This study examines adolescents' coping styles, with relation to their gender and age and level, of six types of problems. The participants were 1843 adolescents (51.7% female and 48.3% male) from the Sultanate of Oman with a mean age of 15.75. Two scales examining general adaptive and maladaptive coping styles and levels of school, economic, personal, health, family, and emotional problems were administered. The findings showed that adolescents' high levels of perceived problems were associated with higher levels of maladaptive coping styles than those with low levels of problems. Furthermore, female adolescents seem to use maladaptive coping styles (across all levels of the six types of problems) more than males. The use of adaptive and maladaptive coping styles increase with age.

This study examines the differences between male and female adolescents and their maths study on their career aspiration. The study investigates the effect of grade point average and parents' educational level on adolescents reported career aspiration. A career aspiration scale is administered to 2717 students representing tenth and eleventh grades. The findings reveal females have higher scores on career aspiration than males. Students who study pure maths in their career path have higher score on career aspiration than those with applied maths. Results also show significant effects of parents' educational level and grade point average on adolescents' career aspiration. Suggestion is provided to consider contextual variables in designing interventions.

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A short version of Buri's (1991) 30-item Parental Authority Questionnaire (PAQ), a widely used measure of Baumrind's (1971) model of authoritative, authoritarian, and permissive parenting styles, has been developed in this study. The participants were 3,025 middle and high school students from Oman. The sample was randomly divided into 2 subsamples. The first sample (N = 1,504) was used for the development of the short version, and the second sample (N = 1,521) served as the validation sample. The results indicate that a reduced 20-item PAQ fit the data better than the 30-item PAQ. The short version evidenced adequate validity and internal consistency. It was discussed and confirmed that the short version of the PAQ utilizes Baumrind's model of parenting styles as well as the original long version of the PAQ, and functions appropriately. This result is consistent with previous research.

Affect is involved in many psychological phenomena, but a descriptive structure, long sought, has been elusive. Valence and arousal are fundamental, and a key question–the focus of the present study–is the relationship between them. Valence is sometimes thought to be independent of arousal, but, in some studies (representing too few societies in the world) arousal was found to vary with valence. One common finding is that arousal is lowest at neutral valence and increases with both positive and negative valence: a symmetric V-shaped relationship. In the study reported here of self-reported affect during a remembered moment (N = 8,590), we tested the valence-arousal relationship in 33 societies with 25 different languages. The two most common hypotheses in the literature–independence and a symmetric V-shaped relationship–were not supported. With data of all samples pooled, arousal increased with positive but not negative valence. Valence accounted for between 5% (Finland) and 43% (China Beijing) of the variance in arousal. Although there is evidence for a structural relationship between the two, there is also a large amount of variability in this relation.