Multidimensional assessment of family involvement among urban elementary students

Family involvement in children's education is fundamental for academic success. This study extended the research on the Family Involvement Questionnaire for Early Childhood (FIQ-EC) by further developing the measure and testing its use with low-income urban elementary students. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses affirmed three salient and reliable family involvement dimensions for a large sample of urban first- through fifth-grade students: Home-based Involvement, School-based Involvement, and Home–School Communication. Multivariate analyses demonstrated the significance of caregiver educational background, family characteristics, and child gender to involvement dimensions. Caregiver age or children's grade level did not significantly relate to family involvement dimensions. This study contributes to evidence for a multidimensional understanding of family involvement.     

The differential effect of team members' trust on team performance: The mediation role of team cohesion

This study examines team performance as affected by various trusting relationships: trust between team members and the team's trust in their direct manager and in top management. Data for the study were collected from a survey of 690 professional elite athletes (belonging to 59 different sports clubs) playing in the regular, top professional Spanish leagues. The model was tested at the team level. Findings reveal that team member trust with respect to the different foci has both a direct and indirect effect on team performance, and that team player trust and cohesion play a mediating role. This study illustrates the dynamic relationship within teams, and, as such, trust among teammates mediates the relationship between trust in the coach as well as team cohesion in determining team performance. The implications for managing teams in other contexts are also evaluated.     

Effects of loss aversion on post-decision wagering: Implications for measures of awareness

Wagering contingent on a previous decision, or post-decision wagering, has recently been proposed to measure conscious awareness. Whilst intuitively appealing, it remains unclear whether economic context interacts with subjective confidence and how such interactions might impact on the measurement of awareness. Here we propose a signal detection model which predicts that advantageous wagers placed on the identity of preceding stimuli are affected by loss aversion, despite stimulus visibility remaining constant. This pattern of predicted results was evident in a psychophysical task where we independently manipulated perceptual and economic factors. Changes in wagering behaviour induced by changes in wager size were largely driven by changes in criterion, consistent with the model. However, for near-threshold stimuli, a reduction in wagering efficiency was also evident, consistent with an apparent but potentially illusory decrease in awareness of the stimulus. These findings challenge an assertion that post-decision wagering provides a direct index of subjective awareness.     

Nonlinear epigenetic variance: review and simulations

We present a review of empirical evidence that suggests that a substantial portion of phenotypic variance is due to nonlinear (epigenetic) processes during ontogenesis. The role of such processes as a source of phenotypic variance in human behaviour genetic studies is not fully appreciated. In addition to our review, we present simulation studies of nonlinear epigenetic variance using a computational model of neuronal network development. In each simulation study, time series for monozygotic and dizygotic twins were generated and analysed using conventional behaviour genetic modelling. In the results of these analyses, the nonlinear epigenetic variance was subsumed under the non-shared environmental component. As is commonly found in behaviour genetic studies, observed heritabilities and unique environmentabilities increased with time, whereas common environmentabilities decreased. The fact that the phenotypic effects of nonlinear epigenetic processes appear as unsystematic variance in conventional twin analyses complicates the identification and quantification of the ultimate genetic and environmental causes of individual differences. We believe that nonlinear dynamical system theories provide a challenging perspective on the development of individual differences, which may enrich behaviour genetic studies.     

Severity Indices of Personality Problems (SIPP-118): development, factor structure, reliability, and validity

This article describes a series of studies involving 2,730 participants on the development and validity testing of the Severity Indices of Personality Problems (SIPP), a self-report questionnaire covering important core components of (mal)adaptive personality functioning. Results show that the 16 facets constituted homogeneous item clusters (i.e., unidimensional and internally consistent parcels) that fit well into 5 clinically interpretable, higher order domains: self-control, identity integration, relational capacities, social concordance, and responsibility. These domains appeared to have good concurrent validity across various populations, good convergent validity in terms of associations with interview ratings of the severity of personality pathology, and good discriminant validity in terms of associations with trait-based personality disorder dimensions. Furthermore, results suggest that the domain scores are stable over a time interval of 14-21 days in a student sample but are sensitive to change over a 2-year follow-up interval in a treated patient population. Taken together, the final instrument, the SIPP-118, provides a set of 5 reliable, valid, and efficient indices of the core components of (mal)adaptive personality functioning.     

The relationship between temperament and personality: An exploratory study

Although the terms temperament and personality are often used interchangeably in the literature and clearly are conceptually related, there is little empirical data to illuminate their relationship. In this exploratory study we measured temperament (using the Dimensions of Temperament Survey), and personality (using the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire), in young adolescents and in adults. Some age and sex differences in relationships between the measures and their correlations were found. The temperament dimension of adaptability was clearly related to Eysenck's Extraversion factor and reactivity to Neuroticism in females. More substantial relationships emerged in the adult sample than in the adolescent group, Our data, combined with that of a 1984 Australian study using different techniques, provides substantial support for measurable overlap between some dimensions of temperament derived largely from the developmental literature, and Eysenck's personality theory.     

A technique for measuring processing load during speech production

A technique is presented for the measurement of fluctuations in processing demands during spontaneous speech. The technique consists of the analysis of errors on a secondary tracking task. Data are presented from illustrative samples of spontaneous speech; thus, evidence was found to suggest that one level of planning in speech is clauses that contain a single main verb. Evidence was also obtained that there is an increase in processing demands at the gap in subject relative and object relative clauses. It is concluded that the secondary tracking task is a useful technique that could be extended to studies of reading and speech comprehension.