Previous studies have found evidence for gender and racial/ethnic differences in depressive symptoms in adolescence; however, the mechanisms driving this relationship are poorly understood. The goal of this study was to examine the role of individual differences in dispositional coping in the relationships between gender and depressive…

Many explanations have been proposed for the evolution of our anomalously large brains, including social, ecological, and epiphenomenal hypotheses. Recently, an additional hypothesis has emerged, suggesting that advanced cognition and, by inference, increases in brain size, have been driven over evolutionary time by the need to deal with…

In the current article, we contrast 2 analytical approaches to estimate the relation of parenting to executive function development in a sample of 1,292 children assessed longitudinally between the ages of 36 and 60 months of age. Children were administered a newly developed and validated battery of 6 executive function tasks tapping inhibitory…

A positive school climate is an important component of successful and effective schools and thus is often an aim of schoolwide initiatives. Climate has traditionally been conceptualized as a school-level factor and is often assumed to be related to other school-level factors (e.g., school size). The current study examines variation in perceptions…

A large number of national and geographic population samples were used to test the hypothesis that the variation in mean values of skin color in the diverse populations are consistently correlated with the mean measured or estimated IQs of the various groups, as are some other physical variables, known as an ecological correlation. Straightforward…

Driving a vehicle under the influence of alcohol is a major public health concern. By distinguishing the type of individuals violating driving while intoxicated (DWI) sanctions, intervention programs will be better suited to reduce drinking and driving. The purpose of this study was to examine the personal characteristics of DWI offenders and…

This paper examines the nature of confidence in relation to cognitive abilities, personality traits, and metacognition. Confidence was measured as it was expressed in answers to each test item during the administration of reading and listening sections of the TOEFL® iBT. The confidence scores were correlated with the accuracy scores from the TOEFL…

This study explored individual differences in educational disadvantage-- deficits in formal and informal education in the school, home, and elsewhere--in the SAT test-taking population. Factor analysis identified six educational disadvantage factors--four concerning the students' schools and two the students' nativity and parenting--and one family…

This paper explores the complex, hierarchical relationship among school characteristics, individual differences in academic achievement, extracurricular activities, and socioeconomic background on performance on the SAT Reasoning Test™ verbal and mathematical sections. Using multilevel structural equation models (SEMs) with latent means, data from…