Journal of Applied Psychological Research
Year:2014 | Volume:5 | Issue:3|Papers Count:6

The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between test anxiety with mental health and implicit-explicit self esteem. The comparison of these constructs between talented and normal schools students was assessed as well.112 talented school male students and 96 normal school male students from Khorasan Razavi were selected by convenience sampling and completed the package of instruments including: Test Anxiety Scale (TAS; carver & shyer, 1981), General Health Questionnaire-12 (GHQ-12; Goldberg, 1972), Pope Self-Esteem Scale (PSES; Pope, 1989) and Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998). Results showed a negative association between explicit self-esteem and mental health with test anxiety, but no significant association for test anxiety and implicit self-esteem.In addition, there was no significant difference between two schools in test anxiety and implicit self-esteem. But the mental health of talented school students was higher than the mental health of normal school students. The findings of this study showed that the academic and social context of students is essential for determination of their level of mental health and self-esteem and dominance on academic challenge and hence, reduce their test anxiety.

Critical thinking is one of the major aims of education, and its prerequisite is to have thoughtful teachers with critical thinking viewpoints. There have been numerous models for critical thinking including two major psychological and sociopolitical ones. The present article has considered a comparative study of critical thinking from the viewpoints of Robert Ennis and Henry Giroux considering its application for the modification of teacher training system. Findings declare that although considering critical thinking, Robert Ennis has drawn a little attention to action. In contrast, Giroux claims that the target of critical thinking is social action occurring in parallel with social justice. From Giroux’s viewpoint, critical thinking has been blended by culture, ethics and politics, and teachers as transformative intellectuals undertake a major mission in developing critical thinking training in pupil and, also, its expansion in society.According to Giroux and Ennis’s thinking, some of the policies of teacher training system in should be improved in the direction of: corporative and dynamic management, transformation of educational contents, critical thinking skills training, providing teachers with possibility of communication with educational policy makers, academic institutes and finally by putting some emphasis upon cultural studies.

goals prioritization, mental health and irrational beliefs are concept much discussed nowadays. This study aims to compare the goals prioritization of the students and its relation to mental health and irrational beliefs. This study was designed and completed descriptively. The sample included 216 students of AllamehTabatabai University. Students completed the Goals and Aspirations, Mental Health and Irrational Beliefs questionnaires. Although there was no significant difference between the goals prioritization and total scale of mental health and irrational beliefs and just in the symptoms of depression and helplessness against the change subscales differences were significant and the number of people who had given priority to the physical goals, were significantly more than other people. According to the mean of data in terms of mental health and the irrational beliefs, people who had given priority to the self superiority goals, are better than those of their priorities is related to physical goals.

Trying to reduce clinical problems in children autism through education of parents in recent years has been addressed by researchers. This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of training of pivotal response treatment (PRT) to mothers with 6 to 12 year old autistic children on reducing the autism symptoms. Also, the impact of PRT on reduction of parenting stress was addressed in this study. In a clinical trial work, 14 mothers of autistic children in a rehabilitation clinic for autistic children in Tehran city, selected. They were randomly assigned to intervention and comparison groups.The intervention group received treatment programs in addition of routine programs of clinic within 12 training sessions. The Autism Evaluation Treatment Checklist (Rimland and Edelson, 2005) and Parental Stress Questionnaire (Berry and Jones, 1995) were used for measuring autism symptoms and parenting stress, respectively. The results of covariance analysis revealed that this treatment method is effective in reducing the parental stress of mothers of autistic children (P£0.01).Furthermore, this method resulted in an improvement in communication abilities, social interaction, cognitive-sensory ability, and behavior of autistic children (P£0.01).

The Pain Anxiety Symptoms Scale (PASS-20) has been developed as a general measure of anxiety and fear in individuals with various chronic pain disorders by McCracken and Dhingra (2002). Short-Form scale of PASS-20 has been extracted from 40 items of DASS which published in 1992. This study aimed to examine the factor structure of a Persian language version of the PASS-20 (IRPASS-20); (2) to examine reliability and construct validity of the IRPASS-20.With regard this objective, Persian version of PASS-20 along with The Tampa scale for Kinesiophobia TSK scale, pain catastrophizing scale (PCS), depression and anxiety scales of DASS-21, pain self-efficacy beliefs and pain behavior questionnaire administrated amongst 310 injured worker at a big industrial company. A result of exploratory factor analysis with maximum likelihood extraction method and oblimin rotation has been showed a three factorial solation with 55.3 percentage of variance. Confirmatory factor analyses showed that all the three-factor solutions tested met the minimum acceptable fit criterion. The results of correlation analysis among PASS-20 and its subscales TSK scale, PCS, scales of DASS-21, pain self-efficacy beliefs and pain behavior questionnaire support both the convergent and divergent validity. The findings provide preliminary support for the reliability and validity of the IRPASS-20.

Smoking is the most common addictive drug and is the main gate for other substance abuse. Relapse is one of the main problems in smoking cessation programs. Smoking abstinence self-efficacy plays a basic role in preventing of re-addiction or relapse after quitting smoking. The aim of this study was to construct and validate smoking abstinence self-efficacy scale for Iranian population. At the first, a questionnaire with 52 questions was constructed based on four international scales. Two hundred students who had a history of smoking were randomly chosen at the University of Birjand and completed the questionnaire. Since Bartlett’s test of sphericity was significance (KOM=.88), a factorial exploratory analysis was applied on the scale. Using a factor analysis with Varimax rotation and method of items analysis, 23 questions were chosen. With factorial confirmatory analysis, a scale with 13 questions and in two factors derived. The concurrent validity of the scale was calculated with General Self-Efficay (GSE10). The results showed there was a significant positive correlation among them.These findings show the abstinence selfefficacy scale with 13 questions is a valid tool and can be used in smoking cessation and other drug abuse prevention programmes in Iran.