Correlations Between Personality, Affective and Filial Self-Efficacy Beliefs, and Psychological Well-Being in a Sample of Italian Adolescents.

Adolescence is a critical period for the emergence of a balanced personality in adults. Extraversion, neuroticism, and affective self-efficacy beliefs in emotion regulation showed to be good predictors of psychological well-being in adolescents. We analyzed the association between affective self-efficacy beliefs, personality traits, and psychological well-being of 179 Italian adolescents. We also analyzed the connection between adolescents' filial self-efficacy beliefs and psychological well-being and possible moderating effects of self-efficacy beliefs on personality traits. Results show that extraversion, neuroticism, and self-efficacy beliefs in emotion regulation are correlated with psychological well-being, while filial self-efficacy does not. Self-efficacy beliefs do not show significant moderating effects on personality traits, even if self-efficacy beliefs in expressing positive emotions reduce negative characteristics of individuals with high level of psychoticism

Improving the psychometric properties of the dissociative experiences scale (DES-II):A Rasch validation study

Background : The Dissociative Experiences Scale-II (DES-II) is a self-report questionnaire that measures dissociative experiences such as derealization, depersonalization, absorption and amnesia. The DES-II has been prevalently used as a screening tool in patients suffering from psychotic disorders or schizophrenia. However, dissociative experiences can also be part of normal psychological life. Despite its popularity, the most problematic aspect of the DES-II is the inconsistency in its factor structure, which is probably due to the tendency to treat ordinal responses as responses on an interval scale, as it is assumed in the Classical Test Theory approach. In order to address issues related to the inconsistency of previous results, the aim of the present study was to collect new psychometric evidence to improve the properties of the DES-II using Rasch analysis, i.e. analyzing the functioning of the response scale. Methods: Data were obtained on a sample composed by 320 Italian participants (122 inmates and 198 community-dwelling individuals) and were analyzed with the Rasch model. This model allows the estimation of participants' level of dissociation, the degree of misfit of each item, the reliability of each item, and their measurement invariance. Moreover, Rasch estimation allows to determine the best response scale, in terms of response modalities number and their discriminant power. Results: Three items of the scale had strong misfit. After their deletion, the resulting scale was composed by 25 items, which had low levels of misfit and high reliability, and showed measurement invariance. Participants tended to select more often lower categories of the response scale. Conclusions: Results provided new knowledge on the DES-II structure and its psychometric properties, contributing to the understanding and measurement of the dissociation construct

On the factor structure of the Dissociative Experiences Scale:ontribution with an Italian version of the DES-II

Aim of the study: Notwithstanding its clinical and empirical relevance, there is no consensus on how to conceptualize dissociation. This may be partly due to the conflicting results yielded on the factor structure of the gold-standard selfreport measure of dissociation (the Dissociative Experiences Scale-Revised; DES-II, Carlson and Putnam, 1993). In an attempt to advance research on this topic, we sought to explore the factorial structure of an Italian version of the DES-II. Material and methods: A sample of 320 subjects (122 inmates and 198 community participants) was administered the Italian version of the DES-II. Results: The Italian version of the DES-II showed good psychometric properties and replicated a two-factor structure. Items content seemed to support the distinction into two qualitatively different forms of dissociative experiences, described as detachment and compartmentalization phenomena. In line with the expectations, participants in the inmate sample reported higher rates of dissociative experiences than community participants, on both dimensions. Conclusions: This study provides further support for the validity of the Italian version of the DES-II for use with community and inmate samples. Furthermore, we corroborated previous evidence on a two-factor structure of the DES-II, which is consistent with theoretical assumptions describing two distinct, albeit overlapping, dissociative dimensions (i.e., detachment and compartmentalization)

Determining a diagnostic cut-off on the Teate Depression Inventory

Michela Balsamo, Aristide SagginoDepartment of Psychological Sciences, Humanities and Territory, G. d’Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara, Chieti, ItalyAbstract: A small but growing body of literature suggests that the Teate Depression ­Inventory (TDI) may be an “objective” measure of depression compared with other commonly used scales. Furthermore, the TDI has strong psychometric properties in both clinical and nonclinical samples. The present study aimed to extend the use of TDI by identifying cut-off scores that could differentiate varying levels of depression severity in a group of clinically diagnosed depression disorder patients (N=125). Three receiver operating characteristic curve analyses indicated cut-off scores of 21 (sensitivity =0.86, specificity =0.94, and classification accuracy =0.90); 36 (sensitivity =0.84, specificity =0.96, and classification accuracy =0.92); and 50 (sensitivity =0.81, specificity =0.93, and classification accuracy =0.90), for minimal, mild, moderate, and severe depression, respectively. Results suggest that the TDI measures depression severity across a broad range with high test accuracy and may be appropriately used to screen for depression.Keywords: major depression, ROC curve, self-report scales, Rasch analysis, depression screenin