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Many studies have found that males, on average, perform better than females in mathematics, although the size of this gender gap is small and varies considerably across countries. Stereotype threat has been proposed as a principal cause of this gender gap. From this perspective, females' performance is affected by fear of confirming a negative stereotype about females' mathematical ability and this stereotype can be activated by an experimental manipulation that reminds females of the stereotype. Yet, evidence of a stereotype threat effect on mathematics performance in childhood and adolescence has been mixed. The present study replicated a highly cited study of stereotype threat among Italian adolescents with a much larger sample of Italian ninth grade (89 male, 75 female, mean age = 14.2) and eleventh grade (84 male, 80 female, mean age = 16.2) public high school students. Performance in tests administered both before and after the experimental manipulations were analyzed with a series of logistic mixed-effects models. Model comparisons confirmed that males performed better than females, but the probability of a stereotype threat effect was infinitesimal. We conclude that Italian adolescent gender differences in mathematics may not be explained by stereotype threat effects.

Background: Reading comprehension can be considered the main learning activity. All learning experiences are infused with emotions; however, to date, few studies have focused on the role of emotional aspects in reading comprehension performance. The impact of emotions on academic achievement is thought to be mediated or moderated by cognitive aspects. Among them, working memory updating is an executive function that plays a crucial role in reading comprehension. Aims: This study aimed to investigate the relationships between reading-related emotions and reading comprehension performance. We also consider the role that updating may play in these relationships. Sample: Two hundred and eight 8th graders were involved in four sessions. Method: Students completed measures of achievement emotions specifically related to reading comprehension activity, updating, and reading comprehension performance. Gender and general cognitive ability were also considered as control variables. Mixed-effects models were used for statistical analyses. According to the Akaike information criterion (AIC; Akaike, 1974), we selected the most plausible model among a set of candidate models fitted to the same data. Results: Results showed that activating-negative emotions (i.e., anxiety, anger, and shame), deactivating-negative emotions (i.e., boredom and hopelessness), and updating are related with reading comprehension performance. Moreover, the interaction between activating-negative emotions and updating also emerged. When activating-negative emotions interact with low and moderate updating, students' reading comprehension performance gets worse. Conclusions: The study indicates the moderating role of a main cognitive ability in the link between reading-related emotions and reading comprehension performance. Strategies can be taught to improve students' ability to self-regulate negative emotions and to update information in working memory.

The current study aimed to examine whether executive functioning (EF) moderates the expected association between poor parental supervision and emotional-behavioral problems among early adolescents with and without a migration background in Italy. In total, 97 Chinese immigrant and 165 Italian nonimmigrant early adolescents, aged 11 to 13 years (52% girls), completed a series of performance and computer-based tasks assessing their EFs, whereas primary caregivers rated their own parental supervision and their offspring's emotional-behavioral problems. Regression analyses indicated that in both groups, a better working memory capacity was associated with fewer problems. Moreover, low levels of inhibitory control strengthened the association between poor parental supervision and emotional-behavioral problems. In addition, among Chinese immigrant youth, higher levels of cognitive flexibility enhanced the link between poor parental supervision and emotional-behavioral problems. Results underscore the importance of parental supervision and EF processes for Chinese immigrant youths' psychological functioning.

The recently developed short form of the Experiences in Close Relationships Scale--Revised Child version (ECR-RC) is a promising tool to assess anxious and avoidant attachment in children and adolescents. Yet, evidence concerning its validity in middle childhood is limited. This study aimed to test the psychometric properties of the 12-item ECR-RC for both mother and father forms in a sample of 448 Italian children (50.2% girls) aged between 8 and 13 years. The scale was adapted by changing the response format to make it more understandable for young children. Psychometric proprieties of the brief ECR-RC were investigated by testing its factor structure and internal consistency, invariance across middle childhood and early adolescence, and concurrent and convergent validity. A series of confirmatory factor analyses provided support for the two-factor structure (i.e., anxiety and avoidance) of the ECR-RC, and multi-group confirmatory factor analyses supported its invariance across middle childhood and early adolescence. Older children reported significantly higher latent mean values in avoidant attachment to both parents compared to their younger counterparts. Furthermore, the questionnaire showed evidence of concurrent and convergent validity. Our results indicate that the 12-item version of the ECR-RC is a psychometrically robust instrument to assess avoidance and anxiety toward mother and father among Italian children and early adolescents.

Objective: Studies on protective factors for school victimization are rare and usually focus on specific assets. The current study examined the association between quantity and variety of domains of developmental assets and school victimization in adolescence. Method: Data were drawn from the California Healthy Kids Survey (CHKS; N = 11,790 high school students attending 17 schools). The Social and Emotional Health Survey-Secondary (SEHS-S) was administered as part of a federally funded school climate initiative in the spring of 2013. A mixed-effects modeling approach tested associations between configurations of assets and school victimization. Results: Adolescents reporting a higher quantity of assets in multiple domains had a lower likelihood of experiencing physical and relational victimization and fear of being victimized in school compared to youth having zero assets. Conclusions: Results supported the importance of considering the quantity of psychological and social assets and also the variety of assets across multiple domains. Interventions promoting multiple protective factors in multiple areas of youthsa' lives may have the highest likelihood of impacting adolescent well-being.

The existing literature on developmental dyslexia (hereafter: dyslexia) often focuses on isolating cognitive skills which differ across dyslexic and control participants. Among potential correlates, previous research has studied group differences between dyslexic and control participants in performance on statistical learning tasks. A statistical learning deficit has been proposed to be a potential cause and/or a marker effect for early detection of dyslexia. It is therefore of practical importance to evaluate the evidence for a group difference. From a theoretical perspective, such a group difference would provide information about the causal chain from statistical learning to reading acquisition. We provide a systematic review of the literature on such a group difference. We conclude that there is insufficient high-quality data to draw conclusions about the presence or absence of an effect.

Background: Previous research indicates that children can display different attention allocation patterns in response to threat. However, data are lacking on the possible existence of an attentional bias in response to academic stressors, and whether variables related to school well-being (SWB) and students' individual characteristics may influence such attentional patterns. Aim: We aimed to investigate whether students show an attentional bias for school-related stressors. We sought to identify groups of students who differ in their perceived SWB, and to test whether they display different attention allocation patterns. We also examined whether negative emotionality moderates the expected association between students' SWB and attentional bias. Methods: Eighth-grade students completed a dot-probe detection task to register attentional patterns towards or away from an academic threatening word. SWB in terms of school anxiety, school-based stress, and perceived class climate was also assessed via self-reports. In addition, participants reported on their negative emotionality. Results: The results indicated that students showed an attentional bias towards words describing academic stressors. Cluster analyses allowed the identification of two groups of students with high versus low SWB. Regression analysis indicated that those with low SWB were more likely to show a greater bias and that negative emotionality moderated this relationship. Specifically, within the context of low SWB, students with high negative emotionality were more prone to biased attention towards school-related stressors compared with students with low negative emotionality. Conclusions: The present data indicate a perceptual bias for the detection of academic threats. Within the school practice, teachers should promote SWB and devote specific attention to students with high negative emotionality to reduce a biased allocation of attention in response to school-related stressors.

Factors related to grade point average (GPA) are of great importance for students' success. Yet, little is known about the impact of individual differences in emotional reactivity on students' academic performance. We aimed to examine the emotional reactivity-GPA link and to assess whether self-esteem and psychological distress moderate this relationship. Eighty undergraduate students reported on their GPA, self-esteem, and psychological distress. Students' pupil radius was monitored during affective picture viewing to assess sympathetic activation in response to emotional stimuli. Cluster analysis on pupil reactivity to pictures identified low, average, and high emotionally reactive students. Regression analyses indicated that profiles of emotional reactivity were associated with GPA. This relationship was moderated by self-esteem, but not psychological distress. Among students with higher emotional reactivity, those with lower self-esteem reported poorer GPA. Findings document the importance of differences in students' emotional reactivity and self-esteem in relation to academic success.

This study compared mother-infant interaction and childrearing patterns across Romanian families in Romania, first-generation Romanian immigrant families in Italy, and Italian families. The relations between acculturation and maternal beliefs and behaviors were also examined. Ninety-five mothers and their infants aged between 0 and 12 months participated. Mothers were videotaped interacting with their infants during free play, and were interviewed about their childrearing beliefs and practices. Results showed that Romanian mothers placed more emphasis on values and behaviors related to interdependence/sociocentrism, whereas Italian mothers more highly valued socialization goals and interactive behaviors consonant with an individualistic/independent orientation. The migrant mothers more closely resembled Italian mothers in the importance attributed to stimulating children's cognitive competence, autonomy, and self-fulfillment, but no homogeneous pattern for maternal behaviors was found. Maternal beliefs and behaviors were not related in either group. While the migrant mothers were significantly more oriented towards participating in the host culture than towards maintaining their own heritage culture, no association between acculturation attitudes, maternal beliefs and behaviors emerged.

The evaluation of agreement among experts in a classification task is crucial in many situations (e.g., medical and psychological diagnosis, legal reports). Traditional indexes used to estimate interrater agreement (such as Cohen's j) simply count the number of observed agreements and correct them by removing chance agreements. In this article, we introduce a new theoretical framework for the evaluation of interrater agreement based on the possibility of adjusting the observed classifications conducted by the raters. This framework refers to the introduction and formalization of two concepts involved in the classification task: (a) the belonging measure of an object to a category and (b) the rater's belonging threshold, which is the minimally sufficient value of the belonging measure at which the rater will classify an object into a category. These factors are ignored by traditional indexes for interrater agreement, though their role may be decisive. Two Bayesian models are tested through a Monte Carlo simulation study to evaluate the accuracy of the new methodology for estimating raters' threshold and the actual degree of agreement between two independent raters. Results show that the computation of traditional indexes for interrater agreement on the adjusted classifications leads to a more accurate estimation of the experts' actual agreement. This improvement is greater when a large difference between raters' belonging thresholds is observed; when the difference is small, the proposed method provides similar results to those obtained in the simple observed classifications. Finally, an empirical application to the field of psychological assessment is presented to show how the method could be used in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Familiarity with an environment enables us to form elaborate mental representations, which also relate to individual visuo-spatial factors. This study examines how several individual cognitive and self-reported visuo-spatial factors contribute to people's knowledge of familiar environments. Undergraduates attending a university campus area for 12 months were administered visuo-spatial (mental rotation and visuo-spatial working memory) tasks, and tested on self-reported preferences, attitudes and strategy use in approaching an environment. Their environment knowledge was tested using location, path length judgment and pointing tasks. Regression modelling on environment knowledge factors (considering all recall tasks together) showed that visuo-spatial abilities and self-reported pleasure in exploring were associated with more accurate environment representations. Some differences emerged when single environment knowledge measures were considered. The contribution of individual visuo-spatial factors to knowledge of familiar environments is discussed from the spatial cognition standpoint. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: The Depression Anxiety Stress Scales-21 (DASS-21) is the short version of a self-report measure that was originally developed to provide maximum differentiation between depressive and anxious symptoms. Despite encouraging evidence, the factor structure and other features of the DASS-21 are yet to be firmly established. Method: A community sample of 417 participants and two clinical groups (32 depressive patients and 25 anxious patients) completed the Italian version of the DASS-21 along with several measures of psychopathology. Results: Confirmatory factor analyses suggested that the DASS-21 is a measure of general distress plus three additional orthogonal dimensions (anxiety, depression, and stress). The internal consistency and temporal stability of the measure were good; each DASS-21 scale correlated more strongly with a measure of a similar construct, demonstrating good convergent and divergent validity. Lastly, the DASS-21 demonstrated good criterion-oriented validity. Conclusion: The validity of the Italian DASS-21 and its utility, both for community and clinical individuals, are supported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses a study on psychological symptoms and coping behaviors in adolescents exposed to terrorism in Beslan, Russia. The role played by coping in the development of posttraumatic stress was investigated under the study. Psychological distress significantly increased and active coping decreased among directly exposed adolescents while indirectly exposed adolescents had better mental health. A disproportionate increase in avoidant coping was observed in boys compared with girls.