A CIPD survey, reports that 25% of organisations surveyed made some use of online tests for selection purposes.  The CIPD website have produced a factsheet on tests and testing, with links to relevant BPS/PTC documents and International Test Commission guidelines.

The factsheet defines psychological tests and sets out the key factors to consider in using tests.

CIPD FACTSHEET 

The latest edition of Psychosomatic medicine, contains a series of articles on issues surrounding the development of the DSM. The current version is DSM-IV and DSM-V will not be published until 2012.  

The first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) was developed between 1946 and 1951, just after World War II. Over the years updates were published. With DSM-III introducing diagnoses to be placed in a multiaxial format, in which preexisting personality disorders or mental retardation, concomitant medical conditions, stressors, and functional capacity were included. Major features also included the naming of conditions as disorders, a term chosen deliberately as etiologically neutral, the listing of sets of specific, defined criteria to be used as the basis for diagnosis and the organisation of diagnostic categories in a hierarchy. In addition, the psychophysiological disorders category was removed and replaced with a psychological factors affecting physical conditions category.

The American Psychiatric Association have a web site to update professionals and the public about the plans for DSM-V 

Worth a look:

Narrow WN, First MB, Sirovatka P, Regier DA, editors. Age and Gender Considerations in Psychiatric Diagnosis: A Research Agenda for DSM-V. Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Association; 2007.

Web Directions:

Psychosomatic Medicine 169, 9 (2007)

DSM-V Prelude Project: Research and Outreach

Assessment journal contains an interesting article on the development of a HIV Medication Readiness scale (HMRS). The HMRS is the first scale developed and validated as a measure of HIV medication readiness.

The authors state that development and success of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART), has transformed HIV from being a terminal disease to a chronic illness, for people living with HIV/AIDS. The article discusses the development and validation of the HIV Medication Readiness scale (HMRS).

Excellent medication adherence (>95%) is required for optimal HIV treatment success and the authors suggest that HMRS is a brief, clinically relevant tool that can assist in identifying people living with HIV at high risk of nonadherence. These patients may benefit from counselling prior to commencing HIV medications.

One hundred and forty two patients from a HIV outpatient clinic completed the HIV Medication Readiness Scale (HMRS,) prior to starting HIV medications. The 10-item HMRS demonstrated high internal consistency (alpha = .90), test-retest reliability (r = .83), and sensitivity to change following a standardized 4-session psychoeducational intervention that was designed to increase readiness for successful adherence. Predictive validity was supported by higher readiness scores on the day patients starting HIV medications and higher treatment adherence at 1-month follow-up.

Web Directions:

Development and Validation of the HIV Medication Readiness Scale

Louise Balfour, Giorgio A. Tasca, John Kowal, Kimberly Corace, Curtis L. Cooper, Jonathan B. Angel, Gary Garber, Paul A. MacPherson and D. William Cameron

Assessment 2007; 14; 408

DOI: 10.1177/1073191107304295

Further Reading

Balfour, L., Kowal, J., Silverman, A., Tasca, G. A., Angel, J. B., MacPherson, P. A., et al. (2006). A randomized controlled psychoeducation intervention trial: Improving psychological readiness for successful HIV medication adherence and reducing depression before initiation HAART. AIDS Care, 18, 830-838

The Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (CERQ) is a multidimensional questionnaire constructed in order to identify the cognitive emotion regulation strategies (or cognitive coping strategies) someone uses after having experienced negative events or situations. The questionnaire refers exclusively to an individual's thoughts after having experienced a negative event. The CERQ is a self-report questionnaire consisting of 36 items. The questionnaire has been constructed both on a theoretical and empirical basis and measures nine different cognitive coping strategies. The CERQ makes it possible to identify individual cognitive strategies and compare them to norm scores from various population groups. In addition, the questionnaire offers the opportunity to investigate relationships between the use of specific cognitive coping strategies, personality variables, psychopathology and other problems.

The CERQ can be administered in normal populations and clinical populations, in different age groups. Separate versions for adults, adolescents and children as well as a short 18-item version have been developed. All of these versions are available in Dutch and English. The CERQ can be used for research purposes.

Develop at the University of Leiden, the questionnaire and numerous papers are available on the questionnaire are available to download from the University website as PDF files.

A recent selection of papers include:-

Amone-P`Olak, K., Garnefski, & Kraaij, V. (2007). Adolescents caught between fires: Cognitive emotion regulation in response to war experiences in Northern Uganda. Journal of Adolescence, 30, 655-669.

D'Acremont, M., & Van der Linden, M. (2007). How is imulsivity related to depression in adolescence? Evidence from a French validation of the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire. Journal of Adolescence, 30, 271-282.

Dasgupta, M., & Sanyal, N. (2007). Relationships between controllability awareness and cognitive emotion regulation in selected clinical samples: A psychosocial perspective. Journal of Projective Psychology and Mental health, 14, 64-75.

Garnefski, N. & Kraaij, V. (2006). Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire: Development of a short 18-item version (CERQ-short). Personality and Individual Differences, 41, 1045-1053.

Garnefski, N. & Kraaij, V. (2006). Relationships between cognitive emotion regulation strategies and depressive symptoms: A comparative study of five specific samples. Personality and Individual Differences, 40, 1659-1669.

Garnefski, N., & Kraaij,V. (2007). The Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire: Psychometric features and prospective relationships with depression and anxiety in adults. European journal of Psychological Assessment, 23, 141-149.

Garnefski, N., Rieffe, C., Jellesma, F., Meerum Terwogt, M., & Kraaij, V. (2007). Cognitive emotion regulation strategies and emotional problems in 9-11-year-old children: The development of an instrument. European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 16, 1-9.

Jermann, F., Van der Linden, M., d'Acremont, M., Zermatten, A. (2006). Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (CERQ): Confirmatory factor analyses and psychometric properties of the French translation. European Journal of Psychological Assessment, 22, 126-131.

Martin, R.C., & Dahlen, E.R. (2005). Cognitive emotion regulation in the prediction of depression, anxiety, stress, and anger. Personality and Individual Differences, 39, 1249-1260.

Schroevers, M., Kraaij, V., & Garnefski, N. (2007). Goal disturbance, cognitive coping strategies, and psychological adjustment to different types of stressful life event. Personality and Individual Differences, 43, 413-423.

Van der Veek, S.M.C., Kraaij, V., Van Koppen, W., & Garnefski, N., & Joekes, K. (2007). Goal disturbance, cognitive coping and psychological distress in HIV-infected persons. Journal of Health Psychology, 12 (2), 225-230.

Web Directions:       

University of Leiden website

We all make everyday errors, such as putting a top on inside out, or pouring hot water on our cereal instead into our mug for tea, but people with brain damage can make so many such errors that it interferes with their daily living.

When it comes to studying everyday mistakes or 'action errors' in healthy participants most researchers have, up until now, relied on diary methods.  Unfortunately, such studies can be unreliable because they depend on people recalling their past behaviour without bias. Meanwhile, current tests such as the Naturalistic Action Test, are only designed for use with clinical populations – indeed, healthy participants tend to score near the maximum.

Now researchers in Philadelphia have developed a novel laboratory task – an adapted version of The Coffee Challenge – which can be used to study everyday action errors in healthy participants or the mildly impaired. Tania Giovannetti at Temple University and colleagues developed the task on the basis that errors committed by brain damaged patients may be caused by a lack of processing resources, a situation they aimed to simulate in healthy people.  

Seventeen healthy participants, with an average age of 35 years, were instructed to make a cup of coffee for two fictional characters, Joe and Martha. The two cups had to be made differently in every respect – for example Joe wanted a travel mug and artificial sweetner whereas Martha required a ceramic mug and real sugar. In all, the two drinks involved the use of 16 items which were located on surfaces laid out in a U-shape around the participants.

The researchers first looked at the effects of practice. As expected, the participants' performance betrayed all the signs of becoming progressively more dependent on a learned 'action plan'. That is, they became quicker, with fewer general errors and greater error detection – they were noticing their own mistakes. Meanwhile 'anticipation errors', the premature completion of a later part of the task sequence, became more frequent, and errors of omission less frequent.

In the second experiment, the researchers tested the same participants again but this time they introduced a secondary, concurrent task, designed to simulate the loss of cognitive resources suffered by people with brain damage. The Oral Trail Making Test requires participants to count aloud in letter-number pairs, for example: A1, B2, C3. Each time the participants attempted The Coffee Challenge, they also had to carry out the Oral Trail Making test with as few errors as possible, with the counting starting each time with an arbitrary letter-number pairing (e.g. R2, S3).

Against the researchers' expectations, the concurrent task did not cause the participants' performance to betray a lack of cognitive resources in a way that resembled the kind of everyday errors made by brain damaged patients. Yes, errors on The Coffee Challenge increased, and performance slowed, but errors of omission did not increase and error monitoring remained intact.

The researchers surmised this could be because, while the participants' cognitive resources had been depleted, their action plan – their higher level knowledge of the task – had remained intact. By contrast, the kind of everyday errors observed in some brain damaged patients may result from both a loss of cognitive resources and a deficit in the task 'action plan' or task knowledge.

"This paper provides evidence that the Coffee Challenge is a valid and reliable new method for the study of action errors in healthy or mildly impaired participants," the researchers concluded. "The Coffee Challenge includes a training phase, baseline condition, and divided-attention condition that reliably elicits errors after practice. Thus, the Coffee Challenge fills an important gap in the naturalistic action methodology and appears to be a promising new tool for future research."

Another observation to emerge from the study related to the order with which the participants used the task items and could help with patient rehabilitation. On each trial, the location of the items was varied, so that participants could either stick to using their preferred ordering or they could adapt their strategy according to the layout of the items. During both the practice and divided attention parts of the study, performance was superior among those participants who stuck to using the task items in the same order. "Our analysis of serial-order consistency strongly suggest that patients undergoing rehabilitation for everyday functioning should be encouraged to learn and perform tasks in a consistent serial order to minimise error," the researchers advised.

References:

Giovannetti, T., Schwartz, M.F. & Buxbaum, L.J. (2007). The Coffee Challenge: A new method for the study of everyday action errors. Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neurospsychology, 29, 690-705. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13803390600932286

Weblinks:

How many D'oh moments does the average person have (from the BPS Research Digest)

Interest in the emotion of disgust has grown rapidly in recent years, in part because disgust sensitivity is thought to play a role in anxiety disorders like obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). Disgust sensitivity is usually measured using The Disgust Scale, developed by Haidt et al in 1994. However, while use of this scale has grown to include studies on clinical, non-clinical and cross-cultural samples, a comprehensive examination of its psychometric properties has, until now, not been conducted.

Bunmi Olatunji and colleagues administered the 32-item Disgust Scale to 655 undergraduate students. Sixteen of the scale's items are statements like "It would bother me tremendously to touch a dead body" requiring a true-false response, while the remaining 16 items such as "You see maggots on a piece of meat in an outdoor garbage pail", require a response on a three point scale from finding the experience "not disgusting at all" to "very disgusting".  For comparison, the students also completed an alternative 30-item scale – the Disgust Emotion Scale devised by Kleinknecht et al in 1997.

Analysis revealed five problematic items were not normally distributed and failed to distinguish between high and low disgust sensitive students based on their scores on the comparison scale. Three of these items were related to sex, suggesting sociomoral issues may be better tapped by a separate scale.

Previously the Disgust Scale has been considered to tap 8 domains of disgust: food, animals, body products, body envelope violations, death, sex, hygiene, and sympathetic magic (related to infection and contamination). However, factor analysis showed that the Disgust Scale has just two clear factors "Core Disgust" (a sense of offensiveness and threat of disease) and "Animal Reminder Disgust" (aversion to stimuli that remind one of the animal origins of humans) as well as a weaker, third factor "Contamination-based Disgust" (perceived threat of transmission of a contagion).

A second study, using a revised 27-item version of the Disgust Scale, with the problematic items removed, was given to 993 students, who also completed the Obsessive Compulsive Inventory. These results confirmed the three-factor model provided a good fit to the data and identified a further two items that could be removed because of redundancy. Moreover, preliminary construct validity for the three factors was established, with Core Disgust and Contamination-based Disgust, but not Animal Reminder Disgust, predicting obsessive compulsive symptoms.

Next, a 25-item version of the Disgust Scale was administered to 215 students and compared with their scores on the original 32-item version. The new version showed good internal consistency and predicted scores on the original version. In other words, the new version has improved psychometric properties but a more parsimonious structure compared with the original instrument.

Finally, the researchers gave the new 25-item Disgust Scale to 56 patients with OCD. Compared with healthy controls and OCD patients without a washing compulsion, OCD washers recorded higher scores on the Core Disgust and Contamination-based Disgust factors of The Disgust scale, but not on the Animal Reminder Disgust factor.

The researchers concluded "The psychometric evaluation and refinement of the revised Disgust Scale represents an important step toward the development of a psychometrically sound measure of disgust sensitivity." However, they added that further improvements still need to be made. For example, half of the scale's items which require a true/false response don't even feature the word "disgust". Moreover, many of the scale's items are almost identical to items from OCD symptom scales, which could be inflating correlations between disgust sensitivity and measures of OCD symptomatology.

References:

Olatunji, B.O., Williams, N.L., Tolin, D.F., Abramowitz, J.S., Sawchuk, C.N., Lohr, J.M. & Elwood, L.S. (2007). The Disgust Scale: Item analysis, factor structure and suggestions for refinement. Psychological Assessment, 19, 281-297. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/1040-3590.19.3.281

Kleinknecht, R.A., Kleinknecht, E.E. & Thorndike, R.M. (1997). The role of disgust and fear in blood and injection-related fainting symptoms: A structure equation model. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 35, 1075-1087. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0005-7967(97)80002-2

Haidt, J., McCauley, C. & Rozin, P. (2004). Individual differences in sensitivity to disgust: A scale sampling seven domains of disgust elicitors. Personality and Individual Differences, 16, 701-713. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0191-8869(94)90212-7

Weblinks:

People sensitive to disgust are more likely to hold right-wing views (from the BPS Research Digest)

Reason and the Yuk factor (From The Psychologist)

Moral psychology: the depths of disgust (from Nature, subscription required)

Research that is to be published in November's Cognition & Emotion suggests that Children's negative written narratives are linked to higher levels of anxiety and depression. Prior research with adults suggests that writing causal-explanatory and emotionally disclosing narratives of stressful experiences is related to psychological well-being. However, limited research with children has shown mixed results.

In the study, 9 to 13 year old children were engaged in writing for 3 days under emotional and non-emotional instructions. The children completed measures of depression, anxiety, strengths and difficulties, and somatic symptoms at the beginning and 2 months after the intervention.

It was found that children in the emotional writing group wrote more about negative evaluations, problems, emotions, explanations and coping than children in the non-emotional writing group. Importantly, it was also found that children who wrote more about negative evaluations, problems and explanations subsequently showed higher levels of anxiety, depression and difficulties.

The researchers suggest that this may be due to the limited narrative and emotional regulation skills of the children and concluded that expressive writing may not benefit or even be detrimental to some children.

Web Directions:

Children's narratives and well-being in Cognition & Emotion, Volume 21, Issue 7, November, 2007.

Investigations of worry-based conditions like Generalised Anxiety Disorder often rely on trait questionnaires of worry like the Penn State Worry Questionnaire (PSWQ) and the Worry Domains Questionnaire (WDQ). Because these questionnaires are designed to gauge people's general worrying tendencies, rather than their actual worries. One concern is that a treatment might be found to lower scores on the PSWQ or WDQ, whilst not leading to a corresponding reduction in actual worrying.

A research team from the Netherlands and the USA have examined how well the following trait questionnaires: the PSWQ, the WDQ and the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory-Trait Form (STAI-T) predict the frequency and persistence of worry in people's lives. Four hundred and thirty-two undergraduate students completed these questionnaires before completing daily logs of their worries for six days.

The PSWQ is a 16-item self-report measure that asks about the excessiveness, duration and uncontrollability of worries with items like 'Once I start worrying, I can't stop'. The WDQ, by contrast, is a 25-item self-report questionnaire that focuses more on the content and amount of worry, with items like 'I worry that I will lose close friends'. The WDQ is arranged according to five subscales including relationships, lack of confidence and finances. The STAI-T measures participants' predisposition to worry, for example by asking whether they think they worry too much.

An immediate observation to come from the study was just how common worry was among this non-clinical population. It was found that participants were worrying an average of 23 minutes a day, and just two per cent of the sample reported not worrying at all for the six days' duration.

The PSWQ and WDQ, together with the STAI-T all correlated moderately with actual worry duration and worry frequency as judged from the logs, with the PSWQ being the most predictive in both cases. When scores from the questionnaires were entered into a regression analysis together, worry duration was best predicted by a combination of the PSWQ and WDQ (but not the STAI-T), while worry frequency was best predicted by a combination of all three measures. The PSWQ was the only measure that correlated with night-time worry.

Although these results support the validity of the questionnaires, the researchers noted that the correlations were modest, with the questionnaires accounting for approximately 24 percent of the variance of worry in daily life. The researchers suggest that the findings imply that the majority of the daily experience of worry is not predicted by trait measures. Writing in the journal Behaviour Research and Therapy, the researchers concluded that future studies assessing the emotional and health outcomes of worry should consider combining trait questionnaires with momentary assessments, for example diaries or logs.

Web Directions:

Verkuil, B., Brosschot, J.F. & Thayer, J.F. (2007). Capturing worry in daily life: Are trait questionnaires sufficient? Behaviour Research and Therapy, 45, 1835-1844.

Further reading:

The BMJ Best Treatments guide to tests of anxiety, including the Penn State Worry Questionnaire

Being a worrier could mean you live longer. This is from the British Psychological Society's Research Digest.

Where dread is located in the brain. This is a journal article.

UK researchers have tested the validity of a violence risk assessment tool, the Violence Risk Scale second edition (VRS-2) on a British sample of psychiatric patients, held in a medium security facility. The VRS-2 has recently been adopted by the UK Home Office as one of its standard measures of 'dangerous and severe personality disorder', yet to date it had not been extensively validated in the UK.

Researchers Mairead Dolan and Rachael Fullam completed the VRS-2 and the already well-validated Historical Risk Assessment Scale (HCR-20) using the admission notes of 136 patients held at the Edenfield Medium Secure Unit in Manchester. The patients were aged 35 years on average, and the majority had a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Most had been referred to the unit from prison, with 14 percent having previously committed murder.

The VRS-2 contains 6 'static factors' including age of first violent conviction and 20 so-called 'dynamic' factors (subject to change through intervention) such as 'criminal attitudes' and 'emotional control'. The HCR-20 contains 10 historical items such as 'age of first violent incident', 5 clinical items such as 'lack of insight' and 5 risk items, including 'lack of personal support'.

There was a strong correlation between scores on the VRS-2 and the HCR-20 showing the VRS-2 has strong 'construct validity. That is, it appears to be measuring what it is supposed to be measuring. The VRS-2 also showed reasonable 'inter-rater reliability '. That is, two people administering the tool to the same person's records tended to give similar scores.

Finally, looking at data from 80 of the patients, the researchers found that those who went on to be violent over the next 12 months tended to have scored higher on the VRS-2 and HCR-20 than did those patients who did not commit violence during that time. This demonstrated both scales have 'predictive validity'. This was especially the case for the dynamic items of the VRS-2 rather than the static items, and the clinical items from the HCR-20.

The researchers noted that 'Taken together our findings suggest that the more dynamic elements of these risk scales are the important factors in predicting institutional violence, at least in patients with major mental disorders.' Read more on this topic by following the links below.

Web Directions:

Dolan, M. & Fullam, R. (2007). The validity of the Violence Risk Scale second edition (VRS-2) in a British forensic inpatient sample. The Journal of Forensic Psychiatry and Psychology, 18, 381-393.

Further reading:

Violence prediction and risk analysis webpage from the Pacific Institute for the Study of Conflict and Aggression:

Information on violence risk assessment from the website of Canadian forensic psychiatrist Stephen Hucker:

'The challenge of preventing violence is not just an American problem'  This is an opinion piece from The Observer newspaper

Study shows clinicians were unable to predict which mentally ill patients would go on to commit violence in the next two years. This is from the British Psychological Society's Research Digest.