Nezlek, J. B., & Gable, S. L. (1999). Response latency and psychological adjustment. Unpublished manuscript.

Participants completed three measures of psychological adjustment, the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression scale, and the Causal Uncertainty Scale, and the amount of time it took to answer each question on these scales (RT) was measured. For all three scales, RT was negatively related to level of adjustment, and this relationship existed only between responses and RT for the same scale. These results suggest that RT may be a useful measure of self-evaluation and that it may be useful to include more specificity in research on self-relevant phenomena such as self-concept clarity and self-focused attention. In addition, the advantages of using latent variable analyses such as hierarchical linear modeling to analyze RT data are discussed.