The study aimed to test how Polish students assess their average mood. The research was based on American and Polish studies conducted several years ago. In the U.S. study, students rated their mood as better than usual, while the Polish students in the 1990s rated theirs as worse than usual. Participants in our study were 82 people (mean age M = 20 years, SD = 1.21). For 30 consecutive days they rated their mood using a 7-point scale. It turned out that the participants tended to rate their mood on a given day as the same as the average one. These results are different from those obtained for Polish students several years ago.
Envy is the emotion felt towards another person when they have something that one wants to have or a wish that they did not have it. Some authors distinguish malicious and benign forms of envy. The main aim of the presented research was to examine whether envy is related to self-esteem, Schadenfreude, optimism, and rumination. Additionally, the aim was to verify the validity and reliability of the Polish version of the Dispositional Envy Scale (DES), measuring the tendency to feel envy that is close to malicious envy. The participants were 1,221 people aged from 14 to 69. The DES was translated into Polish using the back-translation procedure. The 8-item one-factor DES has good psychometric properties, with a Cronbach’s alpha of .86. The findings show that envy is positively related to Schadenfreude and rumination and negatively to age, self-esteem, and optimism.
Driving anxiety is a relatively undervalued topic of research, despite the fact that it can have a substantial detrimental impact on an individuals’ life. The prevalence of driving anxiety in motor vehicle crash (MVC) survivors has been found to range from 18–77%. Although driving anxiety can develop without crash involvement, no information currently exists on the prevalence of driving anxiety in the general population. One barrier to gathering this information is that most of the instruments are designed to measure driving anxiety in MVC survivors. However, the Driving and Riding Avoidance Scale (DRAS; Stewart & St. Peter, 2004) is one instrument that shows promise as a more general measure of driving anxiety, although previous research has noted the need for some minor adaptations (Taylor & Sullman, 2009). Therefore, the present study investigated the psychometric properties of an adapted version of the DRAS and the level of driving anxiety amongst a sample of 210 Polish participants. Internal consistency for the overall DRAS was .91 and ranged from .77 to .85 for the subscales. Factor analysis of the DRAS resulted in two clear factors, with the fi rst containing driving avoidance items and the second consisting solely of riding avoidance items. Therefore it appears that the DRAS can be a useful measure of driving avoidance in samples drawn from the general population as well as MVC survivors.
A major focus of attention in psychology has been on the consequences and determinants of well-being. Religiosity and personality have both been shown to predict mental health and well-being, but the two predictors have not often been investigated together. In 4 studies involving 7 surveys (total N = 1,530) in various social and religious contexts, the relations among well-being, religious orientation, and personality factors were studied. Results showed that Extraversion was the single strongest correlate of higher levels of subjective and psychological well-being. Religiosity had null or weak positive relationships with well-being, and managed to explain variance in some aspects of positive functioning beyond personality factors. The null or week relationship of religiosity with well-being beyond personality was consistent across the HEXACO and the Big Five models of personality structure. It has been suggested that religion is relatively more important for eudaimonic than for hedonic way of living.