The Psychometric Equivalence of the Personal Wellbeing Index School-Children for Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Australian Adolescents

Despite increasing research interest in the subjective wellbeing (SWB) of Indigenous Australians, SWB measures used in these studies have not been validated for use in this population. Until the measurement equivalence of scales used in this population are demonstrated, inferences regarding potential differences in SWB across Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups cannot be validly inferred. To rectify this, the present study examines the psychometric equivalence of the Personal Wellbeing Index—School Children (PWI-SC) for use among samples of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian adolescents using multiple-group confirmatory factor analysis. The Indigenous sample comprised 1,378 adolescents enrolled in the Australian Federal Government’s Youth Connections Program. A sample of 6,401 non-Indigenous adolescents also enrolled in the Youth Connections Program represented a second comparative group. Finally, the third comparative group comprised a convenience sample of 983 Victorian high-school students. The results demonstrated strict factorial invariance between all three adolescent groups, suggesting that the PWI-SC measures the same underlying construct in each sample. These findings support quantitative comparisons between Indigenous and non-Indigenous SWB data as valid. The implications of this research are discussed.     

Emotional Environments: Selective Permeability,Political Affordances and Normative Settings

Topoi - I begin this article with an increasingly accepted claim: that emotions lend differential weight to states of affairs, helping us conceptually carve the world and make rational decisions. I...     

Minding the ($500,000) Gap: Accounting for the Gender-Driven Gap in Executive Severance Agreements

Journal of Business and Psychology - As the number of women in leadership positions continues to rise, it is important to closely examine the gender pay gap at the executive level. Prior studies...     

Content Hungry: How the Nutrition of Food Media Influences Social Media Engagement

What motivates people to consume and engage with food media on social networks? We adopt an evolutionary lens to suggest that the valence of people’s affective state varies by the implied caloric density of food media, which has a direct impact on social media engagement. First, we analyze a catalog of Buzzfeed’s Tasty videos based on nutritional content derived from the dish’s ingredients and find that visualizing caloric density (i.e., calories per serving) positively influences likes, comments, and shares on Facebook. We then replicate this phenomenon in an experiment, providing preliminary evidence for the role of affect as an explanatory mechanism. We conclude by isolating the role of affect with a classic misattribution task, which attenuates the elevated engagement resulting from exposure to calorie-dense food media. These findings contribute to the dialogue on the antecedents of social media engagement and offer implications for content developers, advertisers, consumer health advocates, and policymakers.     

Parental Mood,Parenting Style and Child Emotional and Behavioural Adjustment: Australia-Indonesia Cross-Cultural Study

Journal of Child and Family Studies - Extensive research, in Western countries, links parental mood and parenting styles with child outcomes including emotional and behavioural adjustment. However,...     

The Sex-Based Harassment Inventory: A Gender Status Threat Measure of Sex-Based Harassment Intentions

Sex Roles - We introduce a new inventory measuring sex-based harassment intentions and threat perceptions grounded in gender status threat theories (Berdahl, 2007; Stephan et al., 2016). In Study 1...     

Measuring Productivity in Primary Care Behavioral Health: A Delphi Study

High productivity by behavioral health consultants (BHC) is a defining aspect of the primary care behavioral health (PCBH) model to maximize access to care and is often measured by patient volume. Studies of productivity in health care settings suggest a single productivity target may not be optimal. We used a Delphi method to obtain expert consensus on an operational definition of high productivity by BHCs in the PCBH model. Clinicians, managers, and researchers in PCBH were recruited to participate in a multi-round survey using a modified Delphi technique and develop consensus on PCBH productivity metrics. Ten participants completed all three survey rounds and rated 28 metrics. After three rounds, two direct metrics (average number of billable BHC visits each day; number of patients seen per day) received at least 80% consensus as “Essential”, two received at least 50%, and five received less than 50%. One influencer (level of integration at the practice) received at least 80% consensus as “Very Much” influential, 19 received at least 50%, and eight items received less than 50%. Several themes arose from participant comments. PCBH productivity can be interpreted as being high volume. Numerous practice factors influence how productive a BHC may be. Future studies should determine the feasibility of our metrics in clinical practice, establish productivity expectations based on patient needs and clinic resources, and identify patient-, clinician-, or practice-level moderators of productivity.

     

Pathogenesis: Freud’s Paul and the question of historical truth

Continental Philosophy Review - This article retrieves Freud’s Paul as a forgotten predecessor and untapped critic of the “return to Paul” in contemporary political theology and...     

The influence of speaker gaze on listener comprehension: Contrasting visual versus intentional accounts

Previous research has shown that listeners follow speaker gaze to mentioned objects in a shared environment to ground referring expressions, both for human and robot speakers. What is less clear is whether the benefit of speaker gaze is due to the inference of referential intentions (Staudte and Crocker, 2011) or simply the (reflexive) shifts in visual attention. That is, is gaze special in how it affects simultaneous utterance comprehension? In four eye-tracking studies we directly contrast speech-aligned speaker gaze of a virtual agent with a non-gaze visual cue (arrow). Our findings show that both cues similarly direct listeners’ attention and that listeners can benefit in utterance comprehension from both cues. Only when they are similarly precise, however, does this equality extend to incongruent cueing sequences: that is, even when the cue sequence does not match the concurrent sequence of spoken referents can listeners benefit from gaze as well as arrows. The results suggest that listeners are able to learn a counter-predictive mapping of both cues to the sequence of referents. Thus, gaze and arrows can in principle be applied with equal flexibility and efficiency during language comprehension.