Lexical Decision Task for Success/Failure Focus

[joshfoster]

Below is a posting to the SPSP listserv that I made recently regarding the creating and use of a word list to use in a lexical decision taks measuring whether people focus on success or failure. Attached is a copy of the direct RT input file. Hope this is helpful to anyone wanting to make their own LDT!
______________________________________________

Thanks to all who replied to my request for stimulus words to be used in a
lexical decision task of success/failure focus. Many excellent suggestions
were offered. Several individuals were interested in the final product
(i.e., the stimulus list) of this query...

Nobody had exactly what I was looking for, so I set out to make my own list.
Catalina Kopetz suggested that I have students provide words that to them
best matched these categories, as has been done in some prior studies of
this nature. I took this advice and had students read scenarios in which
they scored either significantly higher or significantly lower than a group
of students on a test of mental ability. They were asked to think of as many
words as they could to describe how they would feel in this situation and
how they would describe their performance. I paid particular attention to
the most commonly occuring words. I also added a few words that my research
assistants and I thought up. I then collected measures of frequency,
familiarity, and length for as many of the words as possible (some cognitive
research suggests that these 3 variables account for the majority of
variance in LDT reaction time). I reduced the total list to a set 96 words
(32 success/32 failure/32 neutral) that were matched in terms of freq, fam,
and length (Fs < 1). I then matched each word with a pronounceable non-word
of the same length. This resulted in a total of
192 words (96 words/96 non-words).

Attached is a direct RT input file (csv format) that contains these words
set up to be used in a LDT task.

To anyone considering using these words in there own research, a few notes
of caution. First, some of the words, particularly the longer ones, were not
included in the CELEX or Kucera-Francis frequency database, or any of the
familiarity databases. Therefore, the comparisons reported above do not
include these words. It is unknown how their inclusion might affect the
comparisons. Second, these words, as a group, have not been used in
research, so whether or not there will be reaction time differences
unrelated to social/personality factors is unknown. I'd obviously be
interested in learning what people find if they do use these words. Third,
measuring age of acquisition is a controversial topic in cognitive
psychology and it is unknown how much this variable is affected by
familiarity, frequency, etc. Thus, I did not attempt to match these words on
AOA. However, some reviewers are insistent that AOA be accounted for. You
may want to assess AOA on your own. Something similar might be suggested for
imageability, concreteness, etc.

Again, thanks to all who replied. This has been an excellent learning
experience. I have a new respect for cognitive psychology (one researcher
told me that he regularly matches on 20 or more variables!).
Below are some links to websites that were suggested to me by members of
this list and various cognitive psychologists, and that I found useful.


Psychonomic Society Archive of Norms, Stimuli, and Data
http://www.psychonomic.org/archive

English Lexicon Project
http://elexicon.wustl.edu

MRC Psycholinguistic Database
http://www.psy.uwa.edu.au/mrcdatabase/uwa_mrc.htm

ARC Non-word Database
http://www.maccs.mq.edu.au/~nwdb/nwdb.html

University of South Florida Free Association Norms
http://w3.usf.edu/FreeAssociation

Thesaurus.com
http://thesaurus.reference.com

Colin Davis's Homepage (has a program, N-Watch, that provides various
psycholiguistic norms)
http://www.maccs.mq.edu.au/~cdavis