Healthy sleep is defined by the combination of adequate duration, good quality, and regular timing. In children, sleep thus depends on the interplay of individual, parental, organizational, community, and social variables, but only a few studies have addressed this issue in a comprehensive way nationwide. Using the Uruguayan nationally representative survey (Nutrition, Child Development, and Health Survey, Encuesta de Nutrición, Desarrollo Infantil y Salud, ENDIS), we present the first epidemiological characterization of chronobiological and sleep parameters in Latin American children.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEnvironmental, social, and behavioral variables influence sleep timing and duration. Using wrist-worn accelerometers, we recorded 31 dancers (age = 22.6 ± 3.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRecent cross-cultural and neuro-hormonal investigations have suggested that love is a near universal phenomenon that has a biological background. Therefore, the remaining important question is not whether love exists worldwide but which cultural, social, or environmental factors influence experiences and expressions of love. In the present study, we explored whether countries' modernization indexes are related to love experiences measured by three subscales (passion, intimacy, commitment) of the Triangular Love Scale.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Early school start times adversely influence adolescents' sleep duration. Late school start times and remote learning are associated with longer sleep durations. We leveraged a highly variable school schedule adopted after the first SARS-CoV-2 wave in Uruguay to study the influence of a hybrid mode of instruction (in-person/remote) with irregular school start times on adolescents' sleep.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSleep behaviour is controlled by both circadian and homeostatic influences. Changes in both factors are related to the delayed sleep timing observed in adolescence, which also generates restrictions in their sleep duration. In addition, the circadian factor explains part of the observed influence of light on sleep duration.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA wide range of literature connects sex ratio and mating behaviours in non-human animals. However, research examining sex ratio and human mating is limited in scope. Prior work has examined the relationship between sex ratio and desire for short-term, uncommitted mating as well as outcomes such as marriage and divorce rates.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: There is increasing evidence defining reading competency in terms of accuracy, speed and prosody, as well as interest in gaining better understanding of the interrelation as a function of prosodic features. This study aims to analyze the relationship between reading competency, in terms of accuracy and speed of written word recognition, and two attributes related to prosody in oral reading of texts: speech rate and rhythm.
Method: Oral reading of a narrative text by 141 third and fourth grade Spanish-speaking students was analyzed using an automated acoustic speech procedure and their reading competency was assessed.
Sleep is crucial for college students' well-being. Although recommended sleep duration is between 7-9 hours per day, many students do not sleep that much. Scholar demands are among the causes of observed sleep deprivation in youth.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Triangular Theory of Love (measured with Sternberg's Triangular Love Scale - STLS) is a prominent theoretical concept in empirical research on love. To expand the culturally homogeneous body of previous psychometric research regarding the STLS, we conducted a large-scale cross-cultural study with the use of this scale. In total, we examined more than 11,000 respondents, but as a result of applied exclusion criteria, the final analyses were based on a sample of 7332 participants from 25 countries (from all inhabited continents).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDuring adolescence, biological, psychosocial, and contextual factors converge in a "perfect storm" and have been put forward to explain the delay in chronotype observed at this age and the prevalence of disrupted sleep. This study provides evidence to support that chronotype and sleep patterns (particularly sleep duration) are socially constrained and to identify novel significant social predictors. Uruguayan public school activities are arranged in up to 4 shifts, creating a natural experiment to examine the effect of school timing on questionnaire-based assessments of sleep and chronotype.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFConsiderable research has examined human mate preferences across cultures, finding universal sex differences in preferences for attractiveness and resources as well as sources of systematic cultural variation. Two competing perspectives-an evolutionary psychological perspective and a biosocial role perspective-offer alternative explanations for these findings. However, the original data on which each perspective relies are decades old, and the literature is fraught with conflicting methods, analyses, results, and conclusions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHumans express a wide array of ideal mate preferences. Around the world, people desire romantic partners who are intelligent, healthy, kind, physically attractive, wealthy, and more. In order for these ideal preferences to guide the choice of actual romantic partners, human mating psychology must possess a means to integrate information across these many preference dimensions into summaries of the overall mate value of their potential mates.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMorningness-Eveningness (M-E) has been associated with school performance when school activities are arranged early in the morning. This study aims to evaluate this association in 224 adolescents of a secondary school in Montevideo, Uruguay, attending either morning or afternoon shifts. Students' socio-demographic characteristics and performance indicators were similar across shifts, while afternoon-shift students exhibited later circadian preferences.
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