Feeling Guilty or Not Guilty. Identifying Burnout Profiles among Italian Teachers

This study aimed at the assessment of psychometric properties of the Italian version of the Spanish Burnout Inventory (SBI-Ita) in a sample of Italian teachers and the analysis of burnout profiles based on a model that includes four dimensions: Enthusiasm toward job, Psychological exhaustion, Indolence, and Guilt. A self-reported questionnaire was filled out by 689 Italian teachers. Data analyses performed Multi-sample Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Hierarchical Cluster Analysis. Results confirmed the hypothesized four-factor structure and the discriminant role of Guilt in differentiating clusters. Results highlights the reliability of the SBI-Ita in the assessment of teachers’ burnout. Furthermore, results evidence for a new typology of burnout that differentiate guilty from non-guilty professionals.     

Delusions and Personal Autonomy

This article will examine the claim that personal autonomy is impaired by a paradigmatic instance of serious psychopathology – namely, the condition of being delusional – in light of the hierarchical conception of personal autonomy. This conception of personal autonomy aims at yielding value‐neutral judgements about freedom and self‐governance. I will argue that when viewed from the perspective of this specific conception of autonomy, delusions do not necessarily impair an agent's personal autonomy. In order to establish this claim, I will probe the general idea that delusional subjects are beset by a mental disease that is rationally incapacitating, to which the hierarchical theorist might appeal. I argue that, understood within the parameters set by the commitment to value neutrality, this idea fails to provide support for the claim that delusion necessarily impairs personal autonomy. One contribution this article makes to the effort of understanding how delusion impairs personal autonomy is to help us pinpoint the ways in which our value commitments inform our judgements of impaired personal autonomy in delusional agents.     

Some men like it black,some women like it pink: consumer implications of differences in male and female website design

• The World Wide Web doubles in size roughly every 2–3 months and dramatic claims are made about the effectiveness of Web‐based commercial efforts. The centrality of non‐price mechanisms of differentiation to the perception, enjoyment and ease of use felt using websites is acknowledged but the only statistically rigorous studies of factors such as form and content have been conducted within a universalist paradigm of aesthetics. This paper reports on an interactionist approach to web aesthetics involving an analysis of 60 male‐ and female‐produced websites. The analysis reveals statistically significant differences between the male‐ and female‐produced websites on 13 out of the 23 factors analysed. These differences span issues of navigation as well as linguistic and visual content. The paper argues that the appeal of websites can be maximised if they mirror the needs and interests of their target populations and that websites targeted at male or female dominated markets need to reflect the aesthetic diversity found in the male‐ and female‐produced websites analysed here. It also presents information on the demographics of the IT profession, showing that there is a potential imbalance between the percentage of women involved online and those involved in the IT profession. This suggests that the male domination of the IT profession could be a barrier to the effective mirroring of female Website preferences.

Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The relationship between age,processing speed,working memory capacity,and language comprehension

A total of 50 elderly individuals and 48 college students were tested on several measures of processing speed and of working memory capacity. Language processing was tested with an on‐line measure of sentence processing efficiency, an end‐of‐sentence acceptability judgement task, and a paragraph comprehension test. Elderly individuals performed more poorly than college students on the speed of processing and working memory measures and had longer listening times overall on the sentence processing measures. Elderly individuals did not, however, have overall longer listening times at the most capacity‐demanding regions of the harder sentence types. Correlational analyses failed to establish a relationship between the increase in syntactic processing load at the capacity‐demanding region of the harder sentence type and the measures of working memory capacity, but did establish a relationship between paragraph comprehension and working memory capacity. The data are argued to provide evidence that the WM system used to structure sentences syntactically is separate from that used in other aspects of language comprehension.     

A Note Regarding the Validity of Lee's Typology of Love

In the present study, we investigated how well Lee's (1973/1976) typology of love characterized response data that adult subjects provided on selected items written by Hendrick and Hendrick. Results suggest that the model represents response data reasonably well and that Hendrick and Hendrick's (1986) measure ought to be valid.     

Memory mechanisms supporting syntactic comprehension

Efforts to characterize the memory system that supports sentence comprehension have historically drawn extensively on short-term memory as a source of mechanisms that might apply to sentences. The focus of these efforts has changed significantly in the past decade. As a result of changes in models of short-term working memory (ST-WM) and developments in models of sentence comprehension, the effort to relate entire components of an ST-WM system, such as those in the model developed by Baddeley (Nature Reviews Neuroscience 4: 829–839, 2003) to sentence comprehension has largely been replaced by an effort to relate more specific mechanisms found in modern models of ST-WM to memory processes that support one aspect of sentence comprehension—the assignment of syntactic structure (parsing) and its use in determining sentence meaning (interpretation) during sentence comprehension. In this article, we present the historical background to recent studies of the memory mechanisms that support parsing and interpretation and review recent research into this relation. We argue that the results of this research do not converge on a set of mechanisms derived from ST-WM that apply to parsing and interpretation. We argue that the memory mechanisms supporting parsing and interpretation have features that characterize another memory system that has been postulated to account for skilled performance—long-term working memory. We propose a model of the relation of different aspects of parsing and interpretation to ST-WM and long-term working memory.     

Cloninger's Temperament and Character Inventory Correlates with Personality Characteristics of Organ Donation Advocates

Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI) and background questionnaire data were collected from a sample of men and women organ donation advocates (N = 362) as part of a national study to investigate their personality characteristics, temperaments, and attitudes about organ donation advocacy. Goals included identifying unique traits for advocates, and response consistency between the TCI and questionnaire. The TCI results included high scores on Cooperativeness and Self-Directedness, and low on Harm Avoidance dimensions. The questionnaire results indicated that most advocates were White, married, college-educated females, who typically spent less than 2 hr with potential donor families, were satisfied with life and job, and believed they would be in a donation position 2 years from the time surveyed. TCI and questionnaire measures were correlated for Self-Transcendence and Spirituality, Helpfulness and Job Satisfaction, and Compassion and Identification variables.