Psychometric properties of an instrument for assessing cyber-sex addiction

Psychometric properties of an instrument for assessing cyber-sex addiction. Cyber-sex addiction is a ?new pathology? whose prevalence has grown rapidly in recent years. Therefore, it is important to have validated assessment instruments. The aim of this study was the adaptation and validation of the Internet Sex Screening Test (ISST) for its use in a Spanish population. The instrument was administered to 1239 Spanish college students. The results yielded five components that account for 47.5% of the variance. Internal consistency was .88 and temporal stability was .84. Moreover, the instrument had adequate convergent and discriminant validity and was related to other behaviors such as the use of pornography, internet addiction, number of hours online and sexual frequency. Therefore, this tool is proposed as an appropriate measure to assess cyber-sex addiction.     

Would Socio-Economic Inequalities in Depression Fade Away with Income Transfers?

A number of recent studies have questioned the conventional view regarding the existence of income-related inequalities in depression and have suggested that other factors have a more marked impact, most notably those socio-environmental effects linked to professional status and educational attainment. This paper seeks to measure and decompose the degree of socio-economic inequality in the factors underlying reported depression by drawing on data from Spain (Spanish National Health Survey, 2003), a country in which mental care coverage is somewhat limited, but where a marked social transformation has been apparent in recent decades. Contrary to recent evidence, our findings point towards the existence of significant income-related inequalities in the prevalence of reported (diagnosed) depression. However, the results from our decomposition analysis are more mixed. While a modest proportion of overall inequalities (6–13%) is accounted for by income alone, labour status, demographics and education appear to be more relevant. However, when controlling for potential endogeneity between income and depression by using instrumental variables (IV), income is found to account for more than 50% of overall inequality in reported depression.

How writing system and age influence spatial representations of actions: a developmental, cross-linguistic study

Recently, researchers reported a bias for placing agents predominantly on the left side of pictures. Both hemispheric specialization and cultural preferences have been hypothesized to be the origin of this bias. To evaluate these hypotheses, we conducted a study with participants exposed to different reading and writing systems: Germans, who use a left-to-right system, and Israelis, who use a right-to-left system. In addition, we manipulated the degree of exposure to the writing systems by testing preschoolers and adults. Participants heard agent-first or recipient-first sentences and were asked to draw the content of the sentences or to arrange transparencies of protagonists and objects such that their arrangement depicted the sentences. Although preschool-age children in both countries showed no directional bias, adults manifested a bias that was consistent with the writing system of their language. These results support the cultural hypothesis regarding the origin of spatial-representational biases.     

God’s categories: The effect of religiosity on children’s teleological and essentialist beliefs about categories

Creationism implies that God imbued each category with a unique nature and purpose. These implications closely correspond to what some cognitive psychologists define as an essentialistic and teleological stance towards categories. This study assessed to what extent the belief in God as creator of categories is related to the mappings of these stances to categories in different domains. Israeli secular and orthodox Jewish 1st and 5th graders responded to questions assessing these three types of beliefs. The results revealed that secular children did not differ from orthodox children with respect to their essentialist beliefs about the stability of animal category membership, and their teleological construal of artifacts. In turn, secular children did differ from orthodox children with respect to their essentialist beliefs about the stability of social category membership, and their teleological construal of both animal and social categories. These findings intimate that while essentialist beliefs about animals, and teleological beliefs about artifacts do not require cultural input in order to emerge, essentialist beliefs about social categories, and teleological beliefs about both animal and social categories do.     

The development of category learning strategies: What makes the difference?

Category learning can be achieved by identifying common features among category members, distinctive features among non-members, or both. These processes are psychologically and computationally distinct, and may have implications for the acquisition of categories at different hierarchical levels. The present study examines an account of children’s difficulty in acquiring categories at the subordinate level grounded on these distinct comparison processes. Adults and children performed category learning tasks in which they were exposed either to pairs of objects from the same novel category or pairs of objects from different categories. The objects were designed so that for each category learning task, two features determined category membership whereas two other features were task irrelevant. In the learning stage participants compared pairs of objects noted to be either from the same category or from different categories. Object pairs were chosen so that the objective amount of information provided to the participants was identical in the two learning conditions. We found that when presented only with object pairs noted to be from the same category, young children (6 ? YO ? 9.5) learned the novel categories just as well as older children (10 ? YO ? 14) and adults. However, when presented only with object pairs known to be from different categories, unlike older children and adults, young children failed to learn the novel categories. We discuss cognitive and computational factors that may give rise to this comparison bias, as well as its expected outcomes.     

What Determines Visual Statistical Learning Performance? Insights From Information Theory

In order to extract the regularities underlying a continuous sensory input, the individual elements constituting the stream have to be encoded and their transitional probabilities (TPs) should be learned. This suggests that variance in statistical learning (SL) performance reflects efficiency in encoding representations as well as efficiency in detecting their statistical properties. These processes have been taken to be independent and temporally modular, where first, elements in the stream are encoded into internal representations, and then the co‐occurrences between them are computed and registered. Here, we entertain a novel hypothesis that one unifying construct—the rate of information in the sensory input—explains learning performance. This theoretical approach merges processes related to encoding of events and those related to learning their regularities into a single computational principle. We present data from two large‐scale experiments with over 800 participants tested in support for this hypothesis, showing that rate of information in a visual stream clearly predicts SL performance, and that similar rate of information values leads to similar SL performance. We discuss the implications for SL theory and its relation to regularity learning.     

USING PARENTS TO MAINTAIN IMPROVED DENTAL FLOSSING SKILLS IN CHILDREN

An experimenter-administered intervention involving prompts, self-monitoring, permanent product collection, rewards for plaque reduction, and corrective feedback was used to improve the flossing skills of four 7- to 11-year-old children. Parents were subsequently trained in the reward and feedback procedures to facilitate maintenance. In a multiple baseline across subjects design, all four subjects snowed improvement in plaque between teeth during experimenter-administered intervention. Three subjects maintained low plaque levels during the 3- to 4-month parent-administered rewards and feedback follow-up condition. Improved plaque levels on nontargeted tooth surfaces also were observed. Pediatric dentistry applications are discussed.     

Foundations of infants' social group evaluations

Previous research has suggested that infants exhibit a preference for familiar over unfamiliar social groups (e.g., preferring individuals from their own language group over individuals from a foreign language group). However, because past studies often employ forced‐choice procedures, it is not clear whether infants' intergroup preferences are driven by positivity toward members of familiar groups, negativity toward members of unfamiliar groups, or both. Across six experiments, we implemented a habituation procedure to independently measure infants' positive and negative evaluations of speakers of familiar and unfamiliar languages. We report that by 1 year of age, infants positively evaluate individuals who speak a familiar language, but do not negatively evaluate individuals who speak an unfamiliar language (Experiments 1 and 2). Several experiments rule out lower‐level explanations (Experiments 3–6). Together these data suggest that children's early social group preferences may be shaped by positive evaluations of familiar group(s), rather than negative evaluations of unfamiliar groups.