Globally increasing prevalence of eating disorders emphasizes the existence of eating psychopathologies across cultures. Investigating eating disorders and depression among emerging adults across ethnic/racial diversity is important regarding theory and interventions. Hence, examination of differences regarding eating attitudes and depression of international university students from Africa and Asia continents was aimed. “Eating Attitudes Test-26” (EAT-26) and “The Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale-Revised” (CESD-R) were used for data collection. Participants are 108 (84 Africans, 24 Asians) university students. Asian students’ and females’ EAT-26 scores were determined as higher.  Regarding depression scores, %14,81 of the all participants (%8,3 of the African and %37,5 of the Asian students) were found above the pathological cut point. But no differences were detected between groups except ‘suicide ideas’. Disordered eating attitudes correlated positively with depressive tendencies and also with ‘sadness’, ‘tiredness’ and ‘suicide ideas’ besides compensating behaviors like ‘laxative diuretic usage’. Results demonstrated some practical and theoretical implications. As well as being consistent with cross-cultural findings regarding eating disorders, results seems consistent with the criteria and the related literature revealing co-existing symptoms of eating disorders, comorbidity between eating disorders and depression and also with Cognitive Theory.

The article deals with the gender differences in experiencing subjective social well-being. Subjective social well-being (SSWB) is defined as an integral social and psychological phenomenon, which reflects awareness and evaluation of social functioning based on the correlation between the level of demand and degree of satisfaction of individual’s social needs, as a result of which he/she defines his/her social being as optimal and experiences the feeling of satisfaction. It has been demonstrated that while divorce decreases the SSWB of men, it equally increases and decreases the SSWB of women. The leading agents of social relation for women are friends, parents and a partner, for men-parents, neighbours and acquaintances. The presence of children decreases the SSWB of women. At the same time, for men the effect depends on the perception of parenthood. For women dominant psychological factors of experiencing SSWB are competence, autonomy, intuitiveness, desire for power, activeness, whereas for men they are courage, expression of aggression, universalism, kindness and conformism.

This study examined the relationship between being members of social network sites (SNS) and the reasons for their use among individuals who are between 20-66 years of age. Social networking status and virtual loneliness are examined according to reasons for using SNS of participants. Researcher did a web-based questionnaire upon Facebook (FB) and reached a volunteer group of FB users and gave Social Networking Status Scale ( SNSS) and Virtual Loneliness Scale (VELS) in order to measure participants networking status and virtual loneliness according to socio-demographical variables. SNSS, gender, and age are the strongest predictors of virtual loneliness. Also, male participants, SNSS scores are significantly higher than female participants which indicates that male participants are more dependent on SNS. When time spent online increases individuals get convergence to usual habits in the virtual world. Individuals SNS usage habits effects their normal lives and make them escape to the virtual world.

Psychological climate is a type of climate that is measured at individual level and pertains to employees’ cognitive appraisal of work environment. Though various attempts have been made to define and conceptualize it, and several models have been proposed to measure this construct, the ambiguity surrounding its conceptualization and measurement still persists. This study aims to synthesize and analyze research on psychological climate, elucidate ambiguities, and contribute to conceptualization and demarcation of the construct.

Our goal was to determine food cravings, nutritional status and physical activity of patients diagnosed with major depression. The study was conducted on 203 (144 women, 59 men) patients, aged 20-64 years, who were diagnosed with major depression at three psychiatry centers. Anthropometric measurements, demographic data, current health status, depression duration, drug use, eating habits, food craving status (Food Craving Questionnaire-Trait/FCQ-T), food consumption frequency, energy and nutrient intake and physical activity level (International Physical Activity Questionnaire-Short Form/IPAQ) were evaluated. Depression duration, the frequency of antidepressant use and FCQ-T scores were higher in females than males. We found a positive correlation between FCQ-T score with the frequency of antidepressant use, depression duration and eating speed  (p < 0.05). Also, depression duration was negatively correlated with folate, vitamin B6, vitamin C and zinc (p < 0.05). Lastly, depression duration and FCQ-T were positively correlated with body weight, body mass index, waist circumference, hip circumference, body fat (%) and fat tissue (kg) (p< 0.05). In addition, physical activity is a very important statement for FCQ-T scores. Both men and women, the risk of FCQ-T score who exercised for <600 Met-min/week were greater relative to that of those who exercised for ≥3000 Met-min/week. The results of this study showed that an inverse correlation between a number of nutrients intake and depression duration, antidepressant use or FCQ-T scores.  It also emphasizes the beneficial effects of habitual exercise participation on food cravings. Future research exploring the nutritional status of individuals with depression is warranted.

Previous studies have confirmed that perceived social support facilitates university adjustment during emerging adulthood. Less is known, however, about the specific dimensions of social support that foster successful transition to university. This research represents the first attempt to examine the combined effects of social provisions, sense of support and perceived acceptance on each facet of adaptation to higher education. The sample consisted of 198 women and 102 men, of average age 18.03 years (SD = 0.52), enrolled in the first year of different degree courses at a public university. Three measures were used to assess various dimensions of perceived social support: the Social Support Questionnaire (SSQ6), the Perceived Acceptance Scale (PAS) and Social Provisions Scale (SPS). The measures of the various facets of university adjustment were obtained from the Student Adaptation to College Questionnaire (SACQ). Regression analysis indicated that reassurance of worth and perceived acceptance by friends were the dimensions that best predicted all facets of university adjustment. The findings provide a more comprehensive understanding of how perception of social support could be used to develop effective intervention strategies and programmes to prevent failure at university.

Insurgency and armed conflict in Northern Nigeria especially Kano metropolis have exposed many secondary school students to trauma related experiences and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It is estimated that about 13,000 persons have been killed and about 981,416 internally displaced persons (IDPs) are living in the various camps in Northern Nigeria (NEMA, 2015). The profound impact of the trauma experienced by these students on their mental health informed the need for the psycho-education intervention. The objective of this study was to determine the effects of psycho-educational intervention on PTSD symptoms among secondary school students exposed to conflict in Kano metropolis and to examine the effects of psycho-education intervention in reduction of re-experiencing, hyper-arousal and avoidance symptoms. A pre-test and post-test control group design was adopted for this study. A sample of 40 research participants (male=19, female=21) were selected for the study. These research participants were drawn from secondary schools clustered within the community where conflicts have taken place. The instrument for data collection was the adapted version of the University of California at Los Angeles post-traumatic stress Disorder Reaction Index  (UCLA PTSD Reaction Index). The UCLA PTSD Reaction Index measured PTSD symptoms. Result obtained after testing the hypotheses showed that there was a significant difference in the PTSD mean scores of students exposed to psychoeducational intervention (Mean= 22.40, Standard deviation = 4.47, Standard error = .998) and those not exposed to the intervention (Mean = 38.90, Standard deviation = 14.835, Standard error = 3.317), t (38) = -4.763, p < .0001 (two-tailed), Effect size is r = .61. It is important to provide professional and psychosocial support to students who developed mental health problems due to exposure to conflict.

This study examined teachers’ attributions and emotions for their subjectively perceived interpersonal relationships with their students as positive or negative, and whether hope (pathways thinking, agency thinking) influences the perceived positive or negative interpersonal relationships, the subsequent attributions and emotions, and the impact of attributions on emotions. Fifty teachers, of both genders, completed the questionnaire for each of their five students who were randomly selected from their teaching classes. The results revealed that the positive interpersonal relationships were predominately attributed to stable, personally controllable and self-student controllable factors, whereas the negative interpersonal relationships were primarily attributed to external, external controllable, unstable, and self-student controllable factors. Also, teachers reported positive emotions of high intensity (sympathy, cheerfulness, exciting, love, not anger, calmness) for the positive relationships, and negative emotions of moderate intensity (no enthusiasm, shame, anxiety, no excitement) for the negative relationships. Yet, the high hope teachers made adaptive attributional and emotional appraisals for the positive and, mainly, negative interpersonal relationships. Agency thinking, as compared to pathway thinking, was a better and worse formulator of the appraisals in negative and positive interpersonal relationships, respectively. Hope, additionally, had direct effect on the emotions, beyond that afforded by attributions, particularly in negative interpersonal relationships.

Executive Functions (EFs) describe a set of cognitive control abilities that help children to develop self-regulated behavior and do well in their schooling. The promotion of EFs in children at social risk is an area of relevance for neurosciences and education. On this basis, the present study set out to analyze a school-based intervention targeted to strengthening EFs in Argentine children at social risk. Participants were 69 children from 8 to 10 years old, from an urban-marginalized federal school in Mendoza. A quasi-experimental pre-test post-test design was used, with a control group. The cognitive intervention was embedded in the school curriculum and was carried out for a month and a half. The schoolchildren were evaluated before and after the intervention with EFs’ neuropsychological tests. The main results showed that the group cognitive intervention was associated with gains in the schoolchildren’s attention processes, although it did not favor other EFs, which could indicate moderate effectiveness. These data provide evidence in favor of ecological interventions as a way to promote attention development trajectories in children at social risk, and in turn, draw up guidelines to reflect on the design and the modalities of school-based interventions.

This work has two objectives. The first is to describe a program to strengthen socio-cognitive abilities in initial education children (called PHSC), which is focused on training teachers on its implementation in the classroom. The second objective is to examine the effectiveness of the program when it is applied in schools with different socio-cultural contexts. It involved a total of 257 initial-level students attending two pre-primary schools in the province of Mendoza. One school was in an urban area of a more stable social environment, and the other in a socially-vulnerable area.  The program was administered by teachers who had been trained for it. Pre- and post-assessments were conducted using socio-cognitive tests on the students. The teachers responded to the Executive Functioning Scale for initial education children before and after implementation of the PHSC program, and parents responded to an on-line survey to find out whether they had noticed any improvements or positive changes after the application of the program. The results suggest the possibility that this program, implemented by teachers, could improve the socio-cognitive abilities in children of both of the different social contexts, as well as being a driver to create conditions of equal opportunities and generate learning benefits in all their students.

This study examines the relationship between prior trauma and post disaster psychological distress in a sample of college students exposed to Hurricane Harvey in Houston, Texas in 2017. College students (n = 324) receive treatment for psychological problems at very low rates, so screening for the most vulnerable students after a disaster is important. While the relationship between prior trauma and post-disaster psychological distress is well established, the evidence for prior disaster exposure as a risk factor outside of other trauma is mixed. Prior trauma was divided into two cumulative risk style indicators: prior traumatic experiences (excluding disasters) and prior disaster exposure. In multiple linear regression models, prior traumatic experiences were significant predictors of post-disaster symptoms of both post-traumatic stress disorder and depression following the hurricane. Prior disaster exposures were not significant in either case. Implications for future screening and analysis of risk factors are discussed.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) is the first human rights treaty with the ultimate goal of providing conditions conducive to child health and development. The CRC is grounded on four guiding principles: (1) non-discrimination; (2) best interests of the child; (3) the right to life, survival, and development; and (4) respect for the views of the child. These CRC principles are consistent with a social justice approach within the field of school psychology. This article highlights implications for school psychologists and encourages school psychologists to be at the center of the process of measuring, advocating, and actualizing all rights under the CRC, including the right to participation, in schools throughout the world. A summary of the Rights Respecting Schools initiative is offered to provide a concrete example for school psychologists and other school-based professionals.

The aim of this study was to examine if perceived family violence of victimized children is related to their perceived aggressive behavior. It has been acknowledged that children learn and behave what they observe and practice including violence. A stratified random sample (N =1160) of Omani school students was drawn from grades 6 to 9. The study used perceived family violence and perceived aggressive behavior measures to collect data. CFA was performed to test the proposed factor structure as well as the structural model. The invariance test lent support to the hypothesis that the structure of constructs is invariant across gender. However, the relations between constructs were not invariant. Children (boys and girls) who expressed high verbal violence on them reported they were more verbally and physically aggressive. Boys, but not girls, who reported high physical violence on them reported they were more verbally and physically aggressive. The relation between perceived family violence and perceived aggressive behavior seem to be dependent on gender and types of family violence as well as the kind of children’s aggressive behavior.

The diagnostic utility of the Woodcock- Johnson III Tests of Cognitive Abilities and Clinical Clusters was assessed in a sample of 52 children (26 Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disordered (ADHD) and 26 matched controls). Multivariate analysis of variance followed by post-hoc testing and d-ratios yielded some statistically significant and clinically meaningful differences between groups on the Cognitive Fluency Cluster and the Tests of Auditory Attention, and Rapid Picture Naming. Discriminant function analyses indicated that the WJ III COG Tests collectively classified 80.77% of the sample correctly (76.92% of controls and 84.62% of children with ADHD correctly identified). The Auditory Attention and Rapid Picture Naming tests were found to make the most significant contribution overall to the discriminant function. Using a cut-score of 85, the WJ-III COG Clinical clusters and subtests examined in this study offered fair to weak diagnostic utility based on indices of sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive power, as well as results of Receiver Operating Characteristic curve analyses. Implications for research and practice are outlined.

During the second decade of the 21st century families and schools world-wide have been affected by several critical events, with economic recession, the refugee crisis, and lately the COVID-19 pandemic being the most prominent. Pertaining to the school community (students, educators, administration, parents, school personnel etc.), evidence-based interventions for improving mental health and supporting psychosocial adjustment are necessary. In this paper the development, implementation, and evaluation of the international WeCARE (We Connect, Accept, Respect, Empower) program, an online multilevel intervention for promoting well-being and resilience in the school community during unsettling times, is presented. The Program has a multicultural perspective and provides the opportunity to students from different countries to cooperate and develop multicultural skills. The intervention is based on a conceptual model for enhancing positive development, resilience, social and emotional skills, and competence. The interventions were implemented on individual and system levels over four consecutive years, including web-based teachers’ training and supervision, seminars for parents, and classroom implementation. Furthermore, collaboration amongst schools and educational settings was highlighted, in the form of networking at national and international level. Based on the evaluation results, the necessity for further development and implementation of programs for the promotion of resilience and well-being during unsettling times is discussed.

The main purpose of this study case is to investigate the contribution of the school community to the improvement of the school. In that context, a two-phase research was conducted. In the first phase, the self-evaluation process was implemented during the first year of the research with the participation of the school community. An overall picture of the school was created, with its strong and weak points reflected in the school's final self-evaluation report. Upon the completion of the school self-evaluation process the school community decided on the implementation of actions in order to reduce a number of dysfunctional behaviors, such as bullying incidents that occurred in the school on the part of some students. The school actions and the relevant results constituted the second phase of the research work. The results showed that some of the dysfunctional behaviors were found to be decreased to a statistically significant level after action was taken by the school community.

The emotional lives of teaching at the universities have remained under research.   This study used a qualitative approach to investigate the emotional lives of lecturers teaching at two selected universities. This study sought to identify, understand and interpret the emotional lives of teaching with interpretive phenomenology research design. In purposefully selected two universities, 12 lecturers participated in the study. Semi-structured individual interviews were employed, the data generated were interpreted, the emerged themes were: work condition, resources and accreditation panel, trade union and government disagreement, and experienced emotions and effects on participants. A further interpretation of the emerged themes revealed that the emotional lives of the participants are dependent on teaching resources, academic war and convenient behaviour. The dependence is thereby suggestive that change in the management of teaching resources, academic war and behaviour of lecturers could positively influence the nature of their emotional lives. The paper used two universities, which lays the foundation for subsequent studies because this is the first study to examine the emotional lives of teaching in Nigerian universities. The study made recommendations for further studies and drew implications for policy and practice.

Studies have documented widespread academic disengagement in middle and high school students. This disengagement has been tied to a myriad of negative outcomes, including failure to graduate from high school and transition into college and meaningful vocations. Supporting adolescents in cultivating a sense of beyond-the-self purpose is one factor that may combat student disengagement. MPower is a program designed to cultivate beyond-the-self purpose in an effort to promote student engagement and completion of high school (Klein et al., 2019). In a recent quantitative study, MPower participants compared to controls demonstrated a higher GPA, BTS purpose, self-efficacy, and decreased performance approach and performance avoidance goal orientations. In the current qualitative descriptive study, 11th and 12th grade (N=25) students in the Northeastern region of the United States, described their experiences in the MPower program. Three themes associated with the transformative aspects of MPower emerged from focus group data: 1) practice in strategic goal planning, 2) engagement in mentoring relationships, and 3) increased social support within a community. Because fostering youth purpose engenders many promotive and protective factors, these findings hold important implications for implementing similar programs more widely.

Endeavors supporting college students’ positive psychosocial development are gaining attention and investment in various countries and social contexts. Higher education experiences provide new academic, social, and vocational advancement opportunities at a critical developmental stage. However, higher education can also cause distress due to the challenges and stressors present during this new stage of increased independence. The Social Emotional Health Survey-Higher Education (SEHS-HE) assesses the core psychosocial strengths of individuals transitioning from secondary schools into institutions of higher education (IHE) to aid campus student support services. The present study sought to extend the SEHS-HE research by examining its application with college student samples from Mexico (n = 4,207), United States (n = 1,638), and Spain (n = 1,734). Confirmatory factor analyses investigated the hypothesized SEHS-HE higher-order factor model. The Mexico sample returned an acceptable model fit, but the USA and Spain samples had a suboptimal fit; hence, we explored alternative models. A two-level structure had full invariance for all three samples. This study extends the current scholarship on the conceptual model and psychometric properties of SEHS-HE. The discussion focuses on implications for future research to enhance SEHS-HE in national and cross-national research and practice.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterised by difficulties in communication and repetitive behaviors. The early detection of ASD is a clinical priority in education centres and medical services. COREAT is a computer adaptation of the Repetitive Behavior Scale-Revised (RBS-R) which has been designed to facilitate the diagnosis of individuals with ASD and intellectual disability. This article describes the development, an initial evaluation of the feasibility and the preliminary outcomes of COREAT. The development of COREAT consists of two phases. Phase 1: Performing a prior analysis of the psychometric properties of the RBS-R scale. Phase 2: Developing the mobile application (pilot tests, testing real cases n = 11, and final feedback). Descriptive data of the pilot study shows that 91.31% of participants indicate that COREAT is very accessible and intuitive. COREAT proves to be a useful diagnostic resource for professionals and families. Cross-cultural differences must be analysed.