Test anxiety: associations with personal and family variables

Test anxiety is a common behavior among students facing social pressure centered on mastery. Only a few studies have analyzed the relations between test anxiety, academic procrastination, personal and family variables and math grades. This work focus on the analysis of the impact of students' social-personal variables such as parents' education level, number of siblings and under-achievement by performing ANOVAs in two samples of 533 and 796 students from junior high-school. Corroborating the findings in other studies, the data stress that test anxiety is higher in girls and decreases when students' parents have higher educational levels, with the number of courses flunked, and when students' math grades were lower. Test anxiety and procrastination correlate positive and significantly. Findings are discussed and compared with those of previous researches. The implications for teaching practice are also analyzed.     

Quality of life in transplant patients, compared to other stressful health situations in pulmonary patients

Transplantation may imply severe biopsychosocial impairments. In order to know the quality of life of patients one year after transplantation, 58 subjects were compared to three different groups of patients (stabilized and acute COPD patients, and lung cancer patients in a surgery unit). Patients filled in two questionnaires: EORTC QLQ-C30 (quality of life) and HAD (anxiety and depression). The quality of life dimensions with inter-group differences were physical, role, emotional and cognitive functioning, global health status, and a number of symptoms (fatigue, dyspnea, insomnia and appetite loss). There were differences in depression, and but not in anxiety. Transplant and surgical patients showed better quality of life and affective status than chronic pulmonary patients. Discriminant analysis showed that the transplant group was the best described group. We conclude that patients, one year after transplantation, show similar quality of life as asymptomatic hospitalised patients, somewhat better than chronic patients in a stabilized stage of the disease, and much better than severe chronic patients.     

Strategies of clinical hypothesis testing

This research examines whether Psychology students, when they test clinical hypotheses, follow either confirmatory or disconfirmatory reasoning strategies. Two hundred and six psychology students, divided in four groups, participated. One group received information about the probability that the hypothesis was correct by means of verbal labels, and another group, by means of numerical expressions. An additional group received the information that getting a precise diagnosis was clinically important. In a last group, diagnostic tests allowed them to increase certainty about the hypothesis. Results show a partial use of confirmatory strategies because, although participants did not seek confirming information, they indeed avoided collecting disconfirming information. When the information increased certainty about the hypothesis, confirmatory strategies became more likely. Neither the increase in the task importance nor the numerical expression of the likelihood that the hypothesis was correct seemed to affect the testing strategy used.     

Motivated Compliance With Bases of Social Power

This contribution examines the degree of compliance with hard and soft power bases ( Raven, Schwarzwald, & Koslowsky, 1998 ) as a function of target motivational and personal orientations. Four field studies were conducted in different European organizations where intrinsic–extrinsic motivational orientations, desire for control, self-presentational styles, and self-esteem were respectively considered as antecedents of employees' compliance with their supervisors' power strategies. Results show that compliance with soft power strategies is positively related to intrinsic motivation, desire for control, "getting-ahead" style, and self-esteem; and negatively related to the "getting-along" style. Compliance with hard power strategies is positively related to extrinsic motivation and to the getting-along style, but negatively related to intrinsic motivation, desire for control, and self-esteem.     

Seeing oneself in one’s choices: Construal level and self-pertinence of electoral and consumer decisions

Building on previous research examining the implications for self-regulation and decision making of construing action at varying levels of abstraction, the authors proposed that construing action in terms of its abstract purposes facilitates orienting one’s decisions toward the standards, characteristics, and goals that define one’s desired self-concept. Consistent with this proposal, desiring for oneself a political candidate’s personal qualities predicted evaluating favorably (in Study 1) and voting for (in Study 2) that candidate to a greater extent among participants focused on the distal future (and presumably construing action at a relatively high-level of abstraction) than the proximal future (and presumably construing action at a relatively low-level of abstraction). Moreover, individuals chronically construing action in high-level terms responded more favorably to advertisements appealing to their desired self-concept (in Study 3) than to product quality. These findings’ implications for decision making are discussed.     

Motivational profiles and flow in physical education lessons

The purpose of this study was to use cluster analysis to identify differences in goal orientation and motivational climate profiles among students in physical education classes as well as differences among the observed clusters on perceived flow experiences. 983 students of 14- to 15-yr.-olds (M = 14.8 yr., SD = 0.91) from a large Spanish metropolitan school district were participants and completed questionnaires assessing goal orientations, motivational climates, and perceived flow. Analysis showed three distinct clusters with 40.3% of the sample with a High Motivation cluster, 27.6% in a Low Motivation cluster, and 32.2% in a Mastery Motivation cluster. These three clusters differed significantly in ratings of perceived flow. Clusters also showed different composition by sex. Implications of these results with regard to instruction in physical education classes are discussed.     

Does subjective well-being show a relationship between parents and their children?

The relationship between the subjective well-being of parents and their own 12–16-year-old children was explored in a Spanish sample of N = 266 families. A positive relationship was expected due to both a shared environment and the possibility of the genetic transmission of subjective well-being ‘set-points’. A positive significant relationship was found for the summated scale of satisfaction domains forming the Personal Well-being Index, and for the specific domains of health and security for the future. However, no relationship was found for the other five domains that make up this Index or for satisfaction with life as a whole. We conclude while these results provide some evidence for the expected influence of a shared environment, they have failed to provide evidence for high heritability of set-points for subjective well-being.     

Second-order conditioning of human causal learning

This article provides the first demonstration of a reliable second-order conditioning (SOC) effect in human causal learning tasks. It demonstrates the human ability to infer relationships between a cause and an effect that were never paired together during training. Experiments 1a and 1b showed a clear and reliable SOC effect, while Experiments 2a and 2b demonstrated that first-order extinction did not affect SOC. These results were similar to those found in animal and human conditioning and suggested that a similar associative mechanism could explain these effects. However, they can also be used to look into the underlying causal mental model people build and store while they are learning this task. From a cognitive view, overall results suggest that an independent rather than a chain causal mental model is stored after second-order learning in human causal tasks.     

MV-Algebras and Quantum Computation

We introduce a generalization of MV algebras motivated by the investigations into the structure of quantum logical gates. After laying down the foundations of the structure theory for such quasi-MV algebras, we show that every quasi-MV algebra is embeddable into the direct product of an MV algebra and a “flat” quasi-MV algebra, and prove a completeness result w.r.t. a standard quasi-MV algebra over the complex numbers. Presented by Heinrich Wansing     

Person‐factors in the California Adult Q‐Set: closing the door on personality trait types?

To investigate recent hypotheses of replicable personality types, we examined data from 1540 self‐sorts on the California Adult Q‐Set (CAQ). Conventional factor analysis of the items showed the expected Five‐Factor Model (FFM). Inverse factor analysis across random subsamples showed that none of the previously reported person‐factors were replicated. Only two factors were replicable, and, most importantly, these factors were contaminated by mean level differences in item endorsement. Results were not due to sample size or age heterogeneity. Subsequent inverse factor analysis of standardized items revealed at least three replicable factors; when five person‐factors were extracted, they could be aligned precisely with the dimensions of the FFM. The major factors of person similarity can be accounted for entirely in terms of the FFM, consistent with the hypothesis that there are no replicable personality types in the CAQ. Published in 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.