Air Force investigated these relationships in a military context. Quantitative data were collected from two self-report questionnaires: the Wong and Law Emotional Intelligence Scale and the Perceived Leadership Effectiveness Scale. These two self-report tools were also administered to the participants’ peers to examine the agreement between self and other assessments of emotional intelligence. A behavior-based leadership assessment rubric completed by the participants’ supervisors was used to determine actual leadership performance. Significant positive relationships were found between emotional intelligence and both perceived and actual leadership effectiveness, as assessed by peers and supervisors, respectively. This study contributes to the understanding of emotional intelligence as a global construct and demonstrates that it is significantly associated with leadership effectiveness in a military training context. The findings have practical implications for using emotional intelligence to enhance leadership effectiveness.     

Equivalence of mother and father ratings of ADHD in children

Obtaining data from multiple informants provides a more comprehensive diagnostic picture in the assessment of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Differences in symptom ratings have been observed between parent- and teacher-report scales, though less information is available regarding differences between mothers and fathers. To address this gap, this study examines the rater agreement between mothers and fathers on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – Fourth Edition (DSM-IV) ADHD Symptom Rating Scale (DSM-ADHD-SRS). The participants consisted of 337 children diagnosed with ADHD who underwent comprehensive neuropsychological assessment. Confirmatory factor analysis indicates that a three-factor model comprising inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity symptoms provides the best fit for both mothers’ and fathers’ ratings. Mothers provided higher mean ratings for the inattention scale. These results suggest that the factor structure for the DSM-ADHD-SRS is the same, regardless of parent gender. However, symptoms of inattention may vary depending upon which parent completes the ratings. This discrepancy could lead to differences in diagnostic impressions in clinical evaluations.     

Consistency of supervisor and peer ratings of assessment interviews conducted by psychology trainees

Observation of counsellor skills through a one-way mirror, video or audio recording followed by supervisors and peers feedback is common in counsellor training. The nature and extent of agreement between supervisor–peer dyads are unclear. Using a standard scale, supervisors and peers rated 32 interviews by psychology trainees observed through a one-way mirror. Results indicated that peers and supervisors used similar dimensions to cluster the various competencies. Peers rated counsellor performance more positively for general counselling skills, but not for specialised techniques. Analyses revealed good supervisor–peer agreement for some items and poor agreement on others, with some differences being unacceptably large. The study has important implications for how feedback involving supervisors and peers might be managed and for peer supervision models.     

Changes in cry acoustics and distress ratings while the infant is crying

Acoustics and distress ratings were examined during four minutes of naturally occurring crying from 20 healthy, 1‐month‐old infants. Two listeners made continuous judgements of infant distress during every 10‐s segment of each cry sample. Dysphonation, number of wails, and pause duration were related to distress ratings across the 4 min of crying. Means and variances of ratings and acoustics, and the predictive value of each acoustic variable to ratings, differed in the first and second halves of the samples. Differences in the pattern of results occurred for individual infants. The results highlight the importance of studying the cry as a dynamic acoustic signal that may provide unique information about an individual infant's level of distress. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Toward a narrative conceptualization of stereotypes: contextualizing perceptions of public housing residents

Expansion of policies aimed at empowering disenfranchised groups, for example, resident/tenant participation in public housing, have been greeted with a great deal of enthusiasm. However, negative beliefs about the intelligence, ability, and morality of these groups, may interfere with the implementation of these policies. A greater understanding of social perceptions may lead to interventions that diminish interference. Traditional stereotyping research methods rely on trait conceptualizations that have been criticized as inadequate to fully describe social perceptions. This study examines the utility of a narrative approach to studying stereotypes about public housing residents. A group of college students (authors) wrote stories about a public housing resident and described the resident using trait objectives. Two readers, one given the story and the other the trait list, predicted how the author responded on various public housing belief and attitude instruments. Results indicate that stories and traits convey unique information not expressed by the other and offer preliminary support for the added usefulness, especially contextual information, of a narrative framework for studying stereotypes. The relevance of a narrative approach for understanding how stereotypes may undermine empowerment-based policies, in this case tenant participation in public housing, will also be explored. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Responsible Teenage Fatherhood in a South African Historically Disadvantaged Community

The study analysed the relationships between teacher ratings and standardised test scores in Reading and Mathematics for students receiving learning support for learning difficulties (n = 60, mean age= 16.3). Teacher ratings were found to significantly predict pupils' performance in Reading. Students with extended learning support had significantly higher teacher attainment ratings in both Reading and Mathematics. Teacher judgment ratings combined with standardized test scores were reliable for assessing instructional effectiveness. Standardised tests were more reliable than teacher ratings in assessing academic attainment.     

The many faces of assumed similarity in perceptions of personality

We propose that most coefficients of assumed similarity in acquaintance ratings are based on actual similarity between observer and target rather than any bias to project self onto other. We assessed assumed similarity, actual similarity, and rater accuracy in 62 university roommate dyads who rated each other on 74 personality-related variables. Our findings indicate that our roommates (a) were actually alike on many variables, (b) knew this, rather than assumed it, and (c) applied this knowledge to enhance the accuracy of their ratings. We outline a model of judgment that urges three distinct concepts: true assumed similarity, known similarity, and spurious similarity. We conclude that personality ratings among acquaintances reflecting true assumed similarity are probably rare.     

Checking for Systematic Value Preferences Using the Method of Triads

Value preferences have long been central to research in political science and psychology. Despite their well‐established theoretical importance, however, their measurement is still an open question. Early research on values relied heavily on ranking instruments for data collection, but more recent work calls this measurement technique into question. Specifically, it is argued that traditional ranking instruments are (1) too long, (2) too complex, and (3) may force respondents to make ad hoc differentiations between values of similar importance, behind which there is no systematic preference. As a result, the reliability of the measure is called into question, and measurement error remains a concern. In this article, we discuss the method of triads—a technique used to gather rankings data that affords the researcher the opportunity to assess the extent to which random error affects preference rankings. Using the method of triads to collect preference data on five values central to American political culture, we find that Americans' value preferences are clearly structured and driven by systematic preferences, even when psychological theory suggests they may not. We also compare the predictive validity of the data collected with the method of triads against that of the data collected with traditional importance ratings. We show that models of ideology, party identification, presidential approval, and vote‐choice fit to “triads” data explain more variance than models fit to ratings data.     

Effects of context on recollection and familiarity experiences are task dependent

The influence of test context on reports of recollection and familiarity depends on how these subjective recognition experiences are conceptualized and measured. Bodner and Lindsay (2003) found that critical items elicited more remember judgments but fewer know judgments in a less (vs. more) memorable context. In contrast, Tousignant and Bodner (2012) found that independent ratings of recollection and familiarity were both higher in a less memorable context. We replicated the dissociative pattern with judgments using recollect/familiar labels (Experiment 1), and in a novel R/F/B task that added a “both” option to eliminate the mutual exclusivity between the recollect and familiar options (Experiment 2). Adding a “guess” option eliminated these context effects (Experiment 3), however whether allowing guesses “cleans up” or “desensitizes” recollection and familiarity judgments remains unclear. Determining which task variants provide appropriate measures of subjective recognition experiences will require an examination of additional dissociations and triangulation with other measures.     

How useful are corpus-based methods for extrapolating psycholinguistic variables?

Subjective ratings for age of acquisition, concreteness, affective valence, and many other variables are an important element of psycholinguistic research. However, even for well-studied languages, ratings usually cover just a small part of the vocabulary. A possible solution involves using corpora to build a semantic similarity space and to apply machine learning techniques to extrapolate existing ratings to previously unrated words. We conduct a systematic comparison of two extrapolation techniques: k-nearest neighbours, and random forest, in combination with semantic spaces built using latent semantic analysis, topic model, a hyperspace analogue to language (HAL)-like model, and a skip-gram model. A variant of the k-nearest neighbours method used with skip-gram word vectors gives the most accurate predictions but the random forest method has an advantage of being able to easily incorporate additional predictors. We evaluate the usefulness of the methods by exploring how much of the human performance in a lexical decision task can be explained by extrapolated ratings for age of acquisition and how precisely we can assign words to discrete categories based on extrapolated ratings. We find that at least some of the extrapolation methods may introduce artefacts to the data and produce results that could lead to different conclusions that would be reached based on the human ratings. From a practical point of view, the usefulness of ratings extrapolated with the described methods may be limited.