Measuring trust in teams: Development and validation of a multifaceted measure of formative and reflective indicators of team trust

This article describes the development and validation of a multidimensional instrument designed to measure trust within teams. Trust is conceptualized as a latent variable resulting from distinct but related (formative) indicators, i.e., propensity to trust and perceived trustworthiness, which lead to (reflective) indicators, i.e., behaviours cooperation and monitoring between team members. The instrument was tested in two different samples. The first sample included 98 hospital professionals (14 teams) and provided data for the exploratory factor analysis of this instrument (Study 1). The second sample included responses from 112 teams (395 individuals) from three social-care institutions and was used to apply confirmatory factor analysis (Study 2). Data attesting to the underlying factor structure, internal homogeneity, construct validity, and consensual power of agreement within teams and discriminant power across teams of the instrument are presented. The final 21-item, four-factor version of this measure demonstrates good psychometric properties, with acceptable levels of reliability and validity. We conclude that the scales form a parsimonious, valid, and efficient instrument to assess trust in teams. Potential applications of this measure in research and practice are described and the implications of these findings for future research are discussed.     

IDENTITY AND IDENTIFICATION: JEWISH YOUTH IN ITALY 1870–1938

The criteria by which Jews identify themselves cover a very wide range and change over time. The aim of this essay is to stress that Italian Jewish identity must be analysed in a historical context, in the larger society in which it is located and with which it interacts. Through the study of the activities of Italian Jewish youth, this article will demonstrate, on the one hand, the integration and uniqueness of the Italian Jews and, on the other, that Italian Jewish identity has been transformed by the political ideology and economics of the surrounding society. The only way to analyse Jewish youth in Italy in their struggle with their Jewish identity should be comparatively, that is, to examine the history of Italian Jews and of Italy as a whole, not as separate but as connected entities.     

Studying Ideological Groups Online: Identification and Assessment of Risk Factors for Violence

Recent acts of violence have demonstrated the impact of violent ideological groups worldwide. However, the systematic study of these groups is somewhat limited. The Internet is a valuable tool for investigating ideological group behavior because it is easily accessible and commonly used by these groups. This study attempted to extend previous research by examining online message boards to assess processes particular to ideological group membership. A content analysis was conducted on several group process variables using 29 groups with message boards. A Kruskal‐Wallis test with follow‐up pairwise comparisons was used to find that violent ideological groups differed from nonviolent ideological and nonviolent nonideological groups on 7 group process variables and 3 content variables. Implications are discussed.     

Cues to intention: the role of movement information

Body movement provides a rich source of cues about other people’s goals and intentions. In the present research, we investigate how well people can distinguish between different social intentions on the basis of movement information. Participants observed a model reaching toward and grasping a wooden block with the intent to cooperate with a partner, compete against an opponent, or perform an individual action. In Experiment 1, a temporal occlusion procedure was used as to determine whether advance information gained during the viewing of the initial phase of an action allowed the observers to discriminate across movements performed with different intentions. In Experiment 2, we examined what kind of cues observers relied upon for the discrimination of intentions by masking selected spatial areas of the model (i.e., the arm or the face) maintaining the same temporal occlusion as for Experiment 1. Results revealed that observers could readily judge whether the object was grasped with the intent to cooperate, compete, or perform an individual action. Seeing the arm was better than seeing the face for discriminating individual movements performed at different speeds (natural-speed vs. fast-speed individual movements). By contrast, seeing the face was better than seeing the arm for discriminating social from individual movements performed at a comparable speed (cooperative vs. natural-speed individual movements, competitive vs. fast-speed individual movements). These results demonstrate that observers are attuned to advance movement information from different cues and that they can use such kind of information to anticipate the future course of an action.     

Effects of syllable structure in aphasic errors: implications for a new model of speech production

Current models of word production assume that words are stored as linear sequences of phonemes which are structured into syllables only at the moment of production. This is because syllable structure is always recoverable from the sequence of phonemes. In contrast, we present theoretical and empirical evidence that syllable structure is lexically represented. Storing syllable structure would have the advantage of making representations more stable and resistant to damage. On the other hand, re-syllabifications affect only a minimal part of phonological representations and occur only in some languages and depending on speech register. Evidence for these claims comes from analyses of aphasic errors which not only respect phonotactic constraints, but also avoid transformations which move the syllabic structure of the word further away from the original structure, even when equating for segmental complexity. This is true across tasks, types of errors, and, crucially, types of patients. The same syllabic effects are shown by apraxic patients and by phonological patients who have more central difficulties in retrieving phonological representations. If syllable structure was only computed after phoneme retrieval, it would have no way to influence the errors of phonological patients. Our results have implications for psycholinguistic and computational models of language as well as for clinical and educational practices.     

Assessment of individual differences in faking

In recent years, change scores obtained under neutral conditions and under faking-inducing conditions have become one of the main alternatives for operationalizing faking. A pending issue regarding these measures is the relevance of individual differences under similar conditions of pressure. This study proposes a simple approach based on the classic test theory that allows the issue to be rigorously assessed. The approach, from which three indices are derived, is based on a pre-test post-test design with a control group, and models the amount of change as an individual parameter. The proposal is applied to an empirical study in personality, and some interesting initial results are obtained.     

Aligning Mars and Venus: The Social Construction and Instability of Gender Differences in Romantic Relationships

An evolutionary approach to gender differences in romantic relationships has pervaded the scientific literature, a trend mirrored in popular culture by Mars-Venus stereotyping. Three studies tested the accuracy of the popular notion that gender differences would emerge for the behaviors women and men want and receive from romantic partners in a sample of 375 students at a southeastern U.S. public university. Across the three studies, only one stable and robust gender difference emerged (desires regarding relationship support), as did several unstable gender differences. However, gender-role identity significantly accounted for nearly half of the variance in this one stable gender difference, challenging the viability of some evolutionary conceptualizations of gender differences and instead providing support for social constructionist and feminist perspectives.     

Detecting fakers of the autobiographical IAT

Autobiographical memories might be identified using a variant of the implicit association test (IAT), or the autobiographical IAT (aIAT). The aIAT provides a measure of association between true sentences and sentences describing an autobiographical event. This tool might be used to evaluate whether specific autobiographical information is encoded within the respondent's mind/brain. This paper examines possible problems arising when the aIAT is used as a lie‐detector technique. The results indicate that, when given previous instruction or training with an aIAT, examinees can alter their results and beat the ‘memory‐detector’. However, we have been able to detect successful fakers of aIAT on the basis of their specific response patterns. Our algorithm has the ability to spot the faker in a satisfactory manner. If, as demonstrated here, faking can be detected, then the real autobiographical event might also be identified when the examinee attempts to alter their results. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Validation of an Italian version of the Sociocultural Attitudes Towards Appearance Questionnaire-3 (SATAQ-3) on adolescent girls

The present study used exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to investigate the factor structure of an Italian version of the Sociocultural Attitudes Towards Appearance Questionnaire-3 (SATAQ-3) with a sample of 598 adolescent girls. Results of EFA indicated a four-factor structure: Information, Pressures, Internalization-General, and Internalization-Athlete. Factor loadings confirmed the original structure of the scale, except for one item. As expected, the four factors appeared to be slightly correlated. Cronbach's alphas for the four subscales were uniformly high: Information = .91, Pressures = .91, Internalization-General = .94, Internalization-Athlete = .84. Convergent validity of this Italian version of the SATAQ-3 was found to be good. SATAQ-3 seems useful to measure different aspects of societal influences on body image in Italian contexts. Future studies could subject SATAQ-3 to a confirmatory factor analysis in order to confirm the adequate fit of the model according to conventional criteria.     

Two tests of the social cognitive model of well-being in Portuguese college students

A social cognitive model of well-being (Lent & Brown, 2006, 2008) was tested in two studies (one cross-sectional, one longitudinal) with Portuguese college students. Participants in Study 1 (N = 366) completed measures of academic self-efficacy, environmental support, goal progress, academic satisfaction and stress, trait positive affect, and overall life satisfaction at a single assessment. Those in Study 2 (N = 158) took the same measures at each of two time points, 15 weeks apart. A modified version of the model improved the fit to the data in Study 1. Optimal fit in Study 2 was achieved with a bidirectional version that modeled reciprocal relations of positive affect to both self-efficacy and support. The predictors in both studies accounted for substantial portions of the variance in academic domain satisfaction, academic stress, and life satisfaction. Implications for future research on the social cognitive model in educational and work settings are considered.