psychometrics.
31 of 1538 NOTE documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| NOTE-314 | Calculation of signal detection theory measures | A practical tutorial that gives closed-form SDT measures computed from the hit rate H and false-alarm rate F. They are d′ = Φ⁻¹(H) − Φ⁻¹(F); β = exp{[Φ⁻¹(F)² − Φ⁻¹(H)²]/2}; c = −[Φ⁻¹(H) + Φ⁻¹(F)]/2; the nonparametric A′ and Grier’s B″ (single-formula versions, eqs. 3 and 9); A_z = Φ(intercept/√(1+slope²)) from the z-ROC, whose slope is σ_noise/σ_signal; and A_d′ = Φ(d′/√2), which equals 2AFC proportion correct under the d′ assumptions. It also gives one-line commands for seven software packages. Its worked rating example (50 signal and 25 noise trials, noise SD larger than signal SD) shows d′ ranging from 0.84 to 1.86 across criteria. The authors conclude that d′ should not be used without rating-task evidence of equal variance. | Read |
| NOTE-397 | Yilmaz, Harma & Doğruyol 2021, the MAC-Q in Turkey | An independent validation of the MAC-Q. In Turkish undergraduates (n = 445) seven factors fit the Relevance items (CFI .949, RMSEA .053, SRMR .046) but not the Judgement items (CFI .828) or the full form (CFI .752), as in the original. Family and deference track resistance to change; deference tracks, and fairness counters, opposition to equality. Resource-scarcity primes in Turkey (n = 576) and in a preregistered US MTurk study (n = 921) had no effect. Relevance scores correlate about .1–.3 with prosocial intentions. The seven are strongly intercorrelated. | Read |
| NOTE-398 | Atari et al. 2023, the MFQ-2 | A new Moral Foundations Questionnaire, built across 25 populations in local languages: 116 candidate items cut to 36, six each for Care, Equality, Proportionality, Loyalty, Authority and Purity, in a “describes me” format. Six factors fit across 19 nations (ESEM CFI .979); reliabilities ω .73–.95; Purity alone fails the alignment invariance threshold. Equality and Proportionality are nearly orthogonal in WEIRD samples. Purity rises most with cultural distance from the U.S. The individualizing–binding split appears in only three national networks. The MFQ-2 predicts criterion scales better than the MFQ-1. | Read |
| NOTE-412 | Curry, Jones Chesters & Van Lissa 2019, the MAC-Q | A 42-item questionnaire for morality-as-cooperation’s seven domains, written by the authors from the theory and reduced to three items per subscale. In UK (n = 1,392) and US (n = 469) online samples, seven factors fit the Relevance items well (CFI .98) and the Judgement items poorly (CFI .87). The two sets cannot be pooled into seven domains (CFI .73); the best model keeps fourteen correlated factors. The MFQ’s five factors are not recovered. MFQ purity items are rated about as morally relevant as its loyalty and authority items, which the authors concede contradicts the theory. The data cannot be shared. | Read |
| NOTE-435 | A Network Theory of Mental Disorders | Borsboom states the network theory as five principles: complexity, symptom-component correspondence, direct causal connections between symptoms, disorders as tightly coupled symptom clusters, and hysteresis. Disorder is an alternative stable state of a strongly connected network that outlasts its trigger; health is the stable state of a weakly connected one. Treatment is symptom, external-field or network intervention. The evidence offered is indirect, and the theory is presented as an organizing framework, not a fitted model. | Read |
| NOTE-445 | The Diffusion Decision Model: Theory and Data for Two-Choice Decision Tasks | The full diffusion model (drift v with across-trial SD η, boundaries 0 and a, starting point z with range s_z, non-decision time Ter with range s_t) fitted by the χ² quantile method. In three dot-motion experiments with 14–17 participants difficulty maps to drift alone, speed–accuracy instructions to boundaries alone, and a 75:25 proportion mainly to starting point; RT distribution shape is invariant across conditions. Drift variability gives slow errors and starting-point variability fast ones. Reviews aging, aphasia and neural-firing applications. | Read |
| NOTE-466 | HDDM: Hierarchical Bayesian Estimation of the Drift-Diffusion Model in Python | HDDM fits the full DDM (v, a, z, t with sv, st, sz) by MCMC in PyMC, with group-level priors such as μ_a ~ Gamma(1.5, 0.75), μ_v ~ N(2, 3), z_j ~ invlogit(N(μ_z, σ_z²)), and the Navarro–Fuss likelihood. A patsy-style regressor lets a parameter vary with a trial covariate. In simulations with 12 subjects and 20–150 trials, hierarchical Bayes had the lowest trimmed recovery error for every parameter and the highest power to detect drift differences and covariate effects, by up to 20% for the latter with larger effects and few trials. | Read |
| NOTE-484 | Bayesian hypothesis testing for psychologists: A tutorial on the Savage–Dickey method | For nested models the Bayes factor for a point null is the ratio of posterior to prior density of the tested parameter at the null value, under the larger model (Eq. 12, derived in Appendix A). It needs the nuisance parameters’ prior to be continuous at the null. Worked examples give BF10 ≈ 2.2 where p ≈ .006, and BF01 ≈ 4 in favour of a null of no group difference. | Read |
| NOTE-957 | Feldman & Lynch — self-generated validity | A theoretical paper, with no new data. When the belief, attitude or intention asked about is not already in memory, the question creates it, and the created answer is later retrieved as an input to other answers and to behaviour; when it is in memory, question order and format still decide which earlier answer is used. An earlier response is used for a later one if it is accessible and more diagnostic than other accessible inputs. Expertise, direct experience and trait involvement reduce the effects, because they supply judgements already formed and rehearsed. | Read |
| NOTE-990 | Lush, Botan, Scott, Seth, Ward & Dienes — Trait phenomenological control and the rubber hand illusion | Hypnotisability predicted rubber hand illusion reports after both synchronous and asynchronous brushing (n = 353, about half a scale point per SWASH point, rs 0.26), a visual control item as well, and synchronous drift weakly (rs 0.11); it also predicted vicarious pain and mirror touch. The expectation manipulation failed and the pre-registered difference-score test was inconclusive, so the study shows that the standard controls do not exclude suggestion, not that the illusion is suggestion. | Read |
| NOTE-992 | Abdulkarim & Ehrsson — No causal link between hand position sense and limb ownership | A motor slid the hidden hand 8 cm toward or away from the rubber hand during brushing, too slowly to be noticed. Pointing followed it by about 5–6 cm, but questionnaire ownership depended only on synchrony and not on where the hand was moved, in two experiments of 18. With the hand still, the classic synchronous drift and its correlation with the illusion reappeared. The authors conclude drift is not a cause of ownership; the null is from small samples within the illusion’s known spatial range. | Read |
| NOTE-997 | Ehrsson et al. — No specific relationship between hypnotic suggestibility and the rubber hand illusion | A reanalysis of Lush et al.’s (2020) open data, n = 353. The synchronous-minus-asynchronous difference in rubber-hand illusion ratings is unrelated to hypnotisability (rho = -0.066, BF01 = 5.7), is significant in every hypnotisability quartile, and is not changed by explicit suggestions about which condition should work; the hypnotisability correlations Lush et al. report appear equally for the asynchronous condition and an “impossible” control item. The authors conclude the illusion is a perceptual one, “driven primarily by multisensory mechanisms”. The reply grants every number and disputes that the asynchronous condition controls for expectation. | Read |
| NOTE-998 | Hohwy & Paton — Explaining away the body | With a foreign arm seen exactly where one’s own arm lies, synchronous tapping raised ratings that the felt touch was produced on the seen arm, and after onset also that a finger hovering 5 cm away caused it or that it was caused on a cardboard box; the box gave no synchrony difference without prior onset. Samples of 9 to 13, single leading questions, no ownership item, no expectation measure, and a 0.13 °C cooling of the real hand in one comparison of four, significant only one-tailed. | Read |
| NOTE-1001 | Roseboom & Lush — Serious problems with interpreting rubber hand illusion experiments | Resampling 351 synchronous-condition reports from Lush et al. 2020 into 10,000 studies of 20, the authors find that samples from above the median of hypnotisability almost always “find” the rubber hand illusion, and samples from below it find agreement with the ownership statement about 4% of the time. The ownership result holds at n = 50; the result for the averaged statements is largely a matter of power. No asynchronous condition, drift or new data are analysed. | Read |
| NOTE-1003 | Lush & Seth — Reply to: No specific relationship between hypnotic suggestibility and the rubber hand illusion | The reply to Ehrsson et al. accepts their reanalyses and denies their reading: expectancies are higher for synchronous than asynchronous brushing, the difference does not vary with hypnotisability (b = -0.16, P = 0.072, B = 0.07), so a null relation between hypnotisability and the synchrony effect is what demand characteristics predict. Agreement with the ownership item rises with hypnotisability (b = 0.76 per SWASH point, rs = 0.27) and reaches minimal agreement only in the top 31%. Whether multisensory integration matters to RHI measures awaits experiments that control expectation. It shows that the suggestion control THEORY-765 accepts can be met without the confound being removed. | Read |
| NOTE-1004 | Longo et al. — What is embodiment? A psychometric approach | 131 people rated 27 statements after synchronous and asynchronous brushing of a rubber hand. Principal components analysis found embodiment of the rubber hand, loss of own hand, movement and affect in both conditions and deafference after asynchrony only; embodiment split into ownership, location and agency. Ownership and location crossed from negative to positive with synchrony and each predicted proprioceptive drift (1.34 cm against 0.30 cm); agency stayed negative. No control separates any of it from expectation. | Read |
| NOTE-1005 | Lush — Demand characteristics confound the rubber hand illusion | People told about the rubber hand procedure, but never put through it, expect the illusion statements more than the control statements and more under synchronous than asynchronous brushing (d = 1.40 and 1.05, n = 20), which is the pattern published reports show. So the field’s standard controls do not control for suggestion. The paper does not show that the illusion is suggestion, and says so. | Read |
| NOTE-1009 | Rohde, Di Luca & Ernst — Feeling of ownership and proprioceptive drift do not go hand in hand | With robot stroking and a visual probe of felt finger position, drift toward a rubber hand was as large when the hand was only seen as under synchronous stroking (about 6 cm), and as large under asynchronous stroking interrupted every 10 s; only continuous asynchrony kept it near zero. Ownership by questionnaire needed synchrony. The authors conclude that drift is visuo-proprioceptive integration that asynchrony suppresses, separate from ownership, and not a proxy for it. Groups of ten; the vision-only ownership report is anecdotal. | Read |
| NOTE-1079 | McFadyen et al. — Doorways do not always cause forgetting | Four conceptual replications from an independent lab. In passive, head-mounted virtual reality, doorways did not lower hits for carried or set-down objects; under a counting load they raised false alarms to recombined probes. Watching or walking a curtained hallway did not change memory for a 16-item grid. The nulls are informative but not direct failures to replicate: movement was passive, and Experiments 3 and 4 used a different memory task. | Read |
| NOTE-1097 | Induction and Profiling of Strong Multi-Componential Emotions in Virtual Reality | Virtual reality induces intense emotions that engage several components, which passive paradigms do not, and the authors argue this is a precondition for testing synchronization. Seven games, 53 participants, one retrospective questionnaire per game. Fear and joy clusters span appraisal, motivation, physiology, feeling and regulation, and appraisal predicts their intensity best. Componentiality is a property of associations across observations. Nothing is measured within an episode. | Read |
| NOTE-1098 | Toward an integrative psychometric model of emotions | An integrative psychometric model of emotions must allow distinct emotions, variation between and within persons, and causal relations among components, one property from each broad class of emotion theory. Reflective and formative latent-variable models fail. A network model passes. In it, the network of causally interacting components constitutes the emotion, and a distinct emotion is a weakly emergent small-world community. Strong connectivity predicts self-sustaining activation and hysteresis, hence longer emotions. A programme paper: no data, and limits named candidly. | Read |
| NOTE-1104 | Interaction and threshold effects of appraisal on componential patterns of emotion: A study using cross-cultural semantic data | From the GRID data on the meaning of 24 emotion words in 27 countries, MARS models of 11 motivation, physiology and expression factors on 7 appraisal factors select interactions up to third order and some hinges. Goal compatibility is the main effect, agency and norm compatibility act only through it, and the structure is partly additive and partly hierarchical. The “threshold effects” are hinges in a continuous piecewise-linear fit. No synchronization measure, no time, and no choice data. | Read |
| NOTE-1105 | Kahneman, Wakker and Sarin — Back to Bentham? Explorations of experienced utility | Decision utility, an outcome’s weight in choice, and experienced utility, its hedonic quality, are distinct and can be measured separately. Experienced utility is instant (real-time report) or remembered (retrospective). Remembered utility follows a Peak-End rule with duration neglect, and choices follow remembered utility, so people choose dominated painful episodes. Total utility is axiomatized as a time integral of ordinal instant utility with a neutral zero. For the record, the dissociation is not a counterexample to potential read within the moment. It shows that potential read from deferred choices measures memory, and that a system’s model of its own past states is systematically biased. | Read |
| NOTE-1107 | Brain networks subserving functional core processes of emotions identified with componential modeling | fMRI during 40 films, with each of 119 short events rated on 32 CoreGRID features. PLSC gives six brain–behaviour processes: valuation, novelty, hedonic impact, goal monitoring, caring for others and approach/avoidance. Valence splits into a wanting-like valuation network carrying the action tendencies and a liking-like hedonic network carrying feeling and expression, and no arousal process appears. There is no synchronization measure, but every event gets a signed score on each process. | Read |
| NOTE-1118 | A Multi-Componential Approach to Emotion Recognition and the Effect of Personality | A crowdsourced film-rating study. Thirty-nine CoreGRID items rated after whole clips show emotion structure beyond valence and arousal (six dimensions) and predict discrete-emotion ratings better together than any component alone. Personality traits correlate with componential items. No synchronization, no within-episode measure, no physiology recorded. | Read |
| NOTE-1260 | Psychometric validation of the Loyola Generativity Scale in Chilean teachers: evidence for a three factor structure | 430 Chilean elementary teachers completed a Spanish Loyola Generativity Scale, McAdams and de St. Aubin’s 20 items on a 4-point scale. Four items were dropped for poor sampling adequacy. Of one- to four-factor solutions, three factors were retained (RMSEA = 0.043, CFI = 0.989, 55.1% of variance); four fit slightly better but were judged over-extracted. Its factors: Generative Inefficacy, three negatively worded items; Generative Action, eight items; and Generative Legacy, three items on symbolic continuity. Action and Legacy correlate .45. The authors call the analysis confirmatory, but it chooses the number of factors from the data. Only 14 of the 16 retained items appear in the final solution, without comment. | Read |
| NOTE-1338 | Ward & Marco — pragmatic-similarity judgments | The first set of human pragmatic-similarity ratings: 693 pairs of a spoken dialog utterance and a re-enactment of it, made six ways so that similarity varies, rated on a 1–5 slider by 6–9 judges in three four-hour sessions, two English and one Spanish, 5,532 ratings in all. Mean pairwise Pearson correlation between judges was 0.45, 0.72 and 0.66 by session. It rose with experience and fell for pairs that differ in wording (0.80 in Session 2 without them). The 0.45 the record cites is the first session’s single-judge figure. A nine-judge mean at that level has an estimated reliability near 0.88. | Read |
| NOTE-1429 v2 | Abuhamdeh — Investigating the flow experience | A conceptual review finding 24 operationalizations of flow in 42 studies, 17 without enjoyment. It argues flow should be measured as Csikszentmihalyi defined it, a discrete, highly enjoyable state distinct from its conditions, and that plain absorption is task involvement, not inherently enjoyable. It reports, and rejects by argument, the view that flow is emotionless or enjoyed only afterwards. It does not show by data that flow is positive during the episode. | Read |
| NOTE-1509 | Kermavnar et al. — A systematic map of need-fulfillment scales | A PRISMA review (searched 21 August 2023) finding 31 original self-report scales of need fulfillment in 32 primary studies, 23 of the scales based on self-determination theory, and 89 adaptations. 21 of the 31 measure satisfaction only; one measures frustration only, one thwarting, four satisfaction and frustration. The review finds the field’s terms used interchangeably, frustration items that are negatively worded satisfaction items (the BPNSFS among them, after Murphy et al. 2023), double-barrelled items, and inconsistent response formats. It names no criterion for need-hood and declines to take a side on the two-dimensional model. | Read |
| NOTE-1530 | Murphy et al. — The BPNSFS probably does not validly measure need frustration | An argument, with factor analyses of eight samples (N = 3,692), that the BPNSFS’s “frustration” scales are mostly negatively keyed satisfaction items with almost no thwarting content, so the satisfaction–frustration split in the scale is “likely primarily a method artifact caused by different item keying directions”. Factors sharing a keying direction correlate .64–.75; satisfaction and frustration of the same need correlate .17–.38; a higher-order model grouping by keying fits better than one grouping by need. The authors say the question cannot be settled with existing data, because keying and the purported construct are fully confounded. | Read |
| NOTE-1531 | Deci & Ryan — The General Causality Orientations Scale | The scale that founded causality orientations theory: twelve vignettes, each with an autonomy, a control and an impersonal response rated 1–7, summed into three subscales. In 636 students the subscales have α .69–.74 and are nearly independent (A–C r = .03, A–I −.25, C–I .27); retest over two months is .71–.78 (n = 51). Validity is a set of correlations in samples of 42 to 128, mostly as predicted, a few at p < .07, and behaviour is the weakest link. | Read |