Instability of Personality Traits of Teachers in Risk Conditions due to Work-Related Stress.

The following study aims to verify whether psychosocial risk conditions determine a variation in personality traits. The sample consisted of 301 teachers, comprising 84 men (27.1%) and 217 women (72.9%). The Big Five Questionnaire (BFQ) was used to measure personality traits, while the Organizational and Psychosocial Risk Assessment (OPRA) questionnaire was used to measure psychosocial risk. The ANOVA results notice the change of BFQ traits. These are significant (Extraversion = 0.000; Agreeableness = 0.001; Neuroticism = 0.000; Openness = 0.017), with the exception of the Conscientiousness trait (Conscientiousness = 0.213). The research supports the approach of seeing personality as the result of the interaction between the individual and the environment; this position is also recognized by work-related stress literature. Stress conditions can lead to a change in the state of health and possibly determine the onset of work-related stress diseases. In the future, it would be useful to start a series of longitudinal studies to understand in greater detail the variability of personality traits due to changes in the Risk Index.

Investigating the automatic in-group bias toward EU and its role for the development of a European Identity

The European Union (EU) is a relatively recent political institution which, in last years, is particularly crossed by centrifugal tensions, making difficult for European citizens to feel a full EU identity, and making their emergent attitudes and beliefs towards EU uncertain. In this vein, an important research issue may be the spontaneous evaluations of EU which, in line with the recent literature, may be considered as embryonic precursors of successive explicit/reflexive beliefs and attitudes. The present study is aimed at investigating implicit attitudes towards EU administering an adaptation of the Implicit Association Test (EU-IAT) to a sample of 210 EU participants (147 males) aged average 38.7 (SD= 15.7), along with the PVQ-21, a scale designed to measure basic values. Results showed: 1) An adequate reliability for the EU-IAT; 2) A positive value for mean IAT scores which is significantly different from zero, indicating that participants associate more strongly EU with good attributes rather than with bad attributes (and Rest of the world with Bad attributes rather than with good attributes); and 3) A significant positive correlation of the EU-IAT with conservation values (in particular with conformity) and a significant negative correlation with openness to change values (in particular with self-direction) with a moderate/high effect size. These results provide first evidence for reliability and criterion validity of the EU-IAT, and suggest that EU citizens showed an automatic and emergent bias in favour of EU that is related to conservation values

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QUASUS: A Tool for Measuring the Parents' School Satisfaction.

No validated instruments for assessing school users' satisfaction are available. This paper means to contribute to address this lack. It outlines a new instrument of measurement of school users' satisfaction - QUASUS (QUestionnaire for the Analysis of the School User's Satisfaction). The main peculiarity of QUASUS lies in the fact that it pays specific attention to the dimension of prosumership, namely the view of the client-service co-constructive relation as a constitutive component of the service's construction and delivery. The study reports the output of an initial validation study of the instrument. Based on two samples of parents (N = 2802 and N = 1365) from Italian schools, analyses provided support to the hypotheses tested: QUASUS proved to be characterized by a good level of reliability (HP1); is able to detect the component comprising the school users' satisfaction (HP2); proves a global connotation of the experience of the school by a unidimensional measure of the overall satisfaction (HP3), associated significantly with the prosumership (HP4).

The Cardiac Rehabilitation Psychodynamic Group Intervention (CR-PGI): An Explorative Study.

Objective: An explorative study focusing on the process of a Cardiac Rehabilitation Psychodynamic Group Intervention (CR-PGI) addressed to myocardial infarction (MI) patients is discussed. The study aimed at analyzing whether the treatment based on CR-PGI serves as a communicational context within which MI patients are enabled to explore new interpretations of their post-infarction condition. Methods: The intervention, divided into 12 weekly one-hour group sessions, was addressed to MI patients recruited within a Public Hospital of southern Italy. Each session was audio-recorded and lexical correspondence analysis (LCA) was applied to the verbatim transcripts, in order to provide a map of the evolution of the communication exchange occurring over the 12 sessions. Results: The findings showed that the discourses associated to the first eight sessions differed from the discourses of the last four sessions. Two main transitions occurred. The first concerns the response to the infarction, first interpreted as a process of affective elaboration and afterwards as practical management of the functional aspects associated with the condition of MI patients. The second concerns the nature of the change and contrasts a lifestyle-oriented model with a social role approach, which refers to social, legal, and medical practices related to the acknowledgment of being an MI patient. Conclusion: The findings offer preliminary support to the capacity of CR-PGI to work as a context where new meanings for the biographical rupture of the MI can be explored. Consistently with the rationale of the model, the intervention seems to have promoted the emergence of new ways of feeling and understanding one's condition.

Correction: Symbolic universes between present and future of Europe. First results of the map of European societies' cultural milieu.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0189885.].

Symbolic universes between present and future of Europe. First results of the map of European societies' cultural milieu.

This paper reports the framework, method and main findings of an analysis of cultural milieus in 4 European countries (Estonia, Greece, Italy, and UK). The analysis is based on a questionnaire applied to a sample built through a two-step procedure of post-hoc random selection from a broader dataset based on an online survey. Responses to the questionnaire were subjected to multidimensional analysis-a combination of Multiple Correspondence Analysis and Cluster Analysis. We identified 5 symbolic universes, that correspond to basic, embodied, affect-laden, generalized worldviews. People in this study see the world as either a) an ordered universe; b) a matter of interpersonal bond; c) a caring society; d) consisting of a niche of belongingness; e) a hostile place (others' world). These symbolic universes were also interpreted as semiotic capital: they reflect the capacity of a place to foster social and civic development. Moreover, the distribution of the symbolic universes, and therefore social and civic engagement, is demonstrated to be variable across the 4 countries in the analysis. Finally, we develop a retrospective reconstruction of the distribution of symbolic universes as well as the interplay between their current state and past, present and future socio-institutional scenarios.

Dietary planning, self-efficacy, and outcome expectancies play a role in an online intervention on fruit and vegetable consumption.

OBJECTIVE: An online intervention to improve fruit and vegetable (FV) intake examines the role of planning, outcome expectancies, self-efficacy and gender. Women are not only expected to eat more FV than men, but they are also expected to be more responsive to nutritional advice and benefit more from treatment. METHOD: A two-arm digital intervention with 269 men and 395 women (Mage = 41.2, SDage = 11.45; range: 19-66 years) was conducted in Italy, Spain and Greece, followed up at three and six months, comparing a static with a dynamic, feedback-intensive platform. RESULTS: Linear mixed models yielded an increase in FV consumption in both the dynamic and the static intervention arms. In men, outcome expectancies were positively related to follow-up FV intake. Dietary planning interacted with self-efficacy on behavioural outcomes. CONCLUSION: FV intake increased overall, and being a woman and involvement in planning facilitated behaviour change. Women seemed to be more engaged in the dynamic platform resulting in a higher amount of planning. Initial motivation, as indicated by outcome expectancies, seemed to be beneficial for men. Self-efficacious individuals benefitted from their engagement in planning, but self-efficacy did not compensate for failing to plan.

The Role of Cultural Factors in Differentiating Pathological Gamblers.

It is recognised that cultural factors play a role in the onset and continuation of several mental health problems. However, there is a significant lack of empirical studies investigating the relationships between cultural factors and gambling behavior. This study assessed whether the subjective cultures through which subjects interpret and enact their experience of the social environment play a major role in increasing (or decreasing) the probability of pathological gambling. Participants, recruited in three different contexts (public health services for the treatment of addiction, casino, undergraduate course) were subjected to the South Oaks Gambling Screen (SOGS) (Lesieur and Blume in Am J Psychiatry 144(9):1184-1188, 1987), in order to identify a group of pathological gamblers-and with the Questionnaire on the Interpretation of the Social Environment (QUISE) (Mossi and Salvatore in Eur J Educ Psychol 4(2):153-169, 2011)-in order to detect their subjective cultures. The study compares pathological group (scoring >5 on SOGS, n = 34) and a healthy control group (scoring <1 on SOGS, n = 35). One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to compare groups on QUISE scores of subjective culture. Moreover, a logistic regression was applied in order to esteem the capability of the QUISE scores to differentiate between pathological gamblers and control. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that pathological group expresses different subjective cultures compared with no gambler subjects. The theoretical and clinical implications of the results are discussed.