Bibliometric Analysis and Visualization of Catholic Health Care Research: 1973–2019

Journal of Religion and Health - A multi-dimensional construct of Catholic health care is examined using a bibliometric analysis of 181 scientific studies from the Web of Science database. Medical...     

Validation of the 2012 European Social Survey Measurement of Wellbeing in Seventeen European Countries

The measurement of wellbeing provides an important indicator of the welfare of nations and presents opportunities for policy making. Researchers generally share the view of wellbeing as a multidimensional concept. The 2012 European Social Survey (ESS) measurement of personal and social wellbeing, a combination of theoretical models and evidence from statistical analysis, is defined as a six-dimensional construct: evaluative wellbeing, emotional wellbeing, functioning, vitality, community wellbeing and supportive relationships. In this paper, the proposed theoretical structure is investigated and the psychometric properties of the measure are assessed for 17 European countries. This involved splitting each country’s sample randomly into halves and performing Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) on the first half-samples. EFA resulted in a four-factor solution for Germany, Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland and the UK, a five-factor solution for Belgium, Finland, France, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Russian Federation and Sweden, and a six-factor solution for Denmark and Hungary. These results were supported by Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) performed on the second half-samples. Subscales were constructed based on analysis of the total samples, applying a simple transformation in order to deal with the different number of response categories used for the wellbeing items. Reliabilities and internal consistencies were investigated. Although the definition of each subscale differs from the proposed structure and across countries, the analysis did produce reliable and valid summary measures (subscales) of wellbeing for informing social policy in each country.

     

Comparison of Egyptian and Canadian children on a picture apperception test

Individualism-collectivism theory predicted that Egyptian and Canadian children's performance would differ on relevant scales of the Roberts Apperception Test for Children (RATC). The RATC was administered to 34 Egyptian and 34 Canadian children ages 6-13 years. Canadian children scored higher on autonomy and lower on receiving support from others and parental limit setting. At older ages, Egyptian children manifested less rejection, desire for help from others, and aggression. There were no cultural differences in anxiety or depression and few differences on indicator and resolution scales related to understanding the task and resolving problems. The findings validated cross-cultural use of the RATC and demonstrated that the increasingly general theory of collectivism allowed meaningful predictions about personality and clinical traits.     

Cognitive structure of writing disorders in Russian: what would Luria say?

Acquired disorders of writing in the Russian language have been reported for more than a century. The study of these disorders reflects the history of Russian neuropsychology and is dominated by the syndrome approach most notably by the writings of Luria. Indeed, our understanding of acquired dysgraphia in Russian speakers is conceptualized according to the classical approach in Modern Russia. In this review, we describe the classical approach and compare it to the cognitive neuropsychological models of writing disorders that are developed to explain dysgraphia in English and in other Western European languages. We argue that the basic theoretical assumptions of the two approaches - cognitive and classical or syndrome approach - share similarities. It is therefore proposed that identification of acquired cases of dysgraphia in Russian could potentially benefit from taking the cognitive neuropsychological perspective. We also conclude that adopting elements of the syndrome approach would substantially enrich the understanding of acquired dysgraphia since these offer an insight into processes not described in the cognitive neuropsychological approach.     

Personality and performance: A comparative analysis of workers in transition economies

We use data collected from employees in five transition economies to study whether locus of control and preference for challenge versus affiliation are positively related to worker performance. We find that earnings are positively related to the internal locus of control and preference for challenge among participants of the Armenian and Serbian surveys. In the Russian sample, earnings tend to be higher among workers with a more internal locus of control. Earnings are not systematically related to personality in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. For most countries, self-reported performance tends to be significantly higher among workers with preference for challenge. Generally, the size of the personality effect on performance is at least as great as the effect of experience or education. Although more research needs to be done before final conclusions about the causes of cross-country differences can be made, we argue that variation in personality effects across countries may be influenced by level of economic development, degree of market-orientation, and cultural diversity.     

Are parrots poor at motor self-regulation or is the cylinder task poor at measuring it?

The ability to inhibit unproductive motor responses triggered by salient stimuli is a fundamental inhibitory skill. Such motor self-regulation is thought to underlie more complex cognitive mechanisms, like self-control. Recently, a large-scale study, comparing 36 species, found that absolute brain size best predicted competence in motor inhibition, with great apes as the best performers. This was challenged when three Corvus species (corvids) were found to parallel great apes despite having much smaller absolute brain sizes. However, new analyses suggest that it is the number of pallial neurons, and not absolute brain size per se, that correlates with levels of motor inhibition. Both studies used the cylinder task, a detour-reaching test where food is presented behind a transparent barrier. We tested four species from the order Psittaciformes (parrots) on this task. Like corvids, many parrots have relatively large brains, high numbers of pallial neurons, and solve challenging cognitive tasks. Nonetheless, parrots performed markedly worse than the Corvus species in the cylinder task and exhibited strong learning effects in performance and response times. Our results suggest either that parrots are poor at controlling their motor impulses, and hence that pallial neuronal numbers do not always correlate with such skills, or that the widely used cylinder task may not be a good measure of motor inhibition.     

Parafoveal processing of inflectional morphology on Russian nouns

The present study investigated whether inflectional morphology on Russian nouns is processed parafoveally during silent reading. The boundary-change paradigm [Rayner, K. (1975). The perceptual span and peripheral cues in reading. Cognitive Psychology, 7, 65–81] was used to examine parafoveal processing of nominal case markings of Russian nouns. The results yielded preview cost for morphologically related preview in gaze duration (vs. an identical baseline) and in total time (TT) (vs. a non-word baseline) and preview benefit in regressions out of the target word. The contribution of the study is two-fold. First this is the first demonstration that bound nominal inflectional morphemes are processed parafoveally in a language with linear concatenated morphology (Russian). Second the observed preview effects suggest that parafoveal preview of a morphologically related word was processed fully in the parafovea and interfered with the integration of the target word into the syntactic structure of the sentence.