Resilience in adolescence: Gender differences two years after the earthquake of L’Aquila

The aim of this study was to evaluate the impact of L’Aquila earthquake (Italy) on Resilience and Coping 2 years after the earthquake in a high school sample. Three hundred and twenty-four male and female students exposed to the earthquake and 147 not-exposed have been assessed with the Resilience Scale for Adolescents (READ) and the Brief COPE. The two way ANOVAs for gender by exposure level to the distressing event showed statistically significant interactions with males exposed to the earthquake reporting consistently higher READ factor scores. Problem-focused but not emotion-focused coping strategies showed a similar pattern. These findings are compatible with a resilient ‘protective mechanism’ for males.     

Predicting school achievement: The role of inductive reasoning,sleep length and morningness–eveningness

Adolescents move to evening orientation just when school schedule becomes earlier. Whereas school achievement has been associated to morningness orientation during morning school schedule, some studies have indicated that evening people are more intelligent. In this study the relative contribution of Morningness–Eveningness (M–E) in the prediction of school achievement, after controlling for age, sex/gender, inductive reasoning and sleep length was analyzed. Participants were 887 adolescents (aged 12–16). School achievement was evaluated using Grade Point Average (GPA), inductive reasoning was evaluated by reasoning subtest of Primary Mental Abilities (PMA-R), sleep length was calculated from rise time and bedtime questions, and M–E was evaluated by Morningness–Eveningness Scale for Children (MESC). Evening adolescents scored higher on PMA-R and obtained lower GPA. Inductive reasoning, age, sex/gender, sleep length and M–E accounted for 19% variance percentage on GPA. M–E was a significant predictor of school achievement even after controlling for traditional predictors, albeit slightly.     

Conceptual implicit memory in subclinical depression

Depression adversely affects explicit memory when implicit memory remains intact unless implicit retrieval requires conceptual processes. The impairment of conceptual implicit memory could be the consequence of the completion of implicit memory tests being contaminated by a voluntary retrieval strategy, hence similar results to those in explicit tests are observed. In this study we adopted a method sensitive to the presence of contamination. Depth-of-study-processing effects were observed for the controls completing the explicit version of a word-association task but were absent for the controls completing the implicit version when compound associates were retrieved. This dissociation indicated the adoption of the designated retrieval strategy in each test with the conceptual implicit memory test being uncontaminated. Subclinically depressed participants showed impairment in the explicit version, while for those completing the implicit version there was evidence that they used a voluntary retrieval strategy. The theoretical implications of the findings are discussed.     

Indirect measures as a signal for evaluative change

Implicit and explicit attitudes can be changed by using evaluative learning procedures. In this contribution we investigated an asymmetric effect of order of administration of indirect and direct measures on the detection of evaluative change: A change in explicit attitudes is more likely detected if they are measured after implicit attitudes, whereas these latter change regardless of the order. This effect was demonstrated in two studies (n=270; n=138) using the self-referencing task whereas it was not found in a third study (n=151) that used a supraliminal sequential evaluative conditioning paradigm. In all studies evaluative change was present only for contingency aware participants. We discuss a potential explanation underlying the order of measure effect entailing that, in some circumstances, an indirect measure is not only a measure but also a signal that can be detected through self-perception processes and further elaborated at the propositional level.     

Anxiety and the deployment of visual attention over time

Two studies investigated the effects of anxiety on the time course of attention to threatening material. A rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigm required report of words belonging to a prespecified semantic category with a distractor placed at varying positions preceding the target. Where there was little resemblance in meaning between distractors and targets, threat distractors briefly captured the attention of high state anxious individuals but only after a delay. Where distractors resembled the meaning of the targets, attention was captured more immediately, but processing of threat-related material was concentrated at different points in time as a function of both the degree of semantic resemblance between distractors and target, and state anxiety. The extent to which distractors are salient to the experimental task influences attentional capture and the temporal course of processing. The methodological implications of these results are discussed together with a new hypothesis about the effects of state anxiety on attention.     

Trust within teams: The relation with performance effectiveness

The acknowledgement that trust is important for the functioning of organizations has increased the demand for research showing how this importance is reflected on the behaviour of its members. In this article we focus on trust within teams and explore the relation with performance effectiveness. A model was tested relating trust with perceived task performance, team satisfaction, relationship commitment, and stress. In this model trust is presented as a multi-component variable with distinct but related dimensions. These include propensity to trust, perceived trustworthiness, cooperative and monitoring behaviours. Data from 112 teams collected in three social care institutions in The Netherlands were analysed with structural equation modelling to test the model. The results are supportive of the multi-component structure of trust and confirmed the importance of trust for the functioning of teams in organizations. The results suggest that trust is positively related with perceived task performance, team satisfaction, and relationship commitment, and negatively related with stress. In addition, perceived task performance was positively related with team satisfaction.     

Child’s Personality and Perception of Parental Relationship as Correlates of Optimal Experience

The study was designed to assess the influence of child’s personality and perception of parental relationship on children’s optimal experiences. We proposed functional and dysfunctional models to analyze the increase or the decrease of the children’s flow experience. The sample of this study included 909 middle class children, aged 9–12 (M = 11.02, SD = 1.08), both sexes, from Argentina. When we analysed the psychological factors that could be related to the flow state in childhood, we found out that the child’s perception of a functional parental relationship, in which there is either acceptance or moderate control, indirectly affects the flow experience, through child’s personality—extraversion, openness to experience, and conscientiousness. Functional personality traits have an important positive effect on optimal experience when they are considered as a unit. In the dysfunctional model of flow, the results showed that the child’s perception of parental pathological control had an important positive effect on neuroticism and –through this—a negative effect on flow. The child’s perception of parental negligence did not have a significant effect on neuroticism; however, neuroticism still maintained its negative effect on flow.     

Measuring Psychological Development With the Rorschach

The aim of this study was to develop and to provide an initial validation of a Rorschach index measuring developmental progress and growth. The Developmental Index (DI) was created in a 3-step, sequential strategy with adult and child data in which we (a) selected potential DI variables from quantitative research literature and from data available to us, (b) identified an optimal group of DI variables and created the DI equation using an independent nonpatient sample, and (c) provided an initial cross-validation of the DI using an independent clinical sample. Age and age rank categorization groups from normative data associated with the Wechsler intelligence scales (Wechsler, 2003, 2008) and contrasts between adults and children served as criteria for development. These samples include a large amount of data from a diverse international subject pool using the Comprehensive System of the Rorschach. Interim validity checks were undertaken to ensure the analytic strategy was sound. The DI includes 12 variables with individual weights determined by regression analysis. The initial independent cross-validation of the DI with a clinical sample revealed that it discriminated well between children and adults. Thus, initial support for this scale as a measure of psychological development across cultures and geography was established, but future research is needed. Clinical implications and specific research needs are presented.     

Spirituality and Religiosity in the Aftermath of a Natural Catastrophe in Italy

The aim of this study is to assess the influence of spirituality and religiousness on the psychological traumatic effects of a catastrophic event in a population that had been exposed to an earthquake compared with a control population that had not been exposed. A total of 901 people have been evaluated using: (1) Brief Multidimensional Measure of Religiousness/Spirituality; (2) Impact of Event Scale and (3) Trauma and Loss Spectrum-Self Report (TALS-SR). Self-perceptions of spirituality and religiousness were used to rank the samples, distinguishing between spiritual and religious, spiritual-only, religious-only and neither spiritual nor religious groups. The sample that had experienced the earthquake showed lower scores in spiritual dimension. The religious-only group of those who were exposed to the earthquake demonstrated TALS-SR re-experiencing and arousal domain scores similar to the population that was not exposed. A weakening of spiritual religiosity in people having difficulty coping with trauma is a consistent finding. We further observed that the religious dimension helped to buffer the community against psychological distress caused by the earthquake. The religiosity dimension can positively affect the ability to cope with traumatic experiences.