Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Increasing Character Strength Knowledge, Interest, And Skill: Preliminary Evidence For A Collaborative And Multimethod Assessment Procedure, Jeff J. Klibert, Michaela D. Simpson, Brandon J. Weiss, C. Thresa Yancey, Calla Pritulsky, Amy Luna, Hayley Houseman, Hani M. Samawi

Department of Psychology Faculty Publications

Introduction: The study’s objective was to evaluate whether a qualitative, collaborative, and multimethod assessment protocol increased reports of character strength interest, knowledge, and perceived skills.

Methods: Thirty-two participants completed three phases of data collection. Participants were first screened for well-being, which was used as an auxiliary covariate to order participants into experimental conditions. Selected participants were randomly assigned to a control or collaborative and multimethod assessment (card sort × qualitative interview) condition. Participants completed pre- and post-measures of strength interest, knowledge, and perceived skill. In the final phase, second phase participants were invited to report on strength-related outcomes 24 h …

Further Validation Of The Realness Scale: Are Celebrity Worshipers Unreal?, Lynn E. Mccutcheon, Lillian Donahue, Joshua L. Williams, Sarah K. Nielson, Scott Peterson, Terry F. Pettijohn Ii

Department of Psychology Faculty Publications

We administered the Realness Scale (RS), Celebrity Attitude Scale (CAS), and the modified Authentic Living Subscale (ALS) from the Authenticity Scale (AS) to undergraduate students from four American institutions of higher learning. We sought to further validate the RS by showing that it correlated positively with the ALS and negatively with the CAS. We also hypothesized that African Americans would score lower than Whites on the RS. Our results supported the first hypothesis, but we found only weak or non-existent support for the other two hypotheses. Discussion focused on reasons why our latter two hypotheses yielded mostly negative results and …

Parent And Teacher Warm Involvement And Student's Academic Engagement: The Mediating Role Of Self-System Processes, Nicolette P. Rickert, Ellen A. Skinner

Department of Psychology Faculty Publications

Parents, teachers, and researchers all share the goal of optimizing students' academic engagement (Handbook of social influences in school contexts: Social-emotional, motivation, and cognitive outcomes, 2016, Routledge, New York, NY). While separate lines of research have demonstrated the importance of high-quality relationships and support from parents and teachers, few studies have examined the collective contributions of adults' warm involvement or the processes by which support from both parents and teachers shapes students' engagement. According to the self-system process model of motivational development, warm involvement from key social partners fosters students' sense of relatedness, competence, and autonomy, (Minnesota Symposium on Child …

Development Of A Multidimensional, Multi-Informent Measure Of Teacher Mindfulness As Experienced And Expressed In The Middle School Classroom, Nicolette P. Rickert, Ellen A. Skinner, Robert W. Roeser

Department of Psychology Faculty Publications

In response to growing interest in mindfulness as a support for educators, the current study sought to create and test a new multidimensional and multi-informant measure of teacher mindfulness in the classroom. To counter some of the limitations of context-general self-reports, we designed two theoretically based classroom-specific measures that capture the experience and expression of mindful teacher behavior from the perspective of teachers and students. Drawing on emerging consensus from experts on mindfulness in education, the measures incorporated three dimensions of mindfulness, namely, Calm, Clear, and Kind teacher behavior in the classroom, as well as their antitheses, namely, Reactive, …

Do Eye Movements During Shape Discrimination Reveal An Underlying Geometric Structure?, Bradley R. Sturz, Ty W. Boyer, John F. Magnotti, Kent D. Bodily

Department of Psychology Faculty Publications

Using a psychophysical approach coupled with eye-tracking measures, we varied length and width of shape stimuli to determine the objective parameters that corresponded to subjective determination of square/rectangle judgments. Participants viewed a two-dimensional shape stimulus and made a two-alternative forced-choice whether it was a square or rectangle. Participants’ gaze was tracked throughout the task to explore directed visual attention to the vertical and horizontal axes of space. Behavioral results provide threshold values for two-dimensional square/rectangle perception, and eye-tracking data indicated that participants directed attention to the major and minor principal axes. Results are consistent with the use of the major …

Cahost: An Excel Workbook For Facilitating The Johnson-Neyman Technique For Two-Way Interactions In Multiple Regression, Stephen W. Carden, Nicholas S. Holtzman, Michael J. Strube

Department of Psychology Faculty Publications

When using multiple regression, researchers frequently wish to explore how the relationship between two variables is moderated by another variable; this is termed an interaction. Historically, two approaches have been used to probe interactions: the pick-a-point approach and the Johnson-Neyman (JN) technique. The pick-a-point approach has limitations that can be avoided using the JN technique. Currently, the software available for implementing the JN technique and creating corresponding figures lacks several desirable features–most notably, ease of use and figure quality. To fill this gap in the literature, we offer a free Microsoft Excel 2013 workbook, CAHOST (a concatenation of the first …

Elementary School Students' Quantitative Reasoning: Processing Whole Numbers And Proportions, Ty W. Boyer, Natalie Branch

Department of Psychology Faculty Publications

Elementary school-aged children have great difficulty reasoning proportionally and struggle with fractions and decimals, theoretically because proportions do not abide by the same principles as more familiar whole number quantities. The present study examines individual differences in proportional reasoning and whole number representations and tests a prediction for a nonlinearity in the development of relations between the two. Pre-kindergarten through fifth-grade students completed a battery of computerized tasks, including a proportional reasoning task, “which is more?” and “which is #?” whole number comparison tasks, and symbolic and nonsymbolic numerical line-estimation tasks. The results indicate that though younger children’s performance on …

Evidence Consistent With The Multiple-Bearings Hypothesis From Human Virtual Landmark-Based Navigation, Martha R. Forloines, Kent D. Bodily, Bradley R. Sturz

Department of Psychology Faculty Publications

One approach to explaining the conditions under which additional landmarks will be learned or ignored relates to the nature of the information provided by the landmarks (i.e., distance versus bearings). In the current experiment, we tested the ability of such an approach to explain the search behavior of human participants in a virtual landmark-based navigation task by manipulating whether landmarks provided stable distance, stable direction, or both stable distance and stable direction information. First, we incrementally shaped human participants’ search behavior in the presence of two ambiguous landmarks. Next, participants experienced one additional landmark that disambiguated the location of the …

The Nonreligious – Nonspiritual Scale (Nrnss): Measuring Everything From Atheists To Zionists, Ryan T. Cragun, Joseph H. Hammer, Michael Nielsen

Department of Psychology Faculty Publications

Although hundreds of measures of personal religiousness and spirituality exist, none are capable of reliably and validly assessing individuals who identify as nonreligious and nonspiritual. There is a need to develop a valid and reliable measure of (non)religiousness and (non)spirituality. This article discusses these problems, and presents the development and initial validation of a 17-item Nonreligious-Nonspiritual Scale (NRNSS) across three studies. The NRNSS exhibited high internal consistency (α > .94) and high test-retest reliability (r = .92). Two exploratory and one confirmatory factor analysis of the NRNSS supported the hypothesized two-factor solution: (a) institutional religiousness and (b) individualistic spirituality. The NRNSS …

Asymmetrical Interference Effects Between Two-Dimensional Geometric Shapes And Their Corresponding Shape Words, Bradley R. Sturz, Joshua E. Edwards, Ty W. Boyer

Department of Psychology Faculty Publications

Nativists have postulated fundamental geometric knowledge that predates linguistic and symbolic thought. Central to these claims is the proposal for an isolated cognitive system dedicated to processing geometric information. Testing such hypotheses presents challenges due to difficulties in eliminating the combination of geometric and non-geometric information through language. We present evidence using a modified matching interference paradigm that an incongruent shape word interferes with identifying a two-dimensional geometric shape, but an incongruent two-dimensional geometric shape does not interfere with identifying a shape word. This asymmetry in interference effects between two-dimensional geometric shapes and their corresponding shape words suggests that shape …

Probabilistic Cue Combination: Less Is More, Daniel Yurovsky, Ty W. Boyer, Linda B. Smith, Chen Yu

Department of Psychology Faculty Publications

Learning about the structure of the world requires learning probabilistic relationships: rules in which cues do not predict outcomes with certainty. However, in some cases, the ability to track probabilistic relationships is a handicap, leading adults to perform non-normatively in prediction tasks. For example, in the dilution effect, predictions made from the combination of two cues of different strengths are less accurate than those made from the stronger cue alone. Here we show that dilution is an adult problem; 11-month-old infants combine strong and weak predictors normatively. These results extend and add support for the less is more hypothesis: limited …

Stroop Interference In A Delayed Match-To-Sample Task: Evidence For Semantic Competition, Bradley R. Sturz, Marshall Lee Green, Lawrence Locker Jr., Ty W. Boyer

Department of Psychology Faculty Publications

Discussions of the source of the Stroop interference effect continue to pervade the literature. Semantic competition posits that interference results from competing semantic activation of word and color dimensions of the stimulus prior to response selection. Response competition posits that interference results from competing responses for articulating the word dimension vs. the color dimension at the time of response selection. We embedded Stroop stimuli into a delayed match-to-sample (DMTS) task in an attempt to test semantic and response competition accounts of the interference effect. Participants viewed a sample color word in black or colored fonts that were ongruent or incongruent …