Audio‐visual speech in noise perception in dyslexia

Individuals with developmental dyslexia (DD) may experience, besides reading problems, other speech‐related processing deficits. Here, we examined the influence of visual articulatory information (lip‐read speech) at various levels of background noise on auditory word recognition in children and adults with DD. We found that children with a documented history of DD have deficits in their ability to gain benefit from lip‐read information that disambiguates noise‐masked speech. We show with another group of adult individuals with DD that these deficits persist into adulthood. These deficits could not be attributed to impairments in unisensory auditory word recognition. Rather, the results indicate a specific deficit in audio‐visual speech processing and suggest that impaired multisensory integration might be an important aspect of DD.     

Measuring Happiness and Overall Life Satisfaction: A Danish Survey Experiment on the Impact of Language and Translation Problems

The paper addresses language and translation problems in the most typical measures of happiness and overall life satisfaction in international surveys using an experimental design. In the experiment, randomly selected groups of Danish university students answered questionnaires in English and Danish, respectively. We found significant differences in the answers on both indices. As such, it was confirmed that the term “happy” is not the same in English and Danish. In Danish the word is similar to the German word “glücklich” which seems to refer to something stronger than just being “happy”. Perhaps more surprisingly, we also found a significant difference between the answers on “overall life satisfaction”, indicating that the answers given in Danish are too high as compared to the English ones. The differences are large enough to argue that such simple tests should be conducted before ranking countries in terms of these two well-established indices of subjective well-being.     

The relationship of emotional intelligence with academic intelligence and the Big Five

The present study examines the relationship of self‐ and other ratings of emotional intelligence with academic intelligence and personality, as well as the incremental validity of emotional intelligence beyond academic intelligence and personality in predicting academic and social success. A sample of 116 students filled in measures for emotional and academic intelligence, the Big Five, and indicators of social and academic success. Moreover, other ratings were obtained from four different raters on emotional intelligence and social success. Factor analysis revealed three emotional intelligence dimensions that were labelled as ‘Empathy’, ‘Autonomy’, and ‘Emotional Control’. Little evidence was found for a relationship between emotional and academic intelligence. Academic intelligence was low and inconsistently related to emotional intelligence, revealing both negative and positive interrelations. Strong relationships were found of the emotional intelligence dimensions with the Big Five, particularly with Extraversion and Emotional Stability. Interestingly, the emotional intelligence dimensions were able to predict both academic and social success above traditional indicators of academic intelligence and personality. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.