Recent studies show that quarantine and lockdown are effective measures for controlling COVID-19 outbreaks, but may be an unpleasant experience with psychological consequences. For this reason, the main aim of this study was to determine which personal sociodemographic and psychological variables are related to adapting to lockdown in a Spanish population. Questionnaires were administered to 2,055 individuals (60.7% women) who were resident in Spain and aged between 18 and 80 years old. We also administered some items related to feelings and behaviors during lockdown. The results showed that sex and age are variables to be taken into account. In fact, women tended to show greater stress, a more pessimistic attitude, and lower self-esteem. However, older people adapted better to lockdown although they were also more worried. Married people also adapted better although they too were more worried. The results also showed that more resilient people, with higher subjective happiness and life satisfaction, develop strategies for adapting positively to adversity, and tend to adapt better to lockdown, with more positive attitudes and behaviors. In terms of personality traits, higher neuroticism and lower extraversion were related to worse adaptation to lockdown. This study also showed that lockdown has had a negative psychological impact on those people who did not adapt well to the situation and the changes during the first 4 weeks of lockdown.

Academic help-seeking as a learning strategy can influence academic achievement. Indeed, seeking help when needed is considered a self-regulated learning strategy that should be taken into account from the educational perspective. In this study, we review twenty-five articles published over the last 10 years that have analysed academic help-seeking in adolescents or university students. The aims of this review are to describe the relationship between academic help-seeking and other sociodemographic, educational, and psychosocial variables, and to evaluate the instruments that are used to assess academic help-seeking. Our results show that there is a lack of consensus on the structure of help-seeking as a construct. Moreover, the role of sex and age is unclear, and there is little replication in the correlational models. Further research is needed to better define the construct and compare the variables that influence academic help-seeking at different stages of education.

In recent years, suicide rates have increased in adolescents and the young population, so these age groups are considered as populations at risk. Considering that suicidal ideation is the first sign of possible future suicide behavior, the objective of this study is to determine the relative importance of psychological maturity, personality, depression and life satisfaction in predicting suicidal ideation in adolescents. Results show that depressive symptoms is the variable that best predicts suicidal ideation, but psychological maturity, life satisfaction and emotional stability are predictors as well (R²= .51,p< .001). However, the Multigroup Structural Equation Models analyses carried out show that emotional stability has an indirect relationship with suicidal ideation, through its relationship with depressive symptoms, life satisfaction and identity. Two Multigroup Structural Equation Models were proposed to better understand the relationships between these variables for each sex. The results show that the fit of the model that includes the variable Self-reliance is better for boys than for girls (chi-square contributions of 8.175 for girls and 1.978 for boys) unlike the other model (chi-square contributions of 0.288 for girls and 1.650 for boys). These results suggest that the psychological maturity subscale Self-reliance play a role in suicidal ideation in males but not in females. Although there have been no previous studies on the role of psychological maturity as a predictor of suicidal phenomena, the current study suggests that it is a feature to be considered in the prediction of adolescent suicidal ideation.

Very few studies have examined whether the degree of adolescents' maturity has any effect on their academic performance. Moreover, there are no studies that show whether maturity explains variance additional to that explained by intelligence and personality. For this reason, the main aim of the current study was to determine how psychological maturity, the Big Five personality traits and mental aptitudes contribute to the prediction of adolescent academic performance. 305 adolescents took part in the study. We performed correlations, multiple regression analysis and structural equation analysis. As expected, results show that the main predictor is intelligence. The results also show that there is a relationship between psychological maturity and academic performance, although this is due only to the work orientation subscale. Moreover, conscientiousness influences academic performance because of its relation to the maturity factor work orientation. Likewise, openness to experience is also indirectly related to academic performance, due to its relationship with intelligence. The results of the current study suggest that psychological maturity is related to academic performance. Only two personality traits are correlated to academic performance, conscientiousness and openness to experience, although these traits do not have direct relationships with academic performance.

In this study, we aimed to identify possible significant differences in the socioemotional development of children who live with dogs in their daily lives, compared with children who do not have this type of contact, and to determine the extent to which these differences are associated with sex. We studied a sample of 120 children (53.3% girls) aged between three and five years old comprising two intact groups (dog and non-dog) from two public (state) schools and one private school. These two groups were balanced in terms of sample size (n = 60 each group) and participant age. The data were collected using the personal-social domain of the Battelle Developmental Inventory, which assesses adult interaction, expression of feelings and affections, self-image, peer interaction, cooperation, and social role. A factorial multivariate analysis of variance test was conducted to identify any differences in the children’s socioemotional development based on sex or their contact with dogs. We found that contact with dogs had a significant association with socialization in both boys and girls and that the differences between the two groups (dog and non-dog) were of a large magnitude. In fact, the group that had contact with dogs obtained significantly higher average scores in all subdomains corresponding to the personal-social domain of the Battelle Developmental Inventory, as expected. Our results show that contact with dogs at home during early childhood is related to more advanced social development in both boys and girls, which is consistent with the findings of other studies. However, more research is needed to clarify which other factors (e.g., individual or family-related or socioeconomic) may be involved in the benefits of having a dog during childhood.

Several studies in different countries have reported that part of the population does not fully comply with the measures recommended to prevent COVID-19, and therefore poses a risk to public health. For this reason, several measures have been developed to assess the level of compliance, although many of them have methodological limitations or do not include a comprehensive set of items. The main goal of the current study was to develop a new instrument with suitable psychometric properties, which includes a more complete set of items and controls the impact of acquiescence bias. The participants were 1410 individuals (59.2% women) from Spain, who answered the new questionnaire and several items on sociodemographic and attitudinal issues. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were carried out, and the results suggested that only one content factor was underlying the data. This solution was replicated in a different subsample, which shows the stability of the solution. Furthermore, the relationships between the scores of the new questionnaire and the sociodemographic and attitudinal variables are similar to those obtained in previous studies, which can be regarded as evidence of the validity of the new questionnaire.