Timofey V. Adamovich

Background. The quality of sleep significantly impacts children’s day-to-day performance, with at least 20% reporting issues with sleepiness. Valid tools for assessing the quality of sleep are needed.

Objective. In this study, we assessed the psychometric properties of the Russian version of the Pediatric Daytime Sleepiness Scale (PDSS). The initial adaptation of the PDSS was conducted on a sample from the Arctic regions of Russia. This location may have influenced the scale's generalizability due to variations in natural daylight across different areas of the country.

Design. To rectify this, we gathered a comprehensive, geographically diverse sample from Russia. This combined dataset comprised 3772 participants between 10 to 18 years of age, from nine different regions of Russia.

Results. We confirmed the unifactorial structure of the PDSS, which showed no regional effects. The psychometric analysis indicated that one item from the 8-item PDSS could be removed, thereby improving the scale's model fit. We also observed gender and age impacts on sleep quality: boys reported fewer sleep-related issues than girls, and younger children reported fewer problems than older children.

Conclusion. This study validates the usefulness and reliability of the Russian version of the PDSS, thereby enhancing its general applicability. Furthermore, we replicated previously reported age and sex effects on the sleep quality of school-aged children.

Background. To assess the structure of inter-ethnic attitudes and the risks of ethnoreligious tension, psychologists mostly use questionnaires, interviews, subjective scaling, content analysis, and special tests. One possible approach to increasing the validity and reliability of these explicit methods is the use of the registration of psychophysiological indicators while a recipient completes the questionnaire or test forms.

Objective. The results of a pilot psychophysiological research are presented, which focus on the study of human psycho-emotional states during socio-psychological testing to identify attitudes in the field of interethnic and interfaith relations.

Design. The essence of the applied experimental approach is to control the functional (psycho-emotional) state of a respondent using the registration of complex psychophysiological (physiological and behavioral) responses in the process of completing the socio-psychological questionnaire.

Results. It was shown that the rhythmic brain activity (ratio of the power indexes of alpha and beta rhythms), the amplitude of the systolic wave (photoplethysmogram) (ASW PhPG) and the magnitude (length) of the ‘circumflex line of the Galvanic Skin Response’ (GSR-L) may be the complex of indicators that possess sufficiently high selective sensitivity to differentiate nonspecific reactions of the human nervous system to personally important (emotiogenic, stressful) questions in the questionnaire.

Conclusion. The proposed approach may help to identify stressful (emotiogenic) issues (questions) in socio-psychological tests and questionnaires that are of the greatest interest to the subject and, as a result, most adequately reflect individual and population attitudes in the field of social relations.

Background. One promising direction in development of contactless techniques for assessment of the human psychoemotional state (PES) is elucidation of the relationships between psychophysiological indices and electromagnetic radiation in the IR and THz ranges.

Objective. To present a complex approach to assessing PESs based on combining psychological testing and psychophysiological diagnostics with measurements of radiation in the IR-THz range from face areas.

Methods. Stressful psychoemotional states were provoked by physical or cognitive stressors. The PES was monitored by psychological testing and registration of heart rate, photoplethysmogram, galvanic skin response, and respiration rate. The facial images in the IR-THz range were extracted by an IR/V-T0831Cdetector (NEC, Japan).

Results and Discussion. Different PESs are characterized by different specific patterns of psychophysiological parameters. Scores on the anxiety test are highly correlated with scores on the chronic stress questionnaire, but there are no reliable links between the data of psychological tests and the psychophysiological indicators. This discrepancy allows us to assume that for reliable identification of PESs, it is necessary to combine these technologies into one diagnostic complex. We found statistically significant correlations between the intensity of the IR-THz image in the forehead and the galvanic skin response.

Conclusion. For the effective diagnosis and forecast of changes in the PES, it is important to consider both the psychological and physiological data. Despite the relatively low signal-to-noise ratio and low frequency of image recording, it is possible to extract informative THz parameters of the broadband IR-THz signal and associate them with psychophysiological reactions. The improvement of IR-THz detectors and the development of new processing methods will allow wide use of the THz range for remote assessment of human PESs in real time.