Dušanka Lazarević

Cross-cultural consistency and relativity in the enjoyment of thinking versus doing.

Which is more enjoyable: trying to think enjoyable thoughts or doing everyday solitary activities? Wilson et al. (2014) found that American participants much preferred solitary everyday activities, such as reading or watching TV, to thinking for pleasure. To see whether this preference generalized outside of the United States, we replicated the study with 2,557 participants from 12 sites in 11 countries. The results were consistent in every country: Participants randomly assigned to do something reported significantly greater enjoyment than did participants randomly assigned to think for pleasure. Although we found systematic differences by country in how much participants enjoyed thinking for pleasure, we used a series of nested structural equation models to show that these differences were fully accounted for by country-level variation in 5 individual differences, 4 of which were positively correlated with thinking for pleasure (need for cognition, openness to experience, meditation experience, and initial positive affect) and 1 of which was negatively correlated (reported phone usage). (PsycINFO Database Record

Development and validation of the physical education attitude scale for adolescents

The goal of this research was to develop and validate a physical education (PE) attitude scale (PEAS) for students in early and middle adolescence, based on the contemporary theories of attitudes as a summary evaluation of different information related to the attitude object. In the first study, preliminary version of the scale was administrated on the sample of 547 students. Principal component analysis (PCA) revealed 4 factors, named Satisfaction, Comfort, Activity and Teacher. Second order PCA showed that these factors are a part of a single construct, general attitude toward PE. Based on the results of the first study, the final version of the PEAS is constructed, consisting of the 43 items. In the second study, on a new sample of 659 students, construct validity of the PEAS is confirmed through confirmatory factor analysis. PEAS has good psychometric properties. External validity of the scale is demonstrated through relations with relevant variables.