Forward flow-An alternative interpretation: Comment on Gray et al. (2019).

Gray et al. (2019) proposed a new construct to predict creativity, which they called forward flow, measured as the originality of chained word associations. Chained word associations, however, do not meet the requirements of a test of originality. The items ask for only 1 response when multiple responses are needed to assess originality, and the sequential responding means that the items are not independent as required for a test. Also, the originality of the associations is questionably calculated from the starting word instead of in relation to the preceding cue word. Probably because of these problems, scores on the new construct measured in this way show only weak correlations with scores on standard measures of creativity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

The new psychometrics: Comment on Appelbaum et al. (2018).

This comment attempts to correct misconceptions about psychometric measurement in the American Psychologist article "Journal Article Reporting Standards for Quantitative Research in Psychology" (Appelbaum et al., 2018) by offering an outline of what the author calls the new psychometrics. The new psychometrics argues for replacing "construct validation" with construct-to-measure validation, abandoning "convergent validation" in favor of content validation requiring correspondence of the content of the measure with the content of the construct definition, and restricting the term reliability to mean only the precision of scores from the measure. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Voice-only does not meaningfully improve detection of emotions: Comment on Kraus (2017).

Kraus (2017) claims that voice-only communication allows more accurate detection of emotions than does voice-plus-visual communication. The present author reanalyzes the data from Kraus's five experiments to reveal that the voice-only advantage is so slight as to not be of any practical importance. (PsycINFO Database Record

Optimal standard measures: Comment on Matthews et al. (2016).

Matthews, Adler, Forrest, and Stead (2016) implied that measures of mental health constructs such as depression can be made interchangeable by standardizing their scores. The present author contends that content differences in the measures a priori prevent their equivalence and that, instead, we need to agree on a standard definition of the construct and then use only a definition-fitting optimal standard measure. (PsycINFO Database Record

Fear patterns: a new approach to designing road safety advertisements.

This research studies fear patterns within fear appeal anti-speeding television commercials. A pattern of fear is the sequence of fear arousal and fear reduction, if any, that is felt by the viewing audience when exposed to a fear appeal advertisement. Many road safety advertisers use fear appeals, such as "shock" advertising, that result in fear arousal, leaving the viewer feeling extremely tense. The moment-to-moment reactions of young drivers to 12 road safety commercials are gauged using a dynamic, temporal measure of fear. The fear patterns generated from each ad are analyzed and a new perspective on creating fear appeal road safety advertisements, with an emphasis on fear-relief, fear-partial relief, and fear-only patterns, is discussed.

Personality characteristics ascribed to young women who drink alcohol.

This study employs an implicit personality rating methodology from marketing research (the "shopping list" method) to investigate young adults' perceptions of young women who drink alcoholic beverages. Whereas there were some differences in perceptions of young women drinkers across the alcohol brands, the greatest differential in the personality ratings was caused by the mere presence or absence of alcohol. Young women who drink alcohol were described as being more "interesting" and "self-assured" than young women who do not drink. These positive traits were reliably ascribed to young women drinkers by both young adult men and young adult women and more strongly by those who themselves drink. Although it is possible that young women drinkers really are differentially interesting and self-assured, a more likely contributor to these perceptions is advertising aimed at the female drinker.