Assessing Measurement Invariance of the Children's Depression Inventory in Chinese and Italian Primary School Student Samples

This study tested the measurement invariance of Children's Depression Inventory (CDI) and compared its factorial variance/covariance and latent means among Chinese and Italian children. Multigroup confirmatory factor analysis of the original five factors identified by Kovacs revealed that full measurement invariance did not hold. Further analysis showed that 4 of 21 factor loadings, 14 of 26 intercepts, and 12 of 26 item errors were noninvariant. Factor variance and covariance invariant tests revealed significant differences between Chinese and Italian samples. The latent factor mean comparison suggested no significant difference across the two groups. Nevertheless, the finding of partial metric and scalar invariance suggested that observed mean differences on the CDI items cannot be fully explained by the mean differences in the latent factor. These results suggest that researchers and practitioners exercise caution when gauging the size of the true national population differences in depressive symptoms among Italian and Chinese children when assessed via CDI. In addition to providing needed evidence on the use of the CDI in Italian and Chinese children specifically, the methods used in this research can serve more generally as an example for other cross-cultural assessment research to test structural equivalence and measurement invariance of scales and to determine why it is important to do so.     

Understanding Asian parenting from a Rasch perspective

This study examines the factor structure of Asian child‐reported parenting from a Rasch perspective. Participants comprised 291 sixth graders (11 to 13 years) in Singapore. Six different aspects of parenting were measured, namely warmth, rejection, structure, chaos, autonomy support, and coercion. Rasch Analysis was used to transform ordinal data into linear measures; category functioning was examined; residual‐based principal components were analysed; differential item functioning was assessed; and items and subjects that were misfitting were removed. Results showed that parenting comprised six dimensions, namely warmth, autonomy support, structure‐control, structure‐warmth, chaos, and negative parenting. The findings suggest that it is important for Asian parents to provide guidance to their children (in structure‐control and structure‐warmth) and reaffirms the relevance of warmth in Asian parenting.     

How does cognition evolve? Phylogenetic comparative psychology

Now more than ever animal studies have the potential to test hypotheses regarding how cognition evolves. Comparative psychologists have developed new techniques to probe the cognitive mechanisms underlying animal behavior, and they have become increasingly skillful at adapting methodologies to test multiple species. Meanwhile, evolutionary biologists have generated quantitative approaches to investigate the phylogenetic distribution and function of phenotypic traits, including cognition. In particular, phylogenetic methods can quantitatively (1) test whether specific cognitive abilities are correlated with life history (e.g., lifespan), morphology (e.g., brain size), or socio-ecological variables (e.g., social system), (2) measure how strongly phylogenetic relatedness predicts the distribution of cognitive skills across species, and (3) estimate the ancestral state of a given cognitive trait using measures of cognitive performance from extant species. Phylogenetic methods can also be used to guide the selection of species comparisons that offer the strongest tests of a priori predictions of cognitive evolutionary hypotheses (i.e., phylogenetic targeting). Here, we explain how an integration of comparative psychology and evolutionary biology will answer a host of questions regarding the phylogenetic distribution and history of cognitive traits, as well as the evolutionary processes that drove their evolution.     

Psychotherapy in France: the legacy and the future

This paper looks at the present situation of psychotherapy in France. In studying the historical background to the introduction of psychoanalysis in France since the 1920s, an assumption is made about the similar changes in paradigms brought about by the emergence of a new field, whether this be psychoanalysis or psychotherapy.     

Use of religious and spiritual interventions by trainees in APA-accredited Christian clinical psychology programs

Little is known about the effectiveness of Christian clinical programs accredited by the American Psychological Association in training students to use religious and spiritual interventions in therapy. We surveyed 162 student therapists from three such programs regarding their training experiences and use of religious and spiritual interventions. Self-reported competency and use of religious and spiritual interventions correlated with a number of training components. However, none of the training components predicted unique variance in regression equations above and beyond that of general professional training, personal religiousness, and intervention-specific training. Suggestions are offered regarding intervention-specific training in both Christian and secular programs, the role of personal therapy in training, and the development of guidelines for competency in using religious and spiritual interventions.     

Effect of Film Velocity on Genre Recognition

Abstract

In this study effects of film velocity on genre recognition were tested. “Happy reunion” film scenes were taken from comic, action, drama, and nonfiction genres. Their speed was varied to result in 3 levels: original velocity, acceleration by one third, and deceleration by one third. Fifty participants judged the fittingness of all scenes in each of the 4 genres. Velocity proved to be an effective parameter in the recognition of the comical and dramatic genres but not of the action and nonfiction genres. As predicted, when a scene belonging to any genre was decelerated, participants judged the scene as belonging more to the dramatic genre (p < .01) and less to the comic genre (p < .01). Acceleration of a scene belonging to any genre increased its comical fittingness (p < .05). The role of prototypicality of scenes in the interaction with velocity turned out to be only modest. In a few cases genre crossings (i.e., confusing a scene's genre with another in recognition) resulted from velocity manipulations of nonprototypical but not prototypical scenes.     

汉语合成词的整词词形表征

关于汉语合成词的表征方式历来存在争论:是分解式表征还是整词式表征?文章阐述了整词式表征存在的心理可能性和实验证据,并指出该表征由语音、语义和字形三种不可分割的表征形式构成.前人研究表明,合成词在语音和语义层面可能拥有整词表征,但目前鲜有研究探讨整词词形表征存在的合理性.据此,文章试图寻找考察整词词形表征的研究范式及可能影响汉语合成词词形表征特点的语言因素.     

Syntactic priming in Chinese sentence comprehension: Evidence from Event-Related Potentials

Using the event-related potential (ERP) technique, this study examined the nature of syntactic priming effects in Chinese. Participants were required to read prime-target sentence pairs each embedding an ambiguous relative clause (RC) containing either the same verb or a synonymous verb. In Chinese, the word de serves as a relative clause marker. During reading a potential Chinese RC structure (either the prime or the target sentence), Chinese readers initially expect to read an Subject–Verb–Object (SVO) structure but the encounter of a relative clause marker de would make readers abandon the initial strategy and reanalyze the structure as a relative clause. A reduced P600 effect was elicited by the critical word de in the target sentence containing the same initial verb as in the prime sentence. No significant reduction of the P600 was observed in the target sentences in the synonymous condition. The results demonstrated that verb repetition but not similarity in meaning produced a syntactic priming effect in Chinese. The constraint-based lexicalist hypothesis and the argument structure theory were adopted to explain the syntactic priming effect obtained in the current study.