Frank M Spinath

Universität des Saarlandes | UKS · Fachbereich Psychologie

The major aim of the German TwinLife study is the investigation of gene-environment interplay driving educational and other inequalities across developmental trajectories from childhood to early adulthood. TwinLife encompasses an 8-year longitudinal, cross-sequential extended twin family design with data from same-sex twins of four age cohorts (5,...

Standardized ability tests that are associated with intelligence are often used for student selection. In Germany two different admission procedures to select students for medical studies are used simultaneously; the TMS and the HAM-Nat. Due to this simultaneous use of both a detailed analysis of the construct validity is mandatory. Therefore, the...

As a component of many intelligence test batteries, figural matrices tests are an effective way to assess reasoning, which is considered a core ability of intelligence. Traditionally, the sum of correct items is used as a performance indicator (total solution procedure). However, recent advances in the development of computer-based figural matrices...

The present study aims to investigate longitudinal changes in mental well-being as well as the role of individual differences in personality traits (Big Five) and the level of Personality Organisation during the first lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany. Overall, 272 adults (Mage= 36.94, SDage= 16.46; 68.62% female, 23.45% male, 0.69% non-...

Figural matrices tasks are one of the most prominent item formats used in intelligence tests, and their relevance for the assessment of cognitive abilities is unquestionable. However, despite endeavors of the open science movement to make scientific research accessible on all levels, there is a lack of royalty-free figural matrices tests. The Open...

Objective: Self-control is a meaningful predictor of crucial life outcomes. Knowingly, genes contribute substantially to differences in self-control, but behavioral genetic findings are often misinterpreted regarding environmental influences. Therefore, we reinvestigate the heritability of self-control as well as potential environmental influences...

Despite the many benefits of computer-based testing, many existing computer-based tests employ response formats that could be used equally in paper-pencil tests. In this article we explore the feasibility of psychological testing on mobile devices, an approach that combines the advantages of computer-based testing with the flexibility of paper-penc...

Intelligence is one of the most important psychological constructs and influences many decisions. Unsurprisingly, a large number of measurement instruments are available. However, conceptual development related to intelligence has been stagnant for many years despite recent technological trends that would enable new approaches to assessing human in...

In Western countries, children's education is strongly influenced by their social background, which cannot be fully explained by individual differences in cognitive ability between social classes. It is still an open question how, to what extent and at what point along the educational path individual and family factors shape children's educational...

It is well documented that training the rules employed in figural matrices tests enhances test performance. Previous studies only compare experimental conditions in which all or no rules were trained and therefore ignore the particular influence of knowledge about the easy and difficult rules. With the current study, we wanted to provide some first...

Due to their high item difficulties and excellent psychometric properties, construction-based figural matrices tasks are of particular interest when it comes to high-stakes testing. An important prerequisite is that test preparation-which is likely to occur in this context-does not impair test fairness or item properties. The goal of this study was...

In contemporary research, the link between shift work and health has received empirical support. Contrary to the well-established association between shift work and adverse health outcomes, literature on the link between shift work and various negative health-related behavior patterns is limited to a rather small number of studies revealing inconsi...

Für die Studieneingangs- und -verlaufsberatung von großem Interesse ist die Frage, welche individuellen Eingangsvoraussetzungen geeignet sind, um den Studienerfolg im Lehramt vorherzusagen. In der vorliegenden Studie wurden ein variablen- und ein personenzentriertes Vorgehen mit Studierenden des Lehramts für weiterführende Schulen realisiert. Erfas...

Scores of commonly administered intelligence tests such as figural matrices are important correlates of external criteria. However, evidence of improving intelligence test scores through practice or coaching has been reported. Moreover, information about intelligence tests is widely and easily accessible (e.g., online tutorial videos). An open rese...

The majority of research on shift work focused on the individual level – often neglecting potential effects on psychosocial factors within shift workers’ social structures. We investigate relationship and leisure time satisfaction as well as global life satisfaction in shift workers compared to regular workers and their respective partners taking s...

Anxiety symptoms and anxiety disorders are highly prevalent among older adults, and are associated with considerable distress, functional impairment, and burden. Also, there is growing need for brief instruments to measure anxiety symptoms in primary care and geriatric medical settings. Therefore, the current study focuses on the development and ps...

Much of the research on working conditions focuses on shift work. Previous work – mostly from the US and Scandinavia – suggests a link between shift work and several health outcomes as well as subjective health. Shift work is assumed to affect health outcomes via the effect of health behavior. However, literature on the link between shift work and...

The German Twin Family Panel (TwinLife) is a German longitudinal study of monozygotic and dizygotic same-sex twin pairs and their families that was designed to investigate the development of social inequalities over the life course. The study covers an observation period from approximately 2014 to 2023. The target population of the sample are reare...

Previous work suggests a link between shift work and several health outcomes. Shift work is assumed to affect health outcomes via the effect of health behavior. However, literature on the link between shift work and various health-related behavior patterns is limited to a small number of studies revealing inconsistent results. This may be due to mo...

The aim of this brief report was to replicate the meta-analytic findings concerning the relationship between Big-Five personality and political orientation reported in Sibley, Osborne, and Duckitt (2012) in a sample of N = 29,015 participants from four panels involving representative German samples. We replicated the expected significant correlatio...

It is well documented that figural matrices tests are harder to solve when multiple rules need to be induced because multiple rules are traditionally associated with a greater demand for dynamically managed sub-goals (goal management), which requires more working memory capacity (WMC). The current research addresses the necessity to apply selective...

Increasing obesity is a world-wide health concern. Its most commonly used indicator, body mass index (BMI), consistently shows considerable genetic and shared environmental variance throughout life, the latter particularly in youth. Several adult studies have observed less total and genetically influenced variance with higher attained SES. These st...

The Scarr-Rowe hypothesis predicts that the heritability of cognitive abilities is higher in more privileged socioeconomic conditions, meaning that genetic potential can be more fully expressed in environments characterized by high socioeconomic status (SES) compared to low SES. This gene × SES interaction, however, has been replicated mostly in th...

The cube construction task represents a novel format in the assessment of spatial ability through mental cube rotation tasks. Instead of selecting the correct answer from several response options, respondents construct their own response in a computerized test environment, leading to a higher demand for spatial ability. In the present study with a...

Response styles (RS) are an important research matter in questionnaire research and have even been interpreted as implicit personality variables aside from explicit personality measurement. To better understand RS and their impact on explicit personality measurement, it is necessary to explore causes of variability in RS, including heritability. Th...

Zusammenfassung Intelligenz ist eines der bestuntersuchten Konstrukte der empirischen Verhaltenswissenschaften und stellt eine allgemeine geistige Kapazität dar, die unter anderem die Fähigkeit zum schlussfolgernden Denken, zum Lösen neuartiger Probleme, zum abstrakten Denken sowie zum schnellen Lernen umfasst. Diese kognitiven Fähigkeiten spielen...

A growing body of studies has emphasized the need to consider method effects due to positively and negatively worded items for a better understanding of the factorial structure of psychological constructs. In particular, several researchers identified such method factors besides the content factor for various scales measuring Need for Cognition (NF...

The successful completion of a university degree program is accompanied by multiple complex opportunities and challenges, which require students to react accordingly with the skills necessary to meet them. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate the role of complex-problem solving (CPS) skills in undergraduate students’ university succe...

A well-known hypothesis in the behavioral genetic literature predicts that the heritability of cognitive abilities is higher in the presence of higher socioeconomic contexts. However, studies suggest that the effect of socioeconomic status (SES) on the heritability of cognitive ability may not be universal, as it has mostly been demonstrated in the...

Der professionellen Wissensbasis von Lehrkräften wird eine hohe Bedeutung für kompetentes Handeln im Unterricht zugeschrieben; das pädagogische Wissen steht hierbei eher mit fachübergreifenden Aspekten der unterrichtlichen Performanz in Zusammenhang. Zur Erfassung dieser Wissensbasis wurden distale Merkmale wie die Anzahl besuchter Kurse oder die A...

The current study considered maternal and paternal parenting styles separately for the prediction of deviant and delinquent behavior in childhood and adolescence using structural equation modeling. Simultaneously, child- and parent-reports on parenting style were taken into account.

Working memory capacity (WMC) and reasoning abilities—as assessed by figural matrices tests—are substantially correlated. It is controversially discussed whether this correlation is only caused by controlled attention or also by storage capacity. This study aims at investigating storage of partial solutions as a possible mechanism by which storage...

. This study deals with the effects of the diagnostic setting on the performance in intelligence tests. We conducted a meta-analysis in which k = 30 samples with a total sample size of N = 2,448 were integrated. We compared results for the same intelligence tests administered either in a group or in an individual setting. The main analysis indicate...

It is now well established that all human traits are influenced both by genes and the environment. This suggests that most relationships, such as the relationship between personality and Internet addiction, may be due in part to genetic influences. To reach a more complete understanding of the risk factors associated with the initiation and mainten...

We analyzed the effect of income inequality on Germans’ life satisfaction considering factors explaining the mechanism of this relationship. Based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study for the years 1984 to 2012, we found a negative relationship between national-level income disparity and average life satisfaction, meaning that people...

Ziel des Forschungsprojekts SioS-L ist die Analyse von Kompetenzentwicklungsprozessen in der Lehrerbildung. Hierzu werden Persönlichkeits-, Einstellungs- und Motivationsmerkmale der Studierenden sowie Merkmale der Ausbildung in Hinblick auf ihren Einfluss auf Studien- Ausbildungs- und Berufserfolg betrachtet. Zur empirischen Prüfung wird ein längss...

This study explores relations between measures of individuals' circadian preferences and the Big Five. To this end, we compared a model of circadian preferences that acknowledges morningness (M) and eveningness (E) as separate dimensions to that of a model that places M and E on a single continuum (M-E). Analyses of 620 correlations from 44 indepen...

Lehrbuch Differentielle Psychologie und Persönlichkeitsforschung

We introduce a new questionnaire which measures interindividual differences in five motivational systems (Security, Arousal, Power, Prestige and Achievement) with six items per scale. As a theoretical base of our work we referred to the Zurich Model of Social Motivation, which describes and models these motivational systems in a system theoretic wa...

A growing body of research focuses on problematic behavior patterns related to the use of the Internet to identify contextual as well as individual risk factors of this new phenomenon called Internet addiction (IA). IA can be described as a multidimensional syndrome comprising aspects such as craving, development of tolerance, loss of control and n...

The German twin family study ‘TwinLife’ was designed to enhance our understanding of the development of social inequalities over the life course. The interdisciplinary project investigates mechanisms of social inequalities across the lifespan by taking into account psychological as well as social mechanisms, and their genetic origin as well as the...

Empathy is an important psychological concept influencing social interaction. However, knowledge about its etiological components is still scarce. Estimates for the heritability of empathy range between 0 and 70 % depending on the sample, method of measurement, and level of aggregation. In this study, we investigated the heritability of empathy usi...

This study addresses the relationship between item response time and item accuracy (i.e., the response time accuracy correlation, RTAC) in figural matrices tests. The dual processing account of response time effects predicts negative RTACs in tasks that allow for relatively automatic processing and positive RTACs in tasks that require controlled pr...

Visual short-term memory (VSTM) capacity and fluid abilities (gF) are strongly interconnected. In addition, storing information efficiently by filtering out irrelevant information is essential for VSTM but its influences on gF are less investigated. In this study, we investigated the impact of filtering on fluid abilities when VSTM capacity is take...

The time of the big debates is over. Even though few voices have vindicated the view that either nature or nurture predominates an individual's successes and failures in life, most scholars have come to the agreement that both are important and neither is deterministic (Caspi, Roberts, & Shiner, 2005). It is only recently, however, that the field h...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0151405.].

Work-related health problems such as depression or burnout syndrome are highly relevant for personal well-being but also for factors such as absenteeism and early retirement from work. It is therefore desirable to identify factors that influence the ability to cope with professional stress and demands to provide interventions before mental or physi...

The article analyzes vocational interests and requirements of beginner (N = 149), advanced (N = 45), and professional (N = 72) teachers in math/science and arts/language. Referring to Hollands' (1997) model, we calculated teachers' person-job fit by two different congruence indices representing participants' fit to university teacher training and t...

The present study investigated for the first time the relative importance of genetics and environment on individual differences in primary emotionality as measured with the Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales (ANPS) by means of a twin-sibling study design. In N = 795 participants (n = 303 monozygotic twins, n = 172 dizygotic twins and n = 267...

Although there is consensus about the importance of students’ satisfaction with their academic studies as one facet of academic success, little is known about the determinants of this significant outcome variable. Past research rarely investigated the predictive power of multiple predictors simultaneously. Hence, we examined how demographic variabl...

Several studies have shown that figural matrices can be solved with one of two strategies: Constructive matching consists of cognitively generating an idealized response, which is compared with the options provided by the response format, whereas response elimination consists of comparing the response format with the item stem in order to eliminate...

This multitrait multimethod twin study examined the structure and sources of individual differences in creativity. According to different theoretical and metrological perspectives, as well as suggestions based on previous research, we expected 2 aspects of individual differences, which can be described as perceived creativity and creative test perf...

Despite cross-cultural universality of core human values, individuals differ substantially in value priorities, whereas family members show similar priorities to some degree. The latter has often been attributed to intra-familial socialization. The analysis of self-ratings on eight core values from 399 twin pairs (age: 7-11) and their biological pa...

Behavioral genetic research has made significant contributions to the understanding of individual differences in cognitive abilities. Hardly any other behavioral dimension or disorder has been studied so extensively in behavioral genetic research as general cognitive ability. Based on the results of this research (mainly family, twin, and adoption...

Intelligence is considered as the strongest predictor of scholastic achievement. Research as well as educational policy and the society as a whole are deeply interested in its role as a prerequisite for scholastic success. The present study investigated the population correlation between standardized intelligence tests and school grades employing p...

Behavior genetics is the study of genetic and environmental influences on individual differences in behavior. Over the past decades, this rapidly evolving field of research has provided compelling evidence for substantial genetic contributions to all important domains of human behavior. Therefore, human development cannot be fully understood withou...

Abstract The aim of the current study is to specify scientific competencies in sociology and to discuss their usefulness for professional practice. To this end we introduce a theoretical model of scientific com- petencies in sociology. To identify building blocks of scientific competencies in sociology, we drew on the Structure of Intellect-model (...

Objective: The purpose of the present study was to explore the heritability of psychoanalyst Karen Horney’s three core neurotic trends (i.e., compliance, aggression, and detachment) in a twin paradigm to evaluate the validity of her theoretically assumed origins of neuroses. Method: Data were collected from 168 adult participants (M age = 21.54 yea...

Unemployment is a major life event that causes an enormous drop in people’s life satisfaction. However, there is substantial variability in people’s ability (or inability) to cope with the experience of unemployment. In the present study, we examined the causes of individual differences in trajectories of life satisfaction when people were faced wi...

Students’ learning strategies as well as the search for its determinants have gained expanding interest in psychology and educational research. The present study investigated the contribution of chronotype, another construct of increasing importance in the academic context, to students’ learning strategies controlling for the established predictor...

The cube construction task represents a novel format in the assessment of spatial ability through mental cube rotation tasks. Instead of selecting the correct answer from several response options, testees construct their own response in a computerized test environment. The format has several advantages: It is no longer possible to guess the correct...

Recent research has revealed that learning behavior is associated with academic achievement at the college level, but the impact of specific learning strategies on academic success as well as gender differences therein are still not clear. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate gender differences in the incremental contribution of lear...