Construction and validation of a multidimensional model of students' adjustment to college context

This article presents a model of interaction of personal and contextual variables in the prediction of academic performance and psychosocial development of Portuguese college students. The sample consists of 560 first-year college students of the University of Minho. The path analysis results suggest that initial expectations of the students' involvement in academic life constituted an effective predictor of their involvement during their first year; as well as the social climate of the classroom influenced their involvement, well-being and levels of satisfaction obtained. However, these relationships were not strong enough to influence the criterion variables integrated in the model (academic performance and psychosocial development). Academic performance was predicted by the high school grades and college entrance examination scores, and the level of psychosocial development was determined by the level of development showed at the time they entered college. Though more research is needed, these results point to the importance of students' pre-college characteristics when we are considering the quality of their college adjustment process.     

Understanding the Effect of Social Capital on the Depression of Urban Chinese Adolescents: An Integrative Framework

Using data from an ongoing longitudinal study of 5,164 adolescents and their parents from seven cities in mainland China, this study investigated how social capital embedded in the family and the community, together with family human capital and financial capital, influenced the depressive symptoms of urban Chinese adolescents within an integrative framework. The structural equation modeling results suggested that higher community social capital was associated with lower level of adolescent depressive symptoms and was the strongest predictor among all these contextual factors. Family social capital played a significant role in mediating the effects of all other contextual factors on adolescent depressive symptoms. Unexpectedly, higher family financial capital predicted increased depressive symptoms both directly and indirectly through its negative effect on family social capital. As for gender, female adolescents reported more depressive symptoms as a result of less available family social capital. Implications of these findings for theory, practice, policy, and future research are discussed.     

The Individualised Patient‐Progress System: A decade of international collaborative networking

Background: The backstage of research projects is seldom presented to the general audience, in particular, how the research questions emerged, how the team interacted and how the methods and design were decided upon. Aim: In this paper we will recount the story behind an international practice‐based research network for personalising health assessment, the joint journey of researchers and therapists from three different countries in creating the Individualised Patient‐Progress System (IPPS). Results: We first describe how the idea of the IPPS emerged; then we show how IPPS is being piloted and integrated into clinical practice. Next, we present the views of therapists and researchers who have been part of this project. Conclusions: We discuss some lessons learned from this 14‐year collaborative research programme.     

The costs and benefits of memory conformity

We examined the influence of external recommendations on memory attributions. In two experiments, participants were led to believe that they were viewing the responses of two prior students to the same memoranda they were currently judging. However, they were not informed of the reliability of these fictive sources of cues or provided with performance feedback as testing proceeded. Experiment 1 demonstrated improvement in the presence of reliable source cues (75% valid), as compared to uncued recognition, whereas performance was unaltered in the presence of random cues provided by an unreliable source (50% valid). Critically, participants did not ignore the unreliable source, but instead appeared to restrict cue use from both sources to low-confidence trials on which internal evidence was highly unreliable. Experiment 2 demonstrated that participants continued to treat an unreliable source as potentially informative even when it was predominantly incorrect (25% valid), highlighting severe limitations in the ability to adequately discount unreliable or deceptive sources of memory cues. Thus, under anonymous source conditions, observers appear to use a low-confidence outsourcing strategy, wherein they restrict reliance on external cues to situations of low confidence.     

Adaptation of Child's Report of Parent Behavior Inventory for a Spanish population

This study presented an adaptation in Spanish of the Child's Reports of Parental Behavior Inventory (CRPBI) . The CRPBI is an instrument that allows us to assess family discipline perceived by children in the relation with their mothers and with their fathers. It's considered a good instrument to assess the perceptions that children have of parent behavior. The Spanish adaptation has been carried out with a sample of 1,274 Spanish adolescents (males and females) from different educational centers of the Valencian Community (13-18 years). The results show that affect, support and control are the main dimensions in the perceived child rearing styles of parents in our population.     

Reconsolidation: a brief history, a retrieval view, and some recent issues

This review briefly traces some of the history of the phenomenon of what has come to be called "reconsolidation." The early findings of retrograde amnesia for an old but reactivated memory led to several interesting but largely behaviorally oriented studies. With only a few sporadic exceptions, research in the area languished until about 2000, when several articles caught the attention of the neuroscience community and led to a number of studies examining the phenomenon at several different levels of analysis. We consider several of the current issues generated by those studies, present a retrieval based model that may account for some findings, and indicate some possible new directions on this topic.     

The development of interpretations for novel noun-noun conceptual combinations during the early school years

This research investigates issues surrounding early school children's use of the similarity between head and modifier terms in deriving interpretations for novel noun-noun conceptual combinations. In these experiments, 6- and 9-year-olds and adults were asked to formulate interpretations of similar and dissimilar conceptual combinations. Both children and adults were sensitive to the similarity aspect of conceptual combinations, although the children had some difficulty with the property interpretations that high-similarity combinations require. Next, we examined 40 popular children's books for the presence of noun-noun conceptual combinations. Adult participants provided interpretations for these combinations and rated the similarity of the head and modifier nouns. Results indicated that there were few high-similarity combinations and few combinations requiring property interpretations, suggesting that children have limited exposure to highly similar combinations and property interpretations. Further analysis of children's interpretations indicates that they may have difficulty in selecting and integrating properties of the modifier onto the head, a process required by property interpretations.