Background: If the adaptive significance of specific fears changes with age, the genetic contribution to individual differences may be lowest at the age of greatest salience. The roles of genes and environment in the developmental-genetic trajectory of five common childhood fears are explored in 1094 like-sex pairs of male and female monozygotic…

The goal of this study was to determine how the fear relevancy of outcomes during probabilistic classification learning affects behavior and strategy use. Novel variants of the "weather prediction" task were created, in which cue cards predicted either looming fearful or neutral outcomes in a between-groups design. Strategy use was…

This study is an item analysis of the Matching Familiar Figures Test-20. We examined error scores in the Matching Familiar Figures Test-20 to determine the influence of the difficulty of the test on the assessment of reflection-impulsivity. The sample included 700 participants aged between 6 and 12 years. The results obtained from the corrected…

More than five decades of research and development have focused on making the Creative Problem Solving process and tools accessible across a wide range of ages and contexts. Recent evidence indicates that when individuals, in both school and corporate settings, understand their own style of problem solving, they are able to learn and apply process…

This article reviews current methods for evaluating models in the cognitive sciences, including theoretically based approaches, such as Bayes factors and minimum description length measures; simulation approaches, including model mimicry evaluations; and practical approaches, such as validation and generalization measures. This article argues…

Over the last two decades, research has suggested that candidates' test performances and scores are collaboratively achieved through interviewing/scoring processes and there could be unfair situations caused by the inter-interviewer variation. To investigate a precise picture of the impact of inter-interviewer variation, this research examines the…

This study investigates the relationships of domain-general cognitive abilities and domain-specific verbal and mathematical abilities to students' educational characteristics when two theoretically grounded, but competing structural models are applied. In the standard model, a single latent ability causes interindividual differences in the…

We conducted a longitudinal analysis of the relative intensity and duration of interests associated with conceptual domains between the ages of 4 and 6 years, respectively. Results indicated a significant portion of preschool children do sustain an interest in conceptual domains during some portion of their childhood. Expected gender differences…

Videotapes of 50 mothers interacting with each of two siblings when each child was 12 months old showed that mothers behaved very similarly towards the siblings. Results suggest that differential maternal treatment of children at the same age in infancy is unlikely to be a major source of observed marked individual differences in siblings.…

Examined the validity of the sentence completion method in the measurement of death anxiety by administering ten items from five measurers to 80 employees in death-related and non-death-related occupations. Results suggested a conscious concern with the deaths of others and a covert expression of death anxiety characterized death-related…

Relations between Tucker's three-mode multidimensional scaling and Carroll and Chang's INDSCAL are discussed. A technique to transform a three-mode solution to the general form of an INDSCAL solution along with applications to two sets of data from the literature are presented. (Author/JKS)

Traces historical development from individual differences psychology through psychological testing, vocational counseling, and student personnel work, to counseling psychology. Describes individual differences tradition in counseling psychology research and practice. Discusses how individual differences psychology has influenced counseling…