FriSem

Date
Fri May 18th 2018, 3:15 - 4:30pm
Event Sponsor
Department of Psychology
Location
Jordan Hall room 050

Speaker: Zeynep Enkavi, Russell Poldrack lab, Department of Psychology, Stanford University

Title: A large-scale analysis of test-retest reliabilities of self-regulation measures

Abstract: A common method of inquiry in psychology is to measure a putative process using a self-report survey or cognitive task and correlate dependent variables with real-world behaviors. Such individual difference analyses treat measures as trait-like variables. Trait-like variables should remain stable across time and imply the same conclusions about the person they pertain to regardless of when they are measured. In other words, they should have high test-retest reliability. In this talk I will examine whether this is true for measures of self-regulation; a domain that is both well-studied for its associations with problematic behaviors (e.g. smoking, over eating etc.) and one that shows a large amount of individual variability. 

First I will present a large literature review on 171 different self-regulation measures that revealed some previously undocumented systematic differences. Then I will present a new dataset of over 400 variables from 150 participants who completed a 10 hour battery of self-regulation measures twice. Our results both confirmed the patterns we found in the literature as well as extended them by providing some insight into the underlying factors of the differences in reliability.