Parents' representations of their children: an exploratory study using the Osgood Semantic Differential Scales

The results of an exploratory national study carried out in Italy using Osgood's Semantic Differential Scales (Osgood, Suci, & Tannenbaum, 1957) with parents of 100 normal 6- to 11-yr.-old children in mainstream classrooms are reported. The aim was to devise a simple tool to be used to explore parents' perceptions of their children in this age group. Parents were asked to rate "my child" using some of Osgood's Semantic Differential Scales especially adapted for this study. Participants were 97 fathers and 100 mothers. Fathers were 32 to 57 years of age (M = 43.2, SD = 5.4), mothers were 29 to 49 years of age (M = 39.7, SD =4.4). In factor analysis four factors were identified: Activity, Evaluation, Emotions evoked by the child, Personality/Physical contact. Average factor scores were significantly different. There were no significant differences between fathers and mothers on the four factor scores. Children were more positively evaluated the younger they were.     

Rorschach Comprehensive System data for two samples of nonpatient children from Italy: 75 aged 5-7 years and 148 aged 8-11 years

This project provides information on how nonpatient children perform on the Rorschach test, administered and scored following Exner's guidelines (1995). Lis, Parolin, Zennaro, and Mazzeschi (2001) previously reported initial data for 70 nonpatient children living in Italy who were administered this instrument by graduate and postgraduate students in a 2-year research course at the Psychotherapy School of the University of Padua between July 1998 and February 2001. The current study is an extension of that work and includes information on an additional 153 participants gathered between November 2002 and December 2006. The total number of participants includes 223 individuals, 75 5-7-year-old children in the first level of elementary school, and 148 8-11-year-old children in the second level of elementary school. Exclusion criteria are described, and interrater reliability statistics at the response level for scoring segments are reported using percent agreement and iota. Rorschach Comprehensive System (CS) findings are presented.     

Job Experience and Big Five Personality Dimensions

Using a sample of engineers (N=80), the correlation between job experience and the personality dimensions was estimated. The results showed very small correlations. Based on these results, we suggest that composites created with job experience and personality measures can be useful for personnel selection.     

On the language specificity of basic number processing: transcoding in a language with inversion and its relation to working memory capacity

Transcoding Arabic numbers from and into verbal number words is one of the most basic number processing tasks commonly used to index the verbal representation of numbers. The inversion property, which is an important feature of some number word systems (e.g., German einundzwanzig [one and twenty]), might represent a major difficulty in transcoding and a challenge to current transcoding models. The mastery of inversion, and of transcoding in general, might be related to nonnumerical factors such as working memory resources given that different elements and their sequence need to be memorized and manipulated. In this study, transcoding skills and different working memory components in Austrian (German-speaking) 7-year-olds were assessed. We observed that inversion poses a major problem in transcoding for German-speaking children. In addition, different components of working memory skills were differentially correlated with particular transcoding error types. We discuss how current transcoding models could account for these results and how they might need to be adapted to accommodate inversion properties and their relation to different working memory components.     

Openness to experience, plasticity, and creativity: Exploring lower-order, high-order, and interactive effects

What are creative people like? Openness to experience is important to creativity, but little is known about plasticity, the higher-order factor that subsumes openness. College students (n = 189) completed measures of the Big Five and measures of creative cognition (fluency and quality of divergent thinking), everyday creative behaviors, creative achievement, and self-rated creativity. Latent variable models found broad effects of openness to experience and few effects of the other four domains. At the higher-order level, plasticity predicted higher scores on nearly all of the facets of creativity, and stability had several significant effects. For some creativity measures, plasticity and stability had opposing effects. Tests of latent interactions found no significant effects: plasticity and stability predict creatively independently, not jointly.     

Family Functioning and Coping Behaviors in Parents of Children with Autism

We analyzed family dynamics and coping behaviors of parents with a child with an autistic spectrum disorder. Previous research suggests that moderate levels of cohesion and adaptability are associated with higher levels of positive coping, and that the more coping strategies a family implements, the greater their satisfaction with family functioning. Using a family systems approach, the relationships among the familial variables of cohesion, adaptability, and social support were evaluated for their contributions to coping in the family unit. We also compared the responses of mothers and fathers. Surprisingly, for these parents of children with autism, those who rated their family as enmeshed implemented more positive coping strategies than did those from other cohesion styles. This finding suggests that the enmeshed style may be more adaptive for a family that encounters extreme challenges. Notably, mothers and fathers agreed on all variables except for perception of social support from family and friends. Mothers perceived more social support from family and friends. The results lead to several interesting suggestions for future research.     

LEXIN: A lexical database from Spanish kindergarten and first-grade readers

The LEXIN database offers psycholinguistic indexes of the 13,184 different words (types) computed from 178,839 occurrences of these words (tokens) contained in a corpus of 134 beginning readers widely used in Spain. This database provides four statistical indicators: F (overall word frequency), D (index of dispersion across selected readers), U (estimated frequency per million words), and SFI (standard frequency index). It also gives information about the number of letters, syntactic category, and syllabic structure of the words included. To facilitate comparisons, LEXIN provides data from LEXESP’s (Sebastián-Gallés, Martí, Cuetos, & Carreiras, 2000), Alameda and Cuetos’s (1995), and Martínez and García’s (2004) Spanish adult psycholinguistic frequency databases. Access to the LEXIN database is facilitated by a computer program. The LEXIN program allows for the creation of word lists by letting the user specify searching criteria. LEXIN can be useful for researchers in cognitive psychology, particularly in the areas of psycholinguistics and education.     

Spoken and gestural production in a naming task by young children with Down syndrome

Lexical production in children with Down syndrome (DS) was investigated by examining spoken naming accuracy and the use of spontaneous gestures in a picture naming task. Fifteen children with DS (range 3.8-8.3 years) were compared to typically developing children (TD), matched for chronological age and developmental age (range 2.6-4.3 years). Relative to TD children, children with DS were less accurate in speech (producing a greater number of unintelligible answers), yet they produced more gestures overall and of these a significantly higher percentage of iconic gestures. Furthermore, the iconic gestures produced by children with DS accompanied by incorrect or no speech often expressed a concept similar to that of the target word, suggesting deeper conceptual knowledge relative to that expressed only in speech.