Human Motivation & Affective Neuroscience Lab
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Assessment of implicit motives: Develop and validate new PSE assessment procedures

The HuMAN Lab has developed, tested, and evaluated a computer-based administration of the PSE, in which picture stimuli are presented on the computer screen, respondents write their stories using the computer keyboard, and stories are recorded for further processing (e.g., automated word counts, manual content coding; Schultheiss, Liening & Schad, 2008). Results show that computer-based PSE testing yields similar test-retest stability as the traditional paper & pencil version and that motive scores of PC-administered PSEs correlate highly with motives scores from handwritten PSEs. Importantly, computer-based administration of the PSE greatly reduces the amount of work associated with measuring implicit motives in written text and produces text files that can be efficiently analyzed with coding software (such as Pennebaker, Francis, & Booth's, 2001, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count). The computer-based PSE is available for Millisecond's Inquisit and tools for working with PSE story files can be obtained from the HuMAN Lab (email Oliver C. Schultheiss).


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