Situational Interest in Literary Text.

This study examined relationships among text characteristics, situational interest, two measures of text understanding, and personal responses when reading a literary text. A factor analysis of ratings made after reading revealed six interrelated text characteristics. Of these, suspense, coherence and thematic complexity explained 54% of the variance in interest.

Test difficulty and judgment bias.

Two experiments tested the hypothesis that overconfidence in performance judgments is due to test- and person-driven errors. In Experiment 1, test difficulty accounted for the vast majority of variation in overconfidence when individuals judged items of varying difficulty within a homogeneous test. In Experiment 2, the severity of overconfidence did not differ between three unrelated tests once test difficulty was controlled.