Voters and leaders in the mirror of politics: similarity in personality and voting choice in Italy and Spain

Relations between voting choice and similarity in traits between voters and political candidates are examined in two studies. The first study was conducted in Spain, where the personalities of Mariano Rajoy and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero were assessed. The second study was conducted in Italy, where the politicians assessed were Walter Veltroni and Silvio Berlusconi. Results show in both cases a similarity between voters' self-reported personality and their appraisals of the leaders of the party for which they voted. Similarity is generally higher with respect to traits that are the most distinctive for each platform and its leader. The findings show a higher similarity between voters and their leaders on the markers of agreeableness, such as "loyal" and "sincere." Findings hold across countries and political figures, demonstrating the role that personal characteristics of both voters and candidates play in orienting political preference.     

Ranking 2010 in production and research productivity in Spanish public universities

The creation of the European Higher Education Area has brought the relevance of the scientific quality assessment in higher education. The result of this interest is a growing interest in the development of rankings of universities, both nationally and internationally. To continue the line started two years ago, the goal of this research is to update the ranking of research productivity in Spanish public universities with the data of 2010. We follow the same methodology to data from 2008 and 2009; although this year it includes measures of total production. The same indicators to evaluate research in 2009: journals articles indexed in the JCR, research periods, research + development projects, doctoral dissertations, grants for training university teachers, Doctoral Programs with Quality Mention and patents. From the results obtained show that universities with higher production were Complutense de Madrid, Barcelona and Granada. The most productive were the Pompeu Fabra University, the Pablo de Olavide, and the Autonoma de Barcelona.     

The role of personal values and basic traits in perceptions of the consequences of immigration: a three-nation study

Using data from Italy, Spain, and Germany (N= 1,569), this study investigated the role of basic values (universalism and security) and basic traits (openness and agreeableness) in predicting perceptions of the consequences of immigration. In line with Schwartz's (1992) theory, we conceptualized security as having two distinct components, one concerned with safety of the self (personal security) and the other with harmony and stability of larger groups and of society (group security). Structural equation modelling revealed that universalism values underlie perceptions that immigration has positive consequences and group security values underlie perceptions that it has negative consequences. Personal security makes no unique, additional contribution. Multi-group analyses revealed that these associations are invariant across the three countries except for a stronger link between universalism and perceptions of the consequences of immigration in Spain. To examine whether values mediate relations of traits to perceptions of immigration, we used the five-factor model. Findings supported a full mediation model. Individuals' traits of openness and agreeableness explained significant variance in security and universalism values. Basic values, in turn, explained perceptions of the consequences of immigration.     

The effects of sleep deprivation on the attentional functions and vigilance

The study of sleep deprivation is a fruitful area of research to increase our knowledge of cognitive functions and their neural basis. In the current work, 26 healthy young adults participated in a sleep deprivation study, in which the Attentional Networks Test for Interactions and Vigilance (ANTI-V) was performed at 10a.m. after a night of normal sleep and again at 10 a.m. after 25.5-27.5 h of total sleep deprivation. The ANTI-V is an experimental task that provides measures of alerting, orienting and executive control attentional functions. Compared with previous versions, the ANTI-V includes a vigilance task, more reliable auditory alerting signals, non-predictive peripheral orienting cues, and also a neutral no-cue condition allowing the analysis of reorienting costs and orienting benefits. Thus, new evidence to evaluate the influence of sleep deprivation on attentional functioning is provided. Results revealed differences in both tonic and phasic alertness after sleep deprivation. Vigilance performance was deteriorated, while a warning tone was more helpful to increase participants' alertness, resulting in slightly faster RT and, in particular, fewer errors. The reorienting costs of having an invalid spatial cue were reduced after sleep loss. No sleep deprivation effect on the executive control measure was found in this study. Finally, since no control group was used, particular precautions were taken to reduce the influence of potential practice effects.     

The effect of age on decision making according to the Iowa gambling task

Aging has been associated with several brain changes that often affect the cognitive functioning of adults, but changes in executive functions, particularly in the field of decision making, have not been fully investigated. The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) is a widely used tool to evaluate decision making, but little is known about the effect of age on its results. This study used the IGT and compared healthy young (n = 40) and elderly (n = 40) adults to evaluate their decision making processes. There were significant differences in the learning curve of the two age groups, but no difference in overall IGT performance. The results for the first IGT block were different from those of the rest of the task, and the group of elderly adults had a better performance in this block. Elderly adults also showed a preference for deck A, the one that resulted in greater losses. Findings confirmed the results of other studies, which reported that the IGT block score is the variable with the greatest sensitivity to age in this instrument.     

How special is sameness for pigeons and people?

Because of the importance of the sense of sameness for psychological science and because of the tenuous support for this notion in pigeons' matching-to-sample behavior, we experimentally explored the possibly special status of sameness for pigeons. Using photographs from three different natural categories (dogs, fish, and flowers) in a three-alternative matching-to-sample design, we obtained a reliable sameness advantage for pigeons only when the number of correct sample-comparison combinations could have contributed to a sameness advantage; otherwise, no sameness advantage emerged. However, human participants exhibited an immediate and dramatic sameness advantage under essentially the same training and testing conditions as had been given to pigeons. At least under these experimental circumstances, humans exhibit a sameness advantage that far eclipses that of pigeons.     

Is Traditional Gender Ideology Associated with Sex-Typed Mate Preferences? A Test in Nine Nations

Social role theory (Eagly, Wood, & Diekman, 2000) predicts that traditional gender ideology is associated with preferences for qualities in a mate that reflect a conventional homemaker-provider division of labor. This study assessed traditional gender ideology using Glick and Fiske's (1996, 1999) indexes of ambivalent attitudes toward women and men and related these attitudes to the sex-typed mate preferences of men for younger mates with homemaker skills and of women for older mates with breadwinning potential. Results from a nine-nation sample revealed that, to the extent that participants had a traditional gender ideology, they exhibited greater sex-typing of mate preferences. These relations were generally stable across the nine nations.     

Sexism, Vocational Goals, and Motivation as Predictors of Men’s and Women’s Career Choice

In the present study we analyzed the impact of vocational goals, sexist attitudes toward women, and motivation on career choice, in a sample of 448 Spanish college students (65.2% women and 34.1% men). Although we found some similarities between men and women in terms of their motivational orientations (extrinsic vs. intrinsic) and vocational goals, men’s extrinsic motivations appear to differ depending on the college major. We also found differences in sexist attitudes toward women by gender and chosen major: both male and female students enrolled in technical majors reported the most sexist attitudes (both hostile and benevolent). These findings underline the importance of taking sexist attitudes toward women into account in attempts to explain gender differences in career choice, something which has been largely overlooked in the research to date.     

Applying social psychology to the study of environmental concern and environmental worldviews: contributions from the social representations approach

Recently some social psychological approaches have intensified their contributions to research in the environmental domain, helping it to focus more consistently on the shared aspects of all environment related experiences. The goal of this paper is that of joining these efforts, exploring the contributions of the social representations approach to research on environmental concern and environmental thought, as another area for applying social psychological knowledge. The paper first sketches how the environmental concern of the publics emerged in the 70s as a problem for the social sciences and proceeds to summarizing the main characteristics of this research, focusing on three problematic areas: (1) incipient theoretical integration among the frameworks dominating research; (2) insufficient reflection about the assumptions and measurement of the concepts employed; (3) a need for new research questions that push studies beyond the analysis of the socio‐demographical correlates of beliefs. Afterwards a presentation of social representations theory will be undertaken and the usefulness of the approach to deal with some aspects of the problematic areas identified will be explored, with examples from recent research, and highlighting the importance of focusing on contradiction, polyphasia, and the articulation of the local and the global. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cigarette smokers do more than just smoke cigarettes

In this study, we hypothesized that light and moderate-to-heavy cigarette smokers, when compared with nonsmokers, would exhibit significantly less healthy attitudes and behaviors on several dimensions relevant to the risk of coronary heart disease (CHD). A factor analysis of survey items measuring knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors in five CHD risk areas produced four major factors, which we labeled Attitudes (Factor 1), Health Consciousness (Factor 2), Knowledge (Factor 3), and Unhealthy Behaviors (Factor 4). Factor-based scales generated for each of these four factors were used in a one-way multivariate analysis of variance to examine differences between nonsmokers, light smokers, and moderate-to-heavy smokers. Cigarette smokers versus nonsmokers exhibited less positive attitudes toward CHD risk behaviors, whereas moderate-to-heavy cigarette smokers, as compared with the light smokers and the nonsmokers, exhibited lower levels of health consciousness and enacted unhealthy behaviors at a greater frequency. The moderate-to-heavy cigarette smokers also exhibited a lower commitment to enact healthy behavioral changes in the immediate future, even after corrections were introduced for their lower frequency of healthy behaviors during the past week. Overall, these results support our hypothesis that cigarette smokers, particularly as they become more involved with cigarette smoking, do more than just smoke cigarettes; they exhibit a less healthy lifestyle as shown by cognitive, behavioral, and motivational dimensions related to cardiovascular health.