The spread of pseudoscience (PS) is a worrying problem worldwide. The study of pseudoscience beliefs and their associated predictors have been conducted in the context of isolated pseudoscience topics (e.g., complementary and alternative medicine). Here, we combined individual differences (IIDD) measures (e.g., personality traits, thinking styles)…

According to the standard definition, creative ideas must be both novel and useful. While a handful of recent studies suggest that novelty is more important than usefulness to evaluations of creativity, little is known about the contextual and interpersonal factors that affect how people weigh these two components when making an overall creativity…

Feedback can rarely enhance learning unless it is used; however, few studies have examined individual differences in students' engagement with feedback. The present study explored: (1) the extent to which personality variables and achievement goal orientation are associated with students' self-reported use of feedback; and (2) whether beliefs…

Personal beliefs about a construct are formed based on individuals' experiences in sociocultural contexts. Personal beliefs are powerful as individuals tend to plan, take actions, and evaluate their own and others' actions based on their belief system. In this chapter, we review pervasive creativity myths, followed by an examination of teachers'…

Epistemic curiosity (EC) is the desire to obtain new knowledge capable of either producing positive experiences of intellectual interest (I-type) or of reducing undesirable conditions of informational deprivation (D-type). Although researchers acknowledge that there are individual differences in young children's epistemic curiosity, there are…

Intra-individual variability over a short period of time may contain important information about how individuals differ from each other. In this article we begin by discussing diverse indicators for quantifying intra-individual variability and indicate their advantages and disadvantages. Then we propose an alternative method that models…

Executive function (EF) skills are the attention-regulation skills that make it possible to sustain attention, keep goals and information in mind, refrain from responding immediately, resist distraction, tolerate frustration, consider the consequences of different behaviors, reflect on past experiences, and plan for the future. As EF research…

This article analyzes latent variable models from a cognitive psychology perspective. We start by discussing work by Tuerlinckx and De Boeck (2005), who proved that a diffusion model for 2-choice response processes entails a 2-parameter logistic item response theory (IRT) model for individual differences in the response data. Following this line…

The importance of higher education has never been clearer. Educational attainment--the number of years a person spends in school--strongly predicts adult earnings, as well as health and civic engagement. Yet relative to other developed nations, educational attainment in the United States is lagging, with young Americans who heretofore led the…

Recent experiments have shown that people process information about themselves more efficiently than other kinds of information. To investigate individual differences in the processing of self-relevant information, subjects (N=41) rated the self- and other-applicability of 90 traits and completed nine standard personality scales. Several measures…

The traditional method of measuring self-esteem has been to construct instruments based on their face validity, even though this approach has been shown to involve many difficulties when deriving scales for subjective dimensions such as self-esteem. An alternative approach to the measurement of self-esteem is based on techniques of psychophysical…

This article discusses women's body image resilience. Body image dissatisfaction is prevalent among girls and women. Girls as young as 6 years old experience negative body image, and there is evidence that women struggle with body concerns throughout the life cycle (Lewis & Cachelin, 2001; Smolak, 2002; Striegel-Moore & Franko, 2002). In fact,…