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Kamlesh Singh
Mohita Junnarkar
Jasleen Kaur
Measures
of Positive
Psychology
Development and Validation
Measures of Positive Psychology
Kamlesh Singh Mohita Junnarkar
•
Jasleen Kaur
Measures of Positive
Psychology
Development and Validation
123
Kamlesh Singh Jasleen Kaur
Department of Humanities and Social Indian Air Force
Sciences Gurgaon
Indian Institute of Technology Delhi India
New Delhi
India
Mohita Junnarkar
Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied
Sciences
Amity University
Noida, Uttar Pradesh
India
ISBN 978-81-322-3629-0 ISBN 978-81-322-3631-3 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-81-322-3631-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016946321
© Springer India 2016

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part
of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations,
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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
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the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this
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for any errors or omissions that may have been made.
Printed on acid-free paper
This Springer imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Springer (India) Pvt. Ltd.
Contents
1 Positive Psychology in India: A Review . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Indian Research on Universal Positive Psychology Constructs . . . . . . . . 2
Indian Constructs Contribute to Positive Psychology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Scales on Positive Psychological Constructs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Scales Confirmed Their Factor Structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Scales Developed on Indian Constructs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Positive Interventions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Future Recommendations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2 Norms for Test Construction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
What Is a Psychological Test? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Test Construction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Principles of Item Writing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Format of Items. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Sample Size for Validation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Preliminary Data Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
Exploratory Factor Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Confirmatory Factor Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
Fit Indices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Parameters for Accepting a Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
3 The Assessment of Resilience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
Resilience in the Realm of Developmental Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
Risk Factors and Protective Factors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
Empirical Studies on Resilience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
v
vi Contents
Correlates and Predictors of Resilience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39

Demographic Variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
Gender . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
Age . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
Education, Income, and Locality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
Individual Characteristics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
External Factors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
Resilience Programs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
Indian Studies on Resilience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
Existing Scales of Resilience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
Revalidation of Resilience Measures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
Relevance of the Study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
Test Construction and Validation Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
Study 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
Concurrent Validity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
Study 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
Norms for the New Resilience Scale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
4 Flow Scale-Construction and Validation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
Nature of Flow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
Flow Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
Causes and Predictors of Flow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
Flow in Web Interactions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
Performance-Enhancing Role of Flow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
Correlates of Flow and Its Dimensions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
Correlation Between Flow and Mindfulness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
Methods of Measuring Flow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
Experience Sampling Method (ESM) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
Need for the Study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
Study 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
Alternative One-Factor Solution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
Study 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
Norms for the New Flow Scale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
Contents vii
5 Mindfulness and Its Assessment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
Correlates and Predictors of Mindfulness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
Mindfulness-Based Interventions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
Existing Scales of Mindfulness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
Need for the Study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
Study 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
Study 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
Norms for the New Mindfulness Scale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
6 Spirituality and Its Assessment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
Nature of Spirituality. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
Correlates and Predictors of Spirituality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130
Spirituality and Demographic Variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
Spirituality and Religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132
Spirituality Based Interventions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
Existing Scales of Spirituality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
Need and Objectives for the Present Study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
Study 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
Statistical Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
Study 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
Norms for the New Spirituality Scale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146
Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150
7 Well-Being and Its Assessment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
Well-Being in Indian Psychology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
Correlates and Predictors of Well-Being . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158
Demographic Variables and Well-Being . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
Existing Scales of Well-Being . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161
Relevance of Well-Being Scale in Indian Context. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161
Study 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166
Study 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
viii Contents

Norms for the New Well-Being Scale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
8 Development and Validation of New Interpersonal
and Intrapersonal Strength Measures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... 185
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... 185
Interpersonal and Intrapersonal Character Strengths . . . . . . . . . . . . .... 186
Correlation of Interpersonal and Intrapersonal Character
Strengths with Well-Being . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... 187
Indian Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... 188
Existing Measures of Interpersonal and Intrapersonal Character
Strengths . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
Present Study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190
Test Construction and Validation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190
Study 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
Measures Used . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200
Study 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204
Norms for the New Inter-intrapersonal Scale. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208
Results and Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212
About the Authors
Kamlesh Singh, Ph.D. (Psychology), joined the Indian Institute of Technology

(IIT) Delhi in 2004 and has about 20 years of experience in research and teaching.
The main areas of her research interests are positive psychology, applied positive
psychology, psychometrics, community psychology, and rural women and ado-
lescents. Kamlesh Singh has to her credit 65 published papers in peer-reviewed
national and international journals and 14 book chapters. She has also presented
about 60 papers at national and international conferences. She has been teaching
courses on positive psychology and psychological testing at IIT Delhi, Indian
Institute of Management (IIM) Indore, and IIM Ranchi. With her ongoing teaching
and various research projects in positive psychology, Kamlesh Singh is also on the
board of directors of the International Association of Positive Psychology (IPPA)
and secretary and founder member of the National Positive Psychology Association
(NPPA). She has recently become Associate Editor of the Journal of the Indian
Academy of Applied Psychology.
Mohita Junnarkar, Ph.D. (Psychology), joined Amity University, Noida, Uttar
Pradesh, in 2015 and has about 4 years of research experience. She has completed
her post-doctoral fellowship in the area of positive psychology and her key research
and teaching areas are positive psychology, applied positive psychology, psycho-
metrics, adolescent development, and cognitive psychology. She has published
about 11 papers in national and international peer-reviewed journals in the area of
psychometric validation of positive psychology constructs and has a book to her
credit. Currently, she is also serving as a reviewer for the Journal of the Indian
Academy of Applied Psychology.
Jasleen Kaur, Ph.D. (Psychology), did her doctorate from Panjab University,
Chandigarh. Currently, she is working as a visiting psychologist with the Indian Air
Force. She works closely with serving personnel and their families and deals with
issues such as academic and behavioural problems in children and adolescents,
counselling for marital discord and handling other mental health issues. Her areas of
ix
x About the Authors
interest include developmental psychology, positive psychology, and child and

adolescent mental health. She has to her credit a number of published papers in the
various peer-reviewed journals. She is one of the founder members of the National
Positive Psychology Association (NPPA). She is also serving as a reviewer for the
Journal of the Indian Academy of Applied Psychology.
Chapter 1
Positive Psychology in India: A Review
Abstract The current chapter introduces positive psychology (PP), Indian psy-
chology (IP) and connection between two. Broadly both focus on well-being but
with different angle; PP focuses more on external sources of happiness and IP
focuses more on internal sources of happiness. The present chapter addresses PP in
India by considering both the points of view. The major distinguishing factor was in
the approach and methodology. Indian sages focus on ‘experiential state’ as the
method of enquiry whereas Western scholars focus on observed facts. Contrasting
Indian vision of behavior emphasizes interdependence and interrelatedness based
on caste, class, family, community, gods, etc., which shapes one’s ego identity
(Dalal and Misra, 2011). The current chapter is divided into four main parts; Indian
research on universal PP constructs, Indian constructs contribute to understand
human nature, PP scales developed and validated in India and intervention modules
implemented in India. Finally, the chapter concludes with future recommendations.
Keywords Positive psychology

Indian psychology Cultural factors

Well-being Interventions Psychological testing
Introduction
The field of positive psychology can be traced to the Presidential Address delivered
by Martin E. P. Seligman in 1998 to the American Psychological Association
(Seligman 1999). Since the Presidential Address, series of scholarly meetings were
held and the field of positive psychology was established. Many definitions of
positive psychology prevail to describe the field. However, the two most compre-
hensive definitions are as follows:
© Springer India 2016 1

K. Singh et al., Measures of Positive Psychology,
DOI 10.1007/978-81-322-3631-3_1
2 1 Positive Psychology in India: A Review
“The field of positive psychology at the subjective level is about valued subjective expe-
riences: well-being, contentment, and satisfaction (in the past); hope and optimism (for the
future); and flow and happiness (in the present). At the individual level, it is about positive
individual traits: the capacity for love and vocation, courage, interpersonal skill, aesthetic
sensibility, perseverance, forgiveness, originality, future mindedness, spirituality, high
talent, and wisdom. At the group level, it is about the civic virtues and the institutions that
move individuals toward better citizenship: responsibility, nurturance, altruism, civility,
moderation, tolerance, and work ethic” (Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi. 2000, p. 5)
“Positive psychology is the study of the conditions and processes that contribute to the
flourishing or optimal functioning of people, groups, and institutions.” (Gable and Haidt
2005, p. 104)
Thus, from definitions it can be summarized that positive psychology deals with
achieving happiness and well-being so that individuals flourish. On the other hand,
“Indian Psychology (IP) has its roots in the diverse traditions of knowledge
deliberated upon in various texts (Shastra), as well as the practices and meanings
embodied in various forms, shared by the people (Loka) in the zone of Indian
civilisation,” (Dalal and Misra 2010, p. 122). Positive psychology (PP) and Indian
psychology (IP) are considered to be birds of the same feather (Salagame 2014).
Both PP and IP focus on achieving well-being which is highly connected with the
concept of mental health, happiness, life satisfaction, and actualization of one’s full
potential. Indian psychology is more subjective, experiential and addressed in first
person approach whereas Western psychology is more objective and addressed in
third-person approach which is easily quantifiable. The Western well-being models
of hedonic and eudaimonic (Ryan and Deci 2001) limit to bio-psycho-social aspects
of human nature whereas the spiritual or transcendent perspective of the
Upanishads approaches the subject matter in terms of the dimensions of con-
sciousness and self and encompass bio-psycho-social and spiritual aspects
(Salagame 2011). Interactive researches in the field of PP and IP can be divided
broadly into the four sections which are being discussed below section wise.
Indian Research on Universal Positive Psychology

Constructs
Majority of Indian psychologists who are active researchers in field of positive

psychology have been involved in studying the impact/effect or validate the
Western constructs on Indian population. For instance, they have found robust
predictors of happiness in Indian studies like self-efficacy (Rao and Mehrotra 2010),
extraversion, and conscientiousness (Bhattacharya et al. 2006), optimism (Puri and
Nathawat 2008), hardiness (Nathawat and Joshi 1997), meaning in life
(Bhattacharya et al. 2008) etc.
Lata (2009) studied resilience in adolescents living with political violence in
Kashmir, along with the role of religious meaning system and their political ide-
ology. Singh and Yu (2010) reported an inverse correlation between negative
emotions and resilience. In another study it was reported that factors such as truth,
Indian Research on Universal Positive Psychology Constructs 3
equanimity, joy, synthesis, and discernment as emerging predictors of resilience,

among factors of spirituality (Narayanan and Jose 2011). It is observed that there is
a tendency to explain happiness with regards to interpersonal connectedness
between self and others, especially among East Asians (Uchida et al. 2004). In
recent studies, it was shown that perceived environmental conditions, such as,
interpersonal relationships with their parents at home and friends or classmates at
school, emerged as major contributors to their happiness & acting as the facilitators
of happiness among north Indian adolescents. In addition, it was seen that the
adolescents sought less academic pressure, more time for leisure, better discipline,
and infrastructural facilities in school as the indicators of their happiness, as viewed
from the ecological perspective, (Khanna and Singh 2015; Singh and Sharma
2015). Other constructs such as gratitude (Khanna and Singh 2016), mental health
(Singh et al. 2015a), depression and stress (Singh et al. 2015b), personal well-being
(Singh et al. 2015d), and quality of life (Singh and Junnarkar 2014) were investi-
gated on north Indian adolescents. The results of the studies indicated that females
possessed better mental health and well-being as compared to their male counter-
parts and rural adolescents possessed higher well-being scores as compared to
urban adolescents. Furthermore the studies also reported that adolescents who
attended private schools possessed better well-being scores as compared to ado-
lescents who attended government schools.
Numerous researches in this section from India support the point that
‘Psychology in India’ is affiliated with etic (universal) approach. However, some
psychologists try to find out well-being and its related factors from Indian religious
and philosophical roots.
Indian Constructs Contribute to Positive Psychology
To reiterate, PP and IP are considered as two birds with same feather (Salagame
2014) as they both are inclined towards attaining well-being (Salagame 2011).
However, “IP remained dissociated from its own vast storehouse of knowledge
inherent in the Indian philosophical texts” (Dalal 2011, p. 1). Psychology was
introduced as a science in 1905 in India. Since Indian psychologists were essen-
tially trained in the Western model of research, it has been a long journey to turn
towards their own heritage (Dalal 2011). For instance, well-being which is main
focus of PP has various more prominent meanings in east and west.
Happiness and well-being have deep cultural roots (Diener et al. 2003; Park et al.
2006; Ryan and Deci 2001; Uchida et al. 2004). Understanding of well-being is
important for human flourishing. Research studies have demonstrated that people
who receive support by close friends, family and support groups have higher level
of well-being and are less vulnerable to sickness or illness. Traditionally, well-being
is broadly categorized as hedonic (subjective well-being; SWB) and eudaimonic
(psychological well-being; PWB). Ryan and Deci (2001) mentioned that hedonic
domain focuses on life satisfaction and emotion (increasing positive emotions and
reducing negative emotions) and eudaimonic domain emphasizes the good life,
with a focus on meaning and related well-being factors. Furthermore Keyes (1998)
suggested that well-being included social dimensions such as coherence, integra-
tion, actualization, contribution and acceptance and suggested mental health con-
tinuum by including emotional well-being, psychological well-being and social
well-being. However, more recently Seligman (2011) defined well-being in terms of
five factors: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accom-
plishment (PERMA). On the other hand, Eastern culture has explored more inner
state of mind like inner harmony (Daukantaite et al. 2015) and peace of mind,
(Lee et al. 2013).
Indian psychologists have explored different concepts from Sankhya Yoga,
Vedanta and other religious texts such as Sat-chit-anada, Koshas, Gunas, Doshas,
Vikaras, Anasakti, meditation etc. to understand well-being and factors affecting it.
Dalal and Mishra (2011) supported the ideology that an Indian system concerning
promotion of well-being should have a focus on advance stages of development and
states of well-being. This view is dissimilar to the Western model that aims to
provide details of psychopathology and early development. Indian perspective
postulates that source of all suffering is within the individual and therefore stresses
on exploring the “world within,” to relieve the suffering by the way of attaining
harmony of mind, spirit, and body for happiness and transcendence of an individual
to higher levels of realization and well-being (Dalal and Misra 2010). This is
deduced as human need to seek for inner source of happiness called sat-chit-ananda
or truthful-awareness-bliss (Srivastava and Misra 2011). Furthermore, studies have
demonstrated that there is a significant relationship between flourishing, affect and
Sat-chit-anada (e.g. Singh et al. 2015c).
Buddhism and scriptures such as in Ayurveda, they presume that personality is
constituted of physical, mental and spiritual characteristics (Jha 2009). These two
schools of thought; Ayurveda and Sankhya school discuss about tri-gunas or per-
sonality. Ayurveda banks on the Panch Mahabutas, their combinations resulting in
the biological humors of Tri-doshas, namely, Vata, Pitta and Kapha and the psy-
chological correlates of tri-gunas, namely, Sattva, Rajas and Tamas (Shilpa and
Murthy 2011; Sharma et al. 2012). It is considered that they both elucidate about
the mind, body, and their constituents, along with the corresponding behavioral
manifestations including the spiritual component (Shilpa and Murthy 2011; Sharma
et al. 2012). The concept has been correlated with existing scales of well-being. In
Ayurveda, health results from the balanced interplay between three functional
principles or dosa-Vata (Air & Ether), Pitta (Water & Fire), and Kapha (Water and
Earth)—that regulate psychophysical functions. Delle Fave et al. (2015) reported
that personality, emotion and health as reported by Vata, Pitta and Kapha was
consistent with the descriptions provided in Ayurveda literature. Such study sug-
gests that Prakriti classification can be fruitfully integrated into diagnostic and
treatment protocols in healthcare and psychotherapy.
Sankhya school of Hindu philosophy iterates that the human mind is the
expression of the prakriti (nature). Furthermore, three gunas (constituents) of a
Indian Constructs Contribute to Positive Psychology 5
person has been described; Sattva (signifies purity, wisdom, and bliss), Rajas
(indicates hankering, attachment and action) and Tamas (stands for bias, heed-
lessness and inertia) (Chakraborty 1987; Goyanka 1999; Krishnan 2002). Sattva,
Rajas and Tamas are also translated as goodness, passion and ignorance, respec-
tively (Stempel et al. 2006). These tri-gunas always act together resulting in pre-
ponderance of one over the others. This degree of predominance of the gunas
determines the individual’s personality type (Das 1987). This conceptualization of
tri-gunas is said to bring about individual’s well-being, consisting of the parallel
concept of hedonic and eudaimonic tendencies.
In the correlational studies evaluating the role of tri-gunas on transformational
leadership, Kejriwal and Krishnan (2004) revealed that Sattva leads to enhanced
transformational behavior in a leader, while an opposite effect was observed for
Tamas. Likewise, Chakraborty (1987) compared the gunas as Sattva is superior to
Rajas, and Rajas to Tamas. The scientific tendency of the otherwise elusive con-
struct is established by the way of psychological measurement. The results on tri-
gunas personality indicated that Sattva was found to be positively correlated with
well-being. Rajas and Tamas were negatively correlated with well-being. Higher
levels of Sattva and well-being were reported in the older age-group. Males scored
higher on Rajas while no gender differences were found in well-being (Khanna
et al. 2013). Additionally in a recent cross-cultural study, it was reported that tri-
gunas significantly accounted for well-being. In an under review cross-cultural
paper, it was observed that tri-gunas accounted significantly for well-being
dimensions, for instance, Sattva accounted for 48 % variance in Czechs, 56 % in
Indians and 55 % in Americans, Rajas accounted for 21 % variance in Czechs,
08 % in Indians and 54 % in Americans and Tamas accounted for 50 % variance in
Czechs, 20 % in Indians and 64 % in Americans. The results reinforce that tri-
gunas personality significantly predict well-being dimensions (Singh et al. 2016a).
Among other areas which are contributing to modern PP is Yoga. The concept of
Yoga with roots in Indian literature has been well adapted in the global context of
positive psychology. According to the Yoga Philosophy, one can pervade these
mental planes by practicing eight steps called the Ashtanga Yoga. The religious text
of Bhagvad Gita too prescribes “performing duties established in Yoga- renouncing
attachment and being even-tempered in success and failure; evenness of temper is
Yoga” (Bhagvad Gita, 2.48), (cited in Raina and Singh 2015).
Another construct, Vikaras is a Sanskrit term signifying a change of form from
the natural peaceful condition of the inner being to a worse state, thus indicating
deterioration. Indian religious and philosophical texts like Bhagavad Gita, Guru
Granth Sahib and Dhammapada have mentioned various Vikaras/vices such as
Kama, Krodha, Lobha, Moha and Ahankara. Concept of prakriti or individual
constitution has also gained worldwide attention. This construct embraces both
physical and mental components whose state of balance is understood to determine
the status of health (Sharma and Singh 2016).
In a succinct model, given by Bhawuk (2011) he explains how spirituality and
indigenous psychology are two-way interactive roads and its scientific realm is
precisely indoctrinated by following organized methodology and by indigenous

models and theories of spirituality, themselves. Therein, he states that the signifi-
cant difference “between philosophy and spirituality, or for that matter religion and
spirituality, is that spirituality, as practiced in India, has an action bias over and
above cognitive (thinking or thoughts) or value (considering something important)
concerns” (Bhawuk 2011, p. 25). However, there is still a need for more insights by
psychologists to understand positive psychology in Indian socio-cultural context.
Numerous studies (Singh et al. 2013b; Delle Fave et al. 2015; Raina and Singh
2015; Singh and Raina 2015; Sharma and Singh 2016) have attempted to develop
and validate different constructs of IP such as Sat-chit-ananda, Vikaras, Anasakti,
Tri-gunas and so forth in Indian context. The studies further have correlated the IP
constructs with existing globally validated scales of PP such as Mental Health
Continuum (Keyes 2009), Flourishing Scale (Diener et al. 2010) and Scale of
Positive and Negative Affect (Diener et al. 2010). These studies have helped to
bridge the gap to understand inclusion of interdisciplinary constructs which are well
understood in Indian religious literature.
Scales on Positive Psychological Constructs
Psychological testing is well-known assessment tool for estimating the effect of

constructs on variables under study. This section gives an account of the various
tests constructed, adapted, validated, and translated in Indian settings.
Different scales such as Positive Personality Traits Questionnaire (Singh and
Duggal-Jha 2010) and Adaptive Schema Questionnaire (Jain and Singh 2015) have
been constructed. Positive Personality Traits Questionnaire (Singh and Duggal-Jha
2010) consists of 43 items that assesses perceived four positive personality traits
namely; Positive Self Image, Commitment, Outward/people orientation, and
Culture identification. Another scale, Adaptive Schema Questionnaire (Jain and
Singh 2015) assesses six adaptive schemas: Adequate schema, Secured schema,
Self-reliant schema, Resistant schema, Success schema, and Self-discipline schema.
Both the scales were found to have sound psychometric properties. It is imperative
to first test the validity of an existing scale in the given culture where it is intended
to be utilized given the cultural variations in understanding of a psychological test.
For instance, Mehrotra et al. (2013) found a four factor psychological well-being
(PWB) solution more suited on Indian sample as compared to the original proposed
six-dimensional PWB model by Ryff (1989), Ryff and Keyes (1995). Four factors
that emerged on the new 20-item scale were Self-acceptance, Mastery and
Competence, Positive Relations, and Engagement and Growth. Similarly, an
alternate a four factor solution was proposed to assess Resilience (Hardiness,
Optimism, Resourcefulness and Purpose) to the original five-factor solution as
measured by Connor–Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC; Connor and Davidson
2003) in Indian setting (Singh and Xiao-nan Yu 2010). These studies suggest, us to
Scales on Positive Psychological Constructs 7
test psychometric properties of the scales especially if these are being used first time
in the selected setting.
Two new scales were recently constructed to measure the Asian concepts of peace
of mind and inner harmony. The peace of mind scale (Lee et al. 2013) possessed
good reliability and validity measures and further it was observed that Taiwanese
individuals scored higher on peace of mind than European Americans. In a more
recent study the concept of harmony was measured through a harmony in life scale
that emphasizes on psychological balance and flexibility in life. The scale possesses
good reliability, validity, and compliments satisfaction with life scale in forming a
more holistic understanding of subjective well-being, (Daukantaite et al. 2015).
Scales Confirmed Their Factor Structure
The other way of using established scales in new cultures is by first testing their
validity and if the proposed original model is confirmed, the appropriate translation
of the measure can be considered so as to render the tool accessible for native
language speakers of the given culture. On this front, several positive psychology
measures have been successfully validated in Indian setting. That is similar factor
solution was arrived at, confirming the original existing factor structure in Indian
setting after thorough statistical analysis and thereafter have been translated in
Hindi. There are various scales which have replicated their original factor solution
such as Adolescent Resilience Scale (Oshio et al. 2002), The Flourishing Scale
(Diener et al. 2010), Brief Multidimensional Student’s Life Satisfaction Scale
(BMSLSS; Seligson et al. 2003) were translated in Hindi and their factor structure
too was confirmed (Singh 2014). Validation of scales in Hindi has its significance
as 41 % of population speaks Hindi in India (Census 2011). Furthermore, the scales
were confirmed to the original factor structure such as Positive and Negative Affect
Schedule’s model (PANAS; Watson et al. 1988; Pandey and Srivastava 2008;
Singh et al. 2013a), WHO Quality of Life-Brief scale (WHOQOL-BREF;
Skevington et al. 2004) (Singh and Junnarkar 2014), Depression, Anxiety, Stress
Scale-21 items (DASS-21, Lovibond and Lovibond 1995) (Singh et al. 2015) and
Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS, Diener et al. 1985) (Singh et al. 2013). The
Scale of Positive and Negative Experiences (SPANE) (Diener et al. 2010) was
found to be satisfactory when translated into Hindi (Mishra 2015) and confirmed in
adolescents and working adults (Singh et al. 2016b).
Personal Well-Being Index-School Children (PWI-SC) inventory developed by
Cummins and Lau (2005) also demonstrated good fit for the proposed original
model in India (Singh et al. 2015d). Mental Health Continuum—Short Form
(MHC-SF; Keyes 2005) when assessed in India also indicated original factor
solution acceptable (Singh 2014; Consistent to the original study of Meaning in
Life Questionnaire (MLQ; Steger et al. 2006; Singh 2010) a two-factor solution
emerged using the Hindi translated version accounting for 56.42 % of total variance
and the CFA was observed as a good fit in Indian setting (Singh et al. 2016b). This
category strengthens rigorous research findings by reliable and valid scales.
Scales Developed on Indian Constructs
Assessment of Indian constructs may contribute to better understanding of

well-being. Some of these are described in this section. According to the Yoga
Philosophy, one can pervade these mental planes by practicing eight steps called the
Ashtanga Yoga. This concept has been scientifically measured through a recent
scale to measure Ashtanga Yoga with adequate alpha reliability of 0.88 (Raina and
Singh 2015). It constitutes of seven factors in accordance with the theoretical
conceptualization given in (Patanjali Yogasutra, 2.29). Namley, Yama Scale:
Niyama Scale, Asana subscale, Pranayama subscale, Pratyahaar subscale: VI
Dharana subscale: VII Dhyaan subscale. Theoretically, the Samadhi is understood
as the goal of Yoga or achievement of Yoga and both mean spiritual absorption
which is understood as parallel to fully functioning person in Psychology (Raina
and Singh 2015). Another 22 items scale has been developed to assess Anasakti
(non-attachment) broken down into six subscales: Outcome Vulnerability, Faith in
God, Empathy, Frustration Tolerance, Effort Orientation and Emotional Equipoise;
explaining 50.79 % of variance with α = 0.70 (Singh and Raina 2015).
A 60-item questionnaire assessing Prakriti as in Auyrvedic literature corre-
sponding to tri doshas: Vaata, Pitta, and Kapha have also been developed
(Antonella et al. 2015). The Vedic Personality Inventory (VPI; Wolf 1998) is the
most extensively researched and validated psychological assessment tool based on
the three Gunas: Sattva, Rajas and Tamas consisting of 56 items. Shilpa and
Murthy (2012) developed another Mysore Tri-guna scale standardized on Indian
population. In India, Vikaras or vices are documented by several religious and
moral discourses, namely: Kama (lust), Krodha (anger), Lobha (greed), Moha
(attachment), etc, (Sharma and Singh 2016) constructed 37 items Vikaras scales
that measures the seven dimensions: Aantrik Krodha/Internalized Anger, Moha/
Attachment/Delusion, Pratyaksh Krodha/Externalized Anger, Lobha/Greed,
Ahankara/Pride, Kama/Lust and Tamas/Apathy.
A scale to measure Sat (Truthfulness), Chit (consciousness), Ananda (blissful-
ness) and Antahshakti (inner strength) was also constructed (Singh et al. 2013b).
The new Sat-Chit-Ananda measure correlated as hypothesized theoretically with all
the measures. The results showed that the newly developed scale was a valid and
reliable measure of Sat-Chit-Ananda. This study is the original and first attempt to
develop a psychometric scale on Sat-Chit-Ananda. The scale was reconfirmed in
another study (Singh et al. 2015c).
Scales on Positive Psychological Constructs 9
Despite having many scales that are developed and validated for Indian popu-
lation, keeping in purview the vast diversity, there is still a need to revalidate these
scales even though they have been constructed after following rigorous psycho-
metric scale development methods.
Positive Interventions
Positive Psychology is the study of human flourishing. Its challenges lies in the
need to shift the focus from individual happiness to group level well-being as an
intervention outcome; giving more focus on contextual factors as relating to
intervention and by the need to better blending research information
(Biswas-Diener et al. 2011). Focus in PP has recently been also directed towards
flourishing communities and societies. The science of happiness is incomplete
without the understanding of interventions that enhance well-being of individuals
and groups. In intervention studies, well-being is commonly defined and measured
from a subjective well-being approach. In this perspective, well-being is a sum of
positive evaluations of one’s life (cognitive) and frequent experiences of positive
emotions and infrequent experiences of negative emotions (affective) (Diener
2000). Positive interventions are ‘‘treatment methods or intentional activities aimed
at cultivating positive feelings, positive behaviors, or positive cognitions’’ (Sin and
Lyubomirsky 2009, p. 467). Several existing meta-analyses on interventions within
positive psychology summarize positive outcomes of these interventions (Bolier
et al. 2013; Sin and Lyubomirsky 2009). Additionally, alternate techniques could be
by the way utilizing of enhancing the existing well-being indigenous strategies such
as Yoga, Meditation or existing religious practices like Satsang (Singing religious
folk songs in a group) to enhance well-being in Indian settings. Efficacy of dis-
seminating to positive intervention to wide range of English educated and computer
savvy adults through web based interventions have been documented (Ritterband
et al. 2003). On similar lines, a web based positive intervention intertwined with
specific well-being variables was examined on Indian population (Choubisa
and Singh 2011) that yielded promising results.
The philosophy of yoga has been also inculcated in the practice of psy-
chotherapy in India (Neki 1975; Venkoba 1978). Several studies conducted in East
or West, document positive effect of Yoga as a practice and in enhancing subjective
well-being (Ross and Thomas 2010; Malathi et al. 2000; Sharma et al. 2008) along
with reduction in mental disorders (Jadhav and Havalappanavar 2009; Varambally
et al. 2012) in improving the quality of life and the treatment of number of psy-
chiatric and psychosomatic disorders (Vahia et al. 1973) and its enhancing influ-
ence on emotions (Narasimhan et al. 2011) along with cognitive variables
(Patwardhan 2008).
Spiritual component in well-being enabling studies have been an imperative part
in Indian literature. Several studies document the efficacy of spiritual based life
style interventional programs in terms of increasing sense of purpose in life and a
need to achieve a higher state of consciousness (Mohan et al. 2004). Similarly,

mental health of children and adolescents has been established using spiritual
values and positive mental health framework (Vohra, 2006). Further, role of
vipasana in enhancing well-being indicators have also been documented (Purohit
and Sudha 1999). Meditation has also been evaluated as a powerful tool in
enhancing well-being measures through various spiritual groups and missionaries
such as Bhramkumaris and Hare Ram Hare Krishna and through several empirical
studies that have highlighted the positive impact of effects of transcendental
meditation (Sridevi and Rao 1998); residential Preksha meditation program on
emotional intelligence (Singhvi and Puri 2008) and on peace (Khubalkar and
Maharaj 2009).
Positive psychologists too have used existing models to assess the change in
well-being levels of Indians. Sachar et al. (2011) investigated the impact of Soka
Gakkai International’s (SGI) Buddhist practice, on psychological well-being
(PWB) and some other factors (well-being index, general psychological health,
gratitude and wisdom) of positive psychology. The results revealed that practitioners
scored significantly higher than the non-practitioners on all the constructs of positive
psychology. Another study (Dangi and Singh 2011) measured the PWB of married
migrant women by formulating and testing the effectiveness of a psychosocial and
cultural specific intervention module delivered to enhance the well-being of married
migrant women population in Haryana villages. Post intervention it was observed by
researchers that participants started enjoying daily life activities and became more
optimistic toward life after experiencing intervention. Singh et al. (2013) have
demonstrated the effectiveness of Satsang as an existing strategy to enhance
well-being of rural women. Similarly, (Singh et al. 2016c) through a field experiment
demonstrated that participants who are followers of a spiritual or religious group
possessed significantly better well-being, quality of life and physical health than the
non-followers. Another research argues that how folk songs (bhajan) communicate
spiritual messages during satsang (Singh et al. 2016d).
Multiplying benefits of music therapy in a culturally sensitive indigenous pos-
itive intervention, some small message driven songs may be designed (lok geet) as
they rapidly spread in society, being sung during cultural occasions such as
childbirth, marriages, and various festivals. Singing of these songs (lok geet) and
broadcast in the locality to be reinforced. It was believed that this intervention
would have twofold benefits: firstly, working as music therapy being unconditional
social setting and secondly owing to the composition of messages comprised in
folksongs will automatically travel within the society (Singh 2009). Additionally, in
a systematic review of three regional studies conducted in rural India, demonstrated
this culturally sensitive practice denoted a satsang to be robust in enhancing sub-
jective well-being of rural women (Singh et al. 2014).
These trends, combined, highlight towards the bridging of the gap between
Western and Eastern approaches to well-being. Cross-cultural studies interestingly
delineate and unite the cultural differences at the same time. Moreover, according to
Gockel (2004), globalization and the growing diversity of the workforce have
popularized Eastern philosophies and spiritual practices.
Future Recommendations 11
Future Recommendations
As researchers we need to understand all applied psychology constructs and then

decide upon the approach we would want to follow. Either one can choose
downwards or the upwards approach to study the positive psychology constructs.
Indian psychologists also need to understand all aspects of well-being and positive
psychology constructs in Indian context. This would enable us to plan intervention
programs so that we can flourish as communities and empower people by facili-
tating healthy practices. Furthermore, a team effort by different professionals such
as mental health workers, social workers, physiotherapists, psychologists, and
medical professionals can work together towards flourishing communities.
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Chapter 2
Norms for Test Construction
Abstract In the subsequent chapters, different scales have been developed and
validated on Indian population. The current chapter aims to give an overview of
various norms that were followed while constructing the scales. In literature, several
methods for scale development and validation exist however, in this chapter only
those methods are discussed more, which have been used in the later chapters. The
current chapter gives an overview of definition of psychological test, steps of test
construction, norms for sample size, preliminary data analysis, exploratory factor
analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, etc.

Keywords Psychological test Test construction Norms Preliminary data

analysis Exploratory factor analysis Confirmatory factor analysis
Introduction
What Is a Psychological Test?
Psychological test is a set of objective and standardized self-report questions whose

responses are then scored and aggregated to attain a composite score (Zumbo et al.
2002). The main components of a psychological test are (i) series statements to
which an participant responds and (ii) a composite score that arises from scoring of
statements that can be obtained either as binary scores that are dichotomous in
nature or on a Likert type scale with grading statements, for example five points
such as strongly agree to strongly disagree. The items in a test are indicators of the
phenomenon under study and hence a composite score is also an indicator of the
phenomenon and not the phenomenon itself (Zumbo et al. 2002).
© Springer India 2016 17

K. Singh et al., Measures of Positive Psychology,
DOI 10.1007/978-81-322-3631-3_2
18 2 Norms for Test Construction
Test Construction
Psychological tests are often subject-centered measurements and follow certain

strict guidelines for construction, administration, scoring and interpretation. The
main goal of developing a new scale is to create a valid and reliable measure of an
existing construct. The following steps are followed during construction of a test
(Crocker and Algina 1986):
1. Identification of primary purpose for which the test scores will be used
2. Identify behaviors that represent the construct or define the domain
3. Prepare a set of test specification, delineating the proportion of items that
should focus on each type of behavior identified in step 2
4. Construct an initial pool of items
5. Review of items
6. Pilot test of the revised items
7. Modification of items (if any from the pilot study)
8. Field test the items on a large sample representative of the examinee population
for whom the test is intended
9. Determine statistical properties of item scores and when appropriate, elimina-
tion of items that do not meet pre-established criteria
10. Design and conduct reliability and validity studies for the final form of the test
11. Develop guidelines for administration, scoring, and interpretation of test scores
(Matlock-Hetzel 1997).
In the forthcoming chapters on positive psychology scales, the above guidelines
were followed. An in-depth and exhaustive literature review was undertaken with
respect to test construction and validation of each construct. Based on literature, an
exhaustive list of domains was prepared followed by item pool generation under
each domain. Then the content validity of the pooled items was established with the
help of five experts who held doctoral degrees in Psychology and were well versed
with scale construction. They independently reviewed the items in the context of
their clarity, readability level and their suitability for the purpose on a four point
rating scale with 1 as least relevant to 4 as most relevant. The items that were rated
by all experts as relevant (3) or most relevant (4) were retained. The remaining
items were deleted. After content validity, data were collected and then scrutinized
for item statistical properties. At this stage too few items wherever required were
deleted (Visser et al. 2000; Steger et al. 2006).
Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was employed with an aim to reduce the
number of items and retain most relevant items only. Post EFA, data were collected
again on a different set of sample. The second set of data were split into one-third
and two-third based on recommended methodologies (Guadagnoli and Velicer
1988; MacCallum et al. 1996). On one-third data, EFA was employed whereas on
two-third data confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was employed. The confirmed
factor validation structure resulted in the final list of domains and items.
Introduction 19
For example, construction of resilience scale was undertaken after exhaustive

literature review of various established resilience scales such as The Adolescent
Resilience Scale (ARS, Oshio et al. 2003), Resilience Scale for Adults (RSA,
Friborg et al. 2003), Connor-Davidson Rating Scale (CD-RISC, Connor and
Davidson 2003), Brief Resilience Scale (BRS, Smith et al. 2008), The Resilience
Scale (RS, Wagnild and Young 1993), Dispositional Resilience Scale Revised 15
(DRS-R15, Bartone et al. 1989) and so on. The existing scales were reviewed for
their factor structure consistency and validity and internal consistency. Later, item
pool was generated by developing new items and items from existing scales which
were subjected to content validity. The pooled items were rated by subject experts
on parameters of relevance, cultural fairness, etc. According to the reviewer’s
suggestions during content validity, some more new items that were culturally
relevant were added. Data were collected on the exhaustive list of items and later
subjected to item analysis and EFA with an aim to reduce items and explore factor
structure. This was followed by data collection on retained item list in the next
phase and once again items analysis; EFA as well as CFA were employed. The
confirmed factor structure items were then translated into Hindi and the CFA was
employed to confirm the factor validation on Hindi version. Same procedure was
followed for all constructs of interest in this book.
It is observed that once established scales show generally acceptable norms
during revalidation except factor solution. Often researchers develop a pool of test
items from existing scales and modify a few items. However, at times the scales
lack rigorous validation process which has become the call of the hour in test
construction. EFA and CFA are the cynosure of test validation. Almost all
researchers use these techniques for analysis. However, several problems arise with
using and reporting these techniques. It is necessary to focus on few parameters
such as creation of item pool, basic principles of item writing, choice of format,
sample size for validation, norms for EFA and CFA. Few other guidelines too were
followed while developing the scales in the next chapters as outlined by Clark and
Watson (1995).
Principles of Item Writing
Writing good items is a precursor to developing a good psychometric test.

A researcher needs to do a thorough literature survey before commencing item
writing (e.g., Angleitner and Wiggins 1985; Comrey 1988; Kline 1986: cited in Clark
and Watson 1995). According to Clark and Watson (1995) the language should be
unpretentious, upfront, suitable and simple in nature. The language should also be of
the reading level of target population. A researcher should avoid using trendy
expressions, idioms, other language forms that vary widely with age, ethnicity,
region, gender, and items that virtually everyone misinterprets (e.g., “Sometimes
I am better-off than at other times”) or no one (e.g., “I am always energetic”)
20 2 Norms for Test Construction
unless they are intended to assess invalid responding, avoid using complex or
double-barrelled items (Clark and Watson 1995).
In the current book chapters, utmost care was taken by authors while item
writing for the scales. All the items were evaluated by reviewers for the above
discussed precursors for good item writing. All the above mentioned points were
followed during developing items for constructs of interest in the next chapters.
Format of Items
The test developer also has to choose the format in which the items would be
written. The two dominant response formats are dichotomous responding (e.g.,
true–false and yes–no) and Likert type rating scales with three or more options.
Checklists, forced-choice, and visual analogy measures also have been used over
the years, but for various reasons are not in favor (Clark and Watson 1995).
In the forthcoming chapters, the scales were designed as five point Likert type
rating scales. The authors decided this format for construction based on literature
review of the constructs and advantages of Likert type of scale.
The central goal of this stage is to represent thoroughly all content that is
potentially relevant to the target construct. Loevinger (1957) stated that “The items
of the pool should be chosen so as to sample all possible contents which might
comprise the putative trait according to all known alternative theories of the trait”
(p. 659). The two key propositions of Loevinger (1957) statement are (a) the initial
pool of items should be extensive and more widespread than the theoretical view of
the target construct and (b) should include content that ultimately will be shown to
be tangential or even unrelated to the core construct. The aim should be that the
resultant psychometric analyses can identify weak, unrelated items that should be
dropped (Watson 2012) from the emerging scale. While creating an item pool
inclusiveness is always better than excluding items related to any aspect of the
construct (Clark and Watson 1995; Watson 2012).
It is also important that the scale developer must include an adequate sample of
items within each of the major content areas comprising the broadly conceptualized
domain (Clark and Watson 1995; Watson 2012). If one fails to do so then there is a
chance of underrepresentation of items in the final scale. To ensure that each
important aspect of the construct is assessed adequately, it is recommended that
formal subscales be created to assess each major content area (Watson 2012).
Loevinger (1957) recommended that the proportion of items dedicated to each
content area should be proportional to the importance of that aspect in the target
construct (Clark and Watson 1995).
Most researchers employ deductive method for scale construction. Good scale
construction process involves several periods of item writing and conceptual and
psychometric analysis (de Barros 2014). The psychometric analyses sharpen the
understanding of the nature and structure of the target domain and also aid to
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he'd told her who he was no woman's voice could have taken on
more graciousness and charm.
Informal, too. Delightfully ... no, intimate wasn't too presumptuous a
word. There had been an unmistakable undercurrent of intimacy in
her voice, as if she'd known him for a long time and they shared a
secret ... a very precious kind of secret she preferred not to talk
about within the four walls of a cold, briskly efficient magazine office.
It had meant, of course, that she was suggesting that they have
lunch together, but before he could think of just the right words she
herself had done the inviting. She had picked the cafe and the time
—"About two ... I'm afraid it has to be a little late...."—and now, in
about five more minutes, he would be there.
It was a very warm day and the air felt almost solid enough to cut
with a knife. But the high humidity didn't bother him, because a
breeze fragrant with springtime scents was blowing through the cab,
even though the driver and no one on the streets—no one anywhere
except himself—seemed to be aware of it.
When the cab drew into the curb in front of the cafe he added a tip to
the fare that dispelled most of the driver's gloom. He got out, walked
into the cafe as if he'd just decided while taking a stroll that the place
looked all right, and so why should he stop to examine the three-
dollar-minimum luncheon menu pasted to the window? He had an
almost irrepressible impulse to tip the uniformed doorman too, just
for the hell of it.
He saw and recognized her quickly enough, because she'd told him
what kind of hat she'd be wearing and there was only one woman in
the place that went with the kind of voice he'd heard on the phone.
It came as a distinct shock to him to discover that she wasn't alone.
There was a man seated opposite her at the small table she'd
chosen—or he had chosen for her—in a softly-lit recess on the left
side of the cafe, about half-way to the back.
He disliked the man straight off, without precisely knowing why. He
was about forty-five, with slightly graying hair cut rather short, a
bland, almost mild-mannered way of smiling and nodding as he
talked, and features which were distinctly on the handsome side. He
was wearing a tropical worsted suit of expensive weave—the kind of
suit you couldn't purchase readymade anywhere for less than a
hundred dollars and you knew it was custom-tailored. Three hundred
dollars would probably have been a more likely estimate of what the
suit had set the man back. He wore a small red carnation in his
buttonhole which the July heat had not yet succeeded in wilting.
Ralph became aware suddenly that she had raised her eyes and
recognized him. But before he could respond with a nod and smile
and draw closer to the table all of the blandness went out of her
companion's face. His face hardened and an angry glint came into
his eyes. He arose from the table, so angrily and abruptly that he
overturned the chair he'd been sitting in.
What he did then was totally outrageous, unheard of. He leaned
across the table and slapped Helen Lathrup on the right cheek,
putting such force into the blow that the smack was audible to
everyone in the cafe.
There was complete silence for an instant; no one moved or spoke.
Helen Lathrup sat rigid, an ugly redness suffusing the right side of
her face from temple to throat.
Then a woman gasped and a man muttered: "Why doesn't
somebody kill the bastard?"
It was exactly what Ralph felt like doing and he made no attempt to
control the impulse.
Helen Lathrup's escort had straightened on delivering the blow and
was just starting to swing about when Ralph reached him, caught
hold of his right arm, making the turn complete, and sent his fist
crashing into the man's face.
It was a nose-breaking kind of blow, aimed directly at the bastard's—
he was certainly that!—nose and mouth and not at his jaw. Ralph
didn't just want to drop him to the floor. He wanted to send him to the
hospital.
He thought he heard a cartilage crunch and splinter, but he couldn't
be sure.
The man made no attempt to fight back, to defend himself in any
way. However much he may have wanted to do so, he was clearly
incapable of it.
The blow had stunned him. He swayed for the barest instant, back
and forth like a marionette on a wire that had gone suddenly slack,
and then his knees gave way, and he crashed to the floor and rolled
over on his face.
Ralph stood very still for an instant staring down at him, almost
equally stunned but feeling a hot surge of triumph pulsing upward
through his chest, rising to his brain, half-intoxicating him.
He was kneeling on the floor at the bastard's side, turning him over,
looking with satisfaction at the thin trickle of blood that was running
from his mouth, when he felt the tugging.
Helen Lathrup was bending over also, close to Ralph, her breath hot
on his face, her fingers biting into his arm, as if she knew that only
pain could bring him quickly to his senses.
"We must leave," she breathed. "We must. Do you hear what I'm
saying? I'm known here—they won't try to stop us. And he won't
lodge a complaint. I'm sure of that. John Darby wouldn't dare—"
He raised his eyes and saw that she was deathly pale, that even the
redness, where the vicious ugly bastard had slapped her, was
starting to recede. He could see that it had left a slight welt, and all of
his fury returned again for an instant, so that he could scarcely
breathe.
She was trembling now and there was a pleading urgency in her
eyes. "Hurry, before they feel they'd better send for the police, if only
to protect themselves. We don't know how badly he's been hurt and
it will take them a minute to find out. They won't try to stop us, I tell
you, if we go right now."
In one way, it was like a nightmare that had come upon him in broad
daylight, been thrust upon him unexpectedly when he had thought
himself fully awake. And in another way, it was an intoxicating kind of
trance, filled with sound and fury, but a trance from which he had no
desire to escape.
Sitting in a cab at her side, with the sound and the fury behind him, it
seemed suddenly that he was in another dimension of time and
space, where nothing but miracles could take place. The fact that
she was trembling still, her very agitation, seemed to make her more
desirable, for it awoke in him protective instincts along with a feeling
of adoration.
He had never thought that any woman could be quite so beautiful.
He had never dared to hope that he would find himself so intimately
involved with a famous editor who was also the most beautiful
woman he had ever seen.
For he had become intimately involved with her. He had fought
another man in a very primitive way as her champion and defender,
and it was impossible not to think of that as intimacy. It had brought
him as close to her, if only for a moment, as a lover's embrace would
have done.
Was not that kind of violence one pathway to intimacy? A murderer
was intimate with his victim in a quite terrible way, even when
physical love-making was completely absent. This was not that kind
of intimacy. But in defending her and trying his best in a moment of
savage rage to injure the man who had struck her, hadn't he come
close to her in much the same primitively intimate way? The only
difference was—he hadn't come close to her with the intention of
doing her harm. But the same savage currents had flowed for an
instant between them, bringing them very close.
She was sitting so close to him that he could feel the warmth and
yielding softness of her body through her thin summer clothes—a
softness that was also a firmness, a roundness—and his temples
began to pound, and a trip-hammer started up in his loins.
He glanced at her quickly and saw that her eyes were shining in a
very strange way. A wild kind of excitement seemed to be stirring in
her.
It should have given him warning, should have given him pause. It
should have at least flashed across his mind that a woman can
become wildly excited in the most primitive of all ways—by just the
sight of two men fighting over her, willing and eager to kill for her.
And even if one of the two had just struck her brutally and no longer
desired her, just the fight alone....
But he did not realize that for many days.
For a fortnight they were together constantly, and his admiration for
her had become like a singing flame, his every instinct had
whispered that he had found the one perfect woman at last, and that
nothing could mar for him the perfection of her body when she came,
slender and white and trembling a little, into his arms.
It had not taken him long to discover that wherever Helen Lathrup
went—people whispered that she went everywhere, but never in his
presence had one of those whispers been heard—she stood out,
was the center of all eyes. In a crowd, at concerts and recitals, in
smoke-filled Beatnik-patronized expresso restaurants in the Village,
on the exclusive, walled-off beaches of fashionable summer resorts
there was and could be only one Helen Lathrup.
And when the blow finally came and she refused even to speak to
him on the phone, when he surrendered all of his masculine pride
and allowed himself to become defenseless and completely at her
mercy, he had not at first completely despaired, or turned against her
like some sick and humiliated dog backed into a corner and forced to
bite at last.
He had gone on begging for her favors, for one more dinner date,
one more hour alone with her, one last opportunity, however brief, to
prove to her that their quarrels had been needless, and he would find
a way to please her still.
He had gone on pleading even when he could no longer deceive
himself about her. Tormenting him gave her pleasure and she was
not only the most beautiful but the cruelest woman he had ever
known.
It was only when she attacked him where he was most vulnerable ...
in his work ... it was only when she sneered at the novel she had
once praised and returned it to him with blue-pencilings that made
him no longer want to go on living ... it was only then that he decided
that he could endure no more, and that only her death would set him
free.
Chapter V
Lieutenant of Detectives Joseph Fenton of Homicide West was
remembering some of the others. The tragic and unusual cases, the
sensational ones, the kind that stayed in the headlines for weeks and
months and increased the circulation of newspapers from coast to
coast by hundreds of millions of copies.
He sat staring down at his best lead so far, the only lead he could
really sink his teeth into, wishing to hell he didn't have to remember.
He drummed with his fingers on the desktop and hunched his
shoulders a little. He was making a big mistake and he knew it. It
was always a mistake to think back across the years when he had a
job to do that called for a maximum of effort and concentration. It
made him feel guilty and took the edge off his keenness. It was the
worst kind of mistake but he kept on making it, because murder was
always a shock to him.
Every time he saw a beautiful white body stretched out cold on a
mortuary slab he remembered how he'd fainted at the sight of the
first one, twenty-five years in the past when he'd been a young
rookie. Just fallen to the floor and passed out, the way medical
students sometimes do when they first have to dissect a cadaver—
the organs are put in separate trays, each neatly labeled—and even
experienced, case-hardened surgeons when an operation is
especially sanguinary ... like on the human eye, for instance. He'd
read that somewhere, and he didn't doubt it, not for a moment.
Well ... there was no danger of that happening to him now. He'd seen
too many of the really gruesome ones, and the badly marked up
ones, and the "floaters" with no fingerprints left to identify them by,
every vestige of flesh dissolved away by weeks in the water, and ...
the beautiful unmarked ones who were in some respects the most
tragic of all.
He had watched many of them carried away in baskets, feeling
angry and resentful but forcing himself to remain calm, refusing to let
the photographers and print men suspect that he was dying himself
a little inwardly, and had kept right on dying, inch by slow inch,
across the years. His hair was white now and his face a little more
heavily lined than it should have been, but otherwise it didn't show
on the surface.
In some of them he had sensed a strange kind of peace—like a hand
reaching out to touch him from beyond the grave; cool, steady, no
longer feverish. But over most of them there still seemed to hover a
penumbra of violence, a crying out for vengeance and retribution, a
protest that even death could not wholly silence.
There was no need for him to remind himself that the Lathrup case
was one of the explosively violent ones, with that strange residual
violence remaining, making itself felt, every time his thoughts
returned to it. Not only in the magazine office itself, with her
loveliness only slightly marred by the small, dark hole in her temple
—the wound had bled profusely, but the blood had not spread over
her features—but later, when the body had been lifted into a sheet,
and removed from the office, and the last flash-bulb had gone off
and he'd been left alone with the medical examiner. He had been
just the same as being completely alone, because Hunter had
completed his preliminary examination, and his thoughts were back
in a smoke-filled room where a poker game was in progress. To
Hunter it had been no more than a routine interruption, breaking in
on a winning hand and making him so morose and ill-tempered that
Fenton, who had always found him a hard man to deal with, had shut
up after asking him only two questions.
The residual violence was there, all right, a something in the room
that seemed to point an accusing finger, to demand that justice be
not too long delayed, to threaten reprisals if the vanished killer were
not relentlessly tracked down and made to answer for his crime. It
was a feeling Fenton had—nothing more. The threat of reprisal was
not directed at him, but at the nebulous entity known as society. But
it was always there, always present, a demand for retribution from
beyond the grave, a screaming and a pleading, an insistence that
justice be done or all hell would yawn for someone.
All right, it was only something he imagined, peculiar to him alone.
But he knew from experience that it was unwise to take even
imagined horrors lightly. They were part of a man's thinking, his inner
life, his individuality. It was a mistake to take them too seriously, but
just as bad to brush them aside as of no importance.
All right, the violence had been there, but in another way the office
had seemed the opposite of crepe-somber. It had seemed still filled
with her living presence, as if she were still striding back and forth
from her desk to the window, or sitting at her desk impatiently talking
into the intercom.
That she had been a strong-willed, very determined woman despite
her aspect of pulse-stirring femininity he'd strongly suspected the
instant he'd entered the office with its costly but severely functional
furnishings. The choice of furnishings had quite obviously not been
influenced in any way by feminine whims and extravagances. No
woman, surely, would have really liked such severity in the décor
surrounding her. But a woman determined to keep her professional
and private lives in separate compartments might well have made
such a choice deliberately and taken pride in her ability to impose a
severe discipline upon herself.
The conclusion he'd drawn, the kind of woman he'd pictured her as
being, hadn't been based on anything very solid. It had been a mere
hunch at first, a gathering together of intangibles. But the few
questions he'd had an opportunity to ask the editorial staff
immediately on his arrival had completely confirmed it. She'd been a
considerable woman, and had ruffled a great deal of fur the wrong
way, apparently, and there had probably been some baring of claws.
Well ... all right. The Lathrup slaying was one of the sensational
ones. It would arouse widespread indignation if it were not solved
quickly and even more indignation if it remained unsolved for the
next fifty years, as well it might. If the murderer was caught and
stood trial—the newspapers would have no reason to complain and
it would enrich a great many other people in a dozen or more ways,
perhaps even the murderer himself if he wrote the story of his life for
a major news syndicate the week before he went to the chair.
He couldn't take it with him—but what the hell. There'd be the thrill of
making all that money overnight. Or was the stipulation that a
murderer couldn't profit from his crime a bugaboo in that department
too? Thirty years on the Force, and he still didn't know for sure.
Well ... there was nothing to be gained by shaking his head and
dwelling with anger and pity on the tragic circumstances of a crime
he could have done nothing to prevent. Her beauty, so cruelly hidden
now from all but the eyes of a mortician—there would be a brief
moment when it would be again on view—every aspect of her
personal life; the way she'd walked and talked and held herself, her
wardrobe, her personal likes and dislikes, the friends she'd made,
the enemies who did not think too highly of her, her jewels, her
rumored affairs, her choice of restaurants, had all become the
emotional property of the public.
Not too short a life perhaps. But to die at thirty-six always meant ...
many of the great moments, the moments of complete fulfillment and
happiness, however brief, which every human being born into the
world had a right to look forward to, would never be experienced at
all. A cruel and tragic outrage had been perpetrated upon her, cutting
off her life in mid-stream.
That the outrage could be attributed to the inscrutable workings of
Fate or Destiny or whatever you cared to call the big, continuously
revolving wheel ... that it struck down thousands of women just as
beautiful every day all over the world ... that illness and accidents
took a far more grievous toll ... did not diminish by one whit the
tragedy of it. And when it was brought about by a deliberate act of
willful criminal violence it had a special quality which made it seem a
hundred times more cruel and unjust.
Fenton looked down at the three letters, spread fanwise on the desk
before him. Each was neatly typewritten, neatly creased and just as
neatly signed in a firm, precise hand. Michael Willard.
An article writer, and a good one, if the staff at Eaton-Lathrup were
right about him and there was no reason to doubt their competence.
A free-lance article writer who had quarreled violently with Helen
Lathrup three weeks before her death. Fenton had found the letters
in the slain woman's desk.
Each was a hot-tempered letter and one was extremely violent, not
quite threatening Lathrup with bodily harm but strongly hinting that
such harm might be visited upon her if she did not correct what the
writer claimed was a very serious mistake.
It seemed incredible to Fenton that anyone, no matter how enraged,
would send a prominent editor such threats and sign the letters with
his own name.
The man had practically started himself on a walk to the chair. And
that particularly irritated Fenton, because Willard would have to be
captured before he could complete the walk, and a three-state alert
had proved as ineffective in locating him as a fast-moving city
dragnet and three Westchester roadblocks in the vicinity of his
suburban home....
Fenton was still frowning down at the letters, the only strong lead he
had, when someone said from the doorway: "He's given himself up."
Fenton looked up quickly, annoyed, the statement not registering
immediately, as First Grade Detective John Gallison had apparently
assumed it would.
Gallison was a big man, almost as big as Fenton, and he had much
the same look about him—the look of a man aged in some ways
beyond his years, but with a curiously unlined face, and the almost
boyish aspect that seems to hover until late in life about big,
ruggedly built men with beat-up features who never take the trouble
to comb their hair.
"What is it, Gallison?" Fenton asked, and then the words themselves
penetrated, and he rose from his desk, a look of stunned disbelief in
his eyes.
"Is it Willard you're talking about?"
"Who else?" Gallison said, coming into the office and sitting down
opposite Fenton in a chair that was two sizes too small for him.
"He came in and gave himself up. He said he knew we'd found the
letters, and it would only be prolonging the agony for him to hide out
in a furnished room somewhere and live in fear until we closed in on
him. He thought of heading north into Canada, or south into Mexico,
and even of hopping a freighter to South America. That's what he
said, believe it or not. I'm practically quoting his exact words."
"Well, what made him change his mind? We've had such a tough job
tracing him he could have gotten all the way to Brazil by this time. If
you're going to tell me he was afraid the Brazilian non-extradition
policy doesn't cover murder ... skip it. I'm not in a very humorous
mood right now."
Gallison smiled slightly. "He said he just wasn't capable of it. Too
sensitive, too imaginative, too afraid of life in the buff to take it by the
horns that way. I'm still quoting him. He said he was never cut out to
be a fugitive. Anything connected with the police terrifies him. If a
Government agent should call on him about some trivial, completely
innocent matter he'd have a heart attack. He just can't take that sort
of thing. He has made a full confession. He says he killed her
because she pulled an outrageous gyp on him."
"Yes, I know," Fenton said. "It's what he claims in these letters. He
claims he wrote a series of articles for her about juvenile
delinquency, and I guess you saw the major, six-million-dollar movie
that was based on his material. The Clark Gable-Monroe sort of
thing. And now it's on TV, a two-year contract for a weekly series and
I think the sponsor is General Motors, but I'm not sure. In case you
don't know, all of that is about as big-time as you can get. It would
make practically any writer feel entitled to walk down Fifth Avenue
shoulder to shoulder with the biggest names in TV and stop for a
moment to shake the paw of the MGM lion. The lions in front of the
library would look that way to him."
"He says he didn't get a cent out of it," Gallison said. "Not one single
penny."
"That's hard to believe," Fenton said. "It seems he sold the Eaton-
Lathrup Publications all rights to the material. I haven't looked too
deeply into the technicalities involved in such transactions but I'm
pretty sure that 'all rights' means exactly what it says. If a magazine
buys material on that basis it is entitled to all of the profits accruing
from subsequent re-sales, to TV, the movies or whatever."
"Willard practically admits that," Gallison said. "In fact—"
"Wait a minute," Fenton said, a little impatiently. "Let me finish. It's
my understanding that not many of the really big magazine groups
buy all rights. There's usually a contract involved, with a stipulation in
it concerning the rights. And even when they do buy all rights they're
seldom one hundred percent legalistic about it. They'll often lean
backwards to see that the author gets a break, gets at least a slice of
the pie if the work passes into the so-called big-time. I don't know
how Lathrup felt about that or just what her policy was, of course.
But if he claims he's been gyped out of money he's entitled to in a
strictly legal sense, I don't believe he has a legal leg to stand on. Not
if he sold the group all rights, with no reservations whatever."
"That's just it," Gallison said. "That's where he claims she took
advantage of him. He says that, like plenty of other writers, he's no
businessman. You'd laugh to hear the way he's been going on about
that, if he wasn't a self-confessed murderer. Nothing a murderer
says or does is ever funny. But the way he put it would have gone
over big on a TV comic program. He claims he has no more
business sense than a two-year-old; would sign any contract that
was pushed under his nose without looking at even the large print,
let alone the fine. He claims he's—well, the term he used was 'a
commercial imbecile.' He takes a sort of pride in it. And he thought
she understood that some writers were like that—some of the
biggest names, in fact, in the writing business.
"They can't even bring themselves to glance twice at a contract. It's
not important to them, they're way off in the clouds somewhere,
figuring what their characters are going to say and do in the next
chapter."
"He could be right about that," Fenton said, sighing. "Up to a point
anyway. I've known two or three big-name mystery writers in my
time, and my wife sort of—well, collects them. Writers in general, I
mean, along with painters and musicians. It's an odd hobby for the
wife of an old police warhorse, but show me just one thing I can
really understand about women and I'll get you a lieutenancy
tomorrow, if I have to go down to Center Street myself and beg for it.
You'd be the biggest asset the Homicide Squad could possibly
have."
It was Gallison's turn to sigh. "I guess I'm the way Willard is about
contracts when it comes to understanding women," he said. "You
seem to forget I've been married myself for fifteen years. Every day
my wife is a different kind of woman. But the big difference came
between the day before and the day after I married her."
"It's usually that way," Fenton said. "You wake up and discover your
wife is a human being."
His expression sobered abruptly. "Where is Willard now? In a cell or
still under the lights. If you've got a signed confession—"
"We've got it, all right—signed, sealed and delivered."
"So you just went ahead without even consulting me, is that it? What
am I supposed to be around here—a rookie fresh from the asphalt?"
"It couldn't be helped, Lieutenant.... It all happened so fast."
"John! You're asking for trouble, boy!"
"All right then, Joe. I swear it really couldn't be helped. It all just
poured out of him, so fast we had trouble in taking it down and had
to ask him to read it over three times. We wouldn't have laid a finger
on him, anyway. You know that as well as I do."
"Sometimes I wonder. A cop can get terribly angry at times and
once, about four years ago, I saw something I deliberately shut my
eyes to, and I've never regretted it. They had this ... human animal ...
stripped to the waist in the tank room and were ... well, never mind.
He committed a brutal sex crime and when they were through with
him ... they had a full confession. I just turned on my heels and
walked out."
"We still wouldn't have laid a finger on Willard."
"I know, I know. I guess I'd better have a talk with him."
Willard was sitting alone in a cell that dwarfed him a little, despite its
narrowness, because he was both a very small and a very frail-
looking man. Fenton put his age at about forty-five, although he
could have been four of five years older.
He didn't look very much like a writer, but Fenton knew that few
writers conformed to the picture people had of them. In general, they
looked remarkably like everybody else.
Willard was about five-feet-two in his socks, and he was in them now
because both his belt and his shoes had been taken away from him.
He had thoughtful gray eyes, and rather handsome features and
there was nothing in the least aggressive-looking about him. He was
hard to picture with a gun in his hand, taking deliberate aim and
shooting a defenseless woman through the head. It was difficult
even, to think of him as a man with a violent temper who could write
threatening letters or resort to any kind of extreme physical violence,
even under the goadings of rage.
He looked up quickly when Fenton and Gallison entered the cell and
then got slowly to his feet.
Fenton frowned a little and gestured toward the cot upon which he
had been sitting.
"Sit down, please," he said. "No sense in standing. We're just going
to have a brief talk and then you can see your lawyer, if you wish.
You don't have to say a word, if you prefer to wait until he gets here.
It's my duty to tell you that, even though you've signed a confession.
Anything you may decide to tell us can be used as evidence in court,
in addition to the information in the statement you've just signed. Is
that clear to you?"
Willard nodded and sat down again on the edge of the cot. "What
does all that matter now?" he said. "I'm going to plead guilty anyway.
I killed her because—well, you don't know what kind of woman she
was, so you probably won't be able to understand how a man can be
driven to desperation—"
"I've just read the statement you made," Fenton said. "It doesn't tell
me what kind of woman she was, but it tells me a great deal about
you. I've read the letters you wrote to her as well. You seem to feel
that you've been very shabbily treated. I would like to know a little
more about that."
"What more can I say? What more can I possibly say? When a writer
who has lived most of his life on a very modest income loses at least
a hundred thousand dollars—"
"You mean ... your rightful share in what your series of articles has
brought the Eaton-Lathrup publications in cash so far? Or will bring
them within the next few months? Or merely what you believe should
be your rightful share, putting aside for the moment all legal
considerations. You signed a contract giving the concern all rights,
didn't you?"
"Yes, but she gave me to believe—"
"Just what did she give you to believe?"
"That she was prepared to be very generous about the entire matter
if the articles should make a great deal of money for the magazines.
She wouldn't hold me to the strict letter of the contract. She'd waive
the 'all rights' clause. A great many magazines do that. It's taken for
granted—"
"I see. But are you sure about that? Don't you think you should have
made sure before signing the contract, if you had any doubts at all?
There's nothing in the least unethical about a magazine group
buying all rights, you know. It's their privilege under the law."
"But she knew how impractical most writers are! She knew how—
well, yes, even infantile they can be about such things. And she
made me feel that she was my friend, that she'd never dream of
taking advantage of me in any way."
"But she didn't, if you signed a contract giving the concern all rights,
unqualifiedly, with no strings attached."
"And I still say she did! She led me on, deceived me. She—"
He was on his feet again now and some of the mildness, the
constrained look, the look that didn't make him look like a man who
might be capable of resorting to violence under stress, was gone
from his eyes.
"She led me on, I tell you. There was something about her,
something I mistook for great generosity and warmth—"
Fenton looked at him steadily for a moment, carefully weighing what
he was about to say. He asked the question in a quiet tone, but he
knew that it was emotionally charged, and strategically just the right
question to put to the man at that particular moment.
"Were you her lover, Willard?"
Willard flushed scarlet and lowered his eyes.
"Were you?"
Willard compressed his lips and said nothing, but a look of torment
had come into his eyes.
"You slept with her, didn't you, Willard?"
"Yes, damn you!" There was a look of naked agony in the frail man's
eyes now, and the words came out choked with rage.
Then, quite suddenly, he was trembling violently, clenching his fists
like a man deranged.
"Why don't you ask me if she was good in bed? Or if I was? Haven't
you a spark of decency in you? I've heard of the third degree but a
question like that is worse. Oh, damn you to hell!"
"Why, Willard? I mean—why do you feel it's such an indecent
question, a question I've no right to ask? You've confessed to a very
serious crime. You've confessed to—I'm going to use another police
term I hope won't shock your sensitive spirit too much—you've
confessed to what we call the Big One. You can't stand on the
niceties when you've taken a human life—or question the right of a
policeman, sworn to uphold the law, to ask what, under ordinary
circumstances, you might consider a damned impertinent question,
an invasion of privacy. Sensitive women, wives and mothers, have
been asked far franker questions on the witness stand. There are
times when every question must be asked and answered, no matter
how much it may anger you or make you writhe."
Perhaps, deep in Willard's nature, there was a submerged
substratum of logic ... a willingness to give ground before an
incontestable fact or an argument he could not hope to win. Fenton
knew that to be true of the more volatile types ... on some occasions,
at any rate.
Most of the anger went out of Willard's eyes and he sat down again
on the edge of the cot, and cradled his head in his arms.
Fenton took a different tack. "The statement you signed wasn't too
clear in a few respects," he said, casting a glance at Gallison that
was generously forgiving, but still a little on the withering side. "I'd
like to go over a few of the details with you. Just what happened
when you entered the office and Miss Lathrup looked up and saw
you standing there with a gun in your hand? Just what did you say to
her before you shot her—and what did she say to you? Was she
genuinely frightened from the start? It would be strange if she wasn't,
but I'd like to have you tell me more about it in your own words.
There are a few other questions I'd like to have answered. Take your
time, try to think clearly. I'm not pressuring you. It's just that we've
got to be convinced that every statement in your confession is true."
Willard looked up quickly, some of the anger sweeping back into his
eyes. "Why should you need to be convinced? Don't you sometimes
slap around poor devils who are completely innocent just to get any
kind of a confession out of them?"
"You've been reading too many paperback novels," Fenton said.
"I'm not a fiction writer," Willard said. "I haven't read a paperback
novel in five years."
"You should," Fenton said, wryly. "Some of the strongest, most
realistic writing in America today is being done in that field. But cops
get slandered in them a helluva lot. Not always, but sometimes.
Some of the writers don't seem to like cops too well. They are often
very sensitive, imaginative guys themselves and they don't like what
cops sometimes do, even when they try to be very hard-boiled and
call a spade a spade. And I won't deny that cops sometimes do step
a little over the line. But it isn't as bad as you might think. Not nearly
as bad."
"I've only your word for that."
"You may take my word for it. I've been on the force for thirty years.
You get sadists in any department of life—I'll challenge anyone to
deny that. And if an innocent man happens to get a bad break—
comes up against the wrong kind of cop—it can be very bad. You
could justify a certain degree of cop hatred in almost anyone on
other grounds. The world we live in isn't for children. If cops were
mild-mannered intellectuals, or held completely modern, psychiatric
views about crime—and the causes of crime—society in general
might be in for trouble on a day-to-day realistic basis."
"It might not do any harm at all if we gave it a try," Willard said.
"On a theoretical level there are times when I'm inclined to agree
with you," Fenton said. "But there's another part of my nature that
says there has to be a kind of binding cement to hold society
together meanwhile—I mean, until Utopia's here. Cops have to be
picked for toughness—to a certain extent. But that doesn't mean
they can't be completely fair. A lot of them lean backwards to be fair,
will be a big brother to young hoodlums if they think there's an ounce
of decency left in them and all they need is a little of that 'not being
completely rejected' feeling to give them a different slant on things.
You know what I mean. But some cops can be sadistic, mean, even
downright vicious. I would be the last to deny it."
Fenton smiled, trying his best to bring a little warmth into his words,
to get the man on the cot to trust him. "There are times when I don't
like cops myself, any better than you do. It's a very human feeling.
Could I go any further than that, considering that I'm supposed to be
just about as tough as they come in some respects, being a
Lieutenant of Detectives on the Homicide Squad?"
"What do you want to know?" Willard asked. "What do you want me
to tell you? I walked into her office and shot her dead. Isn't that all
down on the record now? Haven't I confessed to it?"
"It still needs a little filling out," Fenton said. "Suppose we start at the
beginning and just go over it all again, step by step."
A half hour later Fenton sat again at his desk, drumming with his
fingers on the big double-file spread out before him.
Gallison hadn't seated himself this time. He stood awkwardly shifting
his weight from foot to foot, and casting an occasional glance toward
the window and at the large framed photograph of an Inspector in
uniform on the opposite wall—Inspector Henry Millard, who had
been dead for twenty years. He did not seem to want continuously to
meet and hold Fenton's level, almost accusing gaze.
"He didn't do it," Fenton said. "I knew that the instant I started
questioning him, but I had to make sure, beyond the faintest
possibility of a doubt. All of the things he told me—and at least one-
third of the details in his signed confession—are completely wide of
the mark. He wasn't there, didn't shoot her, couldn't even tell me how
she'd looked in falling fifteen seconds after the shot was fired. How
she must have looked, I mean, for her head and shoulders to strike
the desk the way they did, upsetting an ashtray, and to be consistent
with the position she was in when Miss Prentiss found her. And the
body wasn't moved—not a half-inch—until we arrived.
"Other things—a dozen, at least. I had the impression he wasn't
even sure just where the bullet had entered her head. Oh, a
murderer can be mistaken about many things, way off in some
respects. But not quite that far off. Not nearly that far off, in fact,
when he's studied everything published in the papers about the
case, and has been in that office many times. There were details we
didn't tell the reporters, details he couldn't possibly have known and
he was completely wrong about all of them, with one or two
exceptions. And that only strengthens the case against him—the
very damaging evidence which proves that he wasn't the killer and
couldn't possibly have been."
Fenton nodded, his fingers still tapping on the file. "You'd naturally
expect him to be right about one or two things, even if they didn't
appear in the papers. He's no dumb-bell. He couldn't have written
those juvenile delinquency articles and foster-fathered a major movie
if he was. He'd naturally be pretty good at guessing games. It's
always the exceptions which strengthen, lend real weight, to that
kind of rule."
Fenton cleared his throat. "It's like in medicine. You take a very rare,
unusual kind of disease. Say there are twenty symptoms which are
very diagnostic of that particular disease. But one of them only
occurs in one case of the disease out of a hundred. And the patient
has that one symptom, along with the others. Now ... let's say that in
the whole United States, in the course of the year, only about two
hundred people die of that rare disease.
"Don't you see what I'm driving at Gallison—or do you? It would have
to mean that only about two people die from that disease with that
particular symptom attached to it every year out of a nation of a
hundred and seventy-five million people. According to the law of
averages, how likely would the patient be to have the disease? The
very symptom which does sometimes occur in connection with the
disease—but rarely—which you might think would strengthen the
diagnosis, actually helps to weaken it, to make it so unlikely as to
practically eliminate the possibility that the patient could have it."
"So it's medicine he's talking about now," Gallison said, unable to
keep a slight trace of acidity out of his voice, but wishing, almost
instantly, that he hadn't spoken at all.
"I only used that as an example," Fenton said, his voice sharpening
slightly. "But it spells the difference between a crack medical
diagnostician and a bad one. It's always those little, subtle
intangibles you have to take into consideration. And that's really just
another way of saying you have to have imagination to be either a
good cop or a good doctor."
A slightly wistful look came into Fenton's eyes. "I sometimes wish I'd
taken up medicine. Healing people is much better than wallowing in
the kind of ugly—Oh, well, skip it."
"But you can't clear a self-confessed murderer completely on that
basis alone," Gallison protested. "His confession could be off in a
hundred ways, and he could still be guilty. At least ... it would remain
a possibility. You practically just admitted that yourself. If we had
other evidence ... and we do have a little additional evidence ... we
could still take it before a jury."
"You mean the DA could," Fenton said, his voice becoming tinged
with the kind of impatience a grammar-school teacher might have
displayed toward a pupil who had just pulled a boner in geography.
"What are you trying to do—add to our burdens? The DA could take
it before a jury, all right. But he'd get his ears pinned so far back that
the next time he ran for election it would be as a dog-catcher. Did
you ever hear of an alibi, Gallison? Or is that too involved a point of
law for you?"
Lieutenant Fenton sighed heavily and his voice softened a little.
"Sorry, Gallison. That was a lousy thing for me to say. But at least
you know that I wasn't pulling rank on you. It's something I've never
done or never will do—unless you come in here and toss your badge
on the desk and I have to hand it back to you and tell you to go
through channels."
"Okay, Joe. I understand. Don't let it worry you."
"A policeman shouldn't have nerves, I guess. But things have been
moving a little too fast for me in this case."
"Just how good is his alibi?" Gallison asked.
"Iron-plated," Fenton said. "And of course it isn't his alibi in a strict
sense, because he didn't even present it to us. It's an alibi we'll have
to force him to accept as absolute proof that he couldn't have done
it, because we want him to walk out of here without hallucinating
when we release him. Otherwise someone might get the idea that
this is a side wing of Bellevue. We've done our best so far to create
that impression anyway."
"You mean—you think he may be ... a psycho?"
"Yes—and no," Fenton said.
"That's sure enlightening. Gets right back to what you just said about
medical diagnosis. Maybe you should have been a psychiatrist, Joe."
"Maybe I'd better explain. He's not only a very brilliant writer of true-
fact crime articles for the better magazines, with the stress placed on
juvenile delinquency—he happens to be pretty much of a confirmed
alcoholic. The wild binge kind—once in every three or four weeks he
loses a week-end. Completely, goes absolutely blotto."
"Like in that Jackson novel that made such a big splash about twelve
or fifteen years ago, you mean? I remember the movie even better
than I do the book, but I read the book—"
"We seem to be very literary today," Fenton said. "Everywhere we
turn in this case we come up against famous novels, or big-name
writers or major movies or guys with a grievance against female
editors. I suppose that's only to be expected—considering what kind
of murder it was and where it took place. But it's hard to understand
why so much of it has to drift our way in a single day. To answer your
question—yes, he's the Lost Week-End kind of heavy drinker."
"Then why did you say 'yes—and no,' when I asked you if he was a
psycho?"
"Because it's not a term you can use loosely when you're talking
about alcoholics. What I guess I should say is—it's not a term you
should use unambiguously. It had to be 'Yes—and no,' with a lot of
half-way stages in between. There is such a thing as alcoholic
insanity, you know—a clear-cut psychosis with very definite
symptoms. You can get alcoholic softening of the brain, which is
something else again, because it's physical as well as mental and it's
usually fatal. You can be just a periodic drinker—not a hopeless
alcoholic at all, although you'll be headed that way—and have the
D.T.'s occasionally. Or you can be a very heavy, constant drinker and
never have the D.T.'s.
"It all depends on how alcohol affects you. Just a little alcohol, for
instance, could give Edgar Allan Poe the D.T.'s. And when a man
has the D.T.'s, he's a psychotic, if only temporarily. Or behaves like
one in all respects. And just constant, heavy drinking can make a
man behave so erratically at times you could practically call him a
psycho. And when a man is dead drunk, under any circumstances,
would you say his behavior was merely neurotic?
"The thing you've got to remember about heavy drinking—periodic or
otherwise—is that one of the things it most often does is bring about
memory lapses. Very serious memory lapses—prolonged blackout
periods. And that especially applies to the Lost Week-End kind of
drinker."
"So Willard had a memory lapse and couldn't remember whether he
shot her or not. Is that what you're trying to say?"
Fenton shook his head. "Nothing of the sort. You're forgetting about
the alibi, apparently."
"Sorry I interrupted."
"Think nothing of it. But I'd be very grateful if you'd listen carefully.
I'm just giving you a few simple facts about alcoholism."
"Not as a warning, I hope. I hardly ever touch the stuff."
"I'll just bet. I might have gone for that idea—that he couldn't
remember if he'd shot or not, if we hadn't got all this new information
about him just in the last hour. He's had memory lapses going back
ten or twelve years. He's been in the Bellevue alcoholic ward seven
times. And he just happened to be there on the morning of the
murder. He was picked up the night before in a bar on West Eighth
Street, after a brawl that was a little on the special side. He was
roaring drunk and he blackened the eye of one of his drinking
companions and knocked the other down, almost giving him a
concussion.
"They were good friends of his, so they covered up for him. No
police charge was lodged against him. But he was carted off to
Bellevue and he remained there for two days. I don't believe in
murder by thought control, do you?"
"But why did he confess? It makes no sense at all to me."
"Doesn't it? It makes plenty of sense to me and I'm sure it will to you
if you'll give it a little thought. You know what guilt feelings can do to
an alcoholic, don't you? You must have arrested at least a dozen
drunks in the last ten years who were burning up with impatience to
confess. To homicides they didn't and couldn't have committed."
"Yeah, that's true enough," Gallison said.
"You saw what she meant to him, how he felt about her. When I just
asked him if he'd slept with her it set off a trigger-mechanism in his
brain. It was like a delayed time bomb. He was dead sober when he
turned himself in and confessed, but alcoholics can be dead sober
and still have a kind of emotional hangover—sometimes lasting for
days after a real wild binge on a lost week-end. He was—still is—in a
very abnormal state."
"But why should he feel so guilty about his relations with her?"
Gallison asked. "Why the threatening letters. You mean that he didn't
actually feel she gyped him on that article sale to the movies and
TV? If he didn't, he sure is a great little actor. He should have played
a leading role in the movie himself."
"Oh, he felt she gyped him, all right. And that increased his load of
guilt. He couldn't remember just when he'd last spent two days in
Bellevue—not the exact date. He thought he'd gone to the Eaton-
Lathrup publications on the morning of the murder, had a showdown
with her and shot her dead. He might not have been completely sure
about it, but he couldn't forget his earlier memory lapses. Some
alcoholics feel guilty on just that basis alone. They know they're
subject to memory lapses and they're always wondering what terrible
crime they just might conceivably have committed during the blotto
stage.
"And every aspect of his relations with her was steeped in guilt,
apparently. Just being her lover made him feel guilty, apparently. You
saw how he flared up when I questioned him about it. It sounds
crazy, but there are a few men like that left in this day and age. A
Puritanic hangover that alcoholism makes a real fighting issue, if it's
ever openly discussed.
"Don't you see? She probably threw him over, rejected him, told him
he wasn't her idea of a lover boy just about the time that big movie
sale went through. So he had a double reason for hating her—a
triple reason, in fact, since he felt guilty about just having an affair
with her—and it all came out in the wash when he walked in here
and confessed to a crime he didn't commit."
"But how about that movie and TV angle."
Fenton frowned, staring down at the double-file on his desk. "That's
the screwiest part of it, the part that really ought to be used in a book
sometime, by one of those mystery writers I told you about—two
writers I know very well and would probably give me a percentage
for bringing it to their attention, if I wasn't more or less incorruptible
regarding Homicide Squad files. Fact is ... she leaned backwards to
be fair, to see that he made a fairly large sum out of the movie sale
... even though he wasn't legally entitled to anything at all. He did get
pretty close to his hundred thousand dollars."
Gallison whistled softly. "Brother, that's hard to believe. What
happened to the dough? He's still living in fairly modest
circumstances. He has a small house just north of White Plains, as
you know, but he bought it several years ago and it's mortgaged right
up to the hilt."
"You've hung around bars quite a bit, haven't you?" Fenton said,
smiling a little. "I mean, just in line of duty, of course. Haven't you
heard guys say: 'I made three hundred dollars last week, but it was
burning a hole in my pocket. I blew it all in one night.'"
"Sure, sure," Gallison admitted. "I've heard guys talking that way
often enough. But a hundred thousand dollars—"
"Not quite, probably. Seventy thousand would be closer, I should
imagine. And income tax would take a big slice. Half of the rest could
go as a feedback."
"What do you mean ... a feedback?"
"Money squandered on her while he was still in her good graces, as
her number one lover boy. That would also give him an additional
reason to hate her, when he thought about it afterwards. Know what
it costs to take a woman with her expensive tastes out five nights a
week, for perhaps three months?"
Gallison shrugged. "How should I know? I get upset sometimes
when my wife orders three cocktails before dinner at a midtown bar."
"He's probably been living very high for the past three or four
months, ever since the picture was sold and she gave him a slice of
what it brought in cold cash. Just why she did it I can't imagine.
Maybe there actually was a generous streak in her, and she really
thought the concern owed him something, despite the contract. She
could even have been a little in love with him at one time. He's not a
bad looking guy, remember. And she probably knew she'd get quite a
bit of it back in jewelry, furs and expensive entertainment."
Gallison whistled again. "I'm beginning to get the picture," he said. "If
the dough actually was burning a hole in his pocket and there are
plenty of guys like that. And if he had blotto periods—"
"Well, that winds it up," Fenton said. "We'll have to release him, of
course. No reason to hold him now. The poor little guy. In a way, I
feel sorry for him. It's no joke to be an alcoholic and feel that guilty
about getting himself a piece of very high-class tail."
"You're not fooling me, Joe. I bet you have a Puritan streak yourself.
The only woman you've been interested in for the past fifteen years
is the glamor doll you married."
"It could be," Fenton conceded. "My father was a farmer in Iowa and
he went to church every Sunday, rain or shine. It's something you
never entirely outgrow. But if I ever hear you shooting your mouth off
about it—"
It was Gallison's turn to smile. "Don't worry, Joe. The secret's safe
with me. I'm just glad I'm not that way."
"I see. You step out now and then—just tell your wife it's a double-
duty assignment that will keep you up until dawn."
"I didn't say that. Hell, there's a difference between loyalty and the
kind of act our little friend put on. He actually blushed, or didn't you
notice, when you threw it up to him."
"Some day you'll become tolerant of every kind of human behavior,"
Fenton said. "We all have a chink in our armor somewhere."
"I suppose, I suppose."
"You don't have to suppose. It's goddam true. A guy can be a prig in
one respect and a liberal-minded, very intelligent kind of human
being in another. We're all jackasses one third of the time, at least."
"It's funny," Gallison said. "One of the Eaton-Lathrup editors is an
alcoholic too. That Ellers guy. Do you suppose he has blackouts now
and then?"
"With nothing more than that to go on," Fenton said, "we'd have no
justification for suspecting him. Something may turn up, of course.
We'll see. We've got a lot of digging to do, and our best lead so far
has gone out the window. I didn't say that all confirmed alcoholics
worry or feel guilty about what they may have done during a lost
week-end. Only a few of them do, the ones who have criminal
impulses or a strong reason for hating someone even when they're
sober. We'll see, we'll see. Right now—"
The phone at Fenton's elbow started ringing.
He picked up the receiver, listened for a moment and re-cradled it, a
very odd look coming into his eyes.
"Now nothing can surprise me," he said. "A first-class lead goes out
the window and one just as promising comes flying in, like one of
those goddam pigeons that are always messing up the sill."
"What is it?" Gallison asked. "Or would you rather make a production
out of keeping me guessing?"
"Well ... there's a young writer whose work Helen Lathrup took very
seriously at first and then tore into, ripping his self-esteem to shreds.
I got that from the editor you just mentioned, Ellers. They were also
sort of close and cozy for a time and then she refused to even see
him when he phoned. She slammed his book manuscript back with a
hell of a harsh criticism—Ellers read what she wrote. He also saw
the manuscript and thought it was pretty good."
"Sounds sort of familiar," Gallison said. "Like the same record
almost, but with a different groove maybe in it somewhere. I mean,
she sure was an expert in the tease line. Give them every
encouragement, the better to watch them writhe."
Fenton nodded. "Yeah ... in general I'd say yes. We've run into it
twice before and in questioning the office staff I got the impression
I'd just scratched the surface. She covered a lot of territory with her
teasing. Except that most women who fall into that category either
won't let a man touch them or won't go beyond a kiss. She was very
generous with her encouragement, apparently."
"You mean she was willing to start off as if she was playing for
keeps."
"If you want to put it that way. What puzzles me a little is that she
didn't have to. Just one long, lingering look and most men would
have been hooked, right through the gullet like a frog when you use
it for bait. Ever fish for bass with frogs, Gallison? Sometimes they
climb out of the water on a nearby bank and stare back, looking
forlorn and pathetic as hell—pathetic enough to tear your heart out.
But they're still hooked."
"So is the fisherman—if he doesn't catch any bass. Fisherwoman in
this case, of course. What did she hope to gain by it?"
Fenton shrugged. "Who can say, exactly? Probably the same kind of
cruel pleasure most women who fall into that category get from
keeping a man dangling. Only, as I say, she seems to have been
exceptionally generous-minded about it, at least at first. Women like
that really fall into three categories. The first is scared stiff when a
man so much as touches them, but they enjoy leading men on. The
second had some kind of trauma in childhood which prevents them
from warming up to men, but they'd genuinely like to be generous
and don't intend to be deliberately cruel. The third kind is like
Lathrup. What they are, basically, is men-destroying women. They
can be both generous and cruel, and aren't actually repelled by men
physically. They'll go all the way, but the hooked frog had better
watch out."
"You know what, Joe? You really should have been a psychiatrist."
"Suppose we drop all that for the moment. You asked me what I'd
found out. You want to hear it, or don't you?"
"Why not? We're supposed to be working together on a homicide
case."
"All right, here it is. I put a trailer on the young writer. Not a shadow,
no Squad close-check. Just did a little more digging, keeping him in
view. He was just one of twenty suspects. Thought nothing important
would turn up. His name's Ralph Gilmore, by the way. I gave you a
brief run-down on him. Have you forgotten?"
"Naturally not," Gallison said. "But when you just called him a young
writer—"
"All right, you remember. Good. I won't ask you how much you
remember, because I went into most of this before and you failed to
remember straight off. But anyhow, the digging paid off. All Gilmore
did, about ten days ago, was go into a pawnshop on Park Row and
buy himself a gun. The kind of under-the-counter deal that infuriates
me, and this is one pawnbroker who'll wish he'd thought twice—or
three times. He'll have the book thrown at him."
Gallison narrowed his eyes. "What kind of gun was it, Joe."
"What kind do you suppose? It couldn't have been any other kind,
could it? She was shot with a forty-five, and if he'd bought a pearl-
handled woman's gun did you think for a moment I'd have looked as
stunned as I did just now?"
"You might have. It would have shown he had murder on his mind. At
the last moment, he might have decided that a big automatic was
what he really needed."
"Yeah, I can well imagine."
"I'm serious in one way," Gallison said. "You can fit silencers on
smaller guns. An amateur doesn't usually commit murder with a
forty-five—a big Luger cannon or anything like that—unless he just
happens to have such a weapon lying around ... a war souvenir,
say."
"You can't argue with a fact. Gilmore bought a big, long-barreled gun.
Maybe the pawnbroker had only one gun to sell and that was it. Try
buying a gun from a pawnbroker sometime. Gilmore was one of the
lucky ones."
"And now you think his luck is running out?"
A weary, slightly embittered look came into Fenton's eyes. "How
should I know, at this stage? If I was in his shoes I'd be plenty
worried. But our job is simply to do what we can and take nothing for
granted ... until we've checked and double-checked."
"Then we'd better get right after it."
"I think so," Fenton said.
Chapter VI
Ruth Porges could not have explained, even to herself, why the
scream had unnerved her so. Like the others, she'd been unable to
identify the voice. But she did have a faint, will-of-the-wisp kind of
suspicion that it was Lynn Prentiss who had cried out in shock and
horror. It hadn't sounded like Susan's voice at the desk or the voice
of Joyce Sanderson from the linotype room.
And somehow, all morning, she's been expecting something
alarming to happen. She couldn't have explained that either. It was
just that—well, things were coming to a head as far as Lathrup was

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Textbook Measures of Positive Psychology Development and Validation 1St Edition Kamlesh Singh Ebook All Chapter PDF

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Available Formats

Measures of Positive Psychology

Development and Validation 1st Edition

Positive Psychology and You A Self Development Guide

Positive Psychological Assessment A Handbook of Models

Positive Psychology The Basics 1st Edition Hart

The Positive Side of Occupational Health Psychology 1st

The Wiley Handbook of Positive Clinical Psychology 1st

Positive Psychology in Second and Foreign Language

Positive Psychology: The Science of Happiness and

Positive Psychology The Science of Wellbeing and Human

ISBN 978-81-322-3629-0 ISBN 978-81-322-3631-3 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016946321

© Springer India 2016

Printed on acid-free paper

This Springer imprint is published by Springer Nature

1 Positive Psychology in India: A Review . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Correlates and Predictors of Resilience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39

5 Mindfulness and Its Assessment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99

Concurrent Validity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175

Kamlesh Singh, Ph.D. (Psychology), joined the Indian Institute of Technology

interest include developmental psychology, positive psychology, and child and

Keywords Positive psychology

© Springer India 2016 1

Indian Research on Universal Positive Psychology

Majority of Indian psychologists who are active researchers in ﬁeld of positive

equanimity, joy, synthesis, and discernment as emerging predictors of resilience,

Indian Constructs Contribute to Positive Psychology

precisely indoctrinated by following organized methodology and by indigenous

Scales on Positive Psychological Constructs

Psychological testing is well-known assessment tool for estimating the effect of

Scales Conﬁrmed Their Factor Structure

Scales Developed on Indian Constructs

Assessment of Indian constructs may contribute to better understanding of

need to achieve a higher state of consciousness (Mohan et al. 2004). Similarly,

As researchers we need to understand all applied psychology constructs and then

What Is a Psychological Test?

Psychological test is a set of objective and standardized self-report questions whose

© Springer India 2016 17

Psychological tests are often subject-centered measurements and follow certain

For example, construction of resilience scale was undertaken after exhaustive

Principles of Item Writing

Writing good items is a precursor to developing a good psychometric test.

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