Are preference reversals reduced when made explicit?

Previous research has shown that preferences for options, such as gambles, can reverse depending on the response mode. These preference reversals have been demonstrated when tasks were performed sequentially. That is, subjects completed one task before beginning another. In an attempt to eliminate preference reversals, we asked subjects to perform tasks simultaneously. That is, subjects made two types of responses for each pair of gambles before evaluating the next pair. In the condition with no financial incentives, preference reversal rates were slightly reduced. In another condition, subjects were paid for their participation and they were allowed to play a gamble with real monetary compensation. A gamble pair was randomly selected, and if a subject's responses in the two tasks were consistent for that pair, he or she was allowed to play the ‘preferred’ gamble. Otherwise, the experimenter selected the gamble from the pair. With these financial incentives, systematic preference reversals were eliminated for two of the three task combinations. Preference reversals continued to occur for attractiveness ratings versus selling prices, although, even for that pair of tasks, the reversal rate was significantly reduced. For all three task pairs, preference orders from the two tasks appeared to merge into more consistent orders.     

Bilingual computerized speech-recognition screening for clinical depression: Evaluating a cellular telephone prototype

This exploratory field study evaluated a bilingual computerized speech-recognition cellular telephone prototype of the Center for Epidemiological Studies—Depression scale (CES-D). Thirty Spanish and 22 English speakers completed both computer-telephone and face-to-face CES-D methods and an oral depression checklist in counterbalanced order. Both language groups reported high positive ratings for the computer-telephone method, with the English sample preferring the computer-telephone over the face-to-face method. In both samples, the computer-telephone method yielded high internal consistency estimates, strong alternate form reliabilities, and similar high correlations to the depression checklist. Both groups reported significantly elevated scores with the computer-telephone method, but total score variances for both methods did not differ. Computer-telephone limitations included occasional misrecognitions and template training constraints.     

Taxonomy of Psychological and Social Disturbances in Survivors of Group Psychological Abuse

The purpose of this study was to delimit the psychological and social disturbances that individuals who have suffered psychological abuse within a social group on an ongoing basis can experience. A comprehensive classification of these disturbances was developed based on a review of the scientific literature. Its content was revised by an international panel of 38 experts on the topic. Experts also judged the frequency and intensity with which each disturbance is commonly experienced by survivors of abusive groups. The taxonomy, which includes 20 components classified into four main categories, showed adequate content validity. The components considered the most frequent and intense were related to emotional difficulties, followed by those associated with relational and social integration difficulties, cognitive difficulties, and, finally, other specific problematic behaviors. Operationalizing and classifying the specific psychological and social disturbances commonly experienced by survivors of abusive groups contributes to a better delimitation of the phenomenon. Likewise, it contributes to the understanding of the long-term effects of psychological abuse, which is useful in both the academic and clinical settings.     

Assessment of Conflicts Associated with a Traditional Masculine Gender Role in Spanish College Men and Women

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the psychometric properties of the Spanish version of the Gender Role Conflict Scale – Short Form (GRCS-SF; Wester et al. 2012) in a sample of men. In addition, we extend the gender conflict paradigm by evaluating two samples of women with the same instrument. In Study 1, we investigated the internal structure of the instrument in a sample of 281 Spanish undergraduate women using exploratory factor analysis, finding support to the original factor structure. In Study 2, we analyzed its psychometric properties in a college sample of 184 men and 255 women using confirmatory factor analysis, and we explored differences between the two genders through a factor invariance analysis and a comparison of group means. Sufficient equivalence was found, allowing for comparisons among men’s and women’s scores. Overall, masculine gender conflict was significantly associated with greater distress and less general subjective well-being in both men and women. Our research extends the gender role conflict paradigm to the Spanish context and enhances the study of women’s conflicts associated with the adoption of behaviors traditionally attributed to the male gender role.     

Implementation and evaluation of a first-year university induction support programme for business students in Spain

This paper reports new evidence on students’ evaluation of a first-year induction experience programme and examines the relationship between gender and perceptions. The programme was provided to 610 business studies students at the University of Granada (Spain). The programme includes individual and group sessions providing psychosocial and instrumental support. Gender differences were investigated using nonparametric techniques. Structural equation models were used to test relationships between variables of overall satisfaction with the programme and its activities and the moderating effects of gender. The results obtained show that gender significantly influences enrolment and satisfaction with the programme and with the individual sessions. Satisfaction with group and individual activities is directly related to overall satisfaction with the programme. Gender has a moderating effect on the relation of overall satisfaction with individual sessions.     

The effects of bilingual language proficiency on recall accuracy and semantic clustering in free recall output: evidence for shared semantic associations across languages

Two experiments investigated how well bilinguals utilise long-standing semantic associations to encode and retrieve semantic clusters in verbal episodic memory. In Experiment 1, Spanish-English bilinguals (N?=?128) studied and recalled word and picture sets. Word recall was equivalent in L1 and L2, picture recall was better in L1 than in L2, and the picture superiority effect was stronger in L1 than in L2. Semantic clustering in word and picture recall was equivalent in L1 and L2. In Experiment 2, Spanish-English bilinguals (N?=?128) and English-speaking monolinguals (N?=?128) studied and recalled word sequences that contained semantically related pairs. Data were analyzed using a multinomial processing tree approach, the pair-clustering model. Cluster formation was more likely for semantically organised than for randomly ordered word sequences. Probabilities of cluster formation, cluster retrieval, and retrieval of unclustered items did not differ across languages or language groups. Language proficiency has little if any impact on the utilisation of long-standing semantic associations, which are language-general.     

High Trait Cheerfulness Individuals are More Sensitive to the Emotional Environment

The aim of this paper was to study whether trait cheerfulness modulates changes in state cheerfulness as a result of exposing participants to affective stimuli. Two studies with a within-participant experimental design were carried out. Forty-eight (33 women) and sixty-four (45 women) undergraduate psychology students were selected as Sample 1 and Sample 2, respectively, for scoring high or low on the Trait Form of the State-Trait-Cheerfulness Inventory (STCI-T; Ruch et al. in Humor Int J Humor Res 9:303–339, 1996; Ruch et al. in Personal Individ Differ 22:477–491, 1997). Participants watched amusing, neutral, and sad film clips and reported their affective states before and after viewing them. In the second study, heart rate and skin conductance level were also recorded. Results showed that people with high trait cheerfulness reported greater changes in state cheerfulness when exposed to both amusing and sad film clips, showing larger increases and decreases in state cheerfulness, respectively, than participants with low trait cheerfulness. Effects were not mediated by social desirability. Furthermore, people with low trait cheerfulness showed a greater heart rate deceleration during the visioning of the clips compared to high trait cheerfulness participants, especially in an amusing scene with high emotional load. No modulation on trait cheerfulness was found for skin conductance level. Data with self-report and electrophysiological measures are discussed, highlighting that high trait cheerfulness people are more permeable to affective events, perhaps showing a better understanding and management of them.     

Identifying Students at Risk: An Examination of Computer-Adaptive Measures and Latent Class Growth Analysis

Multitiered systems of support depend on screening technology to identify students at risk. The purpose of this study was to examine the use of a computer-adaptive test and latent class growth analysis (LCGA) to identify students at risk in reading with focus on the use of this methodology to characterize student performance in screening. Participants included 3,699 students in Grades 3–5. Three time points of administration (fall, winter, and spring) of the computer-adaptive reading measure were selected. LCGA results indicated 6–7 classes, depending on grade, informed by level and growth in student performance that significantly predicted failure on the statewide test administered at the end of the year. The lowest-performing classes had failure rates above 90% across all grades. The results indicate that identifying homogeneous groups of learners through LCGA may be valuable as an approach to determining students who need additional instruction. Practical implications and future directions are discussed.     

Procura-PALavras (P-PAL): A Web-based interface for a new European Portuguese lexical database

In this article, we present Procura-PALavras (P-PAL), a Web-based interface for a new European Portuguese (EP) lexical database. Based on a contemporary printed corpus of over 227 million words, P-PAL provides a broad range of word attributes and statistics, including several measures of word frequency (e.g., raw counts, per-million word frequency, logarithmic Zipf scale), morpho-syntactic information (e.g., parts of speech [PoSs], grammatical gender and number, dominant PoS, and frequency and relative frequency of the dominant PoS), as well as several lexical and sublexical orthographic (e.g., number of letters; consonant–vowel orthographic structure; density and frequency of orthographic neighbors; orthographic Levenshtein distance; orthographic uniqueness point; orthographic syllabification; and trigram, bigram, and letter type and token frequencies), and phonological measures (e.g., pronunciation, number of phonemes, stress, density and frequency of phonological neighbors, transposed and phonographic neighbors, syllabification, and biphone and phone type and token frequencies) for ~53,000 lemmatized and ~208,000 nonlemmatized EP word forms. To obtain these metrics, researchers can choose between two word queries in the application: (i) analyze words previously selected for specific attributes and/or lexical and sublexical characteristics, or (ii) generate word lists that meet word requirements defined by the user in the menu of analyses. For the measures it provides and the flexibility it allows, P-PAL will be a key resource to support research in all cognitive areas that use EP verbal stimuli. P-PAL is freely available at http://p-pal.di.uminho.pt/tools.