Search results for "Invariance"
showing 10 items of 239 documents
Positive Youth Development in Bulgaria, Italy, Norway and Romania: Testing the Factorial Structure and Measurement Invariance of the 5Cs Model
2021
This chapter applies the 5Cs model of PYD comprising competence, confidence, character, connection and caring among 1403 youth (M = 18.91 years) in Bulgaria (n = 196), Italy (n = 354), Norway (n = 564) and Romania (n = 289). These countries offer a novel and unique context to apply PYD as related comparative work with youth samples is rare across Eastern (Bulgaria and Romania), Southern (Italy) and Northern Europe (Norway). Further, Bulgaria and Romania are emerging nations following the collapse of the communism in late 1980s in contrast to Italy being a traditionally patriarchal country and social equity driven Norway. The chapter presents an empirical example that evaluates the factorial…
Psychometric Comparisons of Benevolent and Corrective Humor across 22 Countries: The Virtue Gap in Humor Goes International
2018
Recently, two instances of virtue-related humor: benevolent and corrective, have been introduced. Benevolent humor treats human weaknesses and wrongdoings benevolently, while corrective humor aims at correcting and bettering them. Twelve marker items for benevolent and corrective humor (BenCor) were developed, and it was demonstrated that they fill the gap between humor as temperament and virtue. The present study investigates responses to the BenCor from 25 samples in 22 countries (overall N = 7, 226). The psychometric properties of the BenCor were found to be sufficient in most of the samples, including internal consistency, unidimensionality, and factorial validity. Importantly, benevole…
Application of an innovative alignment optimisation method to a cross-cultural mean comparison of teacher self-efficacy: A cross-country study
2021
Teacher self-efficacy is a crucial personal characteristic that is important not only for teachers’ well-being but also for the overall teaching and learning. However, the difficulty to ascertain scalar invariance in the measurement of the construct has beset previous attempts of cross-cultural comparisons. This study implements an alignment optimisation method to compare and rank mean teacher self-efficacy of over 150,000 teachers across 48 countries and economies that participated in the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) that was conducted 2018. The findings show that Columbia, Portugal, United Arab Emirates, Hungary, and South Africa have teachers with the highest mean s…
Item response theory and differential test functioning analysis of the HBSC-Symptom-Checklist across 46 countries
2022
Abstract Background The Symptom Checklist (SCL) developed by the Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC) study is a non-clinical measure of psychosomatic complaints (e.g., headache and feeling low) that has been used in numerous studies. Several studies have investigated the psychometric characteristics of this scale; however, some psychometric properties remain unclear, among them especially a) dimensionality, b) adequacy of the Graded Response Model (GRM), and c) measurement invariance across countries. Methods Data from 229,906 adolescents aged 11, 13 and 15 from 46 countries that participated in the 2018 HBSC survey were analyzed. Adolescents were selected using representative s…
Pinch Technique: Theory and Applications
2009
We review the theoretical foundations and the most important physical applications of the Pinch Technique (PT). This general method allows the construction of off-shell Green’s functions in non-Abelian gauge theories that are independent of the gauge-fixing parameter and satisfy ghost-free Ward identities. We first present the diagrammatic formulation of the technique in QCD, deriving, at one loop, the gauge independent gluon self-energy, quark–gluon vertex, and three-gluon vertex, together with their Abelian Ward identities. The generalization of the PT to theories with spontaneous symmetry breaking is carried out in detail, and the profound connection with the optical theorem and the disp…
Spacetime correlators of perturbations in slow-roll de Sitter inflation
2014
Two-point correlators and self-correlators of primordial perturbations in quasi-de Sitter spacetime backgrounds are considered. For large separations two-point correlators exhibit nearly scale invariance, while for short distances self-correlators need standard renormalization. We study the deformation of two-point correlators to smoothly match the self-correlators at coincidence. The corresponding angular power spectrum is evaluated in the Sachs-Wolfe regime of low multipoles. Scale invariance is maintained, but the amplitude of $C_{\ell}$ could change in a non-trivial way.
Electric-magnetic duality and renormalization in curved spacetimes
2014
We point out that the duality symmetry of free electromagnetism does not hold in the quantum theory if an arbitrary classical gravitational background is present. The symmetry breaks in the process of renormalization, as also happens with conformal invariance. We show that a similar duality-anomaly appears for a massless scalar field in $1+1$ dimensions.
Psychometric Comparisons of Benevolent and Corrective Humor across 22 Countries: The Virtue Gap in Humor Goes International
2018
All authors: Sonja Heintz, Willibald Ruch, Tracey Platt, Dandan Pang, Hugo Carretero-Dios, Alberto Dionigi, Catalina Argüello Gutiérrez, Ingrid Brdar, Dorota Brzozowska, Hsueh-Chih Chen, Władysław Chłopicki, Matthew Collins, Róbert Ďurka, Najwa Y. El Yahfoufi, Angélica Quiroga-Garza, Robert B. Isler, Andrés Mendiburo-Seguel, TamilSelvan Ramis, Betül Saglam, Olga V. Shcherbakova, Kamlesh Singh, Ieva Stokenberga, Peter S. O. Wong and Jorge Torres-Marín.
Primordial power spectrum features in phenomenological descriptions of inflation
2016
We extend an alternative, phenomenological approach to inflation by means of an equation of state and a sound speed, both of them functions of the number of $e$-folds and four phenomenological parameters. This approach captures a number of possible inflationary models, including those with non-canonical kinetic terms or scale-dependent non-gaussianities. We perform Markov Chain Monte Carlo analyses using the latest cosmological publicly available measurements, which include Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) data from the Planck satellite. Within this parametrization, we discard scale invariance with a significance of about $10\sigma$, and the running of the spectral index is constrained as …
Extending the sGLOH descriptor
2015
This paper proposes an extension of the sGLOH keypoint descriptor [3] which improves its robustness and discriminability. The sGLOH descriptor can handle discrete rotations by a cyclic shift of its elements thanks to its circular structure, but its performance can decrease when the keypoint relative rotation is in between two sGLOH discrete rotations. The proposed extension couples together two sGLOH descriptors for the same patch with different rotations in order to cope with this issue and it can be also applied straightly to the sCOr and sGOr matching strategies of sGLOH. Experimental results show a consistent improvement of the descriptor discriminability, while different setups can be …