Depressive and Anxious Symptoms, Experimentally Manipulated Acute Social-Evaluative Threat, and Cortisol Reactivity.

Objective: Exposure to social-evaluative threat (SET) can elicit greater physiological responses, including cortisol, compared to non-SET stressors. An individual's level of depressive and anxious symptoms predicts variability in cortisol responses to stressors, and other research suggests that these individual differences may predict vulnerability to social evaluation. The current study integrates both lines of research, testing if there are different relationships between depressive and/or anxious symptoms and cortisol reactivity in the presence or absence of SET.

Modeling Sequential Dependencies in Progressive Matrices: An Auto-Regressive Item Response Theory (AR-IRT) Approach.

Measurement models traditionally make the assumption that item responses are independent from one another, conditional upon the common factor. They typically explore for violations of this assumption using various methods, but rarely do they account for the possibility that an item predicts the next. Extending the development of auto-regressive models in the context of personality and judgment tests, we propose to extend binary item response models-using, as an example, the 2-parameter logistic (2PL) model-to include auto-regressive sequential dependencies.

Analysis of an Intelligence Dataset.

It is perhaps popular belief-at least among non-psychometricians-that there is a unique or standard way to investigate the psychometric qualities of tests [...

A Mokken Scale Analysis of the Last Series of the Standard Progressive Matrices (SPM-LS).

Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices Raven (1941) is a widely used 60-item long measure of general mental ability. It was recently suggested that, for situations where taking this test is too time consuming, a shorter version, comprised of only the last series of the Standard Progressive Matrices (the SPM-LS; Myszkowski and Storme (2018)) could be used, while preserving satisfactory psychometric properties Garcia-Garzon et al. (2019); Myszkowski and Storme (2018).

Commentary on Corradi et al.'s (2019) new conception of aesthetic sensitivity: Is the ability conception dead?

Corradi et al. (British Journal of Psychology, 2019) argue that their new conception of visual aesthetic sensitivity (as responsiveness to aesthetic features in one's preferences) presents several advantages in comparison with the current ability view of aesthetic sensitivity, usually defined as the ability to judge aesthetic stimuli in accordance with standards (The Journal of Psychology, 1964, 57 and 49). Although the measure they propose is interesting and presents advances to the field, we point to important issues.

Confirmation of a Two-Factor Solution to the Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective Empathy in a French Population of Patients With Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders.

The Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective Empathy (QCAE) is a tool for self-assessing the cognitive and emotional components of empathy. A study showed that a two-factor model fits the data of patients with schizophrenia, whereas other reports on healthy subjects have suggested a five-factor decomposition. We aimed to replicate the model of et al.

Same Test, Better Scores: Boosting the Reliability of Short Online Intelligence Recruitment Tests with Nested Logit Item Response Theory Models.

Assessing job applicants' general mental ability online poses psychometric challenges due to the necessity of having brief but accurate tests. Recent research (Myszkowski & Storme, 2018) suggests that recovering distractor information through Nested Logit Models (NLM; Suh & Bolt, 2010) increases the reliability of ability estimates in reasoning matrix-type tests. In the present research, we extended this result to a different context (online intelligence testing for recruitment) and in a larger sample ( N = 2949 job applicants).

Are reflective models appropriate for very short scales? Proofs of concept of formative models using the Ten-Item Personality Inventory.

Objective: Because of their length and objective of broad content coverage, very short scales can show limited internal consistency and structural validity. We argue that it is because their objectives may be better aligned with formative investigations than with reflective measurement methods that capitalize on content overlap. As proofs of concept of formative investigations of short scales, we investigate the Ten-Item Personality Inventory (TIPI).

Is the Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective Empathy measuring two or five dimensions? Evidence in a French sample.

Although many instruments measure empathy, most of them focus on specific facets (e.g., Spreng et al.

Anger and sadness as adaptive emotion expression strategies in response to negative competence and warmth evaluations.

Previous literature suggested that anger and sadness may be necessary to restore social bonds in the face of immediate relationship threat. The present research compared the social effectiveness of expressing anger and sadness in response to a negative personal evaluation. Results indicated that target anger in response to a negative competence evaluation, and target sadness in response to a negative warmth evaluation, had the most positive effects on the evaluators' subjectively perceived persuasiveness of the targets' communication (Study 1) and on the subjectively perceived fluency of the interaction by both interaction partners (Study 2).

French validation of the overexcitability questionnaire 2: psychometric properties and factorial structure.

Overexcitability corresponds to an overall response to stimulations in 5 domains: psychomotor, sensual, intellectual, imaginational, and emotional. The aim of this study was to develop a French version of the Overexcitability Questionnaire 2 (OEQ2) and to expand its psychometric properties. Two studies were conducted: one with a sample of 474 adolescents and another with a sample of 436 adults.