Hot answers tagged measurement
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PEBL is a free open source programming language to help construct psychological experiments. A wiki and developer community provide some documentation and support.
PEBL has a Psychological Test Battery of many common or simple psychological tests so you may be able to use it out of the box without constructing your own test. PEBL includes free versions of ...
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From what I remember, the MBTI has been compared in some studies to the Big Five (or OCEAN) model of personality. If you've not heard of it, the Big Five is the primary theory of personality that is accepted by researchers who do this sort of thing. Here are some papers comparing the two approaches:
Recent comparison and another.
The main point is that a ...
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The Hare Psychopathology Checklist is considered the current gold standard for measuring potential psychopathy. If you're interested in psychopathology, the book Without Conscience by Robert Hare, Ph.D., is a fascinating read. He has a second book called Snakes In Suits, which I have not yet read, so I cannot recommend or not recommend it. Dr. Hare has a ...
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The standard complexity metric in theoretical computer science and machine learning, in particular in statistical learning theory, is the Vapnik–Chervonenkis (VC) dimension. It is of interest because it gives us a very good tool to measure the learning ability of a neural network (or any other statistical learner, in general).
A good introduction to the use ...
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I had a course which was about IQ; I never read an article about it, so I can't quote studies (I can look up the references if you like).
There are indeed a lot of factors that can influence ones score on an IQ test. These are some transient factors that came to my mind:
The setting: was the test taken at home, at school, at a totally unfamiliar place? ...
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If you come to this question from the bayesian tradition, then there is only one place where you can sneak in bias: your prior. This dovetails nicely with the wikipedia definition:
a pattern of deviation in judgment that occurs in particular situations, leading to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, or what is broadly ...
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Bias can be quantified in many different ways. In human memory research carried out in the cognitive psychology tradition, there are simple ways to think about it. One basic measure of cognitive bias is merely called bias, and it's a measure of the absolute accuracy of an individual's probability judgments. You average probability judgments across a given ...
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What you may be interested are personality traits caught by some statistical correlations, rather than 'manually' merged by an author's intuition.
One of such tools is 16 Personality Factors.
The 16 Personality Factors, measured by the 16PF Questionnaire, were derived using factor-analysis by psychologist Raymond Cattell. This article summarizes the ...
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Do personality tests predict job performance in general?
There is a large academic literature correlating personality test scores with job performance. You might want to check out the meta-analysis by Barrick et al (2001). It reports the meta-analytic correlations often based on hundreds of studies between Big 5 personality test scores and job performance.
...
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Yes and no. Source estimation has been utilized in electrical engineering for decades, but is becoming more and more prevalent in the EEG realm, especially in light of efforts to register EEG readings with concurrent fMRI studies.
Basically, given a set of EEG (or even MEG, magnetoencephalographic) measurements, can we "invert" them to find the individual ...
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Yes! The International Affective Picture System (IAPS) is widely used.
From the IAPS instruction manual:
The International Affective Picture System (IAPS) is being developed
to provide a set of normative emotional stimuli for experimental
investigations of emotion and attention. The goal is to develop a
large set of standardized, ...
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One common way of framing numerical cognition is in terms of a "mental number line". This mental number line is thought to have a logarithmic scale, so perceived differences are inversely proportional to their magnitude. For example, the difference between 6 and 7 is perceived as bigger than the difference between 76 and 77. This is just a variant of the ...
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As I mentioned in my comment: IQ is a measurement that is believed to correlate with certain aspects of 'intelligence'. Executive function is "an umbrella term for cognitive processes such as planning, working memory, attention, problem solving, verbal reasoning, inhibition, mental flexibility, multi-tasking, initiation and monitoring of actions." The two ...
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Measures of arousal surely do play a role in subject performance on a wide variety of cognitive tasks. Generally, scientists can safely ignore this factor as it is assumed to introduce random noise between participants. From a hypothesis testing perspective, scientists are much more worried about factors that introduce systematic bias, or factors that skew ...
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Since things like happiness, sadness, and grief are highly subjective, so I don't think there's any way you could measure those variables directly.
You could operationally define those emotions, such as measuring happiness by the number of hours someone spends doing something they enjoy, but you can imagine all of the confounds involved with that.
Or, ...
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I would first like to discuss the concept of lateralization and clear up a common misconception about hemispheric dominance.
"A brain is considered to be asymmetrical (or lateralized) if one side (hemisphere or other brain region) is structurally different from the other and/or performs a different set of functions." (Bisazza et al., 1998).
A good ...
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In general, having multiple items will increase your reliability of measurement. A common measure of what the literature calls "subjective well-being" is a combination of the following scales.
The PANAS: A measure of positive and negative affectivity. A 20 item measure of positive and negative affect (see Watson et al, 1988).
Diener's Life Satisfaction ...
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Preface
This is a very interesting question, that is also somewhat related to my area of research. I know of several related results (which I might add later in an edit), and I thought that with a few minutes of scholar search I'll find a paper dealing with this question exactly. I was surprised to find no such papers. So I decided to conduct an ...
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The basic approach that you are describing sounds like inverse efficiency scores (e.g., see Townsend and Ashby, 1978,1983), which are measured as
$$\frac{r}{1-e} = \frac{r}{c}$$
where $r$ is reaction time, $e$ is proportion error, and $c$ is proportion correct. John Christie provides a critique of inverse efficiency scores here or see the discussion in ...
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There is no better way to describe brain activity than brain waves! :)
There are newer ways to analyze and think about brain waves, though. Usually you will find these under literature on neuronal oscillations.
Good aspects of thinking about brain activity using brain waves:
Brain waves are directly related to neural activity. They are an electric or ...
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The Hare Psychopathy Checklist is often used to assess psychopathy in clinical settings. NPR has a good, but unscientific read that ponders the validity of the Hare test and its reliability in predicting criminal recidivism.
The online Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy Scale is a test of psychopathy for research situations.
References
Hare, R. D. ...
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Entry into the literature
As a starting point, Simonton (2009) provides an excellent introduction to the field of historiometric assessment of intelligence. To quote the abstract:
Running parallel to mainstream research on the psychometric assessment
of intelligence is another tradition of research on the historiometric
assessment of intelligence ...
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A good overview on the topic is Metacognition: A Literature Review (E. R. Lai), page 27 has a section assessing the measures of Metacognition.
Flavell (1979) describes
assessment tasks that asked children to study a set of items until they were sure they could
remember them completely. Children were then tested on their ability to recall all the ...
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I think your intuitions are correct, and the reason is that Likert scales often suffer from poor construct validity.
One example that comes to mind is Alter et al. (2010), who use a mixed design, and note that participants in both conditions gravitate toward the middle of the scale on their first rating. They suggest that participants do not know how to use ...
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The ability to discretize numbers seems to depend on having words for discrete numbers. But humans seem to be able to estimate, regardless of linguistic constraints.
As a cool counterexample to "typical educated adults" as evidence for exact, symbolic representation of number, the Pirahã people of Brazil do not have words for numbers and do not seem to ...
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You could go with the most direct approach: After every question, ask your subjects how emotionally aroused the last question made them, for example by using a visual analogue scale. Now, this might not be suitable for your research (maybe you don't want your subjects to start to think about their own emotional state), but I think there's a danger in using ...
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PEBL has two main problems,
It isn't normed, which means the external validity is going to be very weak.
Standard computer hardware introduces random lag in timing measurements. Perceptual tests that measure raw neural speed and rely on millisecond measurements are meaningless.
That being said, I love the idea of PEBL and I have been thinking of some ...
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Ronnlund and Nilsson (2006) studied performance on the WAIS block design test in a large sample of adults both longitudinally and cross-sectionally. The time difference was about 5 years. They wanted to tease out age related changes from practice effects. I believe they estimated the 5-year practice related improvement to be about 0.6 of a T score (i.e., ...
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Some side notes to your question:
The amount of self-other-agreement depends on the acquaintance of the perceiver with the target (the more acquaintance, the more agreement) and on the "visibility" of the trait (extraversion can be relatively accurately judged by strangers; Neuroticism can only be judged by well-known others; Vazire, 2010)
Using the ...
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