Building Life Satisfaction Through Well-Being Dimensions: A Longitudinal Study in Children with a Life-Threatening Illness

Recent literature suggests that people increase their life satisfaction over time as a result of developing positive psychological resources (e.g. benefit finding). However, this hypothesis has not yet tested in children. Since suffering from illness is usually associated with challenge and growth, we hypothesized that changes in life satisfaction in a sample of ill children would depend on to what extent they developed resources. Children with a life threatening illness (N = 67 at T1 and N = 49 at T2, ages 7–18 years) completed the Student Life Satisfaction Scale, a measure of health-related functioning problems, a measure of positive emotions (PE), the Benefit Finding Scale for Children, and a measure of strengths from the Values in Action Inventory of Character Strengths for Youth. The same measures were assessed 6 months after the first assessment. Using structural equation modeling techniques, results revealed that health-related functioning problems were associated with negative changes in life satisfaction over time. Moreover, increases in benefit finding and character strengths (i.e., love and gratitude) predicted positive changes in LS over time. Finally, PE predicted changes in benefit finding over time through several personal strengths (i.e., vitality and gratitude). The development of positive psychological resources in children experiencing high levels of stress may promote desirable psychological outcomes. Therefore, in order to help clinicians prevent negative outcomes, future research should strive to better understand life satisfaction and its underlying predictors in children experiencing difficult life circumstances.     

Characterising the Personality of the Public Safety Offender and Non‐offender using Decision Trees: The Case of Colombia

The aim of this paper was to create a decision tree (DT) to identify personality profiles of offenders against public safety. A technique meeting this requirement was proposed that uses the C4.5 algorithm to derive decision rules for personality profiling of public safety offenders. The Mini‐Mult test was used to measure the personality profiles of 238 individuals. With the test results as our database, a C4.5 DT was applied to construct rules that classify each profile into one of two groups, those without and those with records of offences against public safety. The model correctly classified 80% of the personality profiles and delivered a set of decision rules for distinguishing the profiles by group, and the principal personality profiles were interpreted. We conclude that DTs are a promising technique for analysing personality profiles by their offender or non‐offender status. Finally, we believe that the development of a classifying model using DT may have practical applications in the Colombian prison system. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Tell me sweet little lies: An event-related potentials study on the processing of social lies

In reading tasks, words that convey a false statement elicit an enhanced N400 brainwave response, relative to words that convey a true statement. N400 amplitude reductions are generally linked to the online expectancy of upcoming words in discourse. White lies, contrary to false statements, may not be unexpected in social scenarios. We used the event-related potential (ERP) technique to determine whether there is an impact of social context on sentence processing. We measured ERP responses to target words that either conveyed a social “white” lie or a socially impolite blunt truth, relative to semantic violations. Word expectancy was controlled for by equating the cloze probabilities of white lying and blunt true targets, as measured in previous paper-and-pencil tests. We obtained a classic semantic violation effect (a larger N400 for semantic incongruities relative to sense making statements). White lies, in contrast to false statements, did not enhance the amplitude of the N400 component. Interestingly, blunt true statements yielded both a late frontal positivity and an N400 response in those scenarios particularly biased to white lying. Thus, white lies do not interfere with online semantic processing, and they do not engage further reanalysis processes, which are typically indexed by subsequent late positivity ERP effects. Instead, an N400 and a late frontal positivity obtained in response to blunt true statements indicate that they were treated as unexpected events. In conclusion, unwritten rules of social communicative behavior influence the electrical brain response to locally coherent but socially inappropriate statements.     

Math anxiety: A review of its cognitive consequences,psychophysiological correlates,and brain bases

A decade has passed since the last published review of math anxiety, which was carried out by Ashcraft and Ridley (2005). Given the considerable interest aroused by this topic in recent years and the growing number of publications related to it, the present article aims to provide a full and updated review of the field, ranging from the initial studies of the impact of math anxiety on numerical cognition, to the latest research exploring its electrophysiological correlates and brain bases from a cognitive neuroscience perspective. Finally, this review describes the factors and mechanisms that have been claimed to play a role in the origins and/or maintenance of math anxiety, and it examines in detail the main explanations proposed to account for the negative effects of math anxiety on performance: competition for working memory resources, a deficit in a low-level numerical representation, and inhibition/attentional control deficit.     

Review of the Book Child Street Life. An Inside View of Hazards and Expectations of Street Children in Peru (SpringerBriefs in Well-Being and Quality of Life Research)

Applied Research in Quality of Life -     

Symbolic representation of the number three: a study with three-year-old children from contrasting socioeconomic environments

The goal of the present study was to compare a range of aspects in children’s symbolic knowledge about the number three among two groups of three-year-olds from contrasting socioeconomic backgrounds. Every child was presented with five tasks that focused on the number three and that had cognitive demands of different complexity: expressing their age, reciting the conventional number series up to three, quantifying a collection of three, and two tasks requiring the use of visually presented quantitative information.The results showed the same order of difficulty of the tasks in both socioeconomic groups and a clear performance difference depending on socioeconomic background. These findings show that symbolic knowledge about the number three does not come in an all or none fashion. Rather, different aspects of this symbolic competence become apparent in response to different tasks, and seem to depend largely on the socioeconomic environment in which children develop.     

Life Design Counseling: A study on client's operations for meaning construction

This study evaluated the adequacy of the micro-theory of client operations to explain meaning construction during Life Design Counseling. Four adolescents were interviewed about their second counseling session. Their recollections were stimulated through the replay of counseling videotapes. The resulting transcribed interviews were qualitatively analyzed. Results confirmed a sequence of client operations evolving from the symbolic representation of experience and reflexive self-examination towards making new realizations and revisioning self. Moreover, clients reported negative and positive session moments evidencing that clients' attention and activity during the session was not restricted to meaning construction operations. Practical implications for life design counseling are derived from the results and discussed.