Psychometric analysis of the Catalan version of the Alabama Parenting Questionnaire (APQ) in a community sample

The aim of this study was to adapt to Catalan the parents' and children's global report forms of the Alabama Parenting Questionnaire (APQ), using a community sample of 364 children between 10 and 15 years old and their families. Sociodemographic information (from parents) and the presence of externalizing problems (from parents and teachers) were collected. The results suggest a 3-factor structure corresponding to the scales of Positive Parenting Practices (PPP), Inconsistent and Negative Discipline (IND) and Poor Monitoring/Supervision (PMS). The internal consistency is acceptable in all the scales, except for the IND in the children's format. The scales also present good convergent and discriminant validity, and the relations with the external variable studied pointed in the expected direction: inefficient parenting practices are related to the presence of more behavior problems in children. To sum up, the Catalan version of the parents' and children's global report forms of the APQ are considered suitable for use in the area of children's and adolescents' behavior problems.     

Ethnic Minority‐Majority Asymmetry in National Attitudes around the World: A Multilevel Analysis

Using data from the International Social Survey Programme, this research investigated asymmetric attitudes of ethnic minorities and majorities towards their country and explored the impact of human development, ethnic diversity, and social inequality as country‐level moderators of national attitudes. In line with the general hypothesis of ethnic asymmetry, we found that ethnic, linguistic, and religious majorities were more identified with the nation and more strongly endorsed nationalist ideology than minorities (H1, 33 countries). Multilevel analyses revealed that this pattern of asymmetry was moderated by country‐level characteristics: the difference between minorities and majorities was greatest in ethnically diverse countries and in egalitarian, low inequality contexts. We also observed a larger positive correlation between ethnic subgroup identification and both national identification and nationalism for majorities than for minorities (H2, 20 countries). A stronger overall relationship between ethnic and national identification was observed in countries with a low level of human development. The greatest minority‐majority differences in the relationship between ethnic identification and national attitudes were found in egalitarian countries with a strong welfare state tradition.     

Development and validation of a questionnaire about the main variables affecting the individual investor's behavior in the Stock Exchange

Development and validation of a questionnaire about the main variables affecting the individual investor's behavior in the Stock Exchange. There is a considerable lack of information about the methodology usually used in most of the studies about individual investor's behavior. The studies reviewed do not show the method used in the selection of the items or the psychometric properties of the questionnaires. Because of the importance of investment in the Stock Exchange nowadays, it seems relevant to obtain a reliable instrument to understand individual investor's behavior in the Stock Exchange. Therefore, the goal of the present work is to validate a questionnaire about the main variables involved in individual investors' behavior in the Stock Exchange. Based on previous studies, we elaborated a questionnaire using the Delphi methodology with a group of experts. The internal consistency (Cronbach alpha=.934) and validity evidence of the questionnaire show that it may be an effective instrument and can be applied with some assurance.     

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.     

Inferring hidden causal structure

We used a new method to assess how people can infer unobserved causal structure from patterns of observed events. Participants were taught to draw causal graphs, and then shown a pattern of associations and interventions on a novel causal system. Given minimal training and no feedback, participants in Experiment 1 used causal graph notation to spontaneously draw structures containing one observed cause, one unobserved common cause, and two unobserved independent causes, depending on the pattern of associations and interventions they saw. We replicated these findings with less-informative training (Experiments 2 and 3) and a new apparatus (Experiment 3) to show that the pattern of data leads to hidden causal inferences across a range of prior constraints on causal knowledge.     

Usage frequencies of complement-taking verbs in Spanish and English: Data from Spanish monolinguals and Spanish—English bilinguals

Verb bias, or the tendency of a verb to appear with a certain type of complement, has been employed in psycholinguistic literature as a tool to test competing models of sentence processing. To date, the vast majority of sentence processing research involving verb bias has been conducted almost exclusively with monolingual speakers, and predominantly with monolingual English speakers, despite the fact that most of the world’s population is bilingual. To test the generality of competing theories of sentence comprehension, it is important to conduct cross-linguistic studies of sentence processing and to add bilingual data to theories of sentence comprehension. Given this, it is critical for the field to develop verb bias estimates from monolingual speakers of languages other than English and from bilingual populations. We begin to address these issues in two norming studies. Study 1 provides verb bias norming data for 135 Spanish verbs. A second aim of Study 1 was to determine whether verb bias estimates remain stable over time. In Study 2, we asked whether Spanish—English speakers are able to learn verb-specific information, such as verb bias, in their second language. The answer to this question is critical to conducting studies that examine when, during the course of sentence comprehension, bilingual speakers exploit verb information specific to the second language. To facilitate cross-linguistic work, we compared our verb bias results with those provided by monolingual English speakers in a previous norming study conducted by Garnsey, Lotocky, Pearlmutter, and Myers (1997). Our Spanish data demonstrated that individual verbs showed significant similarities in their verb bias across the 3 years of data collection. We also show that bilinguals are able to learn the biases of verbs in their second language, even when immersed in the first language environment. Appendixes A–C, containing the bilingual norms discussed in the article, may be downloaded from http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.     

Parallelism in the Early Moist Texts

Parallelism is present everywhere in the early Moist texts: at the syntactic level, at the semantic level, between sentences, between sets of sentences, between argumentative structures. The present article gives many examples of the phenomenon: parallelism of insistence, insistence from top to bottom, insistence from bottom to top, parallelism with symmetry, parallelism involving negation, subcontraries and negation at deeper levels, parallelism of the argumentative structures. Logic is particularly applied to the study of parallelism involving negation. From the point of view of argumentation, it is shown that many of those constructions have an important role in supporting arguments such as: arguments of generalization, a fortiori arguments, arguments of exemplarity, consequentialist arguments, arguments by comparison. This study draws the attention to the importance of argumentation in the study of Moism and gives a new light on the argument by parallelism (mou 侔) in the “Xiaoqu”: It is a natural extension of what we call “parallelism involving negation,” already very common in the early Moist texts.     

Trait mechanisms in youth with and without attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder

Relations of temperament and personality traits within children and adolescents with ADHD and non-ADHD controls were examined. A two-process structure was hypothesized involving top-down effortful and bottom-up reactive response tendencies. Top-down processes were hypothesized to relate to inattentive ADHD symptoms, whereas bottom-up processes were hypothesized to relate to hyperactive–impulsive ADHD symptoms. Each hypothesis was tested in a sample of 179 children age 7–13 (113 boys; 107 ADHD) and then replicated in 184 adolescents age 14–17 (109 boys; 87 ADHD). All families completed a multistage diagnostic process. Youth completed laboratory measures of cognitive control, and parents completed trait ratings. Traits examined in the current study included effortful control, reactive control, resiliency, negative emotionality, neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Correlational relations among traits were inconclusive, but external correlations with cognitive tasks and ADHD symptoms were interpretable within the hypothesized two-process framework. Results provide partial support for a distinction between effortful and reactive traits and suggest this distinction is useful in relation to understanding ADHD.     

Maternal anxiety and depression and development of prematurely born infants in the first year of life

The purpose of this study was: (a) to assess and to compare anxiety and depression symptoms in mothers of preterm neonates during hospitalization in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, after discharge, and at the end of the infants' first year of life; and (b) to assess the child's development at 12 months of chronological corrected age (CCA). Thirty-six mothers, with no psychiatric antecedents assessed with the SCID-NP, were evaluated by STAI and BDI. The infants were assessed with Bayley-II Scales. There was a significant decrease in clinical symptoms of state-anxiety in mothers (p = .008), comparing the period during hospitalization and after discharge of the infants. Clinical symptoms of anxiety and depression were observed in 20% of the mothers at the end of the infants' first year of age. The majority of the infants exhibited normal development on Bayley-II at 12 months CCA; however, 25% of the infants displayed cognitive problems and 40% motor problems. The mothers' anxiety and depression symptoms decreased at the end of the first year of life of the pre-term infants and the children showed predominately normal development at this phase.