Development and Initial Validation of Two Brief Measures of Left-Wing Authoritarianism: A Machine Learning Approach.

Although authoritarianism has predominantly been studied among political conservatives, authoritarian individuals exist on both "poles" of the political spectrum. A 39-item multidimensional measure of left-wing authoritarianism, the Left-wing Authoritarianism Index, was recently developed to extend the study of authoritarianism to members of the far-left. The present study coupled a fully automated machine learning approach (i.e., a genetic algorithm) with multidimensional item response theory in a large, demographically representative American sample (N = 834) to generate and evaluate two abbreviated versions of the Left-wing Authoritarianism Index. We subsequently used a second community sample (N = 477) to conduct extensive validational tests of the abbreviated measures, which comprise 25- and 13-items. The abbreviated forms demonstrated remarkable convergence with the full LWA Index in terms of their psychometric (e.g., internal consistency) and distributional (e.g., mean, standard deviation, skew, kurtosis) properties. This convergence extended to virtually identical cross-measure patterns of correlations with 14 external criteria, including need for chaos, political violence, anomia, low institutional trust. In light of these results, the LWA-25 and LWA-13 scales appeared to function effectively as measures of LWA.

Spanish Adaptation of the Left-Wing Authoritarianism Index.

Notwithstanding long-simmering controversies around the construct, several studies have gathered consistent evidence of authoritarian attitudes among left-wing voters and activists. Recently, Costello et al. (Clarifying the structure and nature of left-wing authoritarianism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2021) validated, in the English-speaking context, a three-factor scale to measure left-wing authoritarianism, as well as two shortened versions of the same scale (Costello & Patrick, Development and initial validation of two brief measures of left-wing authoritarianism: A machine learning approach, 2021; composed of 39, 25 and 13 items, respectively). In this article, we used three samples (total N = 2586) to validate the structural and construct validity of a Spanish adaptation of these three versions. The resulting scales exhibited an analogous three-factor structure, adequate internal consistency, and convergent and discriminant validity regarding sex, religion, moral exporting, conspiracy theories, social and economic conservatism, and right-wing authoritarianism.

Looking under the tinfoil hat: Clarifying the personological and psychopathological correlates of conspiracy beliefs.

OBJECTIVE: We sought to replicate and extend provisional research on the personological correlates of conspiracy beliefs by examining their associations with abnormal- and normal-range personality domain-level traits and, for the first time, lower-order personality facets; we also examined internalizing symptoms. METHOD: The study comprised four samples of community and student participants (Ntotal  = 1,927), and examined the cross-sectional relations between self-reported conspiratorial ideation and measures of (a) the six-factor model of general personality, (b) intellectual humility (IH), (c) traits relevant to certain personality disorder features (narcissism, psychopathy, disinhibition), and (d) internalizing symptoms (depression, anxiety, anger). RESULTS: Agreeableness and conscientiousness were significant, albeit modest, negative correlates of conspiracy beliefs, although other general personality dimensions tended to manifest negligible associations. Significant associations between lower-order personality facets and conspiracy beliefs, not evident at the domain level, emerged. Indices of IH were significant negative correlates. Conspiracy beliefs were also associated with a range of personality disorder features and internalizing symptoms. CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest that the nonclinical individual prone to conspiratorial ideation is somewhat likely to display a complex mixture of traits including distress, immodesty, impulsivity, and negative affect. Future research should investigate potential multiplicative relations among personological variables in predicting conspiracy beliefs.

A survey of nurses' practices and perceptions of family-centered care in Ireland.

Family-centered care (FCC) is a philosophy of care that recognizes the family's central role in the child's life and in the delivery of care. We used a survey design to investigate the practices and perceptions of nurses toward FCC in Ireland. Data were obtained from 250 nurses in seven hospitals using the Family-Centered Care Questionnaire-Revised (FCCQ-R). Findings indicated that nurses' practices were significantly different from their perceptions of FCC. Nurses with dual registration (children and adult) had significantly lower mean scores on the total current (practice) scale than the other registration subgroups. Nurses with a baccalaureate or a higher academic qualification had higher mean scores than nurses who held a certificate-level qualification on the total necessary (perception) scale, which assessed the activities perceived to be necessary for FCC. Findings showed that nurses support FCC but perceive the design of the health care system and parent-professional collaboration as barriers to FCC practice.

The conspiratorial mind: A meta-analytic review of motivational and personological correlates.

A tidal wave of research has tried to uncover the motivational and personological correlates of conspiratorial ideation, often studying these two classes of correlates in parallel. Here, we synthesize this vast and piecemeal literature through a multilevel meta-analytic review that spanned 170 studies, 257 samples, 52 variables, 1,429 effect sizes, and 158,473 participants. Overall, we found that the strongest correlates of conspiratorial ideation pertained to (a) perceiving danger and threat, (b) relying on intuition and having odd beliefs and experiences, and (c) being antagonistic and acting superior. Considerable heterogeneity was found within these relations--especially when individual variables were lumped together under a single domain--and we identified potential boundary conditions in these relations (e.g., type of conspiracy). Given that the psychological correlates of conspiratorial ideation have often been classified as belonging to one of two broad domains-motivation or personality-we aim to understand the implications of such heterogeneity for frameworks of conspiratorial ideation. We conclude with directions for future research that can lead to a unified account of conspiratorial ideation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Thinking outside the ballot box.

A deeply heterogeneous set of ideological cohorts have shaped the course of history. From anarchists and authoritarians to Zionists and Zapatistas, the expansive alphabet of politics demands an equally expansive psychological vocabulary to describe political belief systems. We propose that constructing such a vocabulary is best facilitated by decentering familiar models that emphasize psychological differences between leftists and rightists. Synthesizing recent developments in the fields of personality, political science, and psychopathology, we characterize individual variation in politics as high-dimensional, heterarchical, intrapersonally eclectic, and contextually shaped and activated. Developing a data-driven taxonomic model of political-psychological phenomena will help create a foundational base of knowledge within political psychology that is more rigorous, more replicable, and certainly richer to investigate.

Psychological profiles of anti-vaccination argument endorsement.

The proliferation of anti-vaccination arguments online can threaten immunisation programmes, including those targeting COVID-19. To effectively refute misinformed views about vaccination, communicators need to go beyond providing correct information and debunking of misconceptions, and must consider the underlying motivations of people who hold contrarian views. Drawing on a taxonomy of anti-vaccination arguments that identified 11 "attitude roots"-i.e., psychological attributes-that motivate an individual's vaccine-hesitant attitude, we assessed whether these attitude roots were identifiable in argument endorsements and responses to psychological construct measures corresponding to the presumed attitude roots. In two UK samples (total n = 1250), we found that participants exhibited monological belief patterns in their highly correlated endorsements of anti-vaccination arguments drawn from different attitude roots, and that psychological constructs representing the attitude roots significantly predicted argument endorsement strength and vaccine hesitancy. We identified four different latent anti-vaccination profiles amongst our participants' responses. We conclude that endorsement of anti-vaccination arguments meaningfully dovetails with attitude roots clustering around anti-scientific beliefs and partisan ideologies, but that the balance between those attitudes differs considerably between people. Communicators must be aware of those individual differences.

The psychological causes and societal consequences of authoritarianism.

Over the past two decades, citizens' political rights and civil liberties have declined globally. Psychological science can play an instrumental role in both explaining and combating the authoritarian impulses that underlie these attacks on personal autonomy. In this Review, we describe the psychological processes and situational factors that foster authoritarianism, as well as the societal consequences of its apparent resurgence within the general population. First, we summarize the dual process motivational model of ideology and prejudice, which suggests that viewing the world as a dangerous, but not necessarily competitive, place plants the psychological seeds of authoritarianism. Next, we discuss the evolutionary, genetic, personality and developmental antecedents to authoritarianism and explain how contextual threats to safety and security activate authoritarian predispositions. After examining the harmful consequences of authoritarianism for intergroup relations and broader societal attitudes, we discuss the need to expand the ideological boundaries of authoritarianism and encourage future research to investigate both right-wing and left-wing variants of authoritarianism.

Revisiting the rigidity-of-the-right hypothesis: A meta-analytic review.

The rigidity-of-the-right hypothesis (RRH), which posits that cognitive, motivational, and ideological rigidity resonate with political conservatism, is an influential but controversial psychological account of political ideology. Here, we leverage several methodological and theoretical sources of this controversy to conduct an extensive quantitative review with the dual aims of probing the RRH's basic assumptions and parsing the RRH literature's heterogeneity. Using multilevel meta-analyses of relations between varieties of rigidity and ideology measures alongside a bevy of potential moderators (s = 329, k = 708, N = 187,612), we find that associations between conservatism and rigidity are tremendously heterogeneous, suggesting a complex-yet conceptually fertile-network of relations between these constructs. Most notably, whereas social conservatism was robustly associated with rigidity, associations between economic conservatism and rigidity indicators were inconsistent, small, and not statistically significant outside of the United States. Moderator analyses revealed that nonrepresentative sampling, criterion contamination, and disproportionate use of American samples have yielded overestimates of associations between rigidity-related constructs and conservatism in past research. We resolve that drilling into this complexity, thereby moving beyond the question of if conservatives are essentially rigid to when and why they might or might not be, will help provide a more realistic account of the psychological underpinnings of political ideology. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Clarifying the structure and nature of left-wing authoritarianism.

Authoritarianism has been the subject of scientific inquiry for nearly a century, yet the vast majority of authoritarianism research has focused on right-wing authoritarianism. In the present studies, we investigate the nature, structure, and nomological network of left-wing authoritarianism (LWA), a construct famously known as "the Loch Ness Monster" of political psychology. We iteratively construct a measure and data-driven conceptualization of LWA across six samples (N = 7,258) and conduct quantitative tests of LWA's relations with more than 60 authoritarianism-related variables. We find that LWA, right-wing authoritarianism, and social dominance orientation reflect a shared constellation of personality traits, cognitive features, beliefs, and motivational values that might be considered the "heart" of authoritarianism. Relative to right-wing authoritarians, left-wing authoritarians were lower in dogmatism and cognitive rigidity, higher in negative emotionality, and expressed stronger support for a political system with substantial centralized state control. Our results also indicate that LWA powerfully predicts behavioral aggression and is strongly correlated with participation in political violence. We conclude that a movement away from exclusively right-wing conceptualizations of authoritarianism may be required to illuminate authoritarianism's central features, conceptual breadth, and psychological appeal. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Stepping Outside the Echo Chamber: Is Intellectual Humility Associated With Less Political Myside Bias?

In recent years, an upsurge of polarization has been a salient feature of political discourse in America. A small but growing body of research has examined the potential relevance of intellectual humility (IH) to political polarization. In the present investigation, we extend this work to political myside bias, testing the hypothesis that IH is associated with less bias in two community samples (N1 = 498; N2 = 477). In line with our expectations, measures of IH were negatively correlated with political myside bias across paradigms, political topics, and samples. These relations were robust to controlling for humility. We also examined ideological asymmetries in the relations between IH and political myside bias, finding that IH-bias relations were statistically equivalent in members of the political left and right. Notwithstanding important limitations and caveats, these data establish IH as one of a small handful psychological features known to predict less political myside bias.

What does family-centred care mean to nurses and how do they think it could be enhanced in practice.

AIM: This paper is a report of the qualitative findings of a multisite survey in seven children's units in Ireland. In this survey, nurses caring for children identified their practice and perception of family-centred care. BACKGROUND: International research has identified inconsistencies with the provision and application of family-centred care in practice. Existing research studies illustrate barriers to family-centred care including nurses' attitudes to families and a lack of support and resources for the philosophy. METHOD: A descriptive survey design was employed to collect data in 2008-2009. Questionnaires were distributed to nurses (n = 750) which yielded a response rate of 33% (n = 250). The nurses completed a 47-item questionnaire which examined nurses' perceptions and practices of family-centred care, the quantitative findings of this study will be reported in another publication. The questionnaire contained two open-ended questions and the data from these questions are reported here. FINDINGS: While nurses accept family-centred care as an ideal philosophy for the care of children and their families, the implementation of family-centred care in practice would seem to present challenges for nurses. The majority in this study indicated that they required further organizational and managerial support to fully implement family-centred care practices. Two interrelated themes were identified 'the components of family-centred care' and 'enhancing family-centred care'. CONCLUSION: To provide good quality family-centred care nurses need adequate resources, appropriate education, support for managers and support from other healthcare disciplines.

The Curious Case of Left-Wing Authoritarianism: When Authoritarian Persons Meet Anti-Authoritarian Norms.

Left-Wing Authoritarianism (LWA) has a controversial history in psychology. Some researchers have expressed skepticism about the existence of LWA, whereas others have argued that LWA is a valid construct. In the present article, we offer a framework to reconcile these two perspectives by proposing that ideologically-based authoritarian norms are sometimes in conflict with the processes that create authoritarian individuals. In Western political contexts, authoritarian norms are more likely to occur on the conservative side of the political spectrum; but authoritarian attributes can occur in both conservatives and liberals. In our model, left-wing authoritarians thus often occupy the space where forces influencing authoritarianism are in conflict. We review existing evidence related to the model, present novel evidence related to the model, derive four hypotheses from the model, and discuss criteria for falsifying the model. We conclude by considering the model's place in current research on the complexities of ideology.

Extending the nomological network of sexual objectification to psychopathic and allied personality traits.

Although the causes and correlates of sexual objectification almost certainly comprise a heterogeneous array of individual difference variables, little is known about sexual objectification perpetration's nomological network. We hypothesized that the broad personality construct of psychopathy would afford a fruitful framework for understanding and statistically predicting sexual objectification and investigated the implications of a host of psychopathic and psychopathy-related traits, including empathy, narcissism, impulsivity, and sadism, for interpersonal sexual objectification perpetration (ISOP). We augmented an extant self-report instrument of behavioral sexual objectification, the Interpersonal Sexual Objectification Scale-Perpetrator Version (Gervais, DiLillo, & McChargue, 2014), with attitudinal items. Two Mechanical Turk samples (Study 1: N = 401, 53% female, Mage = 36; Study 2: N = 419, 48% female, Mage = 37) were administered the augmented Interpersonal Sexual Objectification Scale-Perpetrator Version and a battery of well validated self-report instruments describing psychopathic and psychopathy-related traits. Dark personality traits were strongly associated with sexual objectification; sadism, low affective empathy, narcissism, disinhibition, and meanness emerged as the largest correlates. Further, our hypothesis that psychopathic traits would moderate (potentiate) the relation between ISOP attitudes and ISOP behaviors found support in both samples. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Strengths and Weaknesses of Two Empathy Measures: A Comparison of the Measurement Precision, Construct Validity, and Incremental Validity of Two Multidimensional Indices.

The quality of empathy research, and clinical assessment, hinges on the validity and proper interpretation of the measures used to assess the construct. This study investigates, in an online sample of 401 adult community participants, the construct validity of the Affective and Cognitive Measure of Empathy (ACME) relative to that of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI), the most widely used multidimensional empathy research measure. We investigated the factor structures of both measures, as well as their measurement precision across varying trait levels. We also examined them both in relation to convergent and discriminant criteria, including broadband personality dimensions, general emotionality, personality disorder features, and interpersonal malignancy. Our findings suggest that the ACME possesses incremental validity beyond the IRI for most constructs related to interpersonal malignancy. Our results further indicate that the IRI Personal Distress scale is severely deficient in construct validity, raising serious concerns regarding past findings that have included it when computing total empathy scores. Finally, our results indicate that both questionnaires display poor measurement precision at high trait levels, emphasizing the need for future researchers to develop indices that can reliably measure high levels of empathy.

Psychopathy as an Emergent Interpersonal Syndrome: Further Reflections and Future Directions.

In our article (Lilienfeld et al., 2019), we hypothesized that psychopathy and some other personality disorders are emergent interpersonal syndromes (EISs): interpersonally malignant configurations of distinct personality subdimensions. We respond to three commentaries by distinguished scholars who raise provocative challenges to our arguments and intriguing suggestions for future research. We clarify the role of folk concepts in our understanding of psychopathy, offer further suggestions for testing our interactional hypotheses, consider the role of boldness in motivational accounts of psychopathy, and discuss future directions for incorporating developmental considerations and the role of victims in our EIS account. We are optimistic that this account will prove to be of heuristic value, and should encourage researchers and theoreticians to explore alternative models of psychopathy and other personality disorders.

Personality Disorders as Emergent Interpersonal Syndromes: Psychopathic Personality as a Case Example.

Personality disorders have long been bedeviled by a host of conceptual and methodological quandaries. Starting from the assumption that personality disorders are inherently interpersonal conditions that reflect folk concepts of social impairment, the authors contend that a subset of personality disorders, rather than traditional syndromes, are emergent interpersonal syndromes (EISs): interpersonally malignant configurations (statistical interactions) of distinct personality dimensions that may be only modestly, weakly, or even negatively correlated. Preliminary support for this perspective derives from a surprising source, namely, largely forgotten research on the intercorrelations among the subscales of select MMPI/MMPI-2 clinical scales. Using psychopathic personality as a case example, the authors offer provisional evidence for the EIS hypothesis from four lines of research and delineate its implications for personality disorder theory, research, and classification. Conceptualizing some personality disorders as EISs elucidates long-standing quandaries and controversies in the psychopathology literature and affords fruitful avenues for future investigation.

Nurses' knowledge of mouth care practices.

AIM: to assess nurses' knowledge and practices concerning oral care on surgical and medical wards in a district general hospital in Ireland. METHODS: a survey of all qualified nurses on three medical and three surgical wards was carried out. Two hundred questionnaires were distributed and 50 were returned with 43 of these rendered useable. RESULTS: the majority of nurses (90%) viewed oral care as an important aspect of nursing care. However, nurses lacked adequate knowledge of oral care practices, and experienced problems attending to oral care as a result of time constraints, lack of oral care packs, patients being confused or uncooperative, lack of toothpaste and toothbrush, limited education and low status attached to oral care. Although most nurses (over 70%) had received education on oral care, this was of short duration. Sixty-four per cent did not use an assessment tool to measure the condition of the patient's oral cavity, while 73% believed that an assessment tool would be important to measure a baseline of the condition of the patient's oral cavity. CONCLUSION: although oral care is an essential component of quality nursing care, it appears to be given low priority by some nurses. This study indicates the need for educational updates for qualified nurses, adequate supply of oral care equipment and promotion of formal assessment tools usage in the hospital setting.

Is empathic contagion helpful or harmful? Overlooked heterogeneity in the Empathy Index.

Some theorists have argued that empathy should be defined as feeling the same emotion that one thinks another person is feeling and that other-oriented sympathetic caring should be excluded from this construct. Jordan, Amir, and Bloom (2016) introduced the Empathy Index (EI) as a self-report questionnaire to measure the former circumscribed conceptualization of empathy. They reported that this scale (a) was only weakly associated with broader sympathetic caring and (b) was not robustly predictive of heightened prosociality in behavioral tasks. Using an online sample of adult community participants (N = 389), we demonstrate that the factor structure of the EI is substantively different from that proposed by Jordan and colleagues. In addition, we demonstrate that contagion for enjoyable emotions as measured by the EI is strongly correlated with sympathetic caring, interpersonal attachment, and psychological well-being, as well as substantially negatively correlated with meanness. In sharp contrast, contagion for aversive emotions, as measured by the EI, is not associated with sympathetic caring but is positively associated with emotional distress and personality disorder features. We conclude that empathic contagion should not be treated as a unidimensional construct, as enjoyable contagion and aversive contagion may be associated with markedly different nomological networks. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Psychopathy and Pride: Testing Lykken's Hypothesis Regarding the Implications of Fearlessness for Prosocial and Antisocial Behavior.

Despite widespread assumptions that psychopathy is associated with serious and repeated law-breaking, individuals with psychopathic personality traits do not invariably become chronic criminal offenders. As a partial explanation for this finding, Lykken (1995) ventured that a fearless temperament underlies both psychopathic traits and heroic behavior, and that heroic individuals' early exposure to effective socializing forces such as warm parenting or healthy self-esteem often fosters a characteristic adaption that tends to beget "successful" behaviors, thereby differentiating heroes from convicts. In this study, we investigate relations between psychopathy, principally its fearless dominance dimension, pride, and prosocial and antisocial behavior in a community sample (N = 339). Fearless dominance and self-centered impulsivity components of psychopathy yielded differential relations with authentic and hubristic pride (Tracy and Robins, 2004), such that fearless dominance was significantly positively correlated with both facets of pride while self-centered Impulsivity was significantly negatively correlated with authentic pride and significantly positively correlated with hubristic pride. Further, authentic pride moderated (potentiated) the relation between fearless dominance and transformational leadership, one of the two outcome measures for prosocial behavior employed in our investigation. Authentic pride did not moderate the relations between fearless dominance and either our other measure of prosocial behavior (heroism) or antisocial behavior, nor did positive parenting moderate the relations between psychopathy components and social behavior. Unexpectedly, hubristic pride significantly moderated the relation between impulsive-antisocial features and antisocial behavior in a protective manner.