Maladaptive Variants of Adaptive Traits and Bloated Specific Factors

The Development and Validation of a Measure of Mental Health, Help-Seeking Beliefs in Arabic-Speaking Refugees

Despite reporting elevated rates of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), refugees are less likely than other groups to seek psychological treatment. Relatively little attention has been paid to the role of negative help-seeking beliefs in influencing treatment uptake. The current study sought to develop and psychometrically validate a novel measure indexing negative help-seeking beliefs for refugees (Help-Seeking Beliefs Scale [HSBS]). In this study, 262 Arabic-speaking refugee participants completed an online survey consisting of the HSBS along with measures indexing similar constructs (self-stigma of PTSD and help-seeking, perceived stigma, negative help-seeking attitudes, and help-seeking intentions). Factor analysis revealed a three-factor structure aligning with key themes identified in the literature: (a) Fear of Negative Consequences, (b) Inappropriateness, and (c) Perceived Necessity. The scale demonstrated excellent internal consistency, convergent validity, and predicted reduced help-seeking intentions. Results support the utility of a novel measure capturing a prominent help-seeking barrier in a population with high psychopathology and low treatment uptake.

Development of the Hogan Personality Content Single-Items Inventory

The Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) and Hogan Developmental Survey (HDS) are among the most widely used and extensively well-validated personality inventories for organizational applications; however, they are rarely used in basic research. We describe the Hogan Personality Content Single-Items (HPCS) inventory, an inventory designed to measure the 74 content subscales of the HPI and HDS via a single-item each. We provide evidence of the reliability and validity of the HPCS, including item-level retest reliability estimates, both self-other agreement and other-other (or observer) agreement, convergent correlations with the corresponding scales from the full HPI/HDS instruments, and analyze how similarly the HPCS and full HPI/HDS instruments relate to other variables. We discuss situations where administering the HPCS may have certain advantages and disadvantages relative to the full HPI and HDS. We also discuss how the current findings contribute to an emerging picture of best practices for the development and use of inventories consisting of single-item scales.

Application of the Rasch measurement model in rehabilitation research and practice: early developments, current practice, and future challenges

The application of the Rasch measurement model in rehabilitation is now well established. Both its dichotomous and polytomous forms provide for transforming ordinal scales into interval-level measures, consistent with the requirements of fundamental measurement. The growth of applying the model in rehabilitation spans 30 years, during which both the protocol has steadily developed and several software packages have emerged that provide for analysis, together with the "R" language that has an increasing set of codes for applying the model. This article reviews that development and highlights current practice requirements, including those for providing the relevant information for the methods, and what is expected of the analysis. In addition, this provides a worked example and looks at the remaining issues and current developments of its application.

The Relationship Between Trait Emotional Intelligence and Personality. Is Trait EI Really Anchored Within the Big Five, Big Two and Big One Frameworks?

Pérez-González and Sánchez-Ruiz (2014) published a study in which they found that trait emotional intelligence can be considered a broad personality trait integrated into the higher levels of a multi-level personality hierarchy. They also came to the conclusion that this construct can be considered a proxy for the general factor of personality. The purpose of this study is to try to replicate their study. We follow the same methodology these authors used but with a new sample, and a different definition of trait emotional intelligence and therefore a different measurement tool. Our results show convergent validity between trait emotional intelligence and personality, but not discriminant validity, suggesting than trait emotional intelligence is not integrated in the higher level of the personality hierarchies, but it is another way to measure the same big five personality traits that traditionally compose the construct of personality. We also found that trait emotional intelligence highly correlated with the general personality factor, but additionally we found an extremely high negative correlation between those two constructs and neuroticism. This finding suggest that they may represent above all just the absence of neuroticism in a person.