Temperament and Personal Wellbeing in a Sample of 12 to 16 Year-Old Adolescents

Working on the basis that temperament – understood as the root from which personality traits emerge – is related to subjective wellbeing, a study was conducted on a sample of 1.483 students in compulsory secondary education aged between 12 and 16, half of whom attended schools in a rural or semiurban area and half in an urban setting. The aims of the study were as follows: a) to determine the level of personal wellbeing in a sample of 12 to 16 year-old adolescents measured using scores obtained from the Personal Wellbeing Index (PWI), and b) to analyse the relationship between temperament, measured using the Early Adolescent Temperament Questionnaire (EATQ-R), and personal wellbeing. Results indicate, among other things, that those temperament dimensions which best predict a high level of personal wellbeing are activity level, affiliation, shyness (with a negative weight), inhibitory control and activation control.     

Gender‐typing of leadership: Evaluations of real and ideal managers

This research focuses on female underrepresentation in managerial positions. Specifically, two studies examine gender‐typing for managerial roles in Spain using ratings for real and ideal managers. In addition, we analyse the existence of same‐gender bias on evaluations of the behavior of actual leaders. In the first study, 195 Spanish workers evaluate the extent to which gender‐stereotypical traits are important for becoming a successful middle manager in three conditions (female managers, male managers, and managers in general). In the second study, we explore the degree to which the behavior of real Spanish managers is gender‐typed and the existence of same‐gender bias on leadership styles – transformational, transactional and avoidant/passive – and on leadership outcomes – effectiveness, extra effort and satisfaction – from the perspective of subordinates (N = 605). Overall, the results demonstrate that masculine characteristics were rated as more important than feminine characteristics for managerial positions, and they were more often assigned to male managers than to female managers. Unexpectedly, this manager‐male association is stronger among female participants than among male participants. Our findings also demonstrate that women subordinates evaluate their same‐sex supervisors more favorably in transformational leadership, effectiveness, and extra effort. The negative consequences derived from gender‐typing managerial positions are highlighted according to the role congruity theory of prejudice toward female leaders. The positive effects of in‐group female bias on behavior ratings are also noted. The mixed implications of these results for women's advancement to leadership positions are discussed.     

How orthographic transparency affects morphological processing in young readers with and without reading disability

This study investigates how orthographic modifications to the stems of complex words affect morphological processing in proficient young Spanish readers and children with reading deficits. In a definition task all children, irrespective of their reading skill, were worse at defining derived words that had an orthographic alteration of the base stem than words with no orthographic alteration. In a go/no‐go lexical decision task, an interaction between base frequency and orthographic alteration was found: base frequency affected derived words with no orthographic alteration more than words with alterations, irrespective of reading skill. Overall, results show that all children benefit from a high frequency base, skilled children outperform children with reading deficits and morphological processing is affected by orthographic alterations similarly in proficient and impaired readers.     

The understanding of die as an object that has numerical functions. A longitudinal study using two children from the ages of 24 to 36 months interacting with an adult / La comprensión del dado como objeto con funciones numéricas. Un estudio longitudinal con dos niños desde los 24 a los 36 meses en interacción con un adulto

Abstract

We investigated the process through which children understand the conventional use of numbers in interaction with an adult. We analysed previous semiotic systems that support, transform and adjust to this new semiotic system — the numerical — and we investigated the communicative-educative basis that makes it possible. We conducted an exploratory and longitudinal study with one boy and one girl at 24, 27, 30, 33 and 36 months of age in a triadic interaction (adult-child-object) with their mothers at home. We adopt the pragmatic-semiotic perspective of the object, which considers that triadic interactions are the unit of analysis of early development. Our results show a great variety of semiotic mediators used by children and adults and both children’s progressive comprehension of the meaning and use of the die as a numerical object.     

Reconsidering Life Domains that Contribute to Subjective Well-Being Among Adolescents with Data from Three Countries

Several theoretical models and testing procedures are presented with the aim of identifying the most relevant items and domains to include in a model for evaluating adolescents’ subjective well-being, above and beyond those usually included in adults’ scales. Data were collected in three countries based on a list of 30 items regarding adolescents’ satisfaction with different domains or facets of life. Responses to these 30 items (including Personal Well-Being Index and Brief Multidimensional Students’ Life Satisfaction Scale items) have been analysed by means of Confirmatory Factor Analysis using different Structural Equation Models (SEM) on a pooled sample comprising 5,316 twelve to sixteen-year-olds from Spain, Brazil and Chile. Several models have shown good enough fit statistics. A model using 14 items shows excellent fit statistics and is conceptually coherent. However, the inclusion or non-inclusion of items related to satisfaction with religion or spirituality results in both advantages and disadvantages when comparing the alternative models analysed. The relevance of including these items may therefore depend on the socio-cultural context where data are collected and their inclusion makes cross-country comparison more statistically challenging. The 14-item model has also been tested using multigroup SEM in order to check comparability of data among the three countries. All things considered, multigroup models have shown good fit with constrained loadings, but not with constrained loadings and intercepts, suggesting we can compare correlations and regressions among countries, but not means. Additional multigroup SEM with the five age groups available from the pooled sample have demonstrated that responses—and means—are comparable across different age groups during early adolescence.     

Using Cook's distance in polytomous logistic regression

The previously unknown asymptotic distribution of Cook's distance in polytomous logistic regression is established as a linear combination of independent chi‐square random variables with one degree of freedom. An exhaustive approach to the analysis of influential covariates is developed and a new measure for the accuracy of predictions based on such a distribution is provided. Two examples with real data sets (one with continuous covariates and the other with both qualitative and quantitative covariates) are presented to illustrate the approach developed.