Developing self-report Likert scales is an essential part of modern psychology. However, it is hard for psychologists to remain apprised of best practices as methodological developments accumulate. To address this, this current paper offers a selective review of advances in Likert scale development that have occurred over the past 25 years. We reviewed six major measurement journals between the years 1995–2019 and identified key advances, ultimately including 40 papers and offering written summaries of each. We supplemented this review with an (...) in-depth discussion of five particular advances: conceptions of construct validity, creating better construct definitions, readability tests for generating items, alternative measures of precision [e.g., coefficient omega and item response theory information], and ant colony optimization for creating short forms. The Supplementary Material provides further technical details on these advances and offers guidance on software implementation. This paper is intended to be a resource for psychological researchers to be informed about more recent psychometric progress in Likert scale creation. (shrink)

A number of tasks have been developed to measure the affective theory of mind (ToM), nevertheless, recent studies found that different affective ToM tasks do not correlate with each other, suggesting that further studies on affective ToM and its measurement are needed. More in-depth knowledge of the tools that are available to assess affective ToM is needed to decide which should be used in research and in clinical practice, and how to interpret results. The current study focuses on the Reading (...) the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET) primarily to investigate in a sample of 112 children the currently unexplored relationships in middle childhood between performance on the RMET and fluid intelligence. Relationships with receptive vocabulary, age, and sex were also investigated. Moreover, because studying the family's influence on children mentalization could have important implications in developing prevention and treatment interventions, this study offers a novel contribution to the field by exploring the family's influence on children's RMET performance. Although significant positive correlations were found among RMET-C performance, fluid intelligence, and receptive language, regression analysis revealed that fluid intelligence was the only predictor. No family influence was found on children's RMET performance. On the whole, results from the current study offer some support to the hypothesis that RMET-C is not a “pure” ToM task, specifically the effect of fluid intelligence on RMET performance should be taken into account when RMET is used both in research and in the clinical setting. (shrink)

Affective theory of mind (aToM) impairments associated with the youth antisocial phenotype callous-unemotional (CU) traits predict antisocial behaviour above CU traits alone. Importantly, CU traits associate with decrements in complex but not basic aToM. aToM is modulated by cognitive control and CU traits associate with cognitive control impairments; thus, cognitive control is a plausible mechanism underlying aToM impairments in CU traits. Because cognitive control is dependent on the availability of cognitive resources, youth with CU traits may have difficulty with allocating (...) cognitive resources under greater demands that impact complex aToM. To test this, 81 participants (ages 12–14, Female = 51.8%, Male = 48.2%) were recruited to complete a behavioural paradigm that involved an initial aToM task with complex and basic emotions followed by placing additional demands on cognitive control and a final repeat of the same aToM task. Results indicate adolescents higher in CU traits had intact basic aToM but less accuracy in complex aToM that worsened after taxing cognitive control; and this load only required a short duration to account for ToM decrements (200 ms [range 150–1600 ms]). These results demonstrate CU traits association with cognitive control limitations that impact complex aToM. This may partially explain antisocial behaviour associated with CU traits. (shrink)

The ability to recognise others’ emotions from nonverbal cues is measured with performance-based tests and has many positive correlates. Although researchers have...

ABSTRACTPrevious research has found that individuals vary greatly in emotion differentiation, that is, the extent to which they distinguish between different emotions when reporting on their own fe...

Psychometrically sound short scales are required to comprehensively and yet economically assess fundamental motives in research settings such as large-scale assessments. In order to provide such a time- and cost-efficient instrument, we conducted three studies to develop further and validate 16 German scales with three items each assessing fundamental motives [16 motives research scales ]. In Study 1, we applied a top–down construction process to develop a preliminary item pool on the basis of a thorough revision of existing construct definitions. (...) In Study 2, we chose an approach that allowed us to balance the optimization of psychometric properties with content coverage to select three-item scales for each of the 16 motives. For the item selection process, we combined exploratory factor analyses, confirmatory factor analyses, ant colony optimization algorithm, and Mokken scale analyses. In Study 3, we cross-validated the results obtained in Study 2 and placed the 16mrs in a nomological network consisting of Big Five traits and Power, Achievement, Affiliation, Intimacy, and Fear motives. The results of these studies indicate that the 16mrs can be used to reliably and validly assess fundamental motives that represent a level of personality that differs from the Big Five and covers motivational aspects beyond the well-established Power, Achievement, Affiliation, Intimacy, and Fear motives. Limitations concerning the reliability of the Autonomy scale and the empirical discrimination of the Dominance and Status scales are discussed. In addition to the validated German version, we also provide the English translation of the items, which, however, need to be validated before use. (shrink)

In light of Jaswal & Akhtar's compelling argument, we argue there should instead be more focus on deficits in socio-emotional abilities. However, current research is limited by the psychometric problems with most measures. We discuss specific problems, outlining examples for theory of mind. We conclude with recommendations for new lines of research derived from findings in the individual differences literature.