Anthony J Conger

• PhD
• Purdue University West Lafayette

Drawing parallels to classical test theory, this article clarifies the difference between rater accuracy and reliability and demonstrates how category marginal frequencies affect rater agreement and Cohen’s kappa (κ). Category assignment paradigms are developed: comparing raters to a standard (index) versus comparing two raters to one another (conc...

The learning theory view of sense of self is that problems in one's knowledge about the self arise when: (1) caregivers fail to recognize indicators of a child's private emotional and visceral experiences and (2) subsequently fail to offer appropriate labels that discriminate among those experiences. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the re...

This study pursues a learning theory understanding of adverse race-elicited emotion and racially discriminatory behaviour. Multimodal classical conditioning argues that emotional reactions to neutral stimuli are built from aversive, appetitive and neutral experiences involving those stimuli in direct, observational and/or verbal modes. Modern two-f...

The nature of fear of flying (FOF) is not well understood. It is commonly assumed to be a fear learned from flight-specific experiences. However, existing literature suggests that FOF is a manifestation of fears of other stimuli (e.g., heights) embedded in the flying situation, but not specific to it. This study compared the level of prediction of...

The recent movement to apply evidenced-based approaches to medical and rehabilitation care has increased the importance of approximating outcomes as early in the recovery process as possible. The relationship between injury severity and outcome following traumatic brain injury (TBI), however, has remained unclear due to the variety of predictor and...

Agreement between parents and teachers on ratings of three domains of behaviors exhibited by preschool children and the structural relations between these domains were measured. Parents and teachers rated the behaviors of a socioeconomically diverse sample of 610 children; ratings were obtained from parents at three time points and from teachers at...

The present study was designed to evaluate the bidirectional relationships between parenting stress and child coping competence. Data from a diverse sample of 610 parents enrolled in the parenting our children to excellence program was used to evaluate whether parenting stress negatively contributes to affective, achievement, and social coping comp...

College students with high and low trait anger completed an observational assessment of their "getting acquainted" skills and a questionnaire assessment of their general social skills. Observational results indicated that students in the high trait anger group displayed greater negative affectivity. Questionnaire results indicated that the high tra...

The aim of this paper was to evaluate the relationship between anger and aggressive driving. It was hypothesized that: 1) there is a significant positive relationship between anger and aggressive driving; 2) this relationship systematically differs based on whether anger is trait-based, state/mood-based, or situation-specific; 3) this relationship...

Two hundred fifty one men and women participated in a study of the prediction of fear of heights, snakes, and public speaking by providing retrospective accounts of multimodal classical conditioning events involving those stimuli. The fears selected for study represent those believed by some to be innate (i.e., heights), prepared (i.e., snakes), an...

Despite significant advances over the past three decades in our understanding of the implicit dangers in ad hoc psychometric procedures, some important questions remain, particularly as regards the nature of the underlying reasoning process by which subjectively meaningful theoretical impressions are formulated and expressed. The present article se...

The authors propose that a multimodal classical conditioning model be considered when clinicians or clinical researchers study the etiology of fears and anxieties learned by human beings. They argue that fears can be built through the combined effects of direct, observed, and verbally presented classical conditioning trials. Multimodal classical co...

The authors propose that a multimodal classical conditioning model be considered when clinicians or clinical researchers study the etiology of fears and anxieties learned by human beings. They argue that fears can be built through the combined effects of direct, observed, and verbally presented classical conditioning trials. Multimodal classical co...

The link between anger, social skills, and psychological symptoms was investigated in a college population. Seven hundred and nine individuals were administered the State Trait Anger Expression Inventory, the Anger Inventory, the Social Problem Solving Inventory, the Social Skills Inventory, and a series of questions about the degree to which anger...

This article surveys the recent literature with regard to social phobia and social anxiety as they affect social performance. It suggests that some of the inconsistent findings in this area might be alleviated by the application of Fazey and Hardy's (1988) catastrophe model to ongoing research in the area of social performance.

This research explored facets of anger based on a multidimensional-associationistic conceptualization (Berkowitz, 1994) that includes antecedents, behavior, cognitions, and experiential response dimensions. High and low anger-prone individuals responded to six audiotaped situations validated in previous work to be anger provoking. Participants eval...

This study consists of two experiments investigating the effects of induced mood and food type on perceptions of eating in imagined and real eating situations. A total of 212 female undergraduates representing the continuum of bulimic symptomatology were induced with either elated or depressed moods using a standardized mood-induction procedure. Th...

This study examined whether the socially anxious show deficits in performance on a social task as well as how their anxiety and competence relate to judgments they make about themselves and others. Ratings from a panel of judges were used to compare men of high and low social anxiety on their performances in a simulated job interview. Participants...

In recent articles in this journal (Boyle and Lennon, 1994; Boyle, 1996; Morey, 1995), there has been a controversial discussion of various psychometric properties of the Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI; Morey, 1991). This article attempts to clarify some of these issues; however it also raises new ones.

Anemic approach was adopted to develop a culture-specific instrument for the assessment of Chinese personality. The Multi-Trial Personality Inventory (MTPI) was administered to 1,673 men and 944 women in four major Chinese populations. It was found that Chinese in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the United States possess some common traits d...

Males who self-reported heterosocial difficulties and whose performance in a role-played interaction was judged to be of low social competence were compared to high-competent males on a continuous rating task. The rating task required that subjects make continual, ongoing social competency ratings of their own and six other males'' performance in a...

This paper describes two studies that compared a direct nomination method for identifying the neglected members of children's peer groups with the commonly used derived social impact score method. In the first study, first-grade children were asked to nominate peers to a neglect dimension in addition to the traditional sociometric dimensions of lik...

Males who self-reported heterosocial problems and whose role-play interactions were judged to be low on social competence were compared to a group of high socially competent males on their ability to judge their own and others'' social competency. Results indicated that in comparison to the high-competent group, low-competent males showed less agre...

First-grade children were asked to nominate two classmates to each of three social status dimensions (accepted, rejected, and neglected), and then to support their decisions with behavioral referents. The resulting 551 "cues" for children's social status decisions were used to develop a hierarchical categorization system. Statistical analyses showe...

Cohen's kappa for measuring agreement between two observers using a discrete nominal scale is extended to measuring agreement over time for continuous nominal scales. The continuous kappa coefficient avoids problems encountered by the arbitrary division of real time durations into presence/absence frequencies in discrete intervals. The extension is...

Used a modified analytic research strategy to develop a method for measuring components of heterosocial skills at an intermediate level of behavioral specificity and evaluated the psychometric properties of the resulting Behaviorally Referenced Rating System of Intermediate Social Skills (BRISS). 58 male undergraduates were divided into 3 groups an...

A variety of measures of reliability for two-category nominal scales are reviewed and compared. It is shown that upon correcting these indices for chance agreement, there are only five distinct indices: Fleiss's modification of A1, the &phgr; coefficient, Cohen's kappa, and two intraclass coefficients. Additional derivations indicate that when marg...

Forty same-sex dyads were separated into three groups (accepted, rejected, and mixed status) on the basis of their scores on the likability and rejection scales of the Pupil Evaluation Inventory [Pekarik, E.,et al. (1976).Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 4, 83–97]. These dyads participated in a 10-min videotaped interaction which was separated...

Psychotherapy outcome studies vary widely in virtually all aspects of design methodology and statistical analysis. Some studies employ simple manipulations on an individual and attempt to show effectiveness via functional analysis in A-B-A type designs, while others may involve complex sampling from diverse populations, multiple treatment and contr...

The hyperactivity scale of the Conners' Teacher Rating Scale-Revised (CTRS-R) was investigated to compare teachers' use of this instrument to its use by independent classroom observers. Results of this study indicate that teacher ratings of children are highly stable over time. Independent observers agree with one another within an occasion both wi...

A paradoxical phenomenon of decreases in reliability as the number of elements averaged over increases is shown to be possible in multifacet reliability procedures (intraclass correlations or generalizability coefficients). Conditions governing this phenomenon are presented along with implications and cautions.

Within the social skills research area, the ratings of trained judges are presumed to be of better reliability compared to those of untrained peers, but possibly at a cost in social validity since the latter directly represents the criterion. To investigate these issues, videotapes were obtained of 12 males who interacted with a female confederate...

This research examined the degree to which skill and anxiety ratings vary as a function of audio, video, or live rating conditions. The question was addressed through a generalizability analysis which indicated that ratings of skill may generalize across audio, video, or live rating modes and across judges within a mode. However, results for anxiet...

Two generalizability theory strategies are appropriate for analyzing multiple attributes: the first is an integrated design that includes the attributes as a facet; the other involves a strategy of analyzing variance and covariance components on "specific" attributes. Sums of squares, mean squares, and variance components of the integrated design a...

To evaluate the comparability of the selection methods used in analogue studies on heterosexual-social problem behaviors, 67 undergraduate males were administered four commonly used paper-and-pencil self-report instruments designed to assess both “dating experience” and “social anxiety”. Major findings from the analyses were (a) the majority of the...

J. A. Cohen's kappa (1960) for measuring agreement between 2 raters, using a nominal scale, has been extended for use with multiple raters by R. J. Light (1971) and J. L. Fleiss (1971). In the present article, these indices are analyzed and reformulated in terms of agreement statistics based on all pairs of raters. It has been argued that simultane...

Schachter's externality hypothesis suggests that overweight individuals are more likely to be induced to eat by salient external cues than normal weight individuals. While a range of studies have demonstrated the plausibility of this hypothesis in the case of sensory stimuli (e.g., taste cues), there is little evidence that the hypothesis applies t...

A general approach to obtaining weights and reliability coefficients of maximally reliable composites is offered for a variety of test theoretic models which assume a single common underlying dimension. The reliability maximizing weights are related to the theoretically specified true score scaling weights to show there is a constant relationship b...

The overall purpose of this investigation was to identify the behavioral cues that might contribute to judgments of heterosexual-social anxiety and skill in college students. Male and female peers (n = 135) watched seven videotaped segments representing a range of socially competent and incompetent male undergraduates interacting with female confed...

Examined the ecological validity of role-played dating interactions. 45 male undergraduates, categorized into low-, medium-, and high-frequency dating groups (Social Activity Questionnaire), participated in 4 heterosexual social (heterosocial) situations in a laboratory. Two situations were role plays simulating dating interactions, and 2 were more...

Examined the ecological validity of role-played dating interactions. 45 male undergraduates, categorized into low-, medium-, and high-frequency dating groups (Social Activity Questionnaire), participated in 4 heterosexual social (heterosocial) situations in a laboratory. Two situations were role plays simulating dating interactions, and 2 were more...

Reviews the book, Advances in Psychological Assessment, Vol. 4 edited by Paul McReynolds (1977). The fourth volume of Advances in Psychological Assessment is a nonintegrated collection of original articles covering a broad domain of topics and approaches. The ostensible purpose of this volume is to keep psychological practitioners and behavioral sc...

The performance of 79 male undergraduates in 2 heterosexual social situations was rated by questionnaires (including the Social Anxiety and Skill Questionnaire), self-ratings in role plays, self-ratings of videotapes of role plays, ratings by confederates, and ratings of videotaped role plays by judges. These ratings were characterized with respect...

If variables are scaled so that they have equal errors of measurement, then the maximally reliable composites found in a canonical reliability analysis have highly desirable properties. Under this scaling transformation, canonical factor analysis on all nonerror variance, principal components analysis and canonical reliability analysis all yield eq...

Assigned 24 high- and low-fear female undergraduates (Wolpe and Lazarus's Fear Survey Schedule) to noise or false heart-rate feedback groups. Ss also completed the S-R Inventory of Anxiousness. In addition, contiguity between the shock-snake stimuli was varied to provide a test of an aversion relief model. As was predicted, low-fear as compared to...

The ending of high school years is a critical time for most young people. It is a period when significant developmental tasks confront the adolescent; these tasks, if mastered, contribute to healthy and satisfactory growth into adulthood. Self-esteem, locus of control, and attitudes toward work, community, and family orientations are especially imp...

A review of the literature on the validity and reliability of survey data is presented prior to an analysis of the reliability of selected questions in the Second Followup Questionnaire of the National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972 (NLS). The reliability study includes an evaluation of test-retest reliability as a function of...

The comparative interpretive efficacy of an abbreviated and the standard MMPI was assessed with a sample of psychiatric inpatients. Psychiatric residents evaluated the accuracy of the interpretation of each test form for their patients. While significantly higher mean ratings resulted for the standard MMPI when data were collapsed across sexes, the...

Measures of multivariate reliability are calculated for profiles of WISC subscales on three age groups. Profile dimensions based on reliability considerations are also established and matched across age groups and with factor analytic dimensions. While all possible differences among individual subscales are quite unreliable (about .51), a reduced s...

Reanalyzed data reported by T. S. Langner et al on the prevalence of psychological disturbances in children from welfare and cross-section homes. Results indicate that the data show no meaningful differences in means or skew and a paradoxical greater heterogeneity among welfare children. Some of the difference in variance is clearly attributable to...

In the two-predictor situation it is shown that traditional and negative suppressors increase the predictive value of a standard predictor beyond that suggested by the predictor's zero order validity. This effect of suppression is used to provide a revised definition of suppression and completely accounts for traditional and negative suppression. T...

Two indices of profile reliability (Conger and Lipshitz's canonical reliability, p., and Bock's P) are shown to be equivalent in terms of the individual independent canonical composites; however, because of different weighting procedures, they yield different overall indices of profile reliability. A common formula is provided from which both indic...

A general index of reliability, termed canonical reliability, is developed for use with profiles, or more generally, for use with vectors of random variables. Canonical reliability is defined as the ratio of the average squared distance among true scores to the average squared distance among observed scores. Based on Mahalonobis distances, canonica...

Explicates, definitionally and mathematically, the nature of the suppressor variable and shows the conditions under which there are formal identities between results based upon analyses using a suppressor variable and those based upon approaches involving multiple part and partial correlational approaches. Certain mathematical constraints upon the...

Examined multimethod factor analysis and found substantive and mathematical problems. The validity of the assumptions of uncorrelated methods and orthogonal traits within but not between methods is questioned. Multimethod factor analysis was shown by D. Jackson (see pa, vol. 43:12045) to yield a "very satisfactory delineation of trait factors." it...

The traditional determination of adequacy of measurement in verbal conditioning studies is questioned. Reliance on the single criterion of inter-rater reliability ignores other critical aspects of the typical study, namely, the internal consistency of response classes and problems intrinsic to derived scores. Illustrative data are presented in whic...

Microfilm. Thesis--University of Illinois. Vita. Bibliography: leaves 105-110.

A mathematical model for Ghiselli's moderator variable and index of predictability is developed. From this mathematical structure, conclusions and implications are drawn concerning the use of moderators in multiple regression and suppression. In addition, guides are given as to when and where to look for moderators. Finally, the structure is relate...

A method of analysis specifically designed for binary data was applied to 100 MMPI items. Sixty, items were carefully chosen to represent the nine major clinical scales with respect to direction of keying, social desirability scale value and endorsement frequency. The remaining 40 items were randomly chosen from items not appearing on any of these...