Frontiers in Psychology最新文献

Introduction: The Sniffin' Sticks Extended Test (SSET) is one of the most widely used tools for assessing olfactory function in research and clinical settings. Despite its broad application, a detailed psychometric evaluation of its items, including those within the identification subtest, remains limited. This study aimed to evaluate the reliability, validity, and item-level functioning of the SSET identification subtest using Item Response Theory (IRT), to identify potential weaknesses and propose possible areas for improvement.

Methods: The study included 397 US-based participants (60.5% female; mean age 44.61 ± SD = 18.17 [45 ± 18]) who completed the American English version of the identification subtest of the SSET. IRT analyses were conducted using both a one-parameter (1PL) and a two-parameter (2PL) logistic model to estimate item difficulty and discrimination. A Differential Item Functioning (DIF) analysis was also performed to investigate potential sex-related biases in item responses.

Results: Model comparison indicated that the 2PL model provided a better fit than the 1PL model. The 2PL analysis revealed that three items (i.e., leather, turpentine, and pineapple) exhibited low discrimination parameters, suggesting limited utility in distinguishing among different levels of olfactory ability. The DIF analysis found no evidence of differential item performance between male and female participants.

Discussion: These findings support the use of IRT to identify poorly performing items, enabling the refinement of the SSET, to enhance its precision and reliability across populations. Future research should explore item revisions and extend psychometric evaluations to other subtests and samples.

This study reports on the validation of the University Student Engagement Inventory (USEI) in a Norwegian context. The USEI conceptualizes student engagement (SE) as a three-factor first-order construct encompassing cognitive, emotional, and behavioral dimensions and as a second-order construct. Psychometric analysis was conducted with a sample of 833 students from Norwegian universities and university colleges, representing both science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and non-STEM fields (humanities and social sciences). Psychometric analysis is reported, including distributional properties, sources of evidence related to the internal structure, and external criteria. The paper presents an invariance analysis for area of study and gender. Criterion validity was evaluated with respect to students' dropout intention, failed university courses, and use of medication to cope with study-related challenges. The USEI demonstrated good factorial construct validity and reliability for both the first- and second-order constructs. Higher levels of SE significantly predicted lower dropout intentions, fewer failed courses, and reduced medication use among Norwegian students. The study demonstrates that the USEI can deliver reliable, valid data on SE in the Norwegian context. It has predictive value for academic variables and is therefore important for policymakers and stakeholders in the education system.

Across history and cultures, people have persistently lamented that life seems to move "too fast." Psychology has approached this impression from multiple angles, yet lacks an integrative account of why autobiographically meaningful periods so often feel fleeting in retrospect. In this review, we examine the psychological mechanisms that shape life-tempo judgments (LTJs)-retrospective assessments of how quickly or slowly personally significant periods are remembered to have passed. LTJs are not literal perceptions of temporal speed nor comparisons to clock time, but flexible judgments made relative to subjective standards and expectations. We synthesize major theoretical accounts of LTJs, ranging from classic "cold" cognitive explanations centered on routine, memory compression, and attention, to "hot" motivational and affective accounts emphasizing personal growth, longing, social performance, and identity-relevant evaluation. Rather than treating these perspectives as competitors, we evaluate their explanatory scope, empirical support, and points of convergence. Recent empirical work reviewed here highlights a consistent pattern: periods remembered as especially meaningful, engaging, or growth-promoting are often the same periods described as having passed most quickly. We suggest that this pattern is unlikely to be explained by any single mechanism, but instead reflects the joint influence of memory structure, motivational comparison standards, affective meaning, and cultural narratives in the construction of lived time. By organizing a fragmented literature on LTJs, this review provides a conceptual scaffold for future theoretical refinement, empirical research, and translational work. Rather than prescribing how to slow life down, we argue that understanding why life feels fast may help clarify what a fast life signifies-and when it reflects loss, fulfillment, or some combination of the two.

Background: Emergency nurses are frequently exposed to pediatric death events, which trigger professional grief and impair psychological detachment. Pregnant nurses, due to heightened physiological and psychological sensitivity, may exhibit unique emotional responses, yet evidence remains scarce.

Methods: This study adopted a longitudinal mixed-methods design, combining semi-structured qualitative interviews with quantitative assessment using the DASS-21 scale at three time points. Data were analyzed using Colaizzi's seven-step method to extract themes and depict temporal trajectories.

Results: Five core themes were identified: (1) emotional shock-within 1 week, participants reported intense grief, anxiety, and guilt, with mean DASS-21 stress scores >15; (2) guilt and self-blame-nurses attributed death to their own limitations, prolonging recovery; (3) emotional fluctuation-by 1 month, early- and mid-pregnancy nurses showed ~30% reduction in DASS-21 scores, whereas late-pregnancy participants exhibited minimal improvement; (4) emotional support-family and peer support facilitated partial recovery; (5) physiological factors-late-pregnancy nurses maintained high anxiety (>12) and depression (>15) at 3 months, while those who had delivered showed marked emotional improvement. The overall trajectory followed shock-guilt/self-blame-impaired detachment-gradual recovery.

Conclusion: Pregnancy stage markedly shapes emotional recovery after pediatric death events, with late pregnancy identified as a high-risk period. Guilt is the central barrier to psychological detachment, while social support and postpartum transitions act as protective factors. Tiered psychological interventions tailored to pregnancy stage are recommended to promote recovery and resilience among emergency nurses.

Introduction: High cognitive workload presents an important risk to crew safety during surface exploration extravehicular activity (EVA). However, it remains difficult to draw conclusions about the precise EVA task characteristics that are associated with increases in cognitive workload, or their relationship to performance.

Methods: In the present study, we examined how experimentally manipulating cognitive workload during a surface EVA task was related to subjective cognitive workload assessments, physiological responding, and EVA performance outcomes. Participants (N = 14) completed surface EVA simulations using a virtual reality and integrated treadmill setup in an extended reality exploration surface analog.

Results: Experimentally manipulating the difficulty of geological sample identification was associated with increased subjective cognitive workload, decreased cognitive performance, altered physiological responding, and decreased performance on key EVA tasks. Results demonstrate evidence for a relationship between the cognitive demands of a surface EVA task and the subjective and physiological correlates of cognitive workload and cognitive performance, as well as decrements in EVA task performance due to increased cognitive demand.

Discussion: Cognitive workload during surface exploration EVA may be an important consideration for EVA scheduling and monitoring during critical mission tasks on the Moon and Mars.

Background: Validated and reliable tests are necessary to evaluate the effectiveness of, for example, (data-driven) selection, education and training, and human enhancement interventions, in high-risk professions like the military. Therefore, the current paper describes the development of a test for measuring dismounted soldiers' ability to make quick decisions in unpredictable close-quarters battle (room-clearing) contexts.

Methods: A group of 15 Dutch Marines Special Operation Forces (SOF) operators and 17 Dutch Army SOF-support specialists individually performed a test in Virtual Reality (VR). Participants could physically walk, shoot, and verbally communicate with opponents. Fifteen performance items indicative of situational awareness (SA) of threats were scored by subject-matter experts, shoot/do not shoot errors were counted, and visual response times (VRTs) in shooting were obtained. Eight room-clearing scenarios were performed twice: once before (pretest) and once following a night of sleep deprivation (posttest), to measure test-retest reliability and sensitivity to a typical military stressor.

Results: The SA items demonstrated adequate internal consistency, and there was a significant test-retest correlation. SOF operators had significantly higher SA item scores (p < 0.05) and made fewer shoot/do not shoot errors (p < 0.05) than SOF-support specialists. VRTs showed no significant test-retest correlation or effects. Sleep deprivation had no significant effect on any of the performance measures.

Conclusion: The developed test methodology offers a means to obtain embedded measures of SA, as well as shoot/do not shoot decisions, but VRT measurement appeared to be unreliable. Performance measures were not sensitive to effects of sleep deprivation, possibly due to a counteracting learning effect and limitations in timing of the post-test. The reliability checks of the SA measures were promising, indicating that this study contributes to advancing methodologies for evaluating human enhancement interventions on performance in operationally relevant settings. It is advised to incorporate team performance measures to enhance realism and integrate digitally obtained metrics to minimize observer bias.

Background: The healthcare market is undergoing rapid transformation, requiring the integration of user needs from the earliest stages of product and service design. Living Labs are emerging as a model for the co-creation and evaluation of user-centered innovations. In this work, we developed a Health Concept Maturity Levels grid and questionnaire to assess the maturity of health concepts.

Methods: The research process included multiple stages, starting with the creation of the Association Innov'Autonomie - Health Concept Maturity Levels Questionnaire - 178-items (CMLH questionnaire), designed to evaluate health concept maturity levels. Speech acts from Health Concept Maturity Levels expert interventions were then annotated and used as data for our machine learning and deep learning models. We used the CatBoost algorithm in the first experiment to discern individual Health Concept Maturity Levels factors from speech acts to generate factor probabilities used to feed a neural network trained to take the final decision, to evaluate whether the network could accurately identify the membership factors of Health Concept Maturity Levels criteria when presented with items from the CMLH questionnaire, thus establishing computational semantic validity.

Results: The results of the study indicate that only the models trained with the true factors are able to correctly identify the corresponding factor in the sequentially encoded texts, with the exception of the Need domain's sensitivity metric, which showed artefactual performance. The general performance of the different CatBoost algorithms used to predict one factor versus the other two showed similar performance. For the questionnaire, the models trained with the real factors also showed better performance in identifying the matching factors compared to the random factors. A marginal difference was observed between the "Need" and "Technology" factors.

Conclusion: This study introduces computational semantic validity as a novel complementary approach to traditional psychometric validation, providing evidence that supports both convergent and content validity for the CMLH questionnaire. This computational method demonstrates semantic alignment between expert discourse and questionnaire structure through machine learning and deep learning techniques. However, overlaps between "Programmatic" and "Need" factors indicate a need for improvement in the Concept Maturity Levels Health model. Future work will focus on enhancing these models and investigating their potential application as a complementary validation method for other psychometric tools.

Introduction: English-speaking proficiency is essential for the personal and academic development of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners; however, many students demonstrate limited willingness to communicate (WTC) in classroom settings. Although generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) offers considerable potential for enhancing communicative engagement, existing research has predominantly examined WTC in human-to-human interactions, leaving the applicability of established models in AI-mediated environments uncertain.

Method: To address this gap, the present study, guided by self-determination theory, explores the structural relationships among learning grit, speaking self-efficacy, speaking enjoyment, speaking anxiety, and WTC with GenAI. Questionnaire data were collected from 350 Chinese undergraduate EFL learners who practiced oral English using GenAI, and were analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation modeling (SEM).

Results and discussion: Findings indicate a robust nomological network, with speaking self-efficacy identified as the most influential direct and mediating predictor of WTC with GenAI. Learning grit exerts both direct and indirect effects, while speaking enjoyment and anxiety have comparatively modest impacts. These results suggest that self-efficacy and grit are fundamental psychological drivers of communicative action in GenAI contexts, whereas affective states play a supplementary role. The study extends current WTC frameworks to technology-mediated settings and highlights pedagogical implications for fostering self-belief and perseverance in digital language education.

Introduction: High school is a critical developmental period in which adolescents' psychological functioning and social adaptability are rapidly reconfigured. However, mental health education in Chinese senior high schools often lacks systematic approaches in preventive intervention, pedagogical depth, and the cultivation of students' psychological potential. Self-efficacy theory offers an informative lens for improving school-based mental health education.

Methods: Situated in the context of senior high school mental health education, this qualitative study used semi-structured interviews and grounded theory to examine how self-efficacy is generated and evolves across learning and everyday-life contexts, and how it relates to mental health outcomes. Participants were recruited from a senior high school in Zhengzhou. Twenty-three students in Grades 10-11 were interviewed. Data were analyzed using an iterative grounded-theory coding procedure to develop core categories and an integrative relational model.

Results: The findings indicate a close and dynamic association between self-efficacy and adolescents' mental health. Success and failure experiences, as well as feedback in key situations-such as academic stress, peer interactions, and self-evaluation-shape both moment-to-moment fluctuations and the longer-term development of self-efficacy. These self-efficacy processes are linked to emotional stability, coping patterns, and overall psychological adjustment.

Discussion: We propose a self-efficacy-oriented mechanism for mental health education and outline a coordinated support pathway spanning school and family. The findings provide theory-grounded and actionable implications for shifting school mental health work from predominantly reactive remediation toward development-oriented prevention, and for strengthening systematic home-school collaboration in practice.