Does impulsivity influence performance in reasoning?

ImGo: A Novel Tool for Behavioral Impulsivity Assessment Based on Go/NoGo Tasks

This manuscript aims to present a novel behavioral impulsivity test ImGo, which is suitable for impulsivity assessment in the general population. A series of three studies was conducted to validate its psychometric qualities. In Study 1 we describe the principles of ImGo and verify its test-retest and split-half reliability and its convergent validity with an impulsivity self-report scale and Stop Signal test. In Study 2 we re-analyze the convergent validity of ImGo with a Stop Signal test and examine the potential relationship between ImGo and oculomotor inhibition measured by an Anti-Saccades test. In Study 3 we present a robust research with a large sample size and investigate the discriminant validity of ImGo with tests of other related cognitive and executive processes. Backed by our findings from these studies we can safely claim ImGo is a powerful tool with a good level of reliability (both test-retest and split-half) and validity (convergent and discriminant). Its potential lies in its use in diagnostic and research practice of experts from various countries as the test has already been translated to 9 languages so far. The open-source Hypothesis platform, on which the ImGo test is running, provides the option of both individual and group testing in laboratory conditions as well as remotely through an internet browser.

General Intelligence and the Dark Triad

Abstract. The dark triad of personality (D3) – consisting of psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism – is a set of socially aversive personality traits. All three traits encompass disagreeable behavior and a particular disregard for the well-being of others, but also a tendency to strategic and deceptive manipulation of social environments in order to attain one′s goals. To exercise these complex manipulations effectively it seems beneficial to have high cognitive abilities. Therefore, a meta-analysis was conducted to examine possible relationships between intelligence and the dark triad. A total of 143 studies were identified to estimate the strength of relationships between the D3 and general, verbal, and nonverbal intelligence. The results indicate that none of the constructs of the dark triad are meaningfully related to intelligence. However, there was a small negative correlation between intelligence and Factor 2 psychopathy. The substantial heterogeneity regarding the observed effect sizes could not be explained with meta-regression for the most part. There was no evidence for a publication bias. In total, the results challenge the notion that the dark triad is an adaptive set of personality traits that enables individuals to effectively manipulate their social surroundings.

Bedtime Procrastination Partially Mediates the Impact of Personality Characteristics on Daytime Fatigue Resulting From Sleep Deficiency

Getting good and sufficiently long sleep at night is important for health, effective functioning, and well-being. However, insufficient or delayed sleep are important and growing social problems that can lead to fatigue, poor performance, deterioration of well-being, circadian rhythm disturbances, and health problems. One of the significant determinants of sleep deprivation is bedtime procrastination, which is understood as the individual tendency to postpone going to bed in the absence of any external circumstances that force one to do so. Nowadays, this phenomenon is widespread in various social groups, especially among students. Despite the high prevalence of bedtime procrastination, its relationship with personality characteristics has not yet been thoroughly studied. The presented research aimed to identify the possible impact of the basic dispositional personality traits and trait-like personality characteristics on bedtime procrastination and daytime fatigue resulting from a deficiency of sleep at night. The responses from 399 university students who voluntarily took part in an internet survey were analyzed. The severity of bedtime procrastination was assessed using the Bedtime Procrastination Scale. Five basic dispositional personality traits (extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness/intellect) and their components (aspects) were measured using the International Personality Item Pool - Big Five Aspects Scale. Self-esteem and general self-efficacy were assessed using the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale and the General Self-Efficacy Scale. Perceived locus of control was measured using the Delta Questionnaire. The direct and indirect relationships between personality variables and daytime fatigue were investigated using linear regression models with bedtime procrastination as a mediator variable. Industriousness and orderliness, both of which are aspects of conscientiousness, were found to be indirectly associated with daytime fatigue as a consequence of their impact on bedtime procrastination. Volatility and withdrawal, both of which are aspects of neuroticism, were found to be directly related to daytime fatigue without the intermediary impact of bedtime procrastination. Self-esteem was shown to be associated with experiencing daytime fatigue, both directly and indirectly through bedtime procrastination. General self-efficacy and external locus of control were associated with daytime fatigue only directly, without the intermediary role of bedtime procrastination. The results of our research indicate that personality factors may not only play an important role in shaping sleep-related health behaviors, but they also affect well-being during the day.

Neuroticism Predicts Reasoning Performance in Young but Not Older Adults

Objective: This study was designed to explore age differences in the relationship of neuroticism with reasoning performance in a representative adult sample.Method: A probability sample of 242 adults (range 25-75 years; M age = 47.57 years) from the Midlife Development in the United States (MIDUS) Boston Study of Management Processes were measured on personality and cognition. Using Raven's Progressive Matrices Test as the dependent measure of reasoning, age and neuroticism were entered as independent variables into a hierarchical regression analysis with education and basic cognitive processes (processing speed and working memory) as control variables.Results: Age (younger) and neuroticism (lower) positively predicted reasoning performance. These main effects were further qualified by an age X neuroticism interaction. Younger adults low in neuroticism performed significantly better on reasoning than those high in neuroticism, whereas the relationship of neuroticism with reasoning was not significant for the middle-aged and older adults.Conclusions: Neuroticism affects reasoning performance in young adults but not older adults. Age-related improvements in emotional regulation are suggested as a mechanism for this relationship.

Risk-Taking and Impulsivity: The Role of Mood States and Interoception

Objectives: The consequences of impulsive decisions and actions represent a major source of concern to the health and well-being of individuals and society. It is, therefore, crucial to understand the factors which contribute to impulsive behaviors. Here, we examined how personality traits of behavioral tendencies, interoceptive sensibility as well as transient mood states predict behavioral performance on impulsivity and risk-taking tasks.

Method: 574 (121 males; age 18–45) individuals completed self-report personality measures of impulsivity, reward sensitivity, punishment avoidance as well as interoceptive sensibility, undertook a mood assessment and performed a set of cognitive tasks: delay discounting (temporal impulsivity), probability discounting (risk-taking), and reflection impulsivity task. Data were interrogated using principal component analysis, correlations and regression analyses to test mutual relationships between personality traits, interoceptive sensibility, mood state and impulsive behaviors.

Results: We observed a clear separation of measures used, both trait and behavioral. Namely, sensation-seeking, reward sensitivity and probability discounting reflected risk-taking. These were separate from measures associated with impulsivity, both trait (negative and positive urgency, premeditation, perseverance) and behavioral (delayed discounting and reflection impulsivity). This separation was further highlighted by their relationship with the current emotional state: positive affect was associated with increased risk-taking tendencies and risky decision-making, while negative emotions were related to heightened impulsivity measures. Interoceptive sensibility was only associated with negative emotions component.

Conclusion: Our findings support the proposal that risk-taking and impulsivity represent distinct constructs that are differentially affected by current mood states. This novel insight enhances our understanding of impulsive behaviors.

Further evidence of the heterogeneous nature of impulsivity

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Impulsivity is not a unitary construct and instead comprises dissociable subtypes.

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Reflection-impulsivity is a distinct and well-defined facet of impulsivity.

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Additional characterisations of motor-impulsivity are required.

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Several tasks purported to index impulsivity should be treated with caution.

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Researchers should employ multiple measures of types of impulsivity simultaneously.

‘Impulsivity’ refers to a range of behaviours including preference for immediate reward (temporal-impulsivity) and the tendency to make premature decisions (reflection-impulsivity) and responses (motor-impulsivity). The current study aimed to examine how different behavioural and self-report measurements of impulsivity can be categorised into distinct subtypes.

Exploratory factor analysis using full information maximum likelihood was conducted on 10 behavioural and 1 self-report measure of impulsivity.

Four factors of impulsivity were indicated, with Factor 1 having a high loading of the Stop Signal Task, which measures motor-impulsivity, factor 2 representing reflection-impulsivity with loadings of the Information Sampling Task and Matching Familiar Figures Task, factor 3 representing the Immediate Memory Task, and finally factor 4 which represents the Delay Discounting Questionnaire and The Monetary Choice Questionnaire, measurements of temporal-impulsivity.

These findings indicated that impulsivity is not a unitary construct, and instead represents a series of independent subtypes. There was evidence of a distinct reflection-impulsivity factor, providing the first factor analysis support for this subtype. There was also support for additional factors of motor- and temporal-impulsivity. The present findings indicated that a number of currently accepted tasks cannot be considered as indexing motor- and temporal-impulsivity suggesting that additional characterisations of impulsivity may be required.

Generalizability of Delay of Gratification: Dimensionality and Function

There is a debate about the factor structure of adults' ability to delay gratification and mixed findings concerning the relationship between delay of gratification and achievement. Three studies were conducted to show that delay of gratification had two components. In Study 1, exploratory factor analyses showed that the Generalizability of Deferment of Gratification Questionnaire had two factors: Controlling-Impulse and Planning-and-Waiting. Study 2 verified the two-factor structure by confirmatory factor analysis and demonstrated acceptable reliability, construct and divergent validity. Specifically, Planning-and-Waiting was correlated with delay-discounting, self-control, uncertainty avoidance, Openness, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and self-efficacy, whereas Controlling-Impulse was correlated with self-control, Conscientiousness, and Agreeableness. Moreover, Planning-and-Waiting was the unique predictor of CFC-Future, but Controlling-Impulse predicted substantive variance in both CFC-Future and CFC-Immediate. Study 3, using multi-wave and multi-source data, further showed that only Controlling-Impulse was an important predictor of long-term performance and creative performance, supporting the distinctiveness of the two factors.

Cortical thickness of superior frontal cortex predicts impulsiveness and perceptual reasoning in adolescence

Impulsiveness is a pivotal personality trait representing a core domain in all major personality inventories. Recently, impulsiveness has been identified as an important modulator of cognitive processing, particularly in tasks that require the processing of large amounts of information. Although brain imaging studies have implicated the prefrontal cortex to be a common underlying representation of impulsiveness and related cognitive functioning, to date a fine-grain and detailed morphometric analysis has not been carried out. On the basis of ahigh-resolution magnetic resonance scans acquired in 1620 healthy adolescents (IMAGEN), the individual cortical thickness (CT) was estimated. Correlations between Cloninger's impulsiveness and CT were studied in an entire cortex analysis. The cluster identified was tested for associations with performance in perceptual reasoning tasks of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC IV). We observed a significant inverse correlation between trait impulsiveness and CT of the left superior frontal cortex (SFC; Monte Carlo Simulation P<0.01). CT within this cluster correlated with perceptual reasoning scores (Bonferroni corrected) of the WISC IV. On the basis of a large sample of adolescents, we identified an extended area in the SFC as a correlate of impulsiveness, which appears to be in line with the trait character of this prominent personality facet. The association of SFC thickness with perceptual reasoning argues for a common neurobiological basis of personality and specific cognitive domains comprising attention, spatial reasoning and response selection. The results may facilitate the understanding of the role of impulsiveness in several psychiatric disorders associated with prefrontal dysfunctions and cognitive deficits.

Impulsivity, intelligence, and discriminating reinforcement contingencies in a fixed-ratio 3 schedule

Research conducted in academic contexts suggests a moderating effect of impulsive behavior on the relationship between aptitude and achievement. According to these studies, intelligence scores being equal, higher levels of impulsivity have an adverse effect on achievement (Helmers, Young, & Pihl, 1995; Vigil-Colet & Morales-Vives, 2005; Zeidner, 1995). The present study aims to contrast the aforementioned moderator effect in the context of a discriminant learning task, carried out under a fixed-ratio 3 reinforcement schedule. To that end, an impulsive behavioral pattern was identified in a sample of 1,600 participants' task execution based on response rate and latency. Said pattern was consistent and stable across several trials and can be ascribed to subjects' interactive style (Hernández, 2000). The observed interaction effect supports the hypothesis that impulsivity has a moderating effect on the aptitude-achievement relationship, highlighting how it impacts achievement differentially depending on the subject's level of aptitude.

Common structural correlates of trait impulsiveness and perceptual reasoning in adolescence

BACKGROUND

Trait impulsiveness is a potential factor that predicts both substance use and certain psychiatric disorders. This study investigates whether there are common structural cerebral correlates of trait impulsiveness and cognitive functioning in a large sample of healthy adolescents from the IMAGEN project.

METHODS

Clusters of gray matter (GM) volume associated with trait impulsiveness, Cloningers' revised temperament, and character inventory impulsiveness (TCI-R-I) were identified in a whole brain analysis using optimized voxel-based morphometry in 115 healthy 14-year-olds. The clusters were tested for correlations with performance on the nonverbal tests (Block Design, BD; Matrix Reasoning, MT) of the Wechsler Scale of Intelligence for Children IV reflecting perceptual reasoning.

RESULTS

Cloningers' impulsiveness (TCI-R-I) score was significantly inversely associated with GM volume in left orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). Frontal clusters found were positively correlated with performance in perceptual reasoning tasks (Bonferroni corrected). No significant correlations between TCI-R-I and perceptual reasoning were observed.

CONCLUSIONS

The neural correlate of trait impulsiveness in the OFC matches an area where brain function has previously been related to inhibitory control. Additionally, orbitofrontal GM volume was associated with scores for perceptual reasoning. The data show for the first time structural correlates of both cognitive functioning and impulsiveness in healthy adolescent subjects.

Effortful Control, Surgency, and reading skills in middle childhood

We examined the associations between components of temperament and children's word and pseudo-word reading skills, in a school-age sample using a within-family internal-replication design. We estimated the statistical prediction of word and pseudo-word reading in separate regression equations that included the main effects of, and two-way interaction between, Surgency and Effortful Control. Children with better Effortful Control scores showed better reading skills. Surgency was unrelated to reading skills, but moderated the effect of Effortful Control. The positive association between reading skills and Effortful Control was present only for children who were low in Surgency. Thus, reading achievement in school-age children is optimized by strong Effortful Control, but these processes may be disrupted for those children who are high in Surgency.

Structure and Correlates of the German Version of the Brief UPPS Impulsive Behavior Scales

The article proposes a shortened German version of the UPPS impulsive behavior scales. In Study 1, 149 high-school students completed the UPPS questionnaire, a Big-Five questionnaire, additional established self-report scales to measure conscientiousness and impulsivity, as well as tests of working memory capacity, reasoning, and clerical speed. Measurement models were applied to the full translated UPPS scales using confirmatory factor analysis. A satisfactory measurement model could be established only by removing many of the initial items. The remaining items correlated as expected with other self-report and ability measures: Substantial correlations with impulsivity and conscientiousness contrasted with zero correlations with working memory and reasoning ability. The association between impulsivity factors and perceptual speed was primarily a result of the number of solved items rather than the number of mistakes in the speed tasks. In Study 2 the reduced item set from Study 1 was administered to 246 participants to replicate the model. The fit of this model supports the construct validity of the final item set. The generally low correlations of the UPPS with cognitive variables questions interpretations of self-reported impulsivity that are overly focused on cognition. More appropriate cognitive criteria for impulsivity constructs should be established.

Impulsivity and semantic/emotional processing: an examination of the N400 wave

OBJECTIVE

The study investigated (a) to what extent semantic/emotional processing modulates the N400 wave of the event-related potentials (ERPs) during reading, (b) the influence of impulsivity trait on neurocognitive systems underlying semantic/emotional processing related to the generation of the N400 wave.

METHODS

A canonical semantic sentence processing paradigm, known to selectively elicit the N400 wave was used. The ERPs were elicited to emotionally valenced (neutral, positive and negative) sentence final words that were either semantically congruent or semantically incongruent with the previous sentence context.

RESULTS

Congruent negatively valenced words produced longer reaction times (RTs) than congruent positive and neutral words. Incongruent words elicited more pronounced N400 peak amplitudes than congruent ones, while, for the congruent trials, the N400 amplitude was greater for negative words as compared to positive and neutral words. High impulsive participants, compared to low impulsive ones, (a) made more errors and longer reaction times in identifying incongruent words, (b) displayed more pronounced N400 peak amplitudes over fronto-central midline scalp sites.

CONCLUSIONS

This pattern of results indicated that the activity of fronto-central system may account for individual differences of impulsivity with high impulsive individuals showing more difficulty in integrating incongruent final words into a sentence context.

SIGNIFICANCE

Results open up new perspectives for future investigations on language disorders characterized by substantial impulsivity.

How impulsivity is related to intelligence and academic achievement

This study investigated the relationships between impulsivity, intelligence, and academic failure in a sample of 241 secondary school students who completed Thurstone's (1938) Primary Mental Abilities (PMA) test and Dickman's (1990) and Barratt's (1985) impulsivity questionnaires (DII and BIS-10, respectively). Results show an inverse relationship between impulsivity and intelligence, specific to the scales with higher loadings on crystallized intelligence, and a positive relationship between impulsivity and academic failure. These results indicate that impulsivity is not directly related to intelligence and may act as a moderator variable between individuals' resources and their achievements.