The Therapeutic Effect of Physical Fitness on Measures of Personality: A Literature Review

The authors review the literature concerning the effects of physical fitness on various measures of personality and offer specific suggestions for future research in this area.     

A Community Support Group for Single Custodial Fathers

Within the context of an identified need for establishing a support group for single custodial fathers, this article discusses a five-session group experience that included such topics as dating, remarriage, homemaking and house maintenance, and the effects of divorce on children.     

MAKING DECISIONS FROM AN INTERVIEW: EXPERT MEASUREMENT AND MECHANICAL COMBINATION

One way of making decisions on the basis of qualitative impressions is to identify a number of relevant dimensions, translate the impressions into quantitative ratings on each of the dimensions, and integrate the ratings using a mechanical combination scheme. The paper compares the output of this method to global (clinical) judgment. The basis for the comparison is a large database that includes both information collected in a structured interview and a relevant criterion. The results clearly suggest that mechanical combination outperforms clinical judgment, but also that the combination of both schemes produces the highest accuracy.     

BEYOND THE MEAN BIAS: THE EFFECT OF WARNING AGAINST FAKING ON BIODATA ITEM VARIANCES

We studied the effects of faking biodata test items by randomly warning 214 of 429 applicants for a nurse's assistant position against faking. While the warning mitigated the propensity to fake, the specific warning effects depended on item transparency. For transparent items, warning reduced the extremeness of item means and increased item variances. For nontransparent items, warning did not have an effect on item means and reduced item variances. These faking effects were best predicted when transparency was operationalized in terms of item-specific job desirability in addition to the item-general social desirability. We also demonstrated a psychometric principle: The effect of warning on means at the item level is preserved in scales constructed from those items, but the effect on variances at the item level is masked at the scale level. These results raise new questions regarding the attenuating effects of faking on validity, and regarding the benefit of warning applicants against faking.