Do parents and children know each other? A study about agreement on personality within families

The relationships between self-report and observer-rating versions of personality questionnaires within families in the Spanish cultural context were studied. In the first sample, 336 couples rated the personality of one of their children. The children also assessed their own personality. Goldberg's adjectives were administered. In the second sample, 120 university students rated the personality of their parents. Both parents also assessed their own personality. In this case, Goldberg's adjectives and the NEO-PI-R were administered. Results replicate the level of agreement found in other cultural contexts. Correlations were around .40, and the effect size of the mean differences was not large. Children were more accurate than parents, larger agreement coefficients were found for the NEO-PI-R than for Goldberg's adjectives in Sample 2, especially for the Openness factor, and no substantial role for the sex variable was found in either sample. Implications and limitations of the present study are discussed.     

Psychosocial risk factors at work as predictors of mobbing

This work analyses the way in which various psychosocial risk indicators may predict mobbing. A sample of 638 workers, 168 men and 470 women, from the fruit-and-vegetable sector was evaluated. An anonymous questionnaire was administered to all employees who were present on the evaluation days in the companies comprising the study. After analysing the data obtained with the mobbing questionnaire NAQ-RE (Sáez, García-Izquierdo, and Llor, 2003) and with the psychosocial risk factors evaluation method of the INSHT (Martín and Pérez, 1997), using canonical regression, we found that several psychosocial factors such as role definition, mental workload, interest in the workers, and supervision / participation predict two types of mobbing: personal mobbing and work-performance-related mobbing.     

Emotional lability, negative affect and emotional regulation in children of anxious mothers

This study examined the role of emotional lability and negative affect and emotional regulation in the relation between maternal trait anxiety and attentional and social problems, and internalizing and externalizing symptoms of 275 six- to eleven-year-old children. The results indicated a direct moderating effect of emotional regulation in the relation between maternal anxiety and externalizing behaviour and that lability and negative affect moderated the relation between maternal anxiety and attention and social problems and somatic complaints. The links between maternal anxiety and withdrawal and anxiety/depression symptoms were also mediated by lability and negative affect. This mediation was independent of emotional regulation in the first case, and it depended on emotional regulation with regard to anxiety/depression symptoms.     

The influence of psychological variables on sports performance: assessment with the Questionnaire of Sports Performance-related Psychological Characteristics

The purpose of this research was to observe the relationship among psychological variables and three important issues in sports competition: achieving success, long-term continuance and sustaining injuries. Three studies were carried out with three groups of athletes from the areas of judo, football and swimming, using the Questionnaire of Sports Performance-related Psychological Characteristics as the measuring instrument. The analyses carried out revealed significantly statistical associations between the perception of stress control and of self-confidence, and between achieving success, long-term continuance in competition sports and sustaining injuries. These results indicate the importance of psychological skills training to aid sports performance and prevent injuries, as well as the use of the above-mentioned questionnaire, which, with a limited number of items, measures a wide range of psychological variables in the specific context of sports.     

Emergence of intra verbal antonyms in children with pervasive developmental disorder

In the type of intraverbal that consists of saying the opposite of a word, two intraverbals are related to one another because the response form of each intraverbal functions as part of a discriminative stimulus for the other (e.g., "cold" in response to "name the opposite of hot," and vice versa). Moreover, the contextual cue "Name the opposite of--" is the same in the two intraverbals. The purpose of the present research was to explore a procedure designed to promote emergence of intraverbals of this type. Two children with pervasive developmental disorder learned pairs of intraverbals. Thereafter, they were tested for emergence of intraverbals with reversed stimulus-response functions. Results indicate that, although the participants did not initially show emergence of intraverbals with reversed stimulus-response functions, repeated cycles of probing and teaching facilitated emergence of these relations.     

Expert-novice differences in cognitive and execution skills during tennis competition

This study deals with decision and execution behavior of tennis players during competition. The study is based on the expert-novice paradigm and aims to identify differences between both groups in the decision-making and execution variables in serve and shot actions in tennis. Six expert players (elite Spanish tennis players) and six novice players (grade school tennis players) took part in this study. To carry out this study, the observation protocol defined by McPherson and Thomas in 1989, in which control, decision-making and execution variables were included, was used, where it was applied to the performance of the tennis player in a real match situation. In the analysis, significant differences between experts and novices in decision-making and execution variables are found wherein it can be observed that experts display a greater ability to make the appropriate decisions, selecting the most tactical responses to put pressure on the opponent. Expert tennis players were also able to carry out forceful executions to their opponent with greater efficiency, making the opponent's response to a large extent more difficult. These findings are in accordance with those of McPherson and colleagues.     

Clinical Characterization and Risk Profile of Individuals Seeking Genetic Counseling for Hereditary Breast Cancer in Brazil

Hereditary breast cancer (HBC) accounts for 5–10% of breast cancer cases and it significantly increases the lifetime risk of cancer. Our objective was to evaluate the sociodemographic variables, family history of cancer, breast cancer (BC) screening practices and the risk profile of cancer affected or asymptomatic at-risk women that undergo genetic counseling for hereditary breast cancer in public Brazilian cancer genetics services. Estimated lifetime risk of BC was calculated for asymptomatic women using the Gail and Claus models. The majority of women showed a moderate lifetime risk of developing BC, with an average risk of 19.7% and 19.9% by the Gail and Claus models, respectively. The average prior probability of carrying a BRCA1/2 gene mutation was 16.7% and overall only 32% fulfilled criteria for a hereditary breast cancer syndrome as assessed by family history. We conclude that a significant number of individuals at high-risk for HBC syndromes may not have access to the benefits of cancer genetic counseling in these centers. Contributing factors may include insufficient training of healthcare professionals, disinformation of cancer patients; difficult access to genetic testing and/or resistance in seeking such services. The identification and understanding of these barriers is essential to develop specific strategies to effectively achieve cancer risk reduction in this and other countries were clinical cancer genetics is not yet fully established.     

Effects of prime task on affective priming by facial expressions of emotion

Priming of affective word evaluation by pictures of faces showing positive and negative emotional expressions was investigated in two experiments that used a double task procedure where participants were asked to respond to the prime or to the target on different trials. The experiments varied between-subjects the prime task assignment and the prime-target interval (SOA, stimulus onset asynchrony). Significant congruency effects (that is, faster word evaluation when prime and target had the same valence than when they were of opposite valence) were observed in both experiments. When the prime task oriented the subjects to an affectively irrelevant property of the faces (their gender), priming was observed at SOA 300 ms but not at SOA 1000 ms (Experiment 1). However, when the prime task assignment explicitly oriented the subjects to the valence of the face, priming was observed at both SOA durations (Experiment 2). These results show, first, that affective priming by pictures of facial emotion can be obtained even when the subject has an explicit goal to process a non-affective property of the prime. Second, sensitivity of the priming effect to SOA duration seems to depend on whether it is mediated by intentional or unintentional activation of the valence of the face prime.     

Impact of parenting styles on adolescents' self-esteem and internalization of values in Spain

The relationship of parenting styles with adolescents' outcomes was analyzed within a sample of Spanish adolescents. A sample of 1456 teenagers from 13 to 16 years of age, of whom 54.3% were females, reported on their parents' child-rearing practices. The teenagers' parents were classified into one of four groups (authoritative, authoritarian, indulgent, or neglectful). The adolescents were then contrasted on two different outcomes: (1) priority given to Schwartz's self-transcendence (universalism and benevolence) and conservation (security, conformity, and tradition) values and (2) level of self-esteem (appraised in five domains: academic, social, emotional, family and physical). The results show that Spanish adolescents from indulgent households have the same or better outcomes than adolescents from authoritative homes. Parenting is related with two self-esteem dimensions--academic and family--and with all the self-transcendence and conservation values. Adolescents of indulgent parents show highest scores in self-esteem whereas adolescents from authoritarian parents obtain the worst results. In contrast, there were no differences between the priority given by adolescents of authoritative and indulgent parents to any of the self-transcendence and conservation values, whereas adolescents of authoritarian and neglectful parents, in general, assign the lowest priority to all of these values.