The Association Between Psychological Well-Being and Problematic Use of Internet Communicative Services Among Young People

Previous studies on problematic Internet use have focused almost exclusively on the fact that presence of negative functioning, such as social anxiety, depressive symptoms, or loneliness, represents a risk factor for unhealthy use of the web. For this reason the aim of the present study was to investigate the association between psychological well-being dimensions and problematic use of Internet communicative services. In the current study 495 undergraduate students were recruited. The Italian adaptations of the Psychological Well-being Scales and the Generalized Problematic Internet Use Scale 2 (GPIUS2) were used to assess psychological well-being dimensions and generalized problematic Internet use, respectively. Psychological well-being dimensions explained a significant portion of variance for the GPIUS2 total score levels, after controlling for sex, age, and occupational status. The levels of Autonomy, Environmental Mastery, and Positive Relations with Others acted as significant negative predictors of the tendency to use the web for regulating negative feelings, compulsive use of the web, and the negative outcomes that can arise as a result. The overall findings of the present study provide preliminary evidence that low psychological well-being is associated with problematic use of Internet communicative services.     

Representing time in language and memory: The role of similarity structure

Every day we read about or watch events in the world and can easily understand or remember how long they last. What aspects of an event are retained in memory? And how do we extract temporal information from our memory representations? These issues are central to human cognition, as they underlie a fundamental aspect of our mental life, namely our representation of time. This paper reviews previous language studies and reports a visual learning study indicating that properties of the events encoded in memory shape the representation of their duration. The evidence indicates that for a given event, the extent to which its associated properties or sub-components differ from one another modulates our representation of its duration. These properties include the similarity between sub-events and the similarity between the situational contexts in which an event occurs. We suggest that the diversity of representations that we associate with events in memory plays an important role in remembering and estimating the duration of experienced or described events.     

Making the case for objective performance metrics in newborn screening by tandem mass spectrometry

The expansion of newborn screening programs to include multiplex testing by tandem mass spectrometry requires understanding and close monitoring of performance metrics. This is not done consistently because of lack of defined targets, and interlaboratory comparison is almost nonexistent. Between July 2004 and April 2006 (N=176,185 cases), the overall performance metrics of the Minnesota program, limited to MS/MS testing, were as follows: detection rate 1:1,816, positive predictive value 37% (54% in 2006 till date), and false positive rate 0.09%. The repeat rate and the proportion of cases with abnormal findings actually been reported are new metrics proposed here as an objective mean to express the overall noise in a program, where noise is defined as the total number of abnormal results obtained using a given set of cut-off values. On the basis of our experience, we propose the following targets as evidence of adequate analytical and postanalytical performance: detection rate 1:3,000 or higher, positive predictive value>20%, and false positive rate<0.3%.     

Dependency in consumer media relations: an application to the case of teleshopping

• This paper analyses the teleshopping issue in terms of the Media Dependency Theory. The objective is to verify whether dependency relations between television shoppers and the television medium and television shopping are key variables to explain watching and buying behaviour. A model is proposed that integrates the dependency‐viewing‐purchase relation, tested on a sample of Spanish television shoppers. The results of the study confirm the direct relationship between the antecedents of dependency, dependency and future intentions of behaviour.

Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The latent structure of trait curiosity: evidence for interest and deprivation curiosity dimensions

To evaluate Litman and Jimerson's (2004) Interest/Deprivation (I/D) model of curiosity, 355 students (269 women, 86 men) responded to 6 trait curiosity measures including the Curiosity/Interest in the World scale (C/IW; Peterson & Seligman, 2004), the Curiosity and Exploration Inventory (CEI; Kashdan, Rose, & Fincham, 2004), the Perceptual Curiosity scale (PC; Collins, Litman, & Spielberger, 2004), the Epistemic Curiosity scale (EC; Litman & Spielberger, 2003), and the Curiosity as a Feeling-of-Deprivation scales (CFD; Litman & Jimerson, 2004). Consistent with expectations, the results of confirmatory factor analyses demonstrated that the C/IW, CEI, PC, EC scales defined an Interest (I) curiosity factor, whereas the CFD scales formed a Deprivation (D) curiosity factor. However, as compared to the other interest-based curiosity measures, one of the EC subscales was found to be less differentiated from the CFD scales, presumably because these instruments assess overlapping aspects of Berlyne's (1954) concept of epistemic curiosity. The results of this study indicated that I and D curiosity are related but differentiated curiosity dimensions, providing evidence for the validity of the I/D model.     

Event-related fMRI of category learning: differences in classification and feedback networks

Eighteen healthy young adults underwent event-related (ER) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the brain while performing a visual category learning task. The specific category learning task required subjects to extract the rules that guide classification of quasi-random patterns of dots into categories. Following each classification choice, visual feedback was presented. The average hemodynamic response was calculated across the eighteen subjects to identify the separate networks associated with both classification and feedback. Random-effects analyses identified the different networks implicated during the classification and feedback phases of each trial. The regions included prefrontal cortex, frontal eye fields, supplementary motor and eye fields, thalamus, caudate, superior and inferior parietal lobules, and areas within visual cortex. The differences between classification and feedback were identified as (i) overall higher volumes and signal intensities during classification as compared to feedback, (ii) involvement of the thalamus and superior parietal regions during the classification phase of each trial, and (iii) differential involvement of the caudate head during feedback. The effects of learning were then evaluated for both classification and feedback. Early in learning, subjects showed increased activation in the hippocampal regions during classification and activation in the heads of the caudate nuclei during the corresponding feedback phases. The findings suggest that early stages of prototype-distortion learning are characterized by networks previously associated with strategies of explicit memory and hypothesis testing. However as learning progresses the networks change. This finding suggests that the cognitive strategies also change during prototype-distortion learning.     

Conscientiousness,Its Facets,and the Prediction of Job Performance Ratings: Evidence against the narrow measures

This study empirically tested the predictions of the three basic perspectives on the bandwidth debate about the relationship between personality and job performance, regarding the validity of conscientiousness and its facets. The sample consisted of 226 police officers. Conscientiousness and three facets (order, industriousness, and self‐control) were correlated with three performance criteria (overall job performance, task performance, and orderliness). A Schmid–Leiman transformation made it possible to residualize the variance of the facets and to isolate their unique contribution to the prediction of performance measures. The results showed that conscientiousness predicted the three criteria (true validities of.25,.28 and.37, respectively) and that the facets neither predicted job performance nor showed incremental validity over conscientiousness. Finally, the implications of the findings for theory and practice are commented on, and future research is suggested.     

Gender Roles,Suicide Attempts,and Substance Abuse

In this article, the focus is on a comparison of suicide attempts and substance abuse in the United States. It is argued that suicide attempts and substance abuse may function as psychologically equivalent but gender-specialized forms of self-injurious behaviors. Possible explanations for the gender segregation of suicide attempts and substance abuse are reviewed, and the benefits of crossover theories and treatments are presented.     

Inter-individual variability of forces and modular muscle coordination in cycling: A study on untrained subjects

The aim of this study was to investigate the muscle coordination underlying pedaling in untrained subjects by using the muscle synergies paradigm, and to connect it with the inter-individual variability of EMG patterns and applied forces. Nine subjects performed a pedaling exercise on a cycle-simulator. Applied forces were recorded by means of instrumented pedals able to measure two force components. EMG signals were recorded from eight muscles of the dominant leg, and Nonnegative Matrix Factorization was applied to extract muscle synergy vectors W and time-varying activation coefficients H. Inter-individual variability was assessed for EMG patterns, force profiles, and H. Four modules were sufficient to reconstruct the muscle activation repertoire for all the subjects (variance accounted for >90% for each muscle). These modules were found to be highly similar between subjects in terms of W (mean r = .89), while most of the variability in force profiles and EMG patterns was reflected, in the muscle synergy structure, in the variability of H. These four modules have a functional interpretation when related to force distribution along the pedaling cycle, and the structure of W is shared with that present in human walking, suggesting the existence of a modular motor control in humans.     

Are the sources of interest the same for everyone? Using multilevel mixture models to explore individual differences in appraisal structures

How does personality influence the relationship between appraisals and emotions? Recent research suggests individual differences in appraisal structures: people may differ in an emotion's appraisal pattern. We explored individual differences in interest's appraisal structure, assessed as the within-person covariance of appraisals with interest. People viewed images of abstract visual art and provided ratings of interest and of interest's appraisals (novelty–complexity and coping potential) for each picture. A multilevel mixture model found two between-person classes that reflected distinct within-person appraisal styles. For people in the larger class (68%), the novelty–complexity appraisal had a stronger effect on interest; for people in the smaller class (32%), the coping potential appraisal had a stronger effect. People in the larger class were significantly higher in appetitive traits related to novelty seeking (e.g., sensation seeking, openness to experience, and trait curiosity), suggesting that the appraisal classes have substantive meaning. We conclude by discussing the value of within-person mixture models for the study of personality and appraisal.