Explore the vast range of titles available.

Past research has documented myriad pernicious psychological effects of high economic inequality, prompting interest into how people perceive, evaluate, and react to inequality. Here we propose, refine, and validate the Support for Economic Inequality Scale (SEIS)-a novel measure of attitudes towards economic inequality. In Study 1, we distill eighteen items down to five, providing evidence for unidimensionality and reliability. In Study 2, we replicate the scale's unidimensionality and reliability and demonstrate its validity. In Study 3, we evaluate a United States version of the SEIS. Finally, in Studies 4-5, we demonstrate the SEIS's convergent and predictive validity, as well as evidence for the SEIS being distinct from other conceptually similar measures. The SEIS is a valid and reliable instrument for assessing perceptions of and reactions to economic inequality and provides a useful tool for researchers investigating the psychological underpinnings of economic inequality.

Background The extent to which individuals view, think and feel about their shape and weight in relation to their self-esteem is understood as a risk factor for eating disorders. However, muscularity has yet to be examined as an appearance category that individuals may base their self-esteem on. Thus, this study examined whether evaluating oneself based on muscularity (overevaluation of muscularity) may be relevant to men and women’s self-esteem and whether this form of self-evaluation may relate to eating disorder symptoms most prominently in men, who frequently present with muscularity concerns. Method Young adults ( N  = 290; 50.3% cisgender women) were recruited from a Canadian university and completed a modified version of the Shape and Weight Based Self-Esteem Questionnaire and a measure of eating disorder symptoms. Results Men endorsed greater overevaluation of muscularity than women, although women endorsed greater overevaluation of shape and weight than men. Despite differences in the forms of appearance on which men and women based their self-esteem, multi-group structural equation models demonstrated that there were no differences in the associations between overevaluation of shape-, weight-, and muscularity and eating disorder symptoms across men and women. However, overevaluation of shape-, weight-, and muscularity were associated with distinct eating disorder symptoms. Conclusions Altogether, results provide nuanced information regarding the importance of assessing self-evaluation based on muscularity, alongside shape- and weight, as increased self-evaluation based on these appearance domains may confer risk for eating disorder symptoms. Plain English Summary Basing self-esteem on appearance, such as shape or weight, is shown to be a risk factor for increased eating disorder symptoms. However, basing self-esteem on the appearance of one’s muscles may also be an important appearance category; especially for men who frequently endorse muscularity-related concerns. Despite this, no research has sought to examine whether men or women base their self-esteem on muscularity and, further, whether this may relate to eating disorder symptoms. Thus, this study examined 1) whether men and women base their self-esteem on shape, weight, and muscularity, and 2) whether basing self-esteem on these forms of appearance related to eating disorder symptoms differently for men and women. Results showed that while men were more likely than women to endorse self-esteem based on muscularity, basing self-esteem on any appearance category was related to eating disorder symptoms in both men and women. These results underscore the importance of inquiring about muscularity-related concerns for men and women, especially in the context of understanding risk for eating disorder symptoms.

By some estimates, there are as many as twelve million psychopaths in the United States alone. Cold-blooded, remorseless, and strangely charismatic, they commit at least half of all serious and violent crimes. Supposedly, most serial killers are psychopaths, as, surprisngly, are large numbers of corporate executives. They seem to be an inescapable, and fascinating, threat in our midst. But is psychopathy a brain disorder, as many scientists now claim? Or is it just a reflection of modern society’s deepest fears? The Myth of the Born Criminal offers the first comprehensive critique of the concept of psychopathy from the eighteenth-century origins of the born-criminal theory to the latest neuroimaging, behavioural genetics, and statistical studies. Jarkko Jalava, Stephanie Griffiths, and Michael Maraun use their expertise in neuropsychology, psychometrics, and criminology to dispel the myth that psychopathy is a biologically-based condition. Deconstructing the emotive language with which both research scientists and reporters describe the psychopaths among us, they explain how the idea of psychopathy offers a comforting neurobiological solution to the mystery of evil. A stunning merger of rigorous science and clear-sighted cultural analysis, The Myth of the Born Criminal is for anyone who wonders just what truth – or fiction – lurks behind the study of psychopathy.

Endemic to theoretical and applied psychometrics is a failure to appreciate that the logic at root of each and every latent variable technology is object detection logic. The predictable consequence of a discipline’s losing sight of an organizing logic, is that superficiality, confusion, and mischaracterization are visited upon discussion. In this paper, I elucidate the detection logic that is the foundational, and unifying, logic, of latent variable technology, and discuss and dissolve a number of the more egregious forms of confusion and mischaracterization that, consequent upon its having been disregarded, have come to infect psychometrics.

A stunning merger of rigorous science and clear-sighted cultural analysis, The Myth of the Born Criminal is for anyone who wonders just what truth - or fiction - lurks behind the study of psychopathy.

The behavioural scientist who requires an estimate of narrow heritability, h2, will conduct a twin study, and input the resulting estimated covariance matrices into a particular mode of estimation, the latter derived under supposition of the standard biometric model (SBM). It is known that the standard biometric model can be expected to misrepresent the phenotypic (genetic) architecture of human traits. The impact of this misrepresentation on the accuracy of h2 estimation is unknown. We aimed to shed some light on this general issue, by undertaking three simulation studies. In each, we investigated the parameter recovery performance of five modes- Falconer’s coefficient and the SEM models, ACDE, ADE, ACE, and AE- when they encountered a constructed, non-SBM, architecture, under a particular informational input. In study 1, the architecture was single-locus with dominance effects and genetic-environment covariance, and the input was a set of population covariance matrices yielded under the four twin designs, monozygotic-reared together, monozygotic-reared apart, dizygotic-reared together, and dizygotic-reared apart; in study 2, the architecture was identical to that of study 1, but the informational input was monozygotic-reared together and dizygotic-reared together; and in study 3, the architecture was multi-locus with dominance effects, genetic-environment covariance, and epistatic interactions. The informational input was the same as in study 1. The results suggest that conclusions regarding the coverage of h2 must be drawn conditional on a) the general class of generating architecture in play; b) specifics of the architecture’s parametric instantiations; c) the informational input into a mode of estimation; and d) the particular mode of estimationemployed. The results showed that the more complicated the generating architecture, the poorer a mode’s h2 recovery performance. Random forest analyses furthermore revealed that, depending on the genetic architecture, h2, the dominance and locus additive parameter, and proportions of alleles were involved in complex interaction effects impacting on h2 parameter recovery performance of a mode of estimation. Data and materials: https://osf.io/aq9sx/

To provide researchers with a means of assessing the fit of the structural component of structural equation models, structural fit indices- modifications of the composite fit indices, RMSEA, SRMR, and CFI- have recently been developed. We investigated the performance of four of these structural fit indices- RMSEA-P, RMSEAs, SRMRs, and CFIs-, when paired with widely accepted cutoff values, in the service of detecting structural misspecification. In particular, by way of simulation study, for each of seven fit indices- 3 composite and 4 structural-, and the traditional chi-square test of perfect composite fit, we estimated the following rates: a) Type I error rate (i.e., the probability of (incorrect) rejection of a correctly specified structural component), under each of four degrees of misspecification in the measurement component; and b) Power (i.e., the probability of (correct) rejection of an incorrectly specified structural model), under each condition formed of the pairing of one of three degrees of structural misspecification with one of four degrees of measurement component misspecification. In addition to sample size, the impacts of two model features, incidental to model misspecification- number of manifest variables per latent variable and magnitude of factor loading- were investigated. The results suggested that, although the structural fit indices performed relatively better than the composite fit indices, none of the goodness-of-fit index with a fixed cutoff value pairings was capable of delivering an entirely satisfactory Type I error rate/Power balance, [RMSEAs, .05] failing entirely in this regard. Of the remaining pairings; a) RMSEA-P and CFIs suffered from a severely inflated Type I error rate; b) despite the fact that they were designed to pick up on structural features of candidate models, all pairings- and especially, RMSEA-P and CFIs-manifested sensitivities to model features, incidental to structural misspecification; and c) although, in the main, behaving in a sensible fashion, SRMRs was only sensitive to structural misspecification when it occurred at a relatively high degree.

The widespread employment of the Beck Depression Inventory-1A ( BDI -1 A ) has spawned a number of practices: 1) The employment of an unweighted total score as a measure of depression; 2) Its use in populations other than that in which it was normed; and 3) The employment of BDI -1 A total scores in hypothesis tests about population differences in mean depression. A sequential procedure based on item response theory was employed to assess the validity of these practices for the case of four populations: clinical depressives, mixed nondepressed psychiatric patients, and students from two different universities. The findings suggested that the first practice was not justified for any of these populations, that the BDI -1 A was employable only with clinical depressives and with one of the university populations, and that mean comparisons were not allowable. L'emploi largement répandu de l'inventaire de dépression de Beck - Version 1A ( IDB -1 A ) a engendré de nombreuses pratiques: 1) l'utilisation des scores obtenus comme mesures de la dépression; 2) le recours à l' IDB auprès de populations différentes de celles pour qui ce test a été conçu; et 3) l'application des scores totaux obtenus à l' IDB -1 A à des tests d'hypothèses portant sur les différences de l'indice moyen de dépression dans une population. On a évalué la validité de telles pratiques au moyen d'une procédure séquentielle basée sur la théorie de la réponse d'item auprès de quatre populations différentes: des personnes souffrant de dépression clinique, des patients en établissement psychiatrique souffrant ou non de dépression, et des étudiants de deux universités distinctes. Les conclusions de l'étude révèlent que le recours à la première pratique n'était justifié auprès d'aucune des populations, que l'usage de l' IDB -1 A n'était approprié qu'auprès de la population composée de personnes souffrant de dépression clinique et que les comparaisons des indices moyens de dépression n'étaient pas acceptables.