Reconsidering Life Domains that Contribute to Subjective Well-Being Among Adolescents with Data from Three Countries

Several theoretical models and testing procedures are presented with the aim of identifying the most relevant items and domains to include in a model for evaluating adolescents’ subjective well-being, above and beyond those usually included in adults’ scales. Data were collected in three countries based on a list of 30 items regarding adolescents’ satisfaction with different domains or facets of life. Responses to these 30 items (including Personal Well-Being Index and Brief Multidimensional Students’ Life Satisfaction Scale items) have been analysed by means of Confirmatory Factor Analysis using different Structural Equation Models (SEM) on a pooled sample comprising 5,316 twelve to sixteen-year-olds from Spain, Brazil and Chile. Several models have shown good enough fit statistics. A model using 14 items shows excellent fit statistics and is conceptually coherent. However, the inclusion or non-inclusion of items related to satisfaction with religion or spirituality results in both advantages and disadvantages when comparing the alternative models analysed. The relevance of including these items may therefore depend on the socio-cultural context where data are collected and their inclusion makes cross-country comparison more statistically challenging. The 14-item model has also been tested using multigroup SEM in order to check comparability of data among the three countries. All things considered, multigroup models have shown good fit with constrained loadings, but not with constrained loadings and intercepts, suggesting we can compare correlations and regressions among countries, but not means. Additional multigroup SEM with the five age groups available from the pooled sample have demonstrated that responses—and means—are comparable across different age groups during early adolescence.     

Sleep,resilience, and psychological distress in United States military Veterans

Sleep problems are prevalent among Veterans. Left untreated, such problems may elevate psychological distress and increase risk of subsequent mental health disorders. Psychological resilience may buffer against negative psychological outcomes, yet the relationship between sleep and resilience has not been studied. This study explored poor sleep, resilience, and psychological distress using questionnaires collected as part of the Study of Post-Deployment Mental Health. Participants (N = 1,118) had served in the US military since September 11, 2001, had one or more overseas deployments, and were free from a past-month DSM-defined mental health disorder. Hierarchical linear regression was used to examine the association between poor sleep quality (Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index total score) and psychological distress (Global Symptom Index; Symptom Checklist-90-R), controlling for demographic and health characteristics. Moderation analyses tested for a potential buffering effect of resilience (Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale). Poor sleeping Veterans had worse physical and psychological health, lower resilience, and endorsed more lifetime traumatic events. Poor sleep was associated with greater psychological distress controlling for health and demographic characteristics. Both resilience factors—adaptability and self-efficacy—had significant buffering effects on the relationship between poor sleep and psychological distress, suggesting that resilience may protect against negative outcomes in poor sleepers. Additional research is warranted to better understand the relationships between sleep, resilience, and psychological distress. Such research may inform pertinent prevention efforts, including interventions that improve sleep, enhance resilience, and protect against incident mental health diagnoses.     

Associations among African American Parents’ Beliefs,Involvement, and Measures of School Readiness

Journal of Child and Family Studies - Parents’ beliefs about school readiness have been linked to their involvement practices and children’s achievement. However, there is some evidence...     

Emotional nouns affect attachment decisions in sentence completion tasks

We report three sentence completion experiments in which we manipulate the emotional dimension of the nouns in a complex noun phrase (NP) that precedes a relative clause (RC), as in the classic ambiguity in Someone shot the servant of the actress who was on the balcony. The aim was to see whether nouns such as orgy or genocide affect the well-established preference of Spanish to adjoin the relative clause high in the tree (to servant instead of actress in the example above). We manipulated the valence and arousal of the lexical entities residing in the NP. Our results indicate that (a) the inclusion of either pleasant or unpleasant words induces changes in the usual NP1 preference found in Spanish; (b) the effects of high-arousal words are especially clear, in that they pull RC adjunction towards the NP where they are located, be it the NP1 or the NP2; and (c) in the context of sentence production, these kinds of words seem intense enough to promote changes in (and even reverse) a solid syntactic bias. We discuss these findings in the light of existing theories of syntactic ambiguity resolution.     

Psicobiología del síndrome de Down

Resumen

En este artículo revisamos los conocimientos que existen en la actualidad sobre el síndrome de Down, atendiendo a todos aquellos aspectos que, por su relevancia, facilitan una mejor comprensión de esta cromosomopatía. Después de una breve reseña histórica, y tras definir lo que se entiende por síndrome de Down, pasamos a ocuparnos de la alteración genética que lo determina, así como de los factores que parecen estar relacionados con su origen. A continuación estudiamos las alteraciones específicas que acompañan a este síndrome, considerando principalmente los aspectos morfológicos externos, el problema de la hipotonía muscular y otros trastornos biomédicos, el retraso mental y las diversas anomalías neuroanatómicas y neurofisiológicas que presentan los sujetos afectados. Por último, indicamos las nuevas perspectivas que se abren en el estudio de esta alteración genética.