Sexual Efficacy of Adolescents,Permissiveness, and the Transition Toward Nonvirginity: From Intention to Behavior1

The current study examines teenage sexual behavior (in terms of having had sexual intercourse) as a function of sexual attitudes and sexual efficacy. At the heart of the study lies the assumption that sexual attitudes such as permissiveness are related to sexual behavior, but that this relation is stronger for sexually efficacious teenagers than for others. Using longitudinal data from 253 British adolescents, a structural equation model is tested and fit. The results provide partial support for the expectations, demonstrating the usefulness of sexual efficacy in predicting sexual behavior. Limitations and implications of the study are discussed.     

Quantifiers and Congruence Closure

We prove some results about the limitations of the expressive power of quantifiers on finite structures. We define the concept of a bounded quantifier and prove that every relativizing quantifier which is bounded is already first-order definable (Theorem 3.8). We weaken the concept of congruence closed (see [6]) to weakly congruence closed by restricting to congruence relations where all classes have the same size. Adapting the concept of a thin quantifier (Caicedo [1]) to the framework of finite structures, we define the concept of a meager quantifier. We show that no proper extension of first-order logic by means of meager quantifiers is weakly congruence closed (Theorem 4.9). We prove the failure of the full congruence closure property for logics which extend first-order logic by means of meager quantifiers, arbitrary monadic quantifiers, and the Härtig quantifier (Theorem 6.1).     

The Social Phobia and Anxiety Inventory: Reliability and Validity in an Adolescent Spanish Population

The objective of this study is to examine the factor structure and psychometric properties of the SPAI in a sample of adolescent Spaniards. The results obtained support the use of the correlated two-factor SPAI subscales and indicate high coefficient alpha values for the SPAI subscales. The results provide support for the use of the SPAI in an adolescent population in a non-English-speaking country. Both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses of the Social Phobia subscale showed a four-factor structure, instead of a five-factor dimension, as suggested by previous studies. Effects for gender and age and gender interaction were found. Limitations and suggestions for future research are discussed.     

Psychometric appraisal of Eysenck's revised Psychoticism scale: a cross-cultural study

Psychometric characteristics of Eysenck's revised P scale were studied in a cross-cultural research. The Spanish version of the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire-Revised (EPQ-R) was administered to a Spanish sample of 527 males and 583 females. Maximum-likelihood factor analyses of the item intercorrelations and Direct Oblimin rotations of the extracted factors were carried out separately for males and females. The results revealed four factors identified as psychoticism (P), extraversion (E), neuroticism (N) and dissimulation/conformity (L). Internal consistency and test–retest reliability coefficients were satisfactory and very similar to the ones found in the original study. Skewness and kurtosis of the P scale distribution were closer to normal than on the original British revised P scale.     

The Search for Indigenous Psychologies: Data From Turkey and the Former USSR

On a analysé le contenu de 152 articles du Turkish Journal of Psychology et de 261 articles de la revue Soviet Psychology dans le but d'évaluer le degré d' «indigénisation>> des psychologies turque et soviétique. Il est apparu que la psychologie turque ne présentait aucune tendance à l'indigénisation vu que les théories et perspectives nord-américaines y étaient largement exploitées. Par contre, on a constaté que la psychologie soviétique était l'un des rares exemples de psychologie indigéne.
Articles in the Turkish Journal of Psychology (n = 152), and in the journal Soviet Psychology (n = 261) were content analysed to determine the degree of indigenisation in Turkish and Soviet psychology. The results indicated that there was no tendency towards indigenisation in Turkish psychology, and North American theories and perspectives were widely used. Soviet psychology was found to be one of the rare examples of an indigenous psychology.     

Cognitive Bias to Internal Sources of Information in Anxiety

Discrepancies between (a) self-reported psychosomatic symptoms and (b) actual fitness under non-stress (Study 1), as a function of trait anxiety, were examined, as well as discrepancies between (a) self-reported cognitive and somatic state anxiety and (b) objective measures of behavioural reactivity, physiological arousal, and performance under social-evaluative stress (Study 2). Results indicated that persons high in trait anxiety exaggerated distress in both conditions: They showed disproportionately greater self-reported concerns than actual problems. In contrast, those low in anxiety minimized distress (lower self-reported than actual problems). These discrepancy phenomena are explained in terms of biases in the processing of internal sources of information.     

Natural Deduction for Non-Classical Logics

We present a framework for machine implementation of families of non-classical logics with Kripke-style semantics. We decompose a logic into two interacting parts, each a natural deduction system: a base logic of labelled formulae, and a theory of labels characterizing the properties of the Kripke models. By appropriate combinations we capture both partial and complete fragments of large families of non-classical logics such as modal, relevance, and intuitionistic logics. Our approach is modular and supports uniform proofs of soundness, completeness and proof normalization. We have implemented our work in the Isabelle Logical Framework.