The mental health continuum-short form: the structure and application for cross-cultural studies-A 38 nation study

Objective: The Mental Health Continuum-Short Form (MHC-SF) is a brief scale measuring positive human functioning. The study aimed to examine the factor structure and to explore the cross-cultural utility of the MHC-SF using bifactor models and exploratory structural equation modelling. Method: Using multigroup confirmatory analysis (MGCFA) we examined the measurement invariance of the MHC-SF in 38 countries (university students, N = 8,066; 61.73% women, mean age 21.55 years). Results: MGCFA supported the cross-cultural replicability of a bifactor structure and a metric level of invariance between student samples. The average proportion of variance explained by the general factor was high (ECV =.66), suggesting that the three aspects of mental health (emotional, social, and psychological well-being) can be treated as a single dimension of well-being. Conclusion: The metric level of invariance offers the possibility of comparing correlates and predictors of positive mental functioning across countries; however, the comparison of the levels of mental health across countries is not possible due to lack of scalar invariance. Our study has preliminary character and could serve as an initial assessment of the structure of the MHC-SF across different cultural settings. Further studies on general populations are required for extending our findings.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Country-level correlates of the Dark Triad traits in 49 countries

PMID = 3255761

Country-Level Correlates of the Dark Triad traits in 49 Countries

Objectives: The Dark Triad traits (i.e., narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism) capture individual differences in aversive aspects of personality to compliment work on the other taxonomies such as the Big Five traits. However, most studies on the Dark Triad traits rely on samples from English-speaking countries that are relatively advanced in socio-political development (e.g., Westernized).Method: We drew on data from 49 countries (N = 11,723; 65.8% female; AgeMean = 21.53) to examine how a wide net of country-level variables in economic status (e.g., Human Development Index), social relations (e.g., gender equality), political orientations (e.g., democracy), and cultural values (e.g., embeddedness) relate to country-level rates of the Dark Triad traits and variance in the magnitude of sex differences in them.Results: Narcissism was especially sensitive to country-level factors. Countries that had less advanced systems, with more embedded and hierarchical cultural systems, were more narcissistic as a population. Sex differences in narcissism were larger in more advanced societies, because women were less likely to be narcissistic in advanced as opposed to less advanced countries.Conclusions: We discuss the results using evolutionary and social role models of personality and sex differences. In particular, higher nation-level narcissism was more common in “less advanced” places and sex differences in narcissism were larger in “more advanced” places which is more consistent with evolutionary than social role models.</p