Research about the nature of psychology, its subject matter, its level of analysis, its scientific laws, its relationship with other disciplines, and its social relevance has been a matter of great concern and interest during the development of psychology. This problem can be analyzed in terms of the dilemmas of the psychological discipline, which…

Borsboom (Psychometrika, 71:425-440, 2006) noted that recent work on measurement invariance (MI) and predictive invariance (PI) has had little impact on the practice of measurement in psychology. To understand this contention, the definitions of MI and PI are reviewed, followed by results on the consistency between the two forms of invariance in…

In 1974, a story was published about clandestine research done by John B. Watson that was judged to be so reprehensible that it was offered as the real reason he was fired from his faculty position at Johns Hopkins University in 1920, at perhaps the peak of his academic career. Watson's dismissal from Johns Hopkins may have been the most important…

The recruitment of an additional biomechanical degree of freedom in a unimanual rhythmic task was explored. Subjects were asked to synchronize adduction or abduction of their right index finger with a metronome, the frequency of which was increased systematically. In addition, haptic contact on or off the metronome beat was provided. Results…

S. W. Allen and L. R. Brooks (1991) have shown that exemplar memory can affect categorization even when participants are provided with a classification rule. G. Regehr and L. R. Brooks (1993) argued that stimuli must be individuated for such effects to occur. In this study, the authors further analyze the conditions that yield exemplar effects in…

Luciano L'Abate, recipient of the Award for Distinguished Professional Contributions to Applied Research, contributed to applied research through the introduction of the laboratory method in clinical psychology assessment and intervention, leading to the development of the first automated playroom, linking play therapy with research in child…

Peer review is a gatekeeper, the final arbiter of what is valued in academia, but it has been criticized in relation to traditional psychological research criteria of reliability, validity, generalizability, and potential biases. Despite a considerable literature, there is surprisingly little sound peer-review research examining these criteria or…

This article describes an in-class exercise that illustrates the advantage of semantic over nonsemantic study habits. The exercise includes a survey of students' current study strategies, followed by the presentation of an abbreviated version of Craik and Tulving's(1975) classic levels-of-processing experiment. We observed significant benefits of…

Across many areas of psychology, concordance is commonly used to measure the (intragroup) agreement in ranking a number of items by a group of judges. Sometimes, however, the judges come from multiple groups, and in those situations, the interest is to measure the concordance between groups, under the assumption that there is some within-group…

In a recent article, A. Maydeu-Olivares and D. L. Coffman (2006, see EJ751121) presented a random intercept factor approach for modeling idiosyncratic response styles in questionnaire data and compared this approach with competing confirmatory factor analysis models. Among the competing models was the CT-C(M-1) model (M. Eid, 2000). In an…

Why, during a decision between new alternatives, do people bias their evaluations of information to support a tentatively preferred option? The authors test the following 3 decision process goals as the potential drivers of such distortion of information: (a) to reduce the effort of evaluating new information, (b) to increase the separation…

Egon Brunswik (1903-1955) first made an interesting distinction between perception and explicit reasoning, arguing that perception included quick estimates of an object's size, nearly always resulting in good approximations in uncertain environments, whereas explicit reasoning, while better at achieving exact estimates, could often fail by wide…

Finding hidden objects in space is a fundamental ability that has received considerable research attention from both a developmental and a comparative perspective. Tracking the rotational displacements of containers and hidden objects is a particularly challenging task. This study investigated the ability of 3-, 5-, 7-, and 9-year-old children and…

Jennifer A. Richeson, winner of the Award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology, is cited for creative and sophisticated investigations of the psychological and neural underpinnings of prejudice, discrimination, and intergroup relations. Considering the perspectives of both minority and majority group members,…

Robert E. Ployhart, recipient of the Award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology, is cited for innovative work in examining reactions to staffing practices and efforts to enhance the acceptability of recruitment and staffing practices; for exemplary use of applied statistical models in examining multilevel effects…