| 1. |
- Garcia, Danilo, 1973, et al.
(author)
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Self-descriptions on LinkedIn: Recruitment or Friendship Identity?
- 2018
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In: PsyCh Journal. - : Wiley. - 2046-0252 .- 2046-0260. ; 7:3, s. 152-153
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- We used quantitative semantics to find clusters of words in LinkedIn users' self-descriptions to an employer or a friend. Some of these clusters discriminated between worker and friend conditions (e.g., flexible vs caring) and between LinkedIn users with high and low education (e.g., analytical vs. messy).
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| 2. |
- Al Nima, Ali, et al.
(author)
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The ABC of happiness: Validation of the tridimensional model of subjective well-being (affect, cognition, and behavior) using Bifactor Polytomous Multidimensional Item Response Theory
- 2024
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In: Heliyon. - : CELL PRESS. - 2405-8440. ; 10:2
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Background: Happiness is often conceptualized as subjective well-being, which comprises people's evaluations of emotional experiences (i.e., the affective dimension: positive and negative feelings and emotions) and judgements of a self-imposed ideal (i.e., the cognitive dimension: life satisfaction). Recent research has established these two dimensions as primary parts of a higher order factor. However, theoretical, conceptual, and empirical work suggest that people's evaluations of harmony in their life (i.e., the sense of balance and capacity to behave and adapt with both acceptance and flexibility to inter- and intrapersonal circumstances) constitutes a third dimension (i.e., the behavioral dimension). This tridemensional conceptualization of subjective well-being has recently been verified using Unidimensional Item Response Theory (UIRT) and Classical Test Theory (CTT). Here, we use a recently developed and more robust approach that combines these two methods (i.e., Multidimensional Item Response Theory, MIRT) to simultaneously address the complex interactions and multidimensionality behind how people feel, think, and behave in relation to happiness in their life. Method: A total of 435 participants (197 males and 238 females) with an age mean of 44.84 (sd = 13.36) responded to the Positive Affect Negative Affect Schedule (10 positive affect items, 10 negative affect items), the Satisfaction with Life Scale (five items), and the Harmony in life Scale (five items). We used Bifactor-Graded Response MIRT for the main analyses. Result: At the general level, each of the 30 items had a strong capacity to discriminate between respondents across all three dimensions of subjective well-being. The investigation of different parameters (e.g., marginal slopes, ECV, IECV) strongly reflected the multidimensionality of subjective well-being at the item, the scale, and the model level. Indeed, subjective well-being could explain 64 % of the common variance in the whole model. Moreover, most of the items measuring positive affect (8/10) and life satisfaction (4/5) and all the items measuring harmony in life (5/5) accounted for a larger amount of variance of subjective well-being compared to that of their respective individual dimensions. The negative affect items, however, measured its own individual concept to a lager extent rather than subjective well-being. Thus, suggesting that the experience of negative affect is a more independent dimension within the whole subjective well-being model. We also found that specific items (e.g., “Alert”, “Distressed”, “Irritable”, “I am satisfied with my life”) were the recurrent exceptions in our results. Last but not the least, experiencing high levels in one dimension seems to compensate for low levels in the others and vice versa. Conclusion: As expected, the three subjective well-being dimensions do not work separately. Interestingly, the order and magnitude of the effect by each dimension on subjective well-being mirror how people define happiness in their life: first as harmony, second as satisfaction, third as positive emotions, and fourth, albeit to a much lesser degree, as negative emotions. Ergo, we argue that subjective well-being functions as a complex biopsychosocial adaptive system mirroring our attitude towards life in these three dimensions (A: affective dimension; B: behavioral dimension; C: cognitive dimension). Ergo, researchers and practitioners need to take in to account all three to fully understand, measure, and promote people's experience of the happy life. Moreover, our results also suggest that negative affect, especially regarding high activation unpleasant emotions, need considerable changes and further analyses if it is going to be included as a construct within the affective dimension of a general subjective well-being factor.
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| 3. |
- Bäck, Emma, et al.
(author)
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From I to We : Group Formation and Linguistic Adaption in an Online Xenophobic Forum
- 2018
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In: The Journal of Social and Political Psychology. - : Leibniz Institute for Psychology (ZPID). - 2195-3325. ; 6:1, s. 76-91
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Much of identity formation processes nowadays takes place online, indicating that intergroup differentiation may be found in online communities. This paper focuses on identity formation processes in an open online xenophobic, anti-immigrant, discussion forum. Open discussion forums provide an excellent opportunity to investigate open interactions that may reveal how identity is formed and how individual users are influenced by other users. Using computational text analysis and Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC), our results show that new users change from an individual identification to a group identification over time as indicated by a decrease in the use of “I” and increase in the use of “we”. The analyses also show increased use of “they” indicating intergroup differentiation. Moreover, the linguistic style of new users became more similar to that of the overall forum over time. Further, the emotional content decreased over time. The results indicate that new users on a forum create a collective identity with the other users and adapt to them linguistically.
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| 4. |
- Garcia, Danilo, et al.
(author)
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Validation of Two Short Personality Inventories Using Self-Descriptions in Natural Language and Quantitative Semantics Test Theory
- 2020
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In: Frontiers in Psychology. - : Frontiers Media SA. - 1664-1078. ; 11
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Background: If individual differences are relevant and prominent features of personality, then they are expected to be encoded in natural language, thus manifesting themselves in single words. Recently, the quantification of text data using advanced natural language processing techniques offers innovative opportunities to map people’s own words and narratives to their responses to self-reports. Here, we demonstrate the usefulness of self-descriptions in natural language and what we tentatively call Quantitative Semantic Test Theory (QuSTT) to validate two short inventories that measure character traits. Method: In Study 1, participants (N1 = 997) responded to the Short Character Inventory, which measures self-directedness, cooperativeness, and self-transcendence. In Study 2, participants (N2 = 2373) responded to Short Dark Triad, which measures Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy. In both studies, respondents were asked to generate 10 self-descriptive words. We used the Latent Semantic Algorithm to quantify the meaning of each trait using the participants’ self-descriptive words. We then used these semantic representations to predict the self-reported scores. In a second set of analyses, we used word-frequency analyses to map the self-descriptive words to each of the participants’ trait scores (i.e., one-dimensional analysis) and character profiles (i.e., three-dimensional analysis). Results: The semantic representation of each character trait was related to each corresponding self-reported score. However, participants’ self-transcendence and Machiavellianism scores demonstrated similar relationships to all three semantic representations of the character traits in their respective personality model. The one-dimensional analyses showed that, for example, “loving” was indicative of both high cooperativeness and self-transcendence, while “compassionate,” “kind,” and “caring” was unique for individuals high in cooperativeness. The words “kind” and “caring” indicated low levels of Machiavellianism and psychopathy, whereas “shy” or “introvert” indicated low narcissism. We also found specific keywords that unify or that make the individuals in some profiles unique. Conclusion: Despite being short, both inventories capture individuals’ identity as expected. Nevertheless, our method also points out some shortcomings and overlaps between traits measured with these inventories. We suggest that self-descriptive words can be quantified to validate measures of psychological constructs (e.g., prevalence in self-descriptions or QuSTT) and that this method may complement traditional methods for testing the validity of psychological measures.
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| 5. |
- Johansson, Petter, et al.
(author)
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Choice Blindness and Preference Change: You Will Like This Paper Better If You (Believe You) Chose to Read It!
- 2014
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In: Journal of Behavioral Decision Making. - : Wiley. - 1099-0771 .- 0894-3257. ; 27:3, s. 281-289
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Choice blindness is the finding that participants both often fail to notice mismatches between their decisions and the outcome of their choice and, in addition, endorse the opposite of their chosen alternative. But do these preference reversals also carry over to future choices and ratings? To investigate this question, we gave participants the task of choosing which of a pair of faces they found most attractive. Unknown to them, we sometimes used a card trick to exchange one face for the other. Both decision theory and common sense strongly suggest that most people would easily notice such a radical change in the outcome of a choice. But that was not the case: no more than a third of the exchanges were detected by the participants. We also included a second round of choices using the same face pairs, and two stages of post-choice attractiveness ratings of the faces. This way we were able to measure preference strength both as choice consistency and by looking at measures of rating differences between chosen and rejected options. We found that the initially rejected faces were chosen more frequently in the second choice, and the perceived attractiveness of these faces was increased even in uncoupled individual ratings at the end of the experiment. This result is discussed in relation to Chen and Risen's recent criticism of the Free Choice Paradigm, as it shows that choices can affect future preferences. Copyright (c) 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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| 6. |
- Kjell, Oscar N.E., et al.
(author)
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Prediction and Semantic Trained Scales: Examining the Relationship Between Semantic Responses to Depression and Worry and the Corresponding Rating Scales
- 2020
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In: Statistical Semantics - Methods and Applications. Sikström, Sverker, Garcia, Danilo (Eds.). - Cham, Switzerland : Springer. - 9783030372491 - 9783030372507
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Book chapter (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This chapter focuses on using the semantic representations, consisting of a number of semantic dimensions, in multiple linear regressions to predict a numerical outcome variable. We examine whether there is a statistically significant relationship between texts and numerical values. Thus, we post the question with what certainty we can predict numerical (or categorical) data from text data? We describe how to use leave-n-out cross-validation to avoid using the same data when both the training data and the evaluation data is in the same dataset. Furthermore, we discuss how to avoid overfitting models. We also describe how trained models can be used to predict numerical values from a new set of text data. Subsequently, research using semantic trained scales in different ways is briefly described to give an idea of how they can be used in different research studies. In particular, we focus on examining the relationship between individuals’ word responses to the semantic questions of depression and worry and their responses to corresponding numerical rating scales using the data from Kjell, Kjell, Garcia and Sikström (2018) as described in Chapter 4.
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| 7. |
- Nima, Ali Al, et al.
(author)
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Validation of Subjective Well-Being Measures using Item Response Theory
- 2020
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In: Frontiers in Psychology. - : Frontiers Media SA. - 1664-1078. ; 10
-
Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Background: Subjective well-being refers to the extent to which a person believes or feels that her life is going well. It is considered as one of the best available proxies for a broader, more canonical form of well-being. For over 30 years, one important distinction in the conceptualization of subjective well-being is the contrast between more affective evaluations of biological emotional reactions and more cognitive evaluations of one’s life in relation to a psychologically self-imposed ideal. More recently, researchers have suggested the addition of harmony in life, comprising behavioral evaluations of how one is doing in a social context. Since measures used to assess subjective well-being are self-reports, often validated only using Classical Test Theory, our aim was to focus on the psychometric properties of the measures using Item Response Theory. Method: A total of 1000 participants responded to the Positive Affect Negative Affect Schedule. At random, half of the participants answered to the Satisfaction with Life Scale or to the Harmony in life Scale. First, we evaluate and provide enough evidence of unidimensionality for each scale. Next, we conducted graded response models to validate the psychometric properties of the subjective well-being scales. Results: All scales showed varied frequency item distribution, high discrimination values (Alphas), and had different difficulty parameters (Beta) on each response options. For example, we identified items that respondents found difficult to endorse at the highest/lowest point of the scales (e.g., “Proud” for positive affect; item 5, “If I could live my life over, I would change almost nothing”, for life satisfaction; and item 3, “I am in harmony”, for harmony in life). In addition, all scales could cover a good portion of the range of subjective well-being (Theta): -2.50 to 2.30 for positive affect, -1.00 to 3.50 for negative affect, -2.40 to 2.50 for life satisfaction, and -2.40 to 2.50 for harmony in life. Importantly, for all scales, there were weak reliability for respondents with extreme latent scores of subjective well-being. Conclusion: The affective component, especially low levels of negative affect, were less accurately measured, while both the cognitive and social component were covered to an equal degree. There was less reliability for respondents with extreme latent scores of subjective well-being. Thus, to improve reliability at the level of the scale, at the item level and at the level of the response scale for each item, we point out specific items that need to be modified or added. Moreover, the data presented here can be used as normative data for each of the subjective well-being constructs.
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| 8. |
- Petersén Karlsson, Kristina, 1968-, et al.
(author)
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Gender differences in autobiographical memory : females latently express communality more than do males
- 2019
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In: Journal of Cognitive Psychology. - : Informa UK Limited. - 2044-5911 .- 2044-592X. ; 31:7, s. 651-664
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Gender differences have been found in several aspects of autobiographical memory (i.e. personally experienced events). For example, previous studies have shown that females’ autobiographical memories contain more communal and emotional expressions than do males. However, an important question concerns whether these differences can be observed both in the manifest content (i.e. what is actually said) and in the latent content (i.e. the underlying meaning of what is said). In the present exploratory study, we extended the current knowledge concerning gender differences in autobiographical memory by investigating the manifestly expressed words, as well as the latently expressed words in autobiographical memory descriptions. We observed an overall gender difference in the latent content of the autobiographical memories. Furthermore, females latently described their memories in more communal terms than males did. No other gender differences were found. Our results indicate that females’ autobiographical memories are more communally oriented than male's.
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| 9. |
- Pietraszkiewicz, Agnieszka, et al.
(author)
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The big two dictionaries : Capturing agency and communion in natural language
- 2019
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In: European Journal of Social Psychology. - : Wiley. - 0046-2772 .- 1099-0992. ; 49:5, s. 871-887
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Four studies developed and validated two dictionaries to capture agentic and communal expressions in natural language. Their development followed the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) approach (Study 1) and we tested their validity with frequency‐based analyses and semantic similarity measures. The newly developed Agency and Communion dictionaries were aligned with LIWC categories related to agency and communion (Study 2), and corresponded with subjective ratings (Study 3), confirming their convergent validity. Very low or absent correspondence between proposed dictionaries and unrelated LIWC categories demonstrated their discriminant validity (Study 2). Finally, we applied both dictionaries to language used in advertisements. In correspondence to gender stereotypes, male‐dominated jobs were advertised with more agentic than communal words, and female‐dominated jobs with more communal than agentic words (Study 4). Both dictionaries represent reliable tools for quantifying agentic and communal content in natural language, and will improve and facilitate future research on agency and communion.
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| 10. |
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