Lidia Suárez

James Cook University Singapore · School of Social and Health Sciences

The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) is a brief instrument developed primarily for screening children and adolescents for social-emotional learning. The SDQ contains four factors related to socio-emotional difficulties and one factor related to prosocial behaviour. However, studies of its factor structure have produced mixed results....

Background/Objectives: The Parents’ Evaluation of Developmental Status (PEDS) and Developmental Milestones (PEDS:DM) are cost-effective, self-report tools that can be conveniently utilized in low-and middle-income countries to screen for developmental delays in children. This study assessed the diagnostic accuracy of PEDS and PEDS:DM in distinguish...

Timely screening and surveillance of children for developmental delay and social-emotional learning difficulties are essential in Low-and Middle-Income Countries like India. Screening measures like the Parents' Evaluation of Developmental Status (PEDS) and Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) are considered suitable for India due to their...

Introduction: The Western Pacific region accounts for 25% of global suicide rates globally. In the last decade, however, there is a rising concern over the rate of youth suicides in the region. In line with the regional vision of reducing the rate of non-communicable diseases by 2025, the study contributes to the literature by utilizing a scoping...

Excessive educational expectations are risk factors for poor mental health among students in higher education. However, the literature on educational expectations has largely focused on primary and secondary students with paucity among tertiary students. This study describes the development of a multidimensional scale measuring perceived educationa...

Due to the limited availability of suitable measures, screening children for developmental delays and social-emotional learning has long been a challenge in India. This scoping review examined the use of the Parents' Evaluation of Developmental Status (PEDS), PEDS: Developmental Milestones (PEDS:DM), and the Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire...

The Mental Health Continuum-Short Form (MHC-SF) is aimed at measuring the three dimensions of mental health; emotional, social, and psychological well-being. The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the psychometric properties of the MHC-SF within the context of Singapore and Australia. A total of 299 Singaporeans or permanent residents (59...

The Problem Solving Inventory (PSI) is a widely used instrument that measures problem-solving appraisal, which has been associated with suicidal ideation. However, the PSI has yielded different factorial structures in Western and Asian studies. The aim of the current study was to evaluate the psychometric properties of the PSI with a Southeast-Asia...

Research has shown that the mental activation of concepts related to supernatural agents (e.g., God, ghost) is capable of altering one’s moral behaviours. Based on the supernatural monitoring hypothesis, two experiments were conducted to investigate the impact of priming on cheating behaviour using undergraduate participants from Singapore. The res...

Purpose: This study validated the World Health Organization Quality of Life (WHOQOL-BREF) questionnaire with 3400 respondents living in Singapore. Methods: The ethnic composition was 76.1% Chinese, 12.3% Malay, 9.6% Indian, and 2% Others. The sample included adults with disabilities (28.9%), adults recovering from mental health issues (14%), and...

Interpersonal needs are associated with suicide. However, no interpersonal needs questionnaire has been validated in Asia. The psychometric properties of the Interpersonal Needs Questionnaire were examined in a sample of 340 young male adults in Singapore. This questionnaire measures proximal causes of desire for suicide using the extent to which i...

This study investigated if exposure to spatial language could affect spatial cognition in English-Mandarin bilinguals by focusing on contact/noncontact distinctions, an area that has been a source of contention in the language-and-thought literature. Sixty-three participants were first primed with sentences containing spatial terms (e.g., above, on...

This study investigated conceptual representations changes in bilinguals. Participants were Indonesian-English bilinguals (dominant in Indonesian, with different levels of English proficiency) and a control group composed of English-dominant bilinguals. All completed a gender decision task, in which participants decided whether English words referr...

The present study investigated the priming effects of different supernatural agents (God and ghost) on cheating behaviour. One hundred and twenty participants were invited to solve riddles, with each riddle presented on an individual card. Participants were told that the participant who solved the most riddles would win SGD100. Also, the participan...

Learning to play musical instruments has been shown to enhance a wide variety of cognitive domains. The present study investigated the specific aspects of working memory (WM) that differed between adult musicians and non-musicians. Twenty-four musicians and 30 non-musicians matched for age, gender, years of formal education, and verbal intelligence...

Western societies put emphasis on the development of the individual self, while Asian societies prioritize the sense of the self in relation to social groups. In Western populations roughly 60% of 18-month-old toddlers show self-referential behavior upon viewing themselves reflected in a mirror. Self-referential behavior has been used as a measure...

This study investigated whether English speakers retained the lexical stress patterns of newly learned Spanish words. Participants studied spoken Spanish words (e.g., DUcha [shower], ciuDAD [city]; stressed syllables in capital letters) and subsequently performed a recognition task, in which studied words were presented with the same lexical stress...

Previous studies have shown that bilinguals who use at least one logographic language show facilitation during the acquisition of a new logographic language, in comparison to bilinguals with two alphabetic languages. In the current study, we invited biscriptal English-Chinese bilinguals and monoscriptal English-Malay bilinguals to learn new logogra...

The current study investigated whether the problematic use of massively multiplayer online games (MMO) was associated with a particular attachment style. Moreover, we explored the possible motivations underlying MMO gaming, and the interdependence between motivations and attachment styles. The results showed that gamers with anxious and avoidant at...

This study investigated the priming effects of English prepositions on spatial decisions in Chinese. Participants were English-Chinese bilinguals. One group of participants was exposed to written English sentences (primes) that contained the prepositions on, above, beneath, or below. Immediately after each sentence, an object was shown on the compu...

Time and again research has suggested and supported the supremacy of warm attributes like morality over attributes of competencies. In the present research, we explore whether perception of warmth-morality or prosocial behavior in others, make us more supportive towards them. In addition we also explore whether the established measures of likeness...

This study explored phonological and visual memory skills of English-Chinese and English-Malay bilinguals, when learning words simulating a new language. Participants learnt nonwords presented auditorally and artificial characters presented visually. English-Chinese bilinguals were able to acquire both nonwords and artificial characters. In contras...

With a new metric called phonological Levenshtein distance (PLD20), the present study explores the effects of phonological similarity and word frequency on spoken word recognition, using polysyllabic words that have neither phonological nor orthographic neighbors, as defined by neighborhood density (the N-metric). Inhibitory effects of PLD20 were o...

A large body of knowledge has accumulated in recent years on the cognitive processes underlying language, much of which comes from studies of Indo-European languages, in particular English. This groundbreaking volume explores the languages of South and Southeast Asia, which differ significantly from Indo-European languages in their grammar, lexicon...

In the present article, the effects of phonological neighborhood density and word frequency in spoken word recognition were examined using distributional analyses of response latencies in auditory lexical decision. A density x frequency interaction was observed in mean latencies; frequency effects were larger for low-density words than for high-den...