Development and validation of a scale to assess positive youth development values

This paper describes the development of a self-report scale for adolescents to assess positive youth development values. It presents a substantial number of psychometric results performed on a sample of 2,400 adolescents (1,068 boys and 1,332 girls) from 12 to 17 years ( M = 14.73, SD = 1.25), who were studying secondary education in Western Andalusia. The results provide evidence of the psychometric quality of items, cross-validity of a structure of eight first-order factors and three second-order factors, obtained through exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, and adequate reliability. This study concludes that the scale presents adequate evidence of validity and reliability that allows assessment, especially in school contexts, of a broad set of values of particular relevance to positive youth development.     

The Relationship Quality Interview: evidence of reliability, convergent and divergent validity, and incremental utility

Relationship satisfaction and adjustment have been the target outcome variables for almost all couple research and therapies. In contrast, far less attention has been paid to the assessment of relationship quality. The present study introduces the Relationship Quality Interview (RQI), a semistructured, behaviorally anchored individual interview. The RQI was designed to provide a more objective assessment of relationship quality as a dynamic, dyadic construct across 5 dimensions: (a) quality of emotional intimacy in the relationship, (b) quality of the couple's sexual relationship, (c) quality of support transactions in the relationship, (d) quality of the couple's ability to share power in the relationship, and (e) quality of conflict/problem-solving interactions in the relationship. Psychometric properties of RQI ratings were examined through scores obtained from self-report questionnaires and behavioral observation data collected cross-sectionally from a sample of 91 dating participants and longitudinally from a sample of 101 married couples. RQI ratings demonstrated strong reliability (internal consistency, interrater agreement, interpartner agreement, and correlations among scales), convergent validity (correlations between RQI scale ratings and questionnaire scores assessing similar domains of relationship quality), and divergent validity (correlations between RQI scale ratings and (a) behavioral observation codes assessing related constructs, (b) global relationship satisfaction scores, and (c) scores on individual difference measures of related constructs). Clinical implications of the RQI for improving couple assessment and interventions are discussed.     

« Femmes au volant,danger au tournant » Les conductrices sont-elles victimes d’une menace de stéréotype ?

Owing to the sexuation of occupations associating technical attributes with men and relational skills with women, the latter are less numerous in professions where driving is involved. The negative stereotype associating women with poor driving skills is thus likely to have a cognitive and behavioral impact. According to the model of the stereotype threat, could activation of the threat inhibit the performance of women in a Highway Code test? After performing an association task that demonstrated a largely negative stereotype, 56 female students took a Highway Code test in two conditions: an experimental condition where the stereotype was activated by a comparison between men and women (N = 17); and a control condition without activation (N = 39). Subjects performed less well in the experimental condition, demonstrating the expected effects of the stereotype threat.     

Predictive Validity of the Suicide Probability Scale in a Male Inmate Population

This paper describes the predictive power of the Suicide Probability Scale (SPS) within a male inmate population. The SPS scores of 1,047 inmates from 1995 to 1996 were compared against their suicidal behaviors in the following 10 years. The SPS probability score and the scores on its four subscales were found to be significantly higher in the group that engaged in at least one of three types of suicidal behavior: suicide, non-lethal self-harm and serious suicidal intentions. However, the SPS did not discriminate the inmates who went on to commit suicide. The SPS’s capacity to predict suicidal behavior proved limited in terms of sensitivity. In this regard, the SPS’s low and high risk levels correctly identified 36% of inmates who later engaged in suicidal behavior. The specificity was 0.85. These results confirm the SPS’s predictive power with male prisoners. These findings are the first to demonstrate the predictive validity of the SPS.     

Structural properties of spatial representations in blind people: Scanning images constructed from haptic exploration or from locomotion in a 3-D audio virtual environment

When people scan mental images, their response times increase linearly with increases in the distance to be scanned, which is generally taken as reflecting the fact that their internal representations incorporate the metric properties of the corresponding objects. In view of this finding, we investigated the structural properties of spatial mental images created from nonvisual sources in three groups (blindfolded sighted, late blind, and congenitally blind). In Experiment 1, blindfolded sighted and late blind participants created metrically accurate spatial representations of a small-scale spatial configuration under both verbal and haptic learning conditions. In Experiment 2, late and congenitally blind participants generated accurate spatial mental images after both verbal and locomotor learning of a full-scale navigable space (created by an immersive audio virtual reality system), whereas blindfolded sighted participants were selectively impaired in their ability to generate precise spatial representations from locomotor experience. These results attest that in the context of a permanent lack of sight, encoding spatial information on the basis of the most reliable currently functional system (the sensorimotor system) is crucial for building a metrically accurate representation of a spatial environment. The results also highlight the potential of spatialized audio-rendering technology for exploring the spatial representations of visually impaired participants.     

Sources of Parental Knowledge as Moderators of the Relation Between Parental Psychological Control and Relational and Physical/Verbal Aggression

Previous research demonstrates that aspects of parenting interact to influence child adjustment. We aimed to extend this research by examining parenting strategies associated with behavioral control, specifically sources of parental knowledge regarding child behavior (child disclosure, parental solicitation, parental control), as moderators of the relation between psychological control and relational and physical/verbal aggression. Our sample included 89 children (56% male), ages 9–12. Consistent with prior research on child adjustment, low child disclosure was the only source of parental knowledge associated with both relational and physical/verbal aggression. Moreover, parental solicitation moderated the association between psychological control and relational, but not physical, aggression. That is, at high levels of parental solicitation, psychological control and relational aggression were positively related, whereas at low levels of parental solicitation, psychological control and relational aggression were unrelated. Implications and future directions are discussed.     

Surprise-induced blindness: a stimulus-driven attentional limit to conscious perception

The cost of attending to a visual event can be the failure to consciously detect other events. This processing limitation is well illustrated by the attentional blink paradigm, in which searching for and attending to a target presented in a rapid serial visual presentation stream of distractors can impair one's ability to detect a second target presented soon thereafter. The attentional blink critically depends on 'top-down' attentional settings, for it does not occur if participants are asked to ignore the first target. Here we show that 'bottom-up' attention can also lead to a profound but ephemeral deficit in conscious perception: Presentation of a novel, unexpected, and task-irrelevant stimulus virtually abolishes conscious detection of a target presented within half a second after the 'Surprise' stimulus, but only for its earliest occurrences (generally 1 to 2 presentations). This powerful but short-lived deficit contrasts with a milder but more enduring form of attentional capture that accompanies singleton presentations in rapid serial visual presentations. We conclude that the capture of stimulus-driven attention alone can limit explicit perception.     

Men's sense of humor and women's responses to courtship solicitations: an experimental field study

Producing humor might function as a fitness indicator associated with greater desirability during dating selection. A male confederate in a bar was instructed to tell (or not tell) funny jokes to two other male confederates. A few minutes later, when the second of two male confederates left, the first male confederate asked a female who was near his table and who had heard the funny jokes for her phone number. The previous expression of humor was associated with greater compliance with the male confederate's request and with a higher positive evaluation. The possible effects of humor are discussed from an evolutionary perspective.     

Dissociable neural systems support retrieval of how and why action knowledge

In everyday discourse, people typically represent actions in one of two ways: how they are performed or why they are performed. In the present study, we determined the neural systems that support these natural modes of representing actions. Participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging while identifying how and why people perform various familiar actions. Identifying how actions are performed produced activity in premotor areas that support the execution of actions and in higher-order visual areas that support the perception of action-related objects; this finding supports an embodied view of action knowledge. However, identifying why actions are performed preferentially engaged areas of the brain associated with representing and reasoning about mental states; these areas were right temporoparietal junction, precuneus, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, and posterior superior temporal sulcus. Our results suggest that why action knowledge is not sufficiently constituted by information in motor and visual systems, but requires a system for representing states of mind, which do not have reliable motor correlates or visual appearance.