Validation of the Preschool Anxiety Scale-Traditional Chinese (PAS-TC) in Hong Kong

Anxiety disorders are the most common type of psychiatric conditions in children. Early identification and intervention during preschool years is critical for minimizing their detrimental long-term effects. The Preschool Anxiety Scale (PAS) is a developmentally-sensitive and symptom-specific instrument that has been commonly used and widely validated in the west. The current study tested the psychometric properties of its Traditional Chinese version (PAS-TC) in Hong Kong. The study sample consisted of a total of 1317 Hong Kong parents, recruited from 12 local preschools, with preschool children aged from three to six years old. Results showed that a correlated five-factor model demonstrated a good fit for the data. PAS-TC also demonstrated acceptable reliability and satisfactory validity. Furthermore, gender but not age effects were found in Hong Kong. Additionally, similar to previous studies, items from physical injury fears were the most reported in the top-ten frequently endorsed items. Finally, the anxiety level of our Hong Kong sample was found to be between the Mainland China and western countries. Clinical implications of the above findings concerning PAS-TC are discussed.

     

Marketing Implications of Nonmusical Sounds

This article reviews the concepts of nonmusical sound and noise with respect to sound elements, perception and interpretation. Following a review and synthesis of the literature, which has predominantly been conducted in non-marketing fields, practitioner and researcher implications are identified and discussed.     

The surgical anxiety questionnaire (SAQ): development and validation

Objective: Preoperative anxiety is often assessed using general anxiety measures; existing specific measures might lack content coverage and/or are not psychometrically validated. This study aimed to develop a new self-report measure of surgery-specific anxiety and test its psychometric properties.

Design: The surgical anxiety questionnaire (SAQ) was developed from themes identified in qualitative research and reviewed by an interdisciplinary expert team. It was administered preoperatively to 135 patients (56% female, mean age 51) on the day of surgery alongside additional measures of preoperative anxiety, state anxiety, perceived stress, depression and social desirability. Follow-up assessment was conducted immediately post-surgery and two weeks post-surgery (n?=?114) to examine recovery and predictive validity of the scale.

Results: Factor analysis revealed a three component structure, including: concerns about health (six items), concerns about recovery (four items) and concerns about procedures (four items). Three additional items of relatively high concern were retained in the total score (17 items). The SAQ displayed good reliability, validity (content, construct and predictive) and adequate overall psychometric properties.

Conclusions: Preliminary results suggest that the SAQ is a promising tool for measuring preoperative anxiety and predicting recovery. Recommendations for future research include employing a confirmatory factor analysis and examining test-retest reliability.     

SAVING THE “SECULAR”: The Public Vocation of Moral Theology1

The London suicide bombings of July 7, 2005 were partly the revolt of moral earnestness against a liberal society that, enchanted by the fantasy of rationalist anthropology, surrenders its passionate members to a degrading consumerism. The “humane” liberalism variously espoused by Jürgen Habermas, John Rawls, and Jeffrey Stout offers a dignifying alternative; but it is fragile, and each of its proponents looks for allies among certain kinds of religious believer. Stanley Hauerwas, however, counsels Christians against cooperation. On the one hand, he is right to resist, insofar as liberalism illiberally excludes theology from public discourse. On the other hand, not all humane liberalism does this: Stout's, for example, is genuinely polyglot, requiring not a common secularist language but a common ethic of communicating. Such a liberal ethic and its attendant anthropology merit the support of Christians: there may be more to be said about the Kingdom of God than respect, tolerance, and fairness, but there will not be less. The Christian has good theological reasons to expect some concord with other inhabitants of secular space. Ethical distinctiveness is no measure of theological integrity; and neither theology (pace Barth) nor biblical narrative (pace Richard Hays) should be expected to do all of the ethical running. If Christians are to be thorough in their moral theology and intelligible in their public statements, then they must borrow non‐theological material, formulate abstract concepts, and engage in casuistical analysis. Nevertheless, if an anxious insistence on distinctiveness is a mistake, concern for theological integrity is not. When the moral theologian borrows ethical material from elsewhere, he should integrate it into a theological vision structured by the Christian salvation‐historical narrative, which will sometimes modify the meaning of what is incorporated. So in affirming humane, polyglot liberalism, the moral theologian will at the same time make salutary qualifications. One of these is the assertion of the need of liberal institutions to own and promote their moral and anthropological commitments. In such a confessionally liberal society, universities in general, and the Arts and Humanities in particular, would recover their vocation to form citizens in communicative virtues and to offer them a dignifying, morally serious vision of human being that could save future generations from a degrading consumerism on the one hand and violent over‐reaction on the other.     

Dimensions of Religion and Spirituality: A Longitudinal Topic Modeling Approach

In lieu of the traditional text data analysis methods, structural topic modeling was utilized to analyze the text contents of 255 self-report inventories of religion and spirituality (R/S) published from 1929 to 2017. The study had two objectives: (a) to clarify and identify the latent dimensions of R/S inherent in the items of the measures; and (b) to examine and demonstrate the usefulness of a longitudinal topic modeling in the study of R/S. We identified 5,617 unique text terms from the measures and fitted topic models on those terms to extract latent dimensions called topics. We also simultaneously analyzed the longitudinal effect of publication decade (i.e., 1950s–2010s) on the topics. A topic model with three topics was chosen to best support the data: Experience of Transcendence (Topic 1), Engagement in Transcendence (Topic 2), and Essence of Transcendence (Topic 3). In addition, the longitudinal analysis revealed that Topic 1 showed a continual increase over the decades, while Topics 2 and 3 both demonstrated a gradual decrease, in effect matching the general trend of Topic 1's increasing popularity in society and the academia.