Faking behavior has been examined by various methods and procedures, but without consistent conclusions. This study explores the measurement of faking based on traditional social desirability scales. Under both instructed faking-good and honest contexts, the response distortion was assessed by measures of the Big Five personality traits and the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale. Classification tests and diagnostic analyses were conducted. The majority of suspected fakers flagged by the detection scale had little dependence with those identified by the amount of faking. The diagnostic accuracy and regression model estimates did not support the use of social desirability scales for detecting faking. These findings indicate that social desirability scales are not capable of precisely capturing faking-related changes, although they indicate, to a certain extent, the level of faking. Interpreting these scales as indicators of faking should be approached with caution. Using multiple social desirability scales along with modern model-based methods is recommended.

We investigated the influence of perceived impression on the recognition of strangers’ faces. Two experiments were conducted to examine whether face recognition distortion varies depending on perceived attractiveness and distinctiveness. Participants judged the attractiveness or distinctiveness of a target face presented in a video. Subsequently, they were shown a set of five images in which attractiveness or distinctiveness were manipulated and asked to select the original target face from the five images. Results showed that when participants initially judged a target face to be highly attractive, the more attractive image in the set was recognised as the target face than when participants judged the target face to be low in attractiveness. Furthermore, when participants judged a target face to be highly distinct, the more distinctive image in the set was recognised as the target face than when participants judged a target face to be low in distinctiveness. These findings were discussed in terms of the labelling effect and the verbal overshadowing effect.

Implicit Association Test (IAT) is a popular tool that is widely used in the field of social cognition. Part of the reason why is because the IAT is often used as a measurement of implicit social bias—though this assumption has been increasingly challenged in the literature. In this short review, we focus on a variety of cognitive mechanisms that can possibly explain the IAT’s output, and argue that IAT is a downstream measurement that can be reflecting either: 1) implicit attitude, 2) explicit attitude, or 3) explicit but concealed attitude. As such, studies that attempt to infer implicitness or dissociate explicit and implicit attitudes may require caution in data interpretation.

This study aimed to investigate the association between mindful parenting, parental phubbing, and child problem behaviors and to determine whether parental phubbing mediates the link between mindful parenting and child problem behaviors. 142 Chinese parents with children aged 3 to 5 years provided self-reports on their levels of mindful parenting, parental phubbing, and their children’s internalizing and externalizing problem behaviors. The results showed that parents high in mindful parenting reported less parental phubbing and lower frequency of children’s externalizing problem behaviors. Parents high in phubbing reported more children’s externalizing problem behaviors. Mediation analysis indicated that mindful parenting indirectly alleviated reports of children’s externalizing problem behaviors through parental phubbing. Overall, the present study provided empirical evidence that mindful parents experience fewer externalizing problem behaviors in their children and engage in less parental phubbing. Furthermore, parental phubbing mediates the association between mindful parenting and children’s external problem behaviors.

Epistemic curiosity (EC) is the desire to acquire new knowledge. This study investigated the association between EC and cognitive ability by conducting two different measurements of EC: a report-based measurement using a parent report questionnaire, and a behaviour-based measurement using an exploratory task. In the exploratory task, we used an ambiguous toy that was not novel, but might stimulate EC, and a clear toy that was novel to determine which was preferred. The results showed that preschoolers preferred the ambiguous toy to the clear novel toy. There was a positive correlation between preference for the ambiguous toy and IQ (information subscale). There was a weak relationship between questionnaire scores and exploratory task performance. Cognitive ability (information scores) may support detection of the information gap which triggers curiosity-driven exploration. Each measurement (report-based and behavioural-based) can assess different aspects of EC. Report-based EC may be more indicative of children’s observed EC in daily life, whereas behavioural measurement in a structured setting may better reflect children’s cognitive abilities to detect curiosity-driven stimuli.