Feeling Guilty or Not Guilty. Identifying Burnout Profiles among Italian Teachers

This study aimed at the assessment of psychometric properties of the Italian version of the Spanish Burnout Inventory (SBI-Ita) in a sample of Italian teachers and the analysis of burnout profiles based on a model that includes four dimensions: Enthusiasm toward job, Psychological exhaustion, Indolence, and Guilt. A self-reported questionnaire was filled out by 689 Italian teachers. Data analyses performed Multi-sample Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Hierarchical Cluster Analysis. Results confirmed the hypothesized four-factor structure and the discriminant role of Guilt in differentiating clusters. Results highlights the reliability of the SBI-Ita in the assessment of teachers’ burnout. Furthermore, results evidence for a new typology of burnout that differentiate guilty from non-guilty professionals.     

Some men like it black,some women like it pink: consumer implications of differences in male and female website design

• The World Wide Web doubles in size roughly every 2–3 months and dramatic claims are made about the effectiveness of Web‐based commercial efforts. The centrality of non‐price mechanisms of differentiation to the perception, enjoyment and ease of use felt using websites is acknowledged but the only statistically rigorous studies of factors such as form and content have been conducted within a universalist paradigm of aesthetics. This paper reports on an interactionist approach to web aesthetics involving an analysis of 60 male‐ and female‐produced websites. The analysis reveals statistically significant differences between the male‐ and female‐produced websites on 13 out of the 23 factors analysed. These differences span issues of navigation as well as linguistic and visual content. The paper argues that the appeal of websites can be maximised if they mirror the needs and interests of their target populations and that websites targeted at male or female dominated markets need to reflect the aesthetic diversity found in the male‐ and female‐produced websites analysed here. It also presents information on the demographics of the IT profession, showing that there is a potential imbalance between the percentage of women involved online and those involved in the IT profession. This suggests that the male domination of the IT profession could be a barrier to the effective mirroring of female Website preferences.

Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Work-related stress and well-being: the roles of direct action coping and palliative coping

The purpose of the present study is to analyze the roles of direct action coping and palliative coping in the relationship between work stressors and psychological well-being, as well as their possible interactions, in a sample of 464 bank employees. Hierarchical regression analyses showed main effects of direct action coping on well-being. Palliative coping predicts higher levels of psychological distress. Contrary to what was expected, the interactions between work stressors and direct action coping were not significant. Palliative coping interacted with work stressors when predicting psychosomatic complaints. The interaction between the two types of coping was significant on psychosomatic complaints and psychological distress, but not on job satisfaction. The paper discusses theoretical and practical implications of these results, in order to design intervention strategies to prevent and manage job stress.     

The relationship between age,processing speed,working memory capacity,and language comprehension

A total of 50 elderly individuals and 48 college students were tested on several measures of processing speed and of working memory capacity. Language processing was tested with an on‐line measure of sentence processing efficiency, an end‐of‐sentence acceptability judgement task, and a paragraph comprehension test. Elderly individuals performed more poorly than college students on the speed of processing and working memory measures and had longer listening times overall on the sentence processing measures. Elderly individuals did not, however, have overall longer listening times at the most capacity‐demanding regions of the harder sentence types. Correlational analyses failed to establish a relationship between the increase in syntactic processing load at the capacity‐demanding region of the harder sentence type and the measures of working memory capacity, but did establish a relationship between paragraph comprehension and working memory capacity. The data are argued to provide evidence that the WM system used to structure sentences syntactically is separate from that used in other aspects of language comprehension.     

A Note Regarding the Validity of Lee's Typology of Love

In the present study, we investigated how well Lee's (1973/1976) typology of love characterized response data that adult subjects provided on selected items written by Hendrick and Hendrick. Results suggest that the model represents response data reasonably well and that Hendrick and Hendrick's (1986) measure ought to be valid.     

Memory mechanisms supporting syntactic comprehension

Efforts to characterize the memory system that supports sentence comprehension have historically drawn extensively on short-term memory as a source of mechanisms that might apply to sentences. The focus of these efforts has changed significantly in the past decade. As a result of changes in models of short-term working memory (ST-WM) and developments in models of sentence comprehension, the effort to relate entire components of an ST-WM system, such as those in the model developed by Baddeley (Nature Reviews Neuroscience 4: 829–839, 2003) to sentence comprehension has largely been replaced by an effort to relate more specific mechanisms found in modern models of ST-WM to memory processes that support one aspect of sentence comprehension—the assignment of syntactic structure (parsing) and its use in determining sentence meaning (interpretation) during sentence comprehension. In this article, we present the historical background to recent studies of the memory mechanisms that support parsing and interpretation and review recent research into this relation. We argue that the results of this research do not converge on a set of mechanisms derived from ST-WM that apply to parsing and interpretation. We argue that the memory mechanisms supporting parsing and interpretation have features that characterize another memory system that has been postulated to account for skilled performance—long-term working memory. We propose a model of the relation of different aspects of parsing and interpretation to ST-WM and long-term working memory.     

Cloninger's Temperament and Character Inventory Correlates with Personality Characteristics of Organ Donation Advocates

Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI) and background questionnaire data were collected from a sample of men and women organ donation advocates (N = 362) as part of a national study to investigate their personality characteristics, temperaments, and attitudes about organ donation advocacy. Goals included identifying unique traits for advocates, and response consistency between the TCI and questionnaire. The TCI results included high scores on Cooperativeness and Self-Directedness, and low on Harm Avoidance dimensions. The questionnaire results indicated that most advocates were White, married, college-educated females, who typically spent less than 2 hr with potential donor families, were satisfied with life and job, and believed they would be in a donation position 2 years from the time surveyed. TCI and questionnaire measures were correlated for Self-Transcendence and Spirituality, Helpfulness and Job Satisfaction, and Compassion and Identification variables.     

Unique designs,errors and strategies in the Five-Point Test: The contribution of age,phonemic fluency and visuospatial abilities in Italian children aged 6–11 years

Performances on the Five-Point Test of 161 Italian children aged 6 to 11 years were investigated, along with phonemic fluency, visual-motor integration, visual perception, motor coordination, visuospatial memory, and fluid intelligence. Five-Point Test accuracy was significantly related to phonemic fluency and visual-motor integration, while phonemic fluency was linked to motor coordination. The two fluency measures increased linearly with age, but the developmental progression of Five-Point Test accuracy was less influenced by age. Different age effects were also found on the relationship between fluid intelligence and the two fluency measures. The inspection of qualitative aspects of Five-Point Test performance (errors and strategies) suggested that strategy usage enhanced both productivity and accuracy in children; age-related changes were observed in the relationship between the number of errors and the total number of designs produced.