Do We See Eye to Eye? Moderators of Correspondence Between Student and Faculty Evaluations of Day-to-Day Teaching

Students and instructors show moderate levels of agreement about the quality of day-to-day teaching. In the present study, we replicated and extended this finding by asking how correspondence between student and instructor ratings is moderated by time of semester and student demographic variables. Participants included 137 students and 5 instructors. On 10 separate days, students and instructors rated teaching effectiveness and challenge level of the material. Multilevel modeling indicated that student and instructor ratings of teaching effectiveness converged overall, but more advanced students and Caucasian students converged more closely with instructors. Student and instructor ratings of challenge converged early but diverged later in the semester. These results extend our knowledge about the connection between student and faculty judgments of teaching

Color in context: psychological context moderates the influence of red on approach- and avoidance-motivated behavior.

A basic premise of the recently proffered color-in-context model is that the influence of color on psychological functioning varies as a function of the psychological context in which color is perceived. Some research has examined the appetitive and aversive implications of viewing the color red in romance- and achievement-relevant contexts, respectively, but in all existing empirical work approach and avoidance behavior has been studied in separate tasks and separate experiments. Research is needed to directly test whether red influences the same behavior differently depending entirely on psychological context. The present experiment was designed to put this premise to direct test in romance- and achievement-relevant contexts within the same experimental paradigm involving walking behavior. Our results revealed that exposure to red (but not blue) indeed has differential implications for walking behavior as a function of the context in which the color is perceived. Red increased the speed with which participants walked to an ostensible interview about dating (a romance-relevant context), but decreased the speed with which they walked to an ostensible interview about intelligence (an achievement-relevant context). These results are the first direct evidence that the influence of red on psychological functioning in humans varies by psychological context. Our findings contribute to both the literature on color psychology and the broader, emerging literature on the influence of context on basic psychological processes

Lexical Derivation of the PINT Taxonomy of Goals: Prominence, Inclusiveness, Negativity Prevention, and Tradition

What do people want? Few questions are more fundamental to psychological science than this. Yet, existing taxonomies disagree on both the number and content of goals. We thus adopted a lexical approach and investigated the structure of goal-relevant words from the natural English lexicon. Through an intensive rating process, 1,060 goal-relevant English words were first located. In Studies 1-2, two relatively large and diverse samples (total n = 1,026) rated their commitment to approaching or avoiding these goals. Principal component analyses yielded 4 replicable components: Prominence, Inclusiveness, Negativity prevention, and Tradition (the PINT Taxonomy). Study 3-7 (total n = 1,396) supported the 4-factor structure of an abbreviated scale and found systematic differences in their relationships with past goal-content measures, the Big 5 traits, affect, and need satisfaction. This investigation thus provides a data-driven taxonomy of higher-order goal-content and opens up a wide variety of fascinating lines for future research

Reducing the Tendency to Aggress: Insights from Social and Personality Psychology

The social and personality psychology literature on aggression has largely focused on the factors that are associated with an increase in aggression such as provocation, violent media exposure, and trait anger. This work has been quite important in developing models of aggression. Less emphasis, however, has been placed on examining the factors that reduce this harmful behavior. We use a widely researched model of aggression to examine some factors that are associated with aggression reduction including self-control, pro-social experiences, and appraisal processes. These variables reduce the tendency to aggress, and our review addresses some potential processes involved. We suggest that a stronger research focus on the factors that reduce aggression can aid our understanding of not only why aggression occurs but also how to control it

Assessing the Efficacy of a Participant-Vetting Procedure to Improve Data-Quality on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

In recent years, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) has become a pivotal source for participant recruitment in many social-science fields. In the last several years, however, concerns about data quality have arisen. In response, CloudResearch developed an intensive pre-screening procedure to vet the full participant pool available on MTurk and exclude those providing low-quality data. To assess its efficacy, we compared three MTurk samples that completed identical measures: Sample 1 was collected prior to the pre-screening’s implementation. Sample 2 was collected shortly following its implementation, and Sample 3 was collected nearly a full-year after its implementation. Results indicated that the reliability and validity of scales improved with the implementation of this prescreening procedure, and that this was especially apparent with more recent versions. Thus, this prescreening procedure appears to be a valuable tool to help ensure the collection of high-quality data on MTurk

Counting to Ten Milliseconds: Low Anger but not High Anger, Individuals Pause Following Negative Evaluations

Low-anger individuals are less reactive, both emotionally and behaviourally, to a large variety of situational primes to anger and aggression. Why this is so, from an affective processing perspective, has been largely conjectural. Four studies (total N=270) sought to link individual differences in anger to tendencies exhibited in basic affective processing tasks. On the basis of motivational factors and considerations, it was hypothesised that negative evaluations would differentially activate a psychological alarm system at low levels of anger, resulting in a pause that should be evident in the speed of making subsequent evaluations. Just such a pattern was evident in all studies. By contrast, high-anger individuals did not pause following their negative evaluations. In relation to this affective processing tendency, at least, dramatically different effects were observed among low- versus high-anger individuals. Implications for the personality-processing literature, theories of trait anger, and fast-acting regulatory processes are discussed

What is the “Opposite” of a Value? A Lexical Investigation into the Structure of Generally Undesirable Goal Content

Objectives Past taxonomies of goal-content have focused (either exclusively or predominantly) on generally-desirable values, and they suggest that some values oppose other values. However, many goals are generally-undesirable (i.e., the average person is committed to avoiding them), and these “vices” have been under-studied. This is an important gap because other models suggest that the “opposite” of a value is actually a vice. Methods To fill this gap, we conducted a lexical investigation. Two large samples (involving 504 undergraduates & 257 online participants) first rated their commitment to approaching or avoiding a large number of goals from the English lexicon. Results Analyses indicated that vices can be summarized in terms of Elitism, Rebellion, and Disrepute, which appear opposite from Inclusiveness, Tradition, and Prominence values (respectively) in MDS models. In Study 3 (involving 280 undergraduates) and Study 4 (involving 261 online participants), we found that Schwartz values of Universalism, Tradition, and Self-Enhancement actually appeared opposite from Elitism, Rebellion, and Disrepute (respectively) in MDS models, rather than from other values. Conclusions This investigation develops an instrument which can distinguish between different vices at a holistic level, and it suggests that they are actually the opposite of select values

Supplementary Material, wilkowski_online_appendix – (How) Does Initial Self-Control Undermine Later Self-Control in Daily Life?

<p>Supplementary Material, wilkowski_online_appendix for (How) Does Initial Self-Control Undermine Later Self-Control in Daily Life? by Benjamin M. Wilkowski1, Elizabeth Louise Ferguson, Laverl Z. Williamson and Shaun K. Lappi in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin</p

Thou Shalt Kill: Practicing self-control supports adherence to personal values when asked to aggress

Poor self-control is a root cause of aggression and criminality. But people can improve their self-control through repetitive practice. Because self-control involves acting in accordance with personal values, practicing self-control can promote attainment of value-consistent goals. The present research tested the hypothesis that practicing self-control could both decrease and increase obedient aggression. In Experiment 1, relative to the active control group, participants who practiced self-control were more hesitant to engage in mock violence (e.g., cutting the experimenter's throat with a rubber knife), especially for participants high in dispositional empathy. In Experiment 2, practicing self-control increased obedience to kill insects, but only among participants Who felt little moral responsibility for their actions. There was a trend for decreased killing among participants who felt morally responsible for their actions. Our findings suggest that When asked to behave aggressively, self-control promotes adherence to personal values, which may or may not fuel aggression. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved