The authors examined student responses to faculty traits. Earlier findings revealing a preference for male instructors were obtained before female faculty and students were prevalent on college campuses and may have reflected a male demographic similarity effect. It was hypothesized that students would more favorably evaluate faculty who were…

The current study examined whether rumination serves as a moderator of the temporal association between maternal and child negative affect. Participants included 88 mothers with a history of major depressive episodes and their 123 children. During an initial assessment, mothers and their children completed measures assessing negative affect and…

Dube, Rotello, and Heit (2010) argued (a) that the so-called receiver operating characteristic is nonlinear for data on belief bias in syllogistic reasoning; (b) that their data are inconsistent with Klauer, Musch, and Naumer's (2000) model of belief bias; (c) that their data are inconsistent with any of the existing accounts of belief bias and…

English listeners categorize more of a [k-t] continuum as "t" after [[esh]] than [s] (Mann & Repp, 1981). This bias could be due to compensation for coarticulation (Mann & Repp, 1981) or auditory contrast between the fricatives and the stops (Lotto & Kluender, 1998). In Japanese, surface [[esh]k, [esh]t, sk, st] clusters…

A major strength of the Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI) is its systematic assessment of response styles, including feigned mental disorders. Recently, Mogge, Lepage, Bell, and Ragatz developed and provided the initial validation for the Negative Distortion Scale (NDS). Using rare symptoms as its detection strategy for feigning, the…

Extreme response set, the tendency to prefer the lowest or highest response option when confronted with a Likert-type response scale, can lead to misfit of item response models such as the generalized partial credit model. Recently, a series of intrinsically multidimensional item response models have been hypothesized, wherein tendency toward…

Extending the well-established negativity bias in human cognition to truth judgments, it was recently shown that negatively framed statistical statements are more likely to be considered true than formally equivalent statements framed positively. However, the underlying processes responsible for this effect are insufficiently understood.…

Retrieval demand, as implemented through test format and retrieval instructions, was varied across two misinformation experiments. Our goal was to examine whether increasing retrieval demand would improve the relationship between confidence and memory performance, and thereby reduce misinformation susceptibility. We hypothesized that improving the…

Previous studies have suggested that younger preschoolers exhibit a yes bias due to underdeveloped cognitive abilities, whereas older preschoolers exhibit a response bias due to other factors. To test this hypothesis, we investigated the response latency to yes-no questions pertaining to familiar and unfamiliar objects in 3- to 6-year-olds. The…

The number of students taking at least 1 online course has surpassed 7.1 million and represents 33% (21.3 million) of all higher education students (Allen & Seaman, 2013). With the growing number of online courses, credibility may be questioned. Are there effective evaluation processes in place? This article will describe the results of a…

Research on examinees' response changes on multiple-choice tests over the past 80 years has yielded some consistent findings, including that most examinees make score gains by changing answers. This study expands the research on response changes by focusing on a high-stakes admissions test--the Verbal Reasoning and Quantitative Reasoning measures…

Extreme response style (ERS) is a systematic tendency for a person to endorse extreme options (e.g., strongly disagree, strongly agree) on Likert-type or rating-scale items. In this study, we develop a new class of item response theory (IRT) models to account for ERS so that the target latent trait is free from the response style and the tendency…

This study aimed to: (a) understand practicing teachers' knowledge of model functions and modeling processes, (b) compare the similarities and differences between the knowledge of science and non-science major teachers, and (c) explore the possible reasons for the similarities and differences between the knowledge of these 2 groups. A 4-point…

Despite accumulating evidence that cortical motor areas, particularly the lateral premotor cortex, are activated during language comprehension, the question of whether motor processes help mediate the semantic encoding of language remains controversial. To address this issue, we examined whether low frequency (1 Hz) repetitive transcranial…

Questionnaire surveys have found a strong relationship between students' perceptions of their courses and their approaches to studying, but this might result from the operation of response biases. Responses to the Course Experience Questionnaire and the Revised Approaches to Studying Inventory from 2137 students taking seven courses by distance…