Early theories of categorization assumed that either rules, or prototypes, or exemplars were exclusively used to mentally represent categories of objects. More recently, hybrid theories of categorization have been proposed that variously combine these different forms of category representation. Our research addressed the question of whether there…

Although the L2 acquisition studies of Japanese particles "WA" and "GA" were investigated by many researchers (Sakamoto, 2000), they completely ignored learners' individual differences. Indeed, learners' individualities are important factors for the L2 learning (Lightbrown & Spada, 1999). Thus, this research explored whether learners' individual…

The assumption that effective leaders differ in some identifiable and fundamental ways from other people is still a large part of mainstream I/O psychology. Based on a research review on the trait theory of leadership and what is known about the concept of expertise, this paper attempts to find a convergence between leader and expert traits.…

We examine the argument that teaching will be more effective if adapted to individuals--what we call the interaction/adaptation hypothesis. What is likely correct about this hypothesis (but needs more research) is that modality of instruction may need to be adapted to certain types of content (e.g., geometry vs. literature) or to domain of…

In the present study we used bayesian latent growth modeling to asses the impact of a one-semester creativity course on the development of engineering students' creativity scripts. We compared a treatment (N = 52) and a control (N = 42) group with respect to individual differences in initial status and in rate of change. Results revealed that the…

This study examined the potential influence of alexithymia, dissociation, and social desirability on the narrative features associated with truthful and fabricated traumatic events. Participants (N = 291) wrote narratives describing both genuine and fabricated traumas and completed scales measuring individual differences. Alexithymia was…

This article contains the results of how a selected group of Finnish upper secondary students understand Lutheranism. The data consisted of 63 students' responses to a writing task together with complementary interviews of 11 students. The outcomes of phenomenographic analysis of variation in the students' understanding of Lutheranism are…

Objective and subjective career success were hypothesized to mediate the relationships between sociodemographic variables, human capital indices, individual difference variables, and organizational sponsorship as inputs and a retirement decision and intentions to leave either the specialty of emergency medicine (EM) or medicine as output…

Although commercially developed interest measures based on Holland's RIASEC types are effectively used in a variety of applied settings, these measures have somewhat limited research utility due to their length and copyright restrictions placed by the test publishers. In the present study, two sets of 8-item RIASEC scales were developed using…

In a previous behavioral study, we showed that parents of children with SLI had a subclinical deficit in phonological short-term memory. Here, we tested the hypothesis that they also have a deficit in nonverbal auditory sensory memory. We measured auditory sensory memory using a paradigm involving an electrophysiological component called the…

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…