Extending the integrated model of retirement adjustment: Incorporating mastery and retirement planning

Extending earlier research, this study explores individual (e.g. demographic and health characteristics), psychosocial (e.g. mastery and planning) and organizational factors (e.g. conditions of workforce exit) influencing retirement adjustment. Survey data were collected from 570 semi-retired and retired men and women aged 45 years and older. Findings suggest that higher income, and having better psychological and physical health accounted for better retirement adjustment. After controlling for the effects of demographics and health, a higher personal sense of mastery and more favorable conditions of exit significantly predicted adjustment to retirement. Pre-retirement planning was not related to retirement adjustment. However, analyses revealed that the effect of post-retirement planning on retirement adjustment was mediated by mastery. Practical implications for the design of interventions to promote mastery in later life and provide control over the transition from the workforce are discussed.     

Childhood and adolescent predictors of early adult career pathways

Individual and contextual factors in childhood and adolescence that were hypothesized to contribute to career pathways were examined in a prospective study. Four career pathway groups were distinguished in a sample of 202 at-risk men (23-24 years of age); namely, young men with long-term unemployment, short-term unemployment, full employment, or a college education. Measures of educational attainment, family and peer characteristics, and personal adjustment during childhood and adolescence were used to determine if they would predict early adult career pathways. Findings indicated that the long-term unemployed young men, overall, showed the poorest levels of educational attainment, family and peer characteristics, and personal adjustment during childhood and adolescence.The most important predictors of differing career pathways were educational attainment, arrests, and mental health problems. Implications of the findings for conceptualizing the school-to-work transition within an integrative framework are discussed.     

Revisiting the Factor Structure of the Agoraphobic Cognitions Questionnaire and Body Sensations Questionnaire: A Confirmatory Factor Analysis Study

The twin scales, Agoraphobic Cognitions Questionnaire and Body Sensations Questionnaire (D. L. Chambless, G. C. Caputo, P. Bright, & R. Gallagher, 1984), have been used frequently in the area of anxiety, and in particular, panic disorder with agoraphobia. The present study employed confirmatory factor analysis to investigate the factor structure of the scales in a sample of Australian patients with anxiety disorder. Model testing indicated that neither the original nor the modified factor structures offered a good fit to the data. In addition, confirmatory factor analyses highlighted statistical inconsistencies in the scales. Except for a few, most of the items were problematic. This indicated a need for possible revision of the scales. Moreover, until further research is conducted, researchers and clinicians are recommended to use the scales with caution.     

La protection des données personnelles des patients face à la modernisation de notre système de santé

With the Internet and the artificial intelligence, the collection of personal data is becoming a strategic element for the digital economy. The collection of information touching the health or the body must respect the patients’ rights. The GDPR came into effect on May 25th, 2018. The healthcare professionals who are established in a Member state, must be careful because they can base their exercise on clinical or biological elements of their patients.     

The Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire in Lebanon and the UK: A comparison of the psychometric properties in each country

The aim of this study was to validate the Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire (TEIQue v. 1.5) in a Lebanese sample and compare its factorial structure to that of a UK sample. There were similar gender and age distributions in both samples as well as satisfactory structural reliabilities at the global, factor, and facet levels. Results from exploratory factor analysis showed a four-factor structure similar to that originally obtained by the author of the questionnaire. There were strong correlations between the factor scores derived from the two datasets (≥.90). Tucker congruence supported the similarity between the Lebanese and UK factors. Independent-samples t tests showed that Lebanese participants scored higher on the Sociability factor and the facets of self-esteem, social awareness and emotion perception, whereas UK participants scored higher on the facets of stress management, optimism and relationships. Gender differences are also reported, and recommendations for future research discussed.     

Are our samples representative? Understanding whether temperament influences infant dropout rates at 3 and 7 months

In this study, we examined whether infant temperament predicted study dropout at 3.5 and 7 months and whether dropout was stable across time. Dropout was measured across four experimental tasks (free-play, ERP, still-face, and eye tracking). Temperament was not related to dropout at either timepoint. Dropout was not stable across time, nor was it stable across tasks. These findings suggest that individual differences in temperament are not systematically related to study completion across experimental tasks with varied requirements. These findings additionally suggest that dropout is not consistent across tasks, which may support the utility of multi-study data collection methods.     

Moral perfectionism and moral values,virtues, and judgments: A preliminary investigation

Moral perfectionism has a long tradition in philosophical inquiry, but so far has been ignored in psychological research. This article presents a first psychological investigation of moral perfectionism exploring its relationships with moral values, virtues, and judgments. In three studies, 539 university students responded to items of the Frost Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale (Frost et al., 1990) adapted to measure personal moral standards (PMS) and concern over moral mistakes (CMM) and completed measures of moral values, virtues, and forgiveness, gratitude, and wrong behavior judgments. When partial correlations were computed controlling for the overlap between PMS and CMM, PMS showed positive correlations with moral values, virtues, reciprocal helping, forgiveness, and condemnation of wrong behaviors. In contrast, CMM showed a positive correlation only with indebtedness and a negative correlation with self-reliance. The present findings, while preliminary, suggest that moral perfectionism is a personality characteristic that may help explain individual differences in moral values, virtues, and judgments.     

Salivary progesterone is associated with reduced coherence of attentional, cognitive, and motivational systems

The present study tested whether the hypothesis that high levels of progesterone (P) have a decoupling effect on the function of the brain hemispheres (Hausmann & Gunturkun, 2000) also extends to attentional functions, referential connections between verbal and nonverbal representations and the degree to which implicit motivational needs match a person's explicit goal commitments. Participants (28 women on oral contraceptives, 14 naturally cycling women, 50 men) completed the Lateralized Attention Network Task (Greene et al., 2008), a measure of the alerting, orienting, and conflict-resolution functions of attention for each hemisphere; a measure of referential competence (i.e., the ability to quickly name nonverbal information); a measure of the implicit motives power, achievement, and affiliation; and a content-matched personal goal inventory. In addition, they provided a saliva sample that was assayed for P and cortisol (C). Higher levels of P were associated with lower interhemispheric correlations for alerting and orienting, but with a higher correlation of conflict-resolution performance. Higher P was also associated with longer interhemispheric transfer time, lower congruence between implicit motives and explicit goal commitments and, after controlling for C, with lower referential competence. These results suggest that (a) P is associated with the degree to which attentional functions are correlated between hemispheres, although in a different direction for more posterior (alerting and orienting: decoupling) than for more anterior functions (conflict resolution: coupling), (b) that high P is associated with other indicators of reduced functional coherence between cognitive systems (longer interhemispheric transfer time, lower referential competence), and (c) that high P is also associated with low coherence between implicit and explicit motivational systems.     

The impact of state and dispositional mindfulness on prospective memory: A virtual reality study

Prospective memory (PM) consists of remembering to perform an action that was previously planned. The recovery and execution of these actions require attentional resources. Mindfulness, as a state or a dispositional trait, has been associated with better attentional abilities while mind wandering is linked with attentional failures. In this study, we investigated the impact of mindfulness on PM. Eighty participants learned 15 cue-action associations. They were, then, asked to recall the actions at certain moments (time-based items) or places (event-based items) during a walk in a virtual town. Before the PM task, participants were randomly assigned to a mindfulness or mind wandering (control condition) session. Dispositional mindfulness was measured via the Five Facets Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ). Although considered as two opposite states, we did not report any difference between the two groups on PM abilities. Nevertheless, the natural tendency to describe one's own sensations (the Describing facet of the FFMQ) predicted time-based performance in both groups. We discuss different hypotheses to explain this finding in light of recent findings on the impact of mind wandering on future oriented cognition. Our main observation is a positive link between the Describing facet and time-based PM performances. We propose that this link could be due to the common association of this mindfulness facets and PM with attentional and interoceptive abilities. Additional studies are needed to explore this hypothesis.