Screening utility of the social anxiety screening scale in Spanish speaking adolescents

The aim of this study was to analyse the screening utility of the Social Anxiety Screening Scale (SASS/EDAS) in a sample of 227 adolescents with social anxiety disorder and 156 Without it (14-17 years). Results showed that the EDAS subscales (Avoidance, Distress and Interference) scores were reliable in terms of internal consistency (alpha > .80). All the subscales discriminated between adolescents with and without the disorder. They also showed a positive and significant correlation with other empirically validated measures of social anxiety. The three subscales indicated relevant sensitivity (69.16-84.14%), specificity (63.46-66.03%) and areas under the curve (.74-.81%). Binary logistic regression analyses indicated the adequate predictive utility of EDAS subscales, with the Distress subscale as the best diagnostic predictor. The data provide empirical evidence of the usefulness of EDAS as a screener for adolescent social anxiety disorder in terms of reliability, convergent and discriminant validity, diagnostic accuracy and clinical usefulness.     

Self-recognition and self-regulation: the relationship with socialization trajectories and children's sex

The initial process of self development involves interaction with others and the establishment of relationships taking different paths depending on the socio-cultural context. Self-recognition and self-regulation are considered manifestations of this development between 18 and 24 months of age. This study aimed at analyzing the relationship between these two aspects, maternal beliefs about autonomy and relatedness, as well as identifying differences between boys and girls in this developmental stage. Participants were 94 mothers of different educational levels and their children of 17-22 months of age in two Brazilian cities. Socialization Goals Inventory and Parental Practices in the First Year Inventory were used to collect data on mothers' beliefs. Children performed tasks related to self-recognition (the mirror test) and self-regulation (compliance to requests). The group of mothers studied valued both autonomy and interdependence. Children's responses are consistent with a perspective of relational autonomy, which value both independence and interdependence. Differences were found in relation to sex in both self-recognition and self-regulation, and baby girls showed superior performance than boys in both tasks.     

The memory failures of everyday questionnaire (MFE): internal consistency and reliability

The Memory Failures of Everyday Questionnaire (MFE) is one of the most widely-used instruments to assess memory failures in daily life. The original scale has nine response options, making it difficult to apply; we created a three-point scale (0-1-2) with response choices that make it easier to administer. We examined the two versions' equivalence in a sample of 193 participants between 19 and 64 years of age. The test-retest reliability and internal consistency of the version we propose were also computed in a sample of 113 people. Several indicators attest to the two forms' equivalence: the correlation between the items' means (r = .94; p < .001) and the order of the items' frequencies (r = .92; p < .001). However, the correlation between global scores on the two forms was not very high (r = .67; p < .001). The results indicate this new version has adequate reliability and internal consistency (r(xx) = .83; p < .001; alpha = .83; p < .001) equivalent to those of the MFE 1-9. The MFE 0-2 provides a brief, simple evaluation, so we recommend it for use in clinical practice as well as research.     

Psychological morbidity, illness representations, and quality of life in female and male patients with obstructive sleep apnea syndrome

Obstructive sleep apnea syndrome (OSAS) is a sleep-related breathing disorder that affects both women and men. The aim of this study was to characterize and investigate the differences in terms of anxiety, depression, illness perception, and quality of life between female and male OSAS patients from a total of 111 patients (33 women and 78 men) who were recently diagnosed with OSAS in an outpatient clinic of a University Hospital in Portugal. They underwent a standardized protocol that included evaluation to assess of psychological morbidity (anxiety and depression - Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale), illness representations (Brief Illness Perception Questionnaire), and quality of life (Sleep Apnea Quality of Life Index). The most significant differences between female and male OSAS patients result of apnea/hypopnea index (AHI), after controlling for body mass index (p?相似文献   

Congruent visual information improves traffic signage

In the last five decades, cognitive scientists and the psychologists of reasoning have dedicated a lot of effort designing usable traffic signs. This study investigated the interference effect produced by the position of the sign elements in traffic signage on response accuracy and reaction time. Sixteen drivers performed a flanker interference reaction time task. Incongruent graphical/space solutions, actually used for the airport stack-type sign, lead to increased reaction time and a reduction in the proportion of correct answers. These results suggest that incongruent visual information should be avoided, as this might impair drivers’ performance. These findings provide important information for the specification of future signage design guidelines and for improving road safety.     

The bank of standardized stimuli (BOSS): comparison between French and English norms

Throughout the last decades, numerous picture data sets have been developed, such as the Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980) set, and have been normalized for variables such as name and familiarity; however, due to cultural and linguistic differences, norms can vary from one country to another. The effect due specifically to culture has already been demonstrated by comparing samples from different countries where the same language is spoken. On the other hand, it is still not clear how differences between languages may affect norms. The present study explores this issue by collecting and comparing norms on names and many other features from French Canadian speakers and English Canadian speakers living in Montreal, who thus live in similar cultural environments. Norms were collected for the photos of objects from the Bank of Standardized Stimuli (BOSS) by asking participants to name the objects, to categorize them, and to rate their familiarity, visual complexity, object agreement, viewpoint agreement, and manipulability. Names and ratings from the French speakers are available in Appendix A, available in the supplemental materials. The results show that most of the norms are comparable across linguistic groups and also that the ratings given are correlated across linguistic groups. The only significant group differences were found in viewpoint agreement and visual complexity. Overall, there was good concordance between the norms collected from French and English native speakers living in the same cultural setting.     

Unified framework for recognition, localization and mapping using wearable cameras

Monocular approaches to simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) have recently addressed with success the challenging problem of the fast computation of dense reconstructions from a single, moving camera. Thus, if these approaches initially relied on the detection of a reduced set of interest points to estimate the camera position and the map, they are currently able to reconstruct dense maps from a handheld camera while the camera coordinates are simultaneously computed. However, these maps of 3-dimensional points usually remain meaningless, that is, with no memorable items and without providing a way of encoding spatial relationships between objects and paths. In humans and mobile robotics, landmarks play a key role in the internalization of a spatial representation of an environment. They are memorable cues that can serve to define a region of the space or the location of other objects. In a topological representation of the space, landmarks can be identified and located according to its structural, perceptive or semantic significance and distinctiveness. But on the other hand, landmarks may be difficult to be located in a metric representation of the space. Restricted to the domain of visual landmarks, this work describes an approach where the map resulting from a point-based, monocular SLAM is annotated with the semantic information provided by a set of distinguished landmarks. Both features are obtained from the image. Hence, they can be linked by associating to each landmark all those point-based features that are superimposed to the landmark in a given image (key-frame). Visual landmarks will be obtained by means of an object-based, bottom-up attention mechanism, which will extract from the image a set of proto-objects. These proto-objects could not be always associated with natural objects, but they will typically constitute significant parts of these scene objects and can be appropriately annotated with semantic information. Moreover, they will be affine covariant regions, that is, they will be invariant to affine transformation, being detected under different viewing conditions (view-point angle, rotation, scale, etc.). Monocular SLAM will be solved using the accurate parallel tracking and mapping (PTAM) framework by Klein and Murray in Proceedings of IEEE/ACM international symposium on mixed and augmented reality, 2007.     

Reciprocal relations between recovery and work engagement: the moderating role of job stressors

In this paper, we examined the within-person relations between morning recovery level (i.e., feeling refreshed and replenished) and work engagement throughout the day, and between work engagement throughout the day and the subsequent recovery level at the end of the workday. We hypothesized that job stressors (situational constraints, job demands) moderate these relations. A diary study over 1 workweek with 2 measurement occasions per day (N = 111 persons) provided support for most of the hypotheses: Morning recovery level predicted work engagement, and work engagement predicted subsequent recovery level at the end of the workday after controlling for morning recovery level. As predicted, situational constraints attenuated these relations, but job demands did not. The results suggest that recovery translates into employee work engagement, and work engagement, in turn, prevents a loss in recovery level throughout the day, particularly when situational constraints are low. Situational constraints seem to interrupt the reciprocal processes between recovery level and work engagement.     

The present projects past behavior into the future while the past projects attitudes into the future: How verb tense moderates predictors of drinking intentions

Three studies examined how the use of the present versus the past tense in recalling a past experience influences behavioral intentions. Experiment 1 revealed a stronger influence of past behaviors on drinking intentions when participants self-reported an episode of excessive drinking using the present tense. Correspondingly, there was a stronger influence of attitudes towards excessive drinking when participants self-reported the episode in the past tense. Experiments 2 and 3 liked this effect to changes in construal level (Liberman, Trope, & Stephan, 2007; Trope & Liberman, 2003), with the present tense being similar to a concrete construal level and the past tense being similar to an abstract construal level.