Rushton’s contributions to the study of mental ability

This essay describes Rushton’s contribution to examining the nexus of intelligence, race, and genetics, specifically what I termed “Spearman’s hypothesis”. It states that Black–White differences are “most marked in just those [tests] which are known to be saturated with g”. I (Jensen) had confirmed this hypothesis using large data sets in the 1970s and 1980s and also found that Black–White differences were most marked on the more heritable rather than the more cultural subtests. Rushton confirmed and extended these findings in many highly innovative ways and demonstrated Spearman’s hypothesis applied among samples of Gypsy Roma in Serbia, and East Asian, European, South Asian, Colored and Black samples in South Africa. He has not only documented group differences in brain size, intelligence, life span, family structure, infant mortality, developmental precocity, personality, and temperament, and rates of two egg twinning, and crime among East Asians, Europeans, and Africans, but also provided a life history theory that explains them.     

General and supplementary factors of personality in genetic and environmental correlation matrices

Genetic and environmental correlation matrices among 7 personality scales were estimated, using samples of adult and young adult twins from Australia (2081 and 1178 pairs, respectively). A general factor of personality and two supplemental factors were obtained in each. The supplemental factors were tentatively identified as Social conformity and Other-dependence. Factors from the genetic and environmental correlations replicated well across samples, and they were similar in both the genetic and environmental covariation. It was concluded that the structure of personality is inherent in the evolved phenotype, and is not the immediate consequence of either genetic or environmental organizing factors.     

Factorial invariance and latent mean differences of scores on trait emotional intelligence across gender and age

Little is known about the factorial invariance and latent mean difference across sex and age in trait emotional intelligence (EI). The purpose of this study was to examine whether the measurement structure underlying trait EI is equivalent across sex and age groups. The sample consisted of 2919 teenagers, youths and adults. In order to investigate the above hypothesis the measurement and structural equivalence as well as the equality of latent means of scores across sex and age were tested. The multi-group confirmatory factor analysis results revealed that configural, metric, scalar and structural invariance exist across sex and age samples. Findings regarding the latent mean differences across sex and age groups are discussed with reference to recent and past findings.     

Resolute ignorance on race and Rushton

I review Rushton’s research on the evolutionary divergence of the three major human lineages. His life-history theory predicts, and his multiple analyses document, a consistent three-way patterning of mean differences among blacks, whites, and East Asians on coevolved sets of morphological, physiological, developmental, psychological, and behavioral traits. I then analyze a typical example of how critics evaluate his work, including the rate at which they cast his scientific hypotheses, methods and conclusions in politically charged language. The set of articles in question, although authored by well-known academics and appearing in a major, peer-reviewed journal, illustrate how mob science works to “discredit” valid research and enforce collective ignorance about entire bodies of evidence. Rushton is a scholar and gentleman but it appears that his critics often act like neither.     

Parent predictors of changes in child behavior problems

The present study examined whether ineffective discipline, single parent status, social support, parent involvement, and parent depression predicted changes in preschoolers' (N = 129) behavior problems. This study also evaluated whether child sex and ethnicity moderated the relations between these variables and changes in problem behavior. Parents completed questionnaires at the beginning of the study, and parent, teacher, and observational ratings of children's behavior problems were collected twice during the school year. Parents' own social support predicted improvement for boys and parent depression was associated with worsening symptoms for girls. Single parenthood and parent involvement predicted changes in behavior problems for the sample as a whole. Several significant ethnic differences emerged, highlighting the importance of considering cultural context in studies of parenting and child externalizing behavior.     

Utopia and heightened consciousness

Utopia should not be seen as the end‐point of a continuum of material progress, but as a society whose members enjoy a consciousness raised to its highest attainable level of intensity and value. The urge towards heightened consciousness is seen as a primary, pleasure‐driven human impulse, comparable in scope and intensity to the sex drive and perhaps still more fundamental, in that it emanates from the primordial human organ, the brain. The article explores ways in which an ‘inhibition barrier’ at present limiting the intensity of individual and general consciousness and arising from survival‐orientated modes of perception and feeling, might be raised or removed by a specific modification both of basic mental structures governing perception and conceptualization, and of economic structures, enabling a more efficient but non‐competitive mode of generating and distributing wealth. Insights derived from the psychology of art are thus applied more widely to the process of social living, to generate a concept of an attainable Utopia which would redirect human motivation away from ecologically destructive preoccupations.     

Psychopathy and verbal emotion processing in non-incarcerated males

Incarcerated males who score high on personality measures of psychopathy are reported to be less efficient than other incarcerated males in processing emotionally laden stimuli. In this study, we evaluated whether an emotion deficit is also present in non-incarcerated higher functioning males who score high on psychopathy personality measures. A sample of male university students was screened for psychopathic personality, and two subsamples, those who scored high or low on global psychopathy, participated in a series of language processing tasks designed to assess verbal emotion processing. Unlike previous studies of emotion processing in the verbal domain, stimuli also systematically varied in abstractness. The results showed that participants scoring high in psychopathy were less efficient than those scoring low in psychopathy in processing negatively valenced words, across all levels of word abstractness. The results extend previous accounts of emotional processing deficits in individuals with psychopathic personality to a relatively high-functioning non-incarcerated sample.     

Feeling low,thinking slow? Associations between situational cues,mood and cognitive function

ABSTRACT

Within-person changes in mood, which are triggered by situational cues, for example someone’s location or company, are thought to affect contemporaneous cognitive function. To test this hypothesis, data were collected over 6 months with the smartphone application (app) moo-Q that prompted users at random times to rate their mood and complete 3 short cognitive tests. Out of 24,313 people across 154 countries, who downloaded the app, 770 participants submitted 10 or more valid moo-Q responses (mean?=?23; SD?=?18; range 10–207). Confirming previous research, consistent patterns of association emerged for 6 different situation cues with mood and cognitive function: For example, being alone rather than with others when completing the app resulted in worse mood but better cognitive task performance. Notwithstanding, changes in mood and cognitive function were not coupled. The advantages and challenges of using smartphone technology for studying mood and cognitive function are discussed.     

Impact of individual differences upon emotion-induced memory trade-offs

After seeing a scene containing an emotional component (e.g., a snake in a forest) people often demonstrate a “trade-off” in memory, where memory for the emotional component (e.g., the snake) is good, but memory for the non-emotional elements (e.g., the forest) is poor. The result is an incomplete memory retaining central emotional information at the expense of neutral background information. Though almost everyone demonstrates the trade-off, there may be individual differences in the magnitude of the effect. We investigated whether differences in the strength of the trade-off would correlate with anxiety levels, working memory capacity, and executive functioning abilities. Sixty-four participants studied scenes comprised of a negative or neutral item placed on a neutral background, and memory was later tested for items and backgrounds separately. The magnitude of the trade-off correlated positively with anxiety and negatively with visuospatial working memory and executive function. These results suggest that greater anxiety, poor visuospatial working memory, and poor executive function may inhibit formation of complete mental representations of these complex emotional scenes.     

Sex differences in the ability to recognise non-verbal displays of emotion: A meta-analysis

The present study aimed to quantify the magnitude of sex differences in humans' ability to accurately recognise non-verbal emotional displays. Studies of relevance were those that required explicit labelling of discrete emotions presented in the visual and/or auditory modality. A final set of 551 effect sizes from 215 samples was included in a multilevel meta-analysis. The results showed a small overall advantage in favour of females on emotion recognition tasks (d = 0.19). However, the magnitude of that sex difference was moderated by several factors, namely specific emotion, emotion type (negative, positive), sex of the actor, sensory modality (visual, audio, audio-visual) and age of the participants. Method of presentation (computer, slides, print, etc.), type of measurement (response time, accuracy) and year of publication did not significantly contribute to variance in effect sizes. These findings are discussed in the context of social and biological explanations of sex differences in emotion recognition.