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.     

The international adoption waiting period: waiting experience and coping strategies

The adoption waiting period is a powerful stressor that can affect the well-being and configuration of future family life. Adoption research and practice have not paid enough attention to this phase. The principal aim of this study is to address prospective adoptive parents' experience of and coping with this period. For this purpose, 63 families answered a feelings scale, a coping resources scale and a needs questionnaire, all elaborated for the study. Results show that a shorter length of waiting time, using cognitive and learning coping strategies and associative participation were related to a better general experience of adoption whereas process-centred strategies were related to a worse experience of adoption. Families would like to see more speed in the process, more warmth and humanity in their relation with institutions and better information about their expedients. We conclude by proposing some activities and services during the waiting period that could be useful for post adoption.     

Child sexual abuse coping and long term psychological adjustment

The aim of the study was to analyze the consequences of Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) on the psychological adjustment of university students, as well as the way in which several avoidance and approach coping strategies affect that adjustment. The sample comprised 1162 students from the University of Granada. Data about CSA was obtained from a questionnaire developed with this aim. We used the How I Deal with Things Scale of Burt and Katz to evaluate coping strategies, whereas depression and self-esteem were assessed with the Beck Depression Inventory and the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, respectively. Subjects who were victims of CSA showed significantly higher scores on depression and lower scores on self-esteem. An analysis of coping strategies revealed that only the use of avoidance strategies was related to psychological adjustment. Subjects who used these strategies obtained higher scores on depression and lower scores on self-esteem. These results confirm the idea of CSA as a risk experience that can affect victims' psychological adjustment, to a greater or lesser extent, according to the coping strategy employed.     

Absence of effect of the change of food context in the activity-based anorexia phenomenon in rats

The goal of this study was to analyse how the context in which animals remain during the period of access to food modulates the development of activity-based anorexia in rats. For this purpose, the effect of changing the context of the activity period and the eating period was measured in terms of body weight loss, reduction in food intake and increase in physical activity. A 2 yen 2 factorial design was implemented, by having or not having access to a running wheel, and by being exposed or not exposed to a context change. Results showed that exposure to different contexts for the wheel and for the food did not affect weight loss, food intake or activity levels. These results are in line with the theoretical position of Epling and Pierce (1992) that activity is induced by the food restriction regime.     

Sensitivity to pain, self-regulation, coping and personality in healthy adult women

The goals of this study were to investigate the relation between sensitivity to pain and subjectively perceived intensity of pain, and to establish which psychological variables affect lesser or greater objective sensitivity to experimental pain. The study sample consisted of 74 adult women without regular pain symptoms. Experimental pain was induced by means of the Portable Electronic Dolorimeter (DEP). Intensity of induced pain was evaluated using a Visual Analogic Scale (VAS). Psychological characteristics studied were self-government, stress-coping strategies, sensitivity to anxiety and the five personality dimensions evaluated by the BFQ of Caprara, Barbaranelli and Borgogni (1995). Results revealed a positive relation between sensitivity to pain and subjective intensity of pain. An analysis of variance also revealed statistically significant differences between groups with low and high sensitivity to pain in the following variables: self-motivation, focalization in problem-solving, positive reappraisal of stressful events, energy and mental openness. The importance of the study lies in the identification of specific psychological factors for intervention in the psychological treatment of pain.     

From residential care to school: peer relationships at school of minors in residential care

In this study, peer relationships of minors in residential care in a school context are analysed, both from the perspective of the peers and the teachers. Using a sociometric test and an evaluation protocol for teachers in 50 classrooms, a sample of 60 minors in care is compared to a normative sample of 843 minors. The results show that minors in residential care have a higher rate of rejection by their classmates in academic activities, but not for leisure ones. Furthermore, in comparison with the normative sample, they are more frequently described with negative adjectives. There is a high level of agreement between the peer evaluation and that of the teachers in the most visible aspects in the classroom. The implications of these results for the improvement of the adjustment of this group are discussed.     

Effects of Tradislexia videogame on phonological awareness and word recognition in dyslexic children

The purpose of this research was to analyze the effects of multimedia training on phonological awareness and word recognition in dyslexic children. We used a control pretest-posttest design, and a sample of 62 children (26 male, 36 female) was selected from Primary Education. Children were selected and classified into two different groups: (1) an experimental group (N=32), and (2) a control group (N=30). The average range age was 9 and 12 years (M=126.7, SD=11.7). We administered phonological awareness tasks, which include different types of syllabic structure from the Sicole-R Multimedia Battery for assessment of cognitive processes in reading. We analyzed whether the Tradislexia videogame affected phonological awareness, considering separately the complexity of syllable structure and type of phonological awareness task. We also analyzed whether the gains in phonological processes were related to training based on type of task or type of syllable structure. The results showed that when we controlled the position of phoneme, the multimedia treatment in segmentation and blending with words that include CV syllables is a better predictor to explain improvement of word decoding processes.     

Evaluation of three sensitivity measures in magnitude estimation tasks

Taking into account the studies about the measure of sensitivity in magnitude estimation tasks, we analyze the three most common measures used in this topic: Pearson's product-moment correlation between the logarithm of the stimulus and the logarithm of the response (R), the exponent of Stevens' power function (K), and the measure "M" proposed by Garriga-Trillo. Using a sample of participants greater than usual in psychophysical studies (180 participants), we designed an experiment with two sets of stimuli with different stimulus ranges. In each of these sets, we used two kinds of stimuli (line segments and squares). Our conclusions were: (1) we rejected the use of K as a sensitivity measure because the results provided by this index were the opposite of those expected when we compared the two stimulus ranges. (2) We also rejected the use of M because this measure is a linear transformation of Kendall's coefficient of concordance. (3) Lastly, we suggest the mathematical transformation proposed by Fisher to achieve a normal distribution, and recommend this transformation as the best sensitivity measure.     

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.