General Measurement Tools for Assessing Mental Health Problems Among Children and Adolescents with an Intellectual Disability: A Systematic Review

There is a need for more knowledge of valid and standardized measures of mental health problems among children and adolescents with intellectual disability (ID). In this study, we systematically reviewed and evaluated the psychometric properties of instruments used to assess general mental health problems in this population. Following PRISMA guidelines, we reviewed empirical research published from 1980 through February 2020 with an updated search in March 2021 in Medline, Embase, PsycINFO, Health and Psychological Instruments, CINAHL, ERIC, and Web of Science databases. Forty-nine empirical articles were included in this review. Overall, the review indicated consistently better documentation of the reliability and validity of instruments designed for the ID population compared to instruments developed for the general child population.

Myers-briggs Personality Prediction and Sentiment Analysis of Twitter using Machine Learning Classifiers and BERT

Twitter being one of the most sophisticated social networking platforms whose users base is growing exponentially, terabytes of data is being generated every day. Technology Giants invest billions of dollars in drawing insights from these tweets. The huge amount of data is still going underutilized. The main of this paper is to solve two tasks. Firstly, to build a sentiment analysis model using BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) which analyses the tweets and predicts the sentiments of the users. Secondly to build a personality prediction model using various machine learning classifiers under the umbrella of Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator. MBTI is one of the most widely used psychological instruments in the world. Using this we intend to predict the traits and qualities of people based on their posts and interactions in Twitter. The model succeeds to predict the personality traits and qualities on twitter users. We intend to use the analyzed results in various applications like market research, recruitment, psychological tests, consulting, etc, in future.

To Fall or Not to Fall – Falls and Perceptions of Control and Meaning of the Home

Falls are a major public health problem among older people. Even if the outcome of a fall is not fatal, it may be a traumatic experience with both physical and psychological consequences. However, there is a lack of studies examining how falls in the home may impact the perception of the home. To compare perceptions of the home between those who had fallen and those who had not, we utilized data from the Swedish SNAC-GÅS study (N=371; mean age=68; 43% men). Perceptions of control and meaning of the home were captured by established psychological instruments. Excluding falls in other environments than the home (n=99), those who fell in the home the previous year (n=34) scored notably higher on housing control by “powerful others” (p=0.053) and notably lower on perceived “behavioral home bonding” (p=0.056) compared to non-fallers (n=238). These results warrant further research into the impact of falls on perceived housing.

Investigating Driving Styles: A Validation Study of Multidimensional Driving Styles with British and Chinese Drivers

Culture has a significant impact on driving behaviour and can play an important role in driving safety. The adaptation of traffic-related psychological instruments, developed elsewhere in new national contexts, should consider the cultural context. This paper validates the multidimensional driving style inventory (MDSI) with two cultural samples consisting of 215 Chinese drivers and 240 British drivers. A factor analysis of the driving style yielded evidence that both datasets present some variations from the original version of the instruments in the factorial structure. The analysis of the UK sample is comparable to the previous MDSI by indicating six driving styles, namely, anxious, risky and dissociative, high-velocity and angry, patient, careful, and distress-reduction. The analysis of the Chinese participants’ dataset showed its factorial structure with 40 items of the 44 original items divided over six styles. A new dimension, namely, an inattentive driving style, appeared in the Chinese sample. These differences raise the need to validate and adapt such instruments to consider cultural specificities. Implications were also derived for driver and road safety enhancement solutions through driver behaviour applications.

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LEARNED HELPLESSNESS AND ACADEMIC PROCRASTINATION AMONG UNDERGRADUATES OF UNIVERSTY OF LAGOS

The study examined learnt helplessness on academic procrastination among undergraduate students in the University of Lagos, with the aim of determining the influence of learned helplessness on academic procrastination. It also examined sex differences in academic procrastination. The study involved a cross sectional survey of 250 undergraduates, 125 females and 125 males. A paper and pencil self-report research protocol that, included questions that requested the bio-data of those involved in the study and two standardized Psychological instruments namely; The Learned helplessness scale (LHS), and the General Procrastination Scale (GPS) was used to gather data. The finding of the study shows that, a significant positive relationship exists between academic procrastination and learned helplessness (r= 0.295, p= 0.000, p< 0.01, 2 tailed). The finding also, shows, no significant sex difference on the level of academic procrastination among female and male students (t= -2.022, p= 0.044, p> 0.05). This implies that neither the male or female respondents reported a higher level of academic procrastination. The study concluded that, learned helplessness influences academic procrastination among undergraduate students.

PSYCHOLOGICAL TRAINING – AT THE HEART OF SPEECH COMMUNICATION WITH BILINGUAL CHILDREN

Playing is the base upon which pedagogical interaction with children is built. More and more Roma children enter our system of education. Most of them speak only their mother tongue and are not proficient in Bulgarian. This impedes pedagogue’s speech communication with them and thus his/her whole pedagogical work. Since these children express themselves better emotionally, there arises the challenge of using psychological trainings which could be easily put into practice by teachers. They include interactive methods of training for bilinguals through which teachers’ work gets facilitated.T he psychological trainings are built upon dramatization, role-plays, art-therapeutic techniques, fairy-tale therapy with magical fairy tales, sessions of work with the emotions and other psychological instruments.

Scales and instruments for measuring self-esteem in adolescents and young adults

Self-esteem is an evaluation the individual makes about themself, being classified as positive or negative. To accomplish this, psychology has proposed, use valid and reliable measuring instruments in the Mexican population, since there is a primary need to understand the different levels of self-esteem in individuals. The objective of the study was composing a review of validated scales and psychological instruments in the Mexican population on Self-esteem in adolescents and young adults from 15 to 25 years old. To the Method, the collection of information was made through databases such as PUBMED, Redalyc, Google Academic, Scielo and Dialnet. The descriptors were Self-esteem, adolescence, youth, and instruments of psychological evaluation. 96 articles were found, which only 5 of them fulfill the criteria. The results reflect 5 scales and instruments that measure self-esteem in Mexican adolescents and young adults, the application of these instruments fluctuates from 14 to 51 years and presents a reliability >0.70. It is concluded that in Social Sciences and Psychology, the application of instruments provides objective measures for a variety of problems to deal with. For this reason, valid and reliable self-esteem scales in the Mexican population may smooth the progress of the selection depending on subscales or factors that the psychologist or researcher wants to address individually or in a group.

Psychological Context of Overtraining Syndrome in Elite Athletes in Adolescence: Literature Review

The article presents an overview of important findings concerning the overtraining syndrome (OTS) in elite athletes. Although the scientific community agrees that OTS is a multifactorially determined and individually variable phenomenon, which can have a serious impact on the individual, there are still some inconsistencies. Therefore, in our study we focused on the terminology of the phenomenon, its prevalence, etiology and symptomatology. We paid specific attention to psychological instruments of detecting OTS indicators. Given that in the period of adolescence the training process in the majority of sport disciplines intensifies significantly, the context of developmental changes during this period in relation to OTS is discussed. The final part of the study summarizes the basic principles of prevention of this pathological phenomenon.

Dropout Intention, Motivation and Socio-Demographics of Forestry Students in Romania

Reducing students’ dropout rate is a major challenge for universities. Based on a quantitative approach, this study aims to analyze and explain students’ dropout intention at the largest forestry school in Romania by collecting data in their first two months of the academic year prior to failing any courses. The study participants are undergraduate freshmen, male and female students, and the tools are psychological instruments commonly used or specifically developed for this study. Our findings partly confirm previous results, such as the higher intention of dropping out among male students compared to females, and also among students with admission GPA lower or equal to seven, on a GPA scale from 1 to 10, and among students from families with low income. Dropout intention can be explained by the academic performance expectancy, gender, family, socio-economic status, and perceived barriers to completion of studies. There were no differences regarding whether students were from urban or rural areas, proximity of university to home, and high school academic program. Our results may help to implement efficient measures for increasing student retention.

Supporting Medical Staff from Psycho-Oncology with Smart Mobile Devices: Insights into the Development Process and First Results

Cancer is a very distressing disease, not only for the patients themselves, but also for their family members and relatives. Therefore, patients are regularly monitored to decide whether psychological treatment is necessary and applicable. However, such monitoring processes are costly in terms of required staff and time. Mobile data collection is an emerging trend in various domains. The medical and psychological field benefits from such an approach, which enables experts to quickly collect a large amount of individual health data. Mobile data collection applications enable a more holistic view of patients and assist psychologists in taking proper actions. We developed a mobile application, FeelBack, which is designed to support data collection that is based on well-known and approved psychological instruments. A controlled pilot evaluation with 60 participants provides insights into the feasibility of the developed platform and it shows the initial results. 31 of these participants received paper-based questionnaire and 29 followed the digital approach. The results reveal an increase of the overall acceptance by 58.5% in the mean when using a digital screening as compared to the paper-based. We believe that such a platform may significantly improve cancer patients’ and relatives’ psychological treatment, as available data can be used to optimize treatment.