"Individual differences, situational variables, and personality research": Erratum.

Reports an error in the original article by Irwin G. Sarason (Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 1962, 65[6], 376-380; (see record 1964-10015-001). On page 379, the second line of Paragraph 1 should read: (p     

Universal sex differences in the desire for sexual variety: Tests from 52 nations, 6 continents, and 13 islands.

Evolutionary psychologists have hypothesized that men and women possess both long-term and short-term mating strategies, with men's short-term strategy differentially rooted in the desire for sexual variety. In this article, findings from a cross-cultural survey of 16,288 people across 10 major world regions (including North America, South America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, Middle East, Africa, Oceania, South/Southeast Asia, and East Asia) demonstrate that sex differences in the desire for sexual variety are culturally universal throughout these world regions. Sex differences were evident regardless of whether mean, median, distributional, or categorical indexes of sexual differentiation were evaluated. Sex differences were evident regardless of the measures used to evaluate them. Among contemporary theories of human mating, pluralistic approaches that hypothesize sex differences in the evolved design of short-term mating provide the most compelling account of these robust empirical findings. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Individual differences in dream recall.

Ss who typically fail to remember dreams at home (nonreporters) and Ss who frequently remember dreams (reporters) slept in the laboratory for 4 nights each. Gradual or abrupt awakenings were made at each EEG Stage-I REM (dream) period. Although nonreporters and reporters did not differ in REM-period frequency or EEG patterns during sleep, nonreporters did report dreaming less frequently following REM-period awakenings. Ss showed self-consistency in frequency of dream reporting and in type of failure to report. Some nonreporters typically failed to remember any content; others typically said they were awake and thinking. Comparisons among reporters and sub-groups of nonreporters for eye-movement frequency, arousal threshold, and dreamlike-report content indicate that it may be useful to distinguish different kinds of nonreporters. (17 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Individual differences in beliefs about groups.

The current research examined individual differences in peoples' positive versus negative beliefs about groups. Three studies were conducted to develop and validate a 16-item Beliefs About Groups (BAG) scale. Factor analyses in Studies 1 and 2 identified and replicated a 4-factor solution, with factors reflecting preferences for group versus individual work, positive group performance beliefs, negative group performance beliefs, and beliefs that others will work hard on group tasks. Study 2 also provided evidence for convergent and divergent validity, and explored relationships between the Big Five personality dimensions and group beliefs. Study 3 provided evidence for test–retest reliability. Across these 3 studies, the BAG scale had total score alphas ranging from .83 to .88. Implications of beliefs about groups for member motivation and group performance, as well as for future research and practice, are highlighted. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Individual differences in negative affect repair.

The extant literature implicates affect repair ability as one source of individual differences in negative affect. Emerging from this literature are three regulatory traits that should predict repair ability (negative mood regulation expectancies, monitoring, labeling), yet no experimental examination of this possibility exists. Two studies explored this issue. Participants (Ns = 305, 146) watched negative affect-inducing videos and completed a repair or control writing task, before and after which they reported their affect. Results revealed wide individual differences in repair ability. Specifically, participants with high expectancies of repair success and those who attend to and understand their affect experienced the largest decreases in negative affect and largest increases in positive affect following the repair tasks. These findings advance understanding of individual differences in affect regulation and have implications for future research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Toward an understanding of situational judgment item validity and group differences.

This paper evaluates 2 adjustments to common scoring approaches for situational judgment tests (SJTs). These adjustments can result in substantial improvements to item validity, reductions in mean racial differences, and resistance to coaching designed to improve scores. The first adjustment, applicable to SJTs that use Likert scales, controls for elevation and scatter (Cronbach & Gleser, 1953). This adjustment improves item validity. Also, because there is a White–Black mean difference in the preference for extreme responses on Likert scales (Bachman & O'Malley, 1984), these adjustments substantially reduce White–Black mean score differences. Furthermore, this adjustment often eliminates the score elevation associated with the coaching strategy of avoiding extreme responses (Cullen, Sackett, & Lievens, 2006). Item validity is shown to have a U-shaped relationship with item means. This holds both for SJTs with Likert score response formats and for SJTs where respondents identify the best and worst response option. Given the U-shaped relationship, the second adjustment is to drop items with midrange item means. This permits the SJT to be shortened, sometimes dramatically, without necessarily harming validity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Individual differences for self-regulating task-oriented reading activities.

The goal of this study is to analyze the self-regulation processes present in task-oriented reading activities. In the 1st experiment, we examined the following self-regulation processes in the context of answering questions about an available text: (a) monitoring the comprehension of the question, (b) self-regulating the search process, and (c) monitoring the decision to search. Skilled and less skilled comprehenders from 7th and 8th grades read 2 texts and answered 16 questions while all their actions were recorded on a computer. We hypothesized that skilled comprehenders would differ from less skilled comprehenders on the 1st 2 processes on the basis of their general comprehension skills but that their superiority in the 3rd process would be based on specific characteristics of the interaction between the reader and the text. The results support our hypotheses. In the 2nd experiment, we hypothesized that monitoring the decision to search would be equivalent to judgments of learning (JOLs). Eighth graders made JOLs before answering every question, and then they decided whether to search the text. Our hypothesis was confirmed. Our study reveals that task-oriented reading places specific demands on readers related to metacognitive monitoring. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Individual skill differences and large-scale environmental learning.

Spatial skills are known to vary widely among normal individuals. This project was designed to address whether these individual differences are differentially related to large-scale environmental learning from route (ground-level) and survey (aerial) perspectives. Participants learned two virtual environments (route and survey) with limited exposure and tested on judgments about relative locations of objects. They also performed a series of spatial and nonspatial component skill tests. With limited learning, performance after route encoding was worse than performance after survey encoding. Furthermore, performance after route and survey encoding appeared to be preferentially linked to perspective and object-based transformations, respectively. Together, the results provide clues to how different skills might be engaged by different individuals for the same goal of learning a large-scale environment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Individual differences in social loafing: Need for cognition as a motivator in collective performance.

Numerous situational factors have been found to moderate the extent to which individuals engage in social loafing, but few studies have investigated the influence of individual differences on individual motivation within groups. The present study examined whether need for cognition, an individual's tendency to engage in and enjoy effortful cognitive endeavors, moderates social loafing effects. It was predicted that individuals with a high need for cognition would be less likely to loaf on a cognitively engaging task. Individuals with a low need for cognition performed significantly better in the coactive than in the collective condition, whereas individuals with a high need for cognition worked just as hard collectively as coactively. Results were interpreted within the collective effort model (S. J. Karau & K. D. Williams, 1993). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Individual differences in reaction to failure-induced stress.

"The McKinney Reporting Test and the MMPI were administered to samples of aviation cadets, aircraft commanders, copilots, and ROTC student officers. Two criterion groups representing the extremes in adjustment were selected within each of the military samples… . There was an overall-significant tendency among the low adjustment cases for those who shifted toward more accurate performance on the McKinney stress period to answer on the Hy scale… like Janet's psychasthenic type, and for those who became more inaccurate to answer like the hysteric. This tendency did not hold for high adjustment cases." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Individual differences in judging deception: Accuracy and bias.

The authors report a meta-analysis of individual differences in detecting deception, confining attention to occasions when people judge strangers' veracity in real-time with no special aids. The authors have developed a statistical technique to correct nominal individual differences for differences introduced by random measurement error. Although researchers have suggested that people differ in the ability to detect lies, psychometric analyses of 247 samples reveal that these ability differences are minute. In terms of the percentage of lies detected, measurement-corrected standard deviations in judge ability are less than 1%. In accuracy, judges range no more widely than would be expected by chance, and the best judges are no more accurate than a stochastic mechanism would produce. When judging deception, people differ less in ability than in the inclination to regard others' statements as truthful. People also differ from one another as lie- and truth-tellers. They vary in the detectability of their lies. Moreover, some people are more credible than others whether lying or truth-telling. Results reveal that the outcome of a deception judgment depends more on the liar's credibility than any other individual difference. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Priming and habituation for faces: Individual differences and inversion effects.

Immediate repetition priming for faces was examined across a range of prime durations in a threshold identification task. Similar to word repetition priming results, short duration face primes produced positive priming whereas long duration face primes eliminated or reversed this effect. A habituation model of such priming effects predicted that the speed of identification should relate to the prime duration needed to achieve negative priming. We used face priming to test this prediction in two ways. First, we examined the relationship between priming effects and individual differences in the target duration needed for threshold performance. Second, we compared priming of upright and inverted faces. As predicted, the transition from positive to negative priming as a function of prime duration occurred more slowly for inverted faces and for individuals with longer threshold target durations. Additional experiments ruled out alternative explanations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Individual differences in preferences to photographs.

Individual differences in preferences to photographs were explored based on an alternative framework. This framework predicts that the primary difference between individuals in this respect is their ability to process photographic information, which in turn influences their preferences. Chiefly, people with well-developed schemes in photography (e.g., photo professionals) should have a higher ability to process photographic information than people with less developed schemes (e.g., psychology students). Consequently, people with well-developed schemes in photography should prefer photographs that are relatively more demanding to process. Ten psychology students and 5 photo professionals assessed 32 photographs on six general concepts: Preference, Hedonic Tone, Expressiveness, Familiarity, Uncertainty, and Dynamics. As predicted, photo professionals had a higher ability to process photographic information and preferred photographs that were relatively uncertain and unfamiliar. These results are in concordance with previous research and give strong support to the utility of the present framework in experimental aesthetics. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Individual differences in susceptibility to inattentional blindness.

Inattentional blindness refers to the finding that people do not always see what appears in their gaze. Though inattentional blindness affects large percentages of people, it is unclear if there are individual differences in susceptibility. The present study addressed whether individual differences in attentional control, as reflected by variability in working memory capacity, modulate susceptibility to inattentional blindness. Participants watched a classic inattentional blindness video (Simons & Chabris, 1999) and were instructed to count passes among basketball players, wherein 58% noticed the unexpected: a person wearing a gorilla suit. When participants were accurate with their pass counts, individuals with higher working memory capacity were more likely to report seeing the gorilla (67%) than those with lesser working memory capacity (36%). These results suggest that variability in attentional control is a potential mechanism underlying the apparent modulation of inattentional blindness across individuals. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Working memory capacity and categorization: Individual differences and modeling.

Working memory is crucial for many higher-level cognitive functions, ranging from mental arithmetic to reasoning and problem solving. Likewise, the ability to learn and categorize novel concepts forms an indispensable part of human cognition. However, very little is known about the relationship between working memory and categorization, and modeling in category learning has thus far been largely uninformed by knowledge about people's memory processes. This article reports a large study (N = 113) that related people's working memory capacity (WMC) to their category-learning performance using the 6 problem types of Shepard, Hovland, and Jenkins (1961). Structural equation modeling revealed a strong relationship between WMC and category learning, with a single latent variable accommodating performance on all 6 problems. A model of categorization (the Attention Learning COVEring map, ALCOVE; Kruschke, 1992) was fit to the individual data and a single latent variable was sufficient to capture the variation among associative learning parameters across all problems. The data and modeling suggest that working memory mediates category learning across a broad range of tasks. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Individual differences in the perception of women's faces.

It was shown that membership in age or sex categories affects the way in which an individual perceives a woman when presented with her photograph. It is contended that this is a demonstration of the influence of culturally defined roles upon perception. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Individual differences in response to a Zen meditation exercise.

In order to explore the psychological functions involved in meditation, 28 male college student volunteers were instructed in a concentration exercise related to Zen Buddhist procedures. Their response to the exercise was rated as high, moderate, and low from verbal reports taken after daily 45-min. sessions over a 2-3 wk. period. Response was then compared with premeditation test results related to attention, tolerance for unrealistic experience, and capacity for regression in the service of the ego (derived from Rorschach expressions of "primary process" and from spontaneous visual imagery). Capacity for regression and tolerance for unrealistic experience significantly predicted response to meditation, while attention measures did not. Once issues related to comfort in the face of strange inner experience are resolved, attention functions necessary to the exercise probably became available. (15 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Individual differences in adult decision-making competence.

The authors evaluated the reliability and validity of a set of 7 behavioral decision-making tasks, measuring different aspects of the decision-making process. The tasks were administered to individuals from diverse populations. Participants showed relatively consistent performance within and across the 7 tasks, which were then aggregated into an Adult Decision-Making Competence (A-DMC) index that showed good reliability. The validity of the 7 tasks and of overall A-DMC emerges in significant relationships with measures of socioeconomic status, cognitive ability, and decision-making styles. Participants who performed better on the A-DMC were less likely to report negative life events indicative of poor decision making, as measured by the Decision Outcomes Inventory. Significant predictive validity remains when controlling for demographic measures, measures of cognitive ability, and constructive decision-making styles. Thus, A-DMC appears to be a distinct construct relevant to adults' real-world decisions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of The uncertain mind: Individual differences in facing the unknown.

Reviews the book, The uncertain mind: Individual differences in facing the unknown by Richard M. Sorrentino and Christopher J. R. Roney (see record 2000-07377-000). The book under review is located within an important intellectual tradition in psychology, one that speaks to something about human nature. Sorrentino and Roney approach this topic through the study of individual differences in whether people seek out certainty or uncertainty in their lives. While some of us find meaning in terms of the familiar and predictable, others search for meaning in the novel uncertainties of life. This scholarly monograph describes a 15-year program of research, theoretically grounded in both earlier paradigms (e.g., Atkinson's motivational model) and contemporary social cognition. This monograph merits attention by researchers and students interested in social cognition, individual differences, and societal change. The writing is technical, and one would wish for chapter summaries. However, the book is clearly written, well-organized and at times thought-provoking; it is well worth the effort. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)