Psychological Testing in Child Custody Evaluations With Ethnically Diverse Families: Ethical Concerns and Practice Recommendations

Given increasing ethnic diversity of divorcing families, it is more important than ever for family court evaluators to understand the ethical concerns and principles underlying the use of psychological testing with ethnic family members. Major professional organizations have promulgated the guidelines of child custody evaluation with an imperative to consider cultural factors in the evaluation. However, there is a paucity of literature that addresses ethnicity and psychological testing in child custody evaluations. This article addresses three major ethical domains: (a) competence, (b) test fairness, and (c) test interpretation when psychological tests are used. Practice recommendations provide guidelines to ensure ethical standards and competence in using psychological testing with ethnically diverse families in child custody and other family court evaluations.     

河北省优秀传统文化的近期偏好、现代阐释和愿景设计

河北省作为京津冀协同发展及其雄安新区建设的重要一环,具有很强文化资源禀赋。通过对河北省传统文化近期偏好、现代阐释和愿景设计的研究,为河北省消除地区文化差异和经济差异提供理论指导,并为之注入现代内涵,具有很强的现实意义和理论意义。     

An integrative model of leadership behavior

Decades of questionnaire and interview studies have revealed various leadership behaviors observed in successful leaders. However, little is known about the actual behaviors that cause those observations. Given that lay observers are prone to cognitive biases, such as the halo effect, the validity of theories that are exclusively based on observed behaviors is questionable. We thus follow the call of leading scientists in the field and derive a parsimonious model of leadership behavior that is informed by established psychological theories. Building on the taxonomy of Yukl (2012), we propose three task-oriented behavior categories (enhancing understanding, strengthening motivation and facilitating implementation) and three relation-oriented behavior categories (fostering coordination, promoting cooperation and activating resources), each of which is further specified by a number of distinct behaviors. While the task-oriented behaviors are directed towards the accomplishment of shared objectives, the relation-oriented behaviors support this process by increasing the coordinated engagement of the team members. Our model contributes to the advancement of leadership behavior theory by (1) consolidating current taxonomies, (2) sharpening behavioral concepts of leadership behavior, (3) specifying precise relationships between those categories and (4) spurring new hypotheses that can be derived from existing findings in the field of psychology. To test our model as well as the hypotheses derived from this model, we advocate the development of new measurements that overcome the limitations associated with questionnaire and interview studies.     

Estimates of subgroup treatment effects in overall nonsignificant trials: To what extent should we believe in them?

In drug development, it sometimes occurs that a new drug does not demonstrate effectiveness for the full study population but appears to be beneficial in a relevant subgroup. In case the subgroup of interest was not part of a confirmatory testing strategy, the inflation of the overall type I error is substantial and therefore such a subgroup analysis finding can only be seen as exploratory at best. To support such exploratory findings, an appropriate replication of the subgroup finding should be undertaken in a new trial. We should, however, be reasonably confident in the observed treatment effect size to be able to use this estimate in a replication trial in the subpopulation of interest. We were therefore interested in evaluating the bias of the estimate of the subgroup treatment effect, after selection based on significance for the subgroup in an overall “failed” trial. Different scenarios, involving continuous as well as dichotomous outcomes, were investigated via simulation studies. It is shown that the bias associated with subgroup findings in overall nonsignificant clinical trials is on average large and varies substantially across plausible scenarios. This renders the subgroup treatment estimate from the original trial of limited value to design the replication trial. An empirical Bayesian shrinkage method is suggested to minimize this overestimation. The proposed estimator appears to offer either a good or a conservative correction to the observed subgroup treatment effect hence provides a more reliable subgroup treatment effect estimate for adequate planning of future studies.     

博彩者特征和彩票功能悖论

一些经济学理论认为理性的人可能在一定情形下因偏好风险而参加博彩,而一些心理学实验研究则发现博彩者可能存在系统性的心理偏误。对理论的分析发现,彩票对穷人更具有吸引力且博彩者存在非理性心理。国内实证文献也支持这两个结论。如果博彩行为是非理性行为,那么博彩业就有利用人们非理性幼稚心理牟利的嫌疑。政府宣称发行彩票的目的是筹集资金用于社会公益事业,这就形成了一个悖论,即从贫穷群体那里筹集资金来改善他们的处境。     

Generalized Augmentation to Control the False Discovery Exceedance in Multiple Testing

Abstract.  A new multiple testing procedure, the generalized augmentation procedure (GAUGE), is introduced. The procedure is shown to control the false discovery exceedance and to be competitive in terms of power. It is also shown how to apply the idea of GAUGE to achieve control of other error measures. Extensions to dependence are discussed, together with a modification valid under arbitrary dependence. We present an application to an original study on prostate cancer and on a benchmark data set on colon cancer.     

A clarifying comparison of methods for controlling the false discovery rate

Traditional multiple hypothesis testing procedures fix an error rate and determine the corresponding rejection region. In 2002 Storey proposed a fixed rejection region procedure and showed numerically that it can gain more power than the fixed error rate procedure of Benjamini and Hochberg while controlling the same false discovery rate (FDR). In this paper it is proved that when the number of alternatives is small compared to the total number of hypotheses, Storey's method can be less powerful than that of Benjamini and Hochberg. Moreover, the two procedures are compared by setting them to produce the same FDR. The difference in power between Storey's procedure and that of Benjamini and Hochberg is near zero when the distance between the null and alternative distributions is large, but Benjamini and Hochberg's procedure becomes more powerful as the distance decreases. It is shown that modifying the Benjamini and Hochberg procedure to incorporate an estimate of the proportion of true null hypotheses as proposed by Black gives a procedure with superior power.     

Is ethnic prejudice declining in Britain? Change in social distance attitudes among ethnic majority and minority Britons

Most literature on racial prejudice deals with the racial attitudes of the ethnic majority and ethnic minorities separately. This paper breaks this tradition. We examine the social distance attitudes of white and non‐white British residents to test if these attitudes follow the same trends over time, whether they are driven by the same social processes and whether they are inter‐related. We have three main findings. Firstly, social distance from other ethnic groups has declined over time for both white and ethnic minority Britons. For the white majority there are both period and cohort elements to this decline. Secondly, we see some evidence that social distance between the majority and minority groups is reciprocal. Specifically, minorities who experience rejection by the white British feel a greater sense of distance from them. Thirdly, we find that all groups share the perception of the same ethnic hierarchy. We see evidence of particularly widespread hostility towards Muslim Britons from all ethnic groups suggesting that Muslims are singled out for negative attention from many British residents of all other backgrounds, including a large number who do not express hostility to other groups.