BACKGROUND The Nottingham Health Profile index of Distress (NHPD) has been proposed as a generic undimensional 24-item measure of illness-related distress that is embedded in the Nottingham Health Profile (NHP). Data indicate that the NHPD may have psychometric advantages to the 6-dimensional NHP profile scores. Detailed psychometric evaluations are, however, lacking. Furthermore, to support th...

BACKGROUND Most cases of acute gouty arthritis are diagnosed in primary care and without joint fluid analysis in many instances. Our objectives were to estimate the validity of this diagnosis by family physicians and to develop a diagnostic rule. METHODS Patients with monoarthritis recruited in an open Dutch population with gout by family physician diagnosis were enrolled in a diagnostic stud...

International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, 10th Revision (ICD-10) has included a diagnostic category of "enduring personality change after catastrophic experience" (EPCACE). Preliminary investigation suggests that there is considerable endorsement in principle for this new category among experts in the field of intentional human trauma, yet many aspects of...

OBJECTIVES Employing national registers for research purposes depends on a high diagnostic validity. The aim of the present study was to examine the diagnostic validity of recorded diagnoses of early-onset obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) in the Danish Psychiatric Central Register (DPCR). DESIGN Review of patient journals selected randomly through the DPCR. METHOD One hundred cases of OC...

CONTEXT Distinctive diagnostic classification schemes for insomnia diagnoses are available, but the optimal insomnia nosology has yet to be determined. OBJECTIVES To test the reliability and validity of insomnia diagnoses listed in the American Psychiatric Association's DSM-IV-TR and the International Classification of Sleep Disorders, second edition (ICSD-2). DESIGN Multitrait-multimethod ...

Three studies were conducted to examine the validity of the four versions of BIATs that are supposed to measure the same construct but differ in shared focal category. Study 1 investigated the criterion validity of four BIATs measuring attitudes toward flower versus insect. Study 2 examined the experimental sensitivity of four BIATs by considering attitudes toward induced ingroup versus outgrou...

Cognitive Science research is hard to conduct, because researchers must take phenomena from the world and turn them into laboratory tasks for which a reasonable level of experimental control can be achieved. Consequently, research necessarily makes tradeoffs between internal validity (experimental control) and external validity (the degree to which a task represents behavior outside of the lab)...

This paper discusses two conventions pertaining to the study of computer game addiction that are rarely discussed. Traditionally when addictions are assessed, it is not customary for the researcher to be concerned with whether or not the addiction causes harm; or in other words: whether the addiction adds more to the overall life quality than it subtracts. Similarly, it is not customary to ask ...

How strongly does humor (i.e., the construct-relevant content) in the Humor Styles Questionnaire (HSQ; Martin et al., 2003) determine the responses to this measure (i.e., construct validity)? Also, how much does humor influence the relationships of the four HSQ scales, namely affiliative, self-enhancing, aggressive, and self-defeating, with personality traits and subjective well-being (i.e., cr...