In his focus article, "Rethinking Traditional Methods of Survey Validation," published in this issue of "Measurement: Interdisciplinary Research and Perspectives," Andrew Maul wrote that it is commonly believed that self-report, survey-based instruments can be used to measure a wide range of psychological attributes, such as…

A debate is emerging concerning the use of deception in social science research (especially when it employs experimental methods), driven primarily by the relatively recent move by many economists into experimental work. These economists generally argue that deception should be banned. Deception includes a variety of practices in social science…

Griffiths, Christian, and Kalish (this issue) present an iterative-learning paradigm applying a Bayesian model to understand inductive biases in categorization. The authors argue that the paradigm is useful as an exploratory tool to understand inductive biases in situations where little is known about the task. It is argued that a theory developed…

This article presents the authors' response to Pignotti and Mercer's "Holding Therapy and Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy Are Not Supported and Acceptable Social Work Interventions." Pignotti and Mercer offer a very detailed, informative, scholarly, and eloquently expressed concern about the merit of holding therapies and the danger of offering…

The authors respond to the article by H. F. Coelho, P. H. Canter, and E. Ernst (2007), which reviewed the current status of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT). First, they clarify the randomization procedures in the 2 main MBCT trials. Second, they report posttreatment and follow-up data to show that trial participants allocated to…

Six unsuccessful attempts at replicating a key finding in the linguistic relativity literature [Boroditsky, L. (2001). Does language shape thought?: Mandarin and English speakers' conceptions of time. "Cognitive Psychology," 43, 1-22] are reported. In addition to these empirical issues in replicating the original finding, theoretical issues…

N. Stewart, G. D. A. Brown, and N. Chater's relative judgment model includes three core assumptions that enable it to predict accurately the vast majority of "classical" phenomena in absolute identification choices, but not the time taken to make them, including sequential effects, such as assimilation and contrast. These core assumptions, coupled…

N. Stewart, G. D. A. Brown, and N. Chater presented a relative judgment model (RJM) of absolute identification, in which the current stimulus is judged relative to the preceding stimulus. S. Brown, A. A. J. Marley, and Y. Lacouture found that the RJM does not predict their finding of increased accuracy after large stimulus jumps, except at the…

In the last two decades, La Heij and colleagues have presented accounts of a number of context effects in Stroop-like word-production tasks. Roelofs (2007 this issue) criticises various aspects of our proposals, ranging from the number of processing stages assumed to details of simulation results. In this reply we first argue that we do not…