The research team recruited 50 Latinx students in grades three through five from a charter school in the Kansas City metropolitan area that serves a predominantly Latinx student body. The children, whose average age was just under ten, completed a battery of standardized assessments administered by bilingual research staff. Community violence exposure was measured with the Community Experiences Questionnaire, which asks children how often they have been victims of or witnesses to threats, beatings, weapon attacks, and shootings. Mental health symptoms were assessed with the Revised Child Anxiety and Depression Scale, and cognitive flexibility was measured using the computerized Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, a classic neuropsychological task in which sorting rules change without warning and the child must detect and adapt to the new rule.

The Wisconsin Card Sorting Test works by rewarding one sorting principle, such as color, shape, or number, and then silently switching to another. Children who keep sorting by the old rule despite corrective feedback commit what researchers call perseverative errors, and these errors are considered the clearest behavioral signature of reduced cognitive flexibility. In this study, fewer perseverative errors meant greater flexibility. The bilingual component of the study relied on the Woodcock-Muñoz Language Survey III, which yielded separate standard scores for English and Spanish proficiency. Rather than sorting children into bilingual and monolingual categories, the researchers calculated the absolute difference between each child’s English and Spanish scores, treating bilingualism as a continuum of balanced proficiency.

The core results were strikingly clear. Greater exposure to community violence was associated with more symptoms of both anxiety and depression, consistent with a large body of prior research linking violence exposure to internalizing problems. But the strength of that association depended on the child’s cognitive flexibility. Among children with high levels of flexibility, the link between violence exposure and internalizing symptoms was statistically indistinguishable from zero. Among children at the median level, the association was significant, and among children with the lowest flexibility, it was strongest. In the combined anxiety and depression model, the interaction term accounted for an additional 7.1 percent of the variance in symptoms, and a parallel pattern emerged for depressive symptoms specifically, where the interaction added 8.4 percent of explained variance.

The moderation effect for anxiety alone followed the same direction but fell just short of statistical significance, with a p-value of .063. The authors interpret the overall pattern through the lens of emotion regulation. Children with greater cognitive flexibility may be better able to disengage from threat-focused or ruminative thinking and redirect attention toward alternative appraisals and goal-directed coping. Children with lower flexibility, by contrast, may become stuck in perseverative, worried thought loops after witnessing or experiencing violence, a process that gradually builds toward anxiety and depression. This account aligns with cognitive-behavioral theory, in which the ability to generate alternative explanations for distressing events is a cornerstone of adaptive functioning, and with neurobiological evidence that trauma alters fronto-limbic circuits supporting executive control.

Not every hypothesis survived the data, however. The study set out to test the controversial idea of a bilingual advantage, the notion that managing two languages trains domain-general executive abilities. Bilingual speakers must constantly disengage from one linguistic system and select another as conversational partners and settings change, and some studies have found superior performance on switching tasks as a result. But the evidence is deeply mixed. One meta-analysis cited in the paper found support for a bilingual advantage in only 54.3 percent of reviewed studies, with 28.3 percent producing mixed findings and 17.4 percent finding null or contrary effects. In the present sample, the English-Spanish proficiency difference scores did not predict cognitive flexibility at all, and bilingualism was also unrelated to mental health symptoms, whether directly or in combination with flexibility.

The authors offer several possible explanations for these null results. The school’s predominantly Latinx environment may have meant that the cultural contexts children navigate, home versus school, were not distinct enough to demand frequent cognitive switching. A related possibility is that cognitive benefits attributed to bilingualism may actually stem from biculturalism, the demands of navigating two cultural worlds. Supporting this idea, a prior study found that Turkish-German children who identified equally with both cultures outperformed peers on a switching task. The sample also showed limited variability in Spanish proficiency: 76 percent of children scored in the Initial or Early Development range in Spanish, while only 14 percent reached Emerging Proficiency or higher, reflecting the English-dominant profiles typical of children from language-minority households in the United States. With so little balanced bilingualism, detecting an association may have been statistically difficult from the start.

Important caveats temper the headline finding. The sample was small, and a sensitivity analysis showed the study was powered only to detect medium or larger interaction effects. Community violence exposure was also relatively low: half of the children reported no direct victimization and 44 percent reported no witnessed violence, and mean symptom scores fell well below clinical thresholds. The authors caution that the results may not generalize to youth experiencing more frequent or severe violence, and that the significant moderation effect could be unstable given the restricted range. The cross-sectional design also prevents any conclusions about causality or the temporal ordering of exposure, flexibility, and symptoms. Notably, the researchers stress that individual-level factors like cognitive flexibility should not be framed as substitutes for addressing the structural conditions, including residential segregation, discrimination, and immigration-related stressors, that produce unequal exposure to violence in the first place.

Still, the practical implications are compelling. Because cognitive flexibility is modifiable, therapies that train it, such as cognitive behavioral therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, and dialectical behavior therapy, could help protect vulnerable children. The authors point to recent evidence that trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy reduces executive function difficulties in youth exposed to interpersonal violence, with improved executive function tracking reductions in PTSD symptoms among adolescents. Screening for flexibility deficits could also allow clinicians to tailor interventions for children at heightened risk. As the fastest-growing youth subgroup in the United States, Latinx children stand to benefit enormously from such targeted supports, provided they complement rather than replace broader community and systems-level prevention.

Subject of Research: Cognitive flexibility as a moderator of the relationship between community violence exposure, bilingualism, and mental health symptoms in Latinx youth

Article Title: The Effects of Cognitive Flexibility on the Relation between Community Violence Exposure, Bilingualism, and Mental Health Symptoms in Latinx Youth

Article References: The Effects of Cognitive Flexibility on the Relation between Community Violence Exposure, Bilingualism, and Mental Health Symptoms in Latinx Youth. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10578-026-02094-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10578-026-02094-4

Keywords: cognitive flexibility, community violence exposure, bilingualism, Latinx youth, mental health, anxiety, depression, executive function, Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, resilience, child psychology, bilingual advantage

The research, conducted by Haniyeh Shakery Chenary, Kolsoum Akbarnataj Bisheh, and Ebrahim Mohammadian Akerdi, recruited 54 students with dyslexia aged 8 to 12 years from learning disorder centers in Babol, a city in northern Iran. The children, both boys and girls, were selected according to inclusion criteria using a convenience sampling method and then randomly assigned to one of three groups of 18 participants each: a cognitive-behavioral play therapy group, a cognitive rehabilitation group, and a control group that received no intervention. The study followed a pre-test, post-test design with a one-month follow-up, allowing the researchers to track not only whether the treatments worked immediately but whether their effects persisted.

To measure executive functions, the team used the Brief Executive Function Behavioral Rating Questionnaire, an instrument designed to capture everyday manifestations of executive control as observed in children’s behavior. Executive functions are typically broken down into core components: inhibitory control, the ability to suppress impulsive responses; working memory, the capacity to hold and manipulate information in mind; and cognitive flexibility, the skill of shifting between tasks or mental sets. In children with dyslexia, deficits in these domains are well documented and are thought to compound the phonological processing difficulties that define the disorder, making reading acquisition and academic performance even harder.

The results were striking in their symmetry. After the interventions, post-test scores for executive functions decreased significantly in both treatment groups—lower scores on this behavioral rating measure indicating fewer executive function problems, and therefore improvement. Statistical analysis using repeated-measures analysis of variance confirmed that these changes were highly significant, with p values below .001, and crucially, the improvements were maintained at the one-month follow-up. The control group, by contrast, showed no comparable change. In practical terms, both therapies appeared to equip children with better self-regulation, attention, and mental control, and those benefits did not evaporate once the sessions stopped.

Perhaps the most intriguing finding, however, was what the researchers did not find. When the two intervention groups were compared head to head, no statistically significant difference emerged between them (p > .05). Cognitive-behavioral play therapy, with its emphasis on emotional expression and behavioral learning through play, proved just as effective as cognitive rehabilitation, a more direct, exercise-based approach to training cognitive skills. This equivalence matters, because it suggests that clinicians and schools may be able to choose the modality that best fits a particular child, setting, or budget without sacrificing therapeutic benefit.

The mechanisms behind the two approaches differ in fascinating ways. Cognitive rehabilitation is grounded in neuropsychology: it involves repeated, structured practice on tasks designed to strengthen specific cognitive operations, much like physical therapy targets particular muscle groups. Modern implementations range from paper-and-pencil exercises to computerized and even virtual reality-based programs, and the approach has been applied across populations from stroke survivors to children with learning disabilities. The underlying premise is neuroplasticity—that targeted, progressive challenge can reshape the efficiency of the neural networks supporting attention and memory.

Cognitive-behavioral play therapy, by contrast, marries the principles of cognitive-behavioral therapy with the natural language of childhood: play. Rather than asking an 8-year-old to sit through abstract discussions of thoughts and feelings, the therapist embeds cognitive and behavioral strategies in games, stories, and imaginative scenarios. Through play, children rehearse self-control, practice problem-solving, learn to tolerate frustration, and internalize coping strategies. For children with dyslexia, who frequently experience academic failure, shame, and anxiety around reading, this format may address both the cognitive deficits and the emotional fallout that accompany them. Previous research has linked poor reading to elevated rates of internalizing problems such as anxiety and depression, and to diminished self-concept, making an intervention that works through an enjoyable, low-pressure medium particularly appealing.

The study’s authors frame their findings against a sobering backdrop. Many children with dyslexia face poor academic and career outcomes, and their difficulties extend beyond phonological processing to attention and executive functions. Executive dysfunction in dyslexia has been documented in neuropsychological studies across multiple countries, and deficits in working memory have been shown to correlate with reading performance. Because executive functions also predict broader academic achievement and classroom learning behaviors, improving them may yield dividends that go well beyond reading itself—better task completion, stronger self-regulation, and greater capacity to benefit from reading instruction.

The quasi-experimental design, while robust for a clinical field study, does carry limitations worth noting. The sample was drawn from learning disorder centers in a single city using convenience sampling, which may limit how broadly the findings generalize. The outcome measure relied on a behavioral rating questionnaire rather than direct neuropsychological testing, and the follow-up period was one month, leaving open the question of whether benefits persist over longer horizons. Still, the randomized assignment to groups, the inclusion of a control condition, and the follow-up assessment give the findings a credibility that many small clinical studies lack. The researchers also report that the study protocol and ethics code were approved by the Ethics Committee of Islamic Azad University, Sari Branch, and that caregiver consent and child assent were obtained before data collection.

For clinicians, educators, and parents, the takeaway is refreshingly practical: two effective, accessible, and fundamentally different treatments can improve the executive functions of children with dyslexia, and neither holds a decisive advantage. Cognitive rehabilitation offers a targeted, skills-drilling route for settings equipped with structured programs, while cognitive-behavioral play therapy offers a developmentally sensitive, emotionally attuned alternative that children may find inherently motivating. The authors conclude that both can be used as effective and accessible therapeutic approaches for treating students with dyslexia. In a field where families often face long waiting lists and expensive specialized services, evidence that two distinct pathways lead to the same destination is genuinely good news—and a reminder that the developing brain, given the right kind of support, can be nudged toward stronger self-regulation and control.

Subject of Research: Comparing cognitive-behavioral play therapy and cognitive rehabilitation for improving executive functions in students with dyslexia

Article Title: The Effectiveness of Cognitive-Behavioral Play Therapy and Cognitive Rehabilitation on Executive Functions in Students With Dyslexia

Article References: Shakery Chenary, H., Akbarnataj Bisheh, K., & Mohammadian Akerdi, E. (2026). The Effectiveness of Cognitive-Behavioral Play Therapy and Cognitive Rehabilitation on Executive Functions in Students With Dyslexia. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-026-07548-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10803-026-07548-1

Keywords: dyslexia, executive functions, cognitive-behavioral play therapy, cognitive rehabilitation, working memory, inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility, learning disorders, child psychology, intervention study, neuropsychology, academic outcomes

Türkiye hosts millions of forcibly displaced people, which makes social integration a national priority rather than an abstract policy goal. Schools occupy a pivotal position in this process, because they are the primary arenas where young people from different origins encounter one another daily and where the cognitive seeds of either social cohesion or intergroup conflict are sown. Despite this, comparatively few studies have directly compared how Turkish, Syrian, and Iraqi students conceptualize the term refugee within the same educational settings. The research team, Orhan Ünal and Murat Bayram Yilar of Ondokuz Mayıs University and Yıldıray Karadağ of Süleyman Demirel University, designed their investigation precisely to fill this gap by examining the cognitive structures of children enrolled in schools with high enrolment of forcibly displaced students.

Methodologically, the study employed a multi-stage descriptive design. The Word Association Test asks participants to produce the words that a given stimulus concept evokes, and it is prized by researchers because it bypasses deliberative self-presentation and surfaces underlying perceptions and perspectives. In this study, the technique was applied to students in the 10-to-15 age bracket, a developmental window during which social attitudes are actively consolidating. The researchers then subjected the resulting word pools to descriptive analysis, determining frequency distributions and statistical cut-off points for the associated words, and to thematic analysis, which organized the semantic content of those words into coherent conceptual categories. A comparative layer of analysis then identified the similarities and differences in conceptual structures across the three participant groups, while correspondence analysis tested whether the thematic profiles of the groups differed in statistically significant ways.

The results show that for Turkish students, the themes of Security and Threat, Country and Geography, and Negative Perception, Blaming, and Othering carried substantial weight in their perceptions of refugees. In other words, the concept activated associations with borders, belonging, and perceived risk, together with attributions of fault and processes of social exclusion. These associations are characteristic of a majority group’s perspective, in which the displaced population is construed primarily as an external collective whose presence requires explanation, management, or judgment. The prominence of threat-related content in children’s mental maps is particularly noteworthy, because such cognitive structures, once entrenched, are known to predict intergroup anxiety and support for exclusionary social policies in adulthood.

Yet the Turkish students’ cognitive maps were not monolithically negative. The analysis also surfaced themes of Positive Perspective and Attributes, together with Sadness and Compassion, revealing a genuine undercurrent of empathy and solidarity among host-community children. This duality is analytically important: it suggests that the concept of refugee in these students’ minds is contested ground, where exclusionary framings coexist with humanitarian ones. For educators and policymakers, the coexistence of both clusters within the same cognitive structures represents an opportunity, because interventions can amplify the empathetic associations rather than needing to construct prosocial attitudes from nothing.

The profiles of the Syrian and Iraqi students were qualitatively different in ways that reflect lived experience. Their associations centered on themes bound up with forced displacement itself: Poverty and the Struggle for Survival, Violence and Death, and Physical and Emotional Pain. For these children, the term refugee is not an external social category but a compressed autobiography, a linguistic container for memories of conflict, loss, deprivation, and the physical and psychological costs of flight. The research also found that Syrian and Iraqi students associated the concept with a search for hope, indicating that even within profoundly painful semantic fields, displaced children maintain a forward-looking, aspirational dimension to their self-understanding.

Correspondence analysis, a statistical technique that visualizes the relationships between categorical variables in a shared space, confirmed that the thematic divergence between the Turkish group on one side and the Syrian and Iraqi groups on the other was statistically significant. This formal confirmation matters because it rules out the possibility that the observed differences were merely anecdotal or the product of random variation in word choice. Instead, the data indicate two meaningfully distinct cognitive geographies of the same concept: one organized around the vantage point of the receiving society, oscillating between threat and compassion, and the other organized around the vantage point of displacement, oscillating between trauma and hope.

The psychological implications of this divergence extend well beyond the classroom. Cognitive structures of the kind captured by the Word Association Test function as interpretive lenses through which subsequent social information is filtered. When host-community children’s mental maps foreground threat and blame, everyday interactions with displaced peers risk being encoded through suspicion, reinforcing stereotype and fueling a self-perpetuating cycle of othering. Conversely, when displaced children’s associations are dominated by pain and loss, their sense of belonging in the school environment may remain fragile, particularly if the peer environment validates exclusionary narratives. The study suggests that these two cognitive worlds currently operate side by side in Turkish schools, with limited semantic overlap between how the host and displaced groups understand who a refugee is.

The authors argue that the findings make a direct case for targeted educational interventions designed to reduce stereotypical and exclusionary associations and to strengthen empathy, perspective-taking, and shared human values. Because the Word Association Test exposes the raw material of children’s conceptual thinking, the same technique can serve as a diagnostic instrument before and after such interventions, allowing educators to measure whether exclusionary word clusters shrink and empathetic ones expand. The researchers specifically recommend that schools and educators use these insights to challenge exclusionary narratives, promote inclusive peer relations, and create supportive environments that foster the inclusion and well-being of children from forced-migration backgrounds. In practice, this could involve structured contact programs, collaborative learning, and curricular approaches that reframe the refugee concept around common humanity rather than difference.

As displacement continues to reshape societies across the Middle East, Europe, and beyond, this study offers a rare quantitative glimpse into the earliest cognitive layer where integration succeeds or fails: the associative networks children build around a single word. The contrast between Turkish students’ security-laden but partially empathetic maps and Syrian and Iraqi students’ trauma-tinged but hopeful ones encapsulates the central challenge of diverse classrooms. The same term that evokes borders and burden for one child evokes graves and survival for another, and only deliberate educational design can bridge that gap. Published as open-access research with ethics approval from Ondokuz Mayıs University and conducted under the Declaration of Helsinki with parental consent and children’s right to withdraw, the study provides both the evidence and the methodological toolkit for educators willing to begin that work, transforming the mental map of refugee from a marker of division into a shared terrain of understanding.

Subject of Research: Cognitive structures and perceptions of the concept of refugee among Turkish, Syrian, and Iraqi secondary school students

Article Title: The mental map of the concept of “refugee”: a comparative analysis of the cognitive structures of Turkish, Syrian, and Iraqi students

Article References: Ünal, O., Karadağ, Y., & Yilar, M. B. (2026). The mental map of the concept of “refugee”: a comparative analysis of the cognitive structures of Turkish, Syrian, and Iraqi students. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05688-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05688-8

Keywords: refugee perception, word association test, cognitive structure, Turkish students, Syrian students, Iraqi students, social integration, inclusive education, forced displacement, child psychology, intergroup relations, Türkiye

The study, published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, analyzed records from 727 children aged six to sixteen who completed the WISC-V as part of comprehensive developmental evaluations at a large pediatric hospital in the midwestern United States between December 2014 and May 2022. The sample was predominantly male, at 78 percent, and predominantly White, at 77 percent, with a mean Full-Scale IQ of 88.4 and a standard deviation of 17.7. Slightly more than half of the children, 53 percent, had received an autism spectrum disorder diagnosis, while the remainder carried other neurodevelopmental conditions. Notably, the sample spanned a wide range of intellectual functioning, including roughly one hundred children with IQ scores in the intellectual disability range, a group that is frequently excluded from cognitive research.

Autism spectrum disorder is defined by differences in social communication and by restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior or interest, but its presentation varies enormously from one child to the next. Since the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, folded former subcategories such as Asperger syndrome and Pervasive Developmental Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified into a single spectrum diagnosis in 2013, clinicians have relied on dimensional ‘levels of support’ to describe severity. These levels, however, are subjective and vary with a clinician’s training and experience. Many researchers have hoped that quantifiable cognitive measures, particularly intelligence testing, could offer a more objective and standardized way to carve the spectrum into biologically or clinically meaningful subtypes, especially because general IQ is among the strongest predictors of long-term outcomes in autistic individuals.

To test that hypothesis rigorously, the team employed latent profile analysis, a person-centered statistical technique that assigns each child a probability of belonging to underlying subpopulations rather than simply comparing group averages. The method assumes that if genuine subtypes exist, they will emerge as distinct clusters when the five WISC-V index scores, covering verbal comprehension, visual-spatial skill, fluid reasoning, working memory, and processing speed, are fed into the model. The researchers tested solutions ranging from one to ten profiles under multiple variance assumptions, evaluating them with fit indices including the Bayesian and Akaike information criteria and the Analytic Hierarchy Process. Their sample comfortably exceeded the commonly recommended minimum of 500 participants for this class of analysis, lending statistical power that most prior studies lacked.

The results were strikingly consistent across criteria. Although one metric, the Analytic Hierarchy Process, favored a three-profile solution, that solution showed poor classification accuracy, with suboptimal entropy of 0.62 and marginal probabilities of group membership. More tellingly, the three extracted profiles were essentially parallel to one another, a pattern statisticians call the ‘salsa effect,’ in which the algorithm separates groups that differ only in overall level rather than in shape. Two-thirds of the children fell into a middle profile, with the rest split fairly evenly above and below it. The authors concluded that these were not genuinely distinct cognitive types but slices of a single continuous distribution of general intelligence, the psychometric construct known as the g factor.

To probe the underlying structure further, the team fitted bifactor confirmatory factor models in which the ten WISC-V primary subtests load both onto a general intelligence factor and onto specific domain factors. They then compared the two clinical groups to the nationally representative WISC-V standardization sample using multigroup measurement invariance testing. The models showed excellent fit, and the test confirmed that intelligence is measured in fundamentally the same way across autistic children, children with other neurodevelopmental disabilities, and typically developing children. Two subtests, Coding and Block Design, showed intercept differences between the clinical and standardization samples, hinting at modest measurement bias, but these differences appeared in both clinical groups, meaning they reflect neurodevelopmental risk in general rather than autism specifically.

The bifactor analyses delivered the study’s most clinically consequential finding: after accounting for general intelligence, nearly every WISC-V index explained too little unique variance to be meaningfully interpreted on its own. Fluid reasoning was the most extreme case, with factor loadings so close to zero that it could not be separated from the general factor at all. The lone exception was processing speed, which demonstrated sufficient explained variance above and beyond Full-Scale IQ across the clinical and standardization groups. Yet even here, the pattern was transdiagnostic. Slower processing speed appeared across children with autism and those with other neurodevelopmental conditions alike, marking it as a sensitive but non-specific signal of neurodevelopmental complexity rather than an autism-specific signature.

These findings land squarely in a long-running theoretical debate. The influential Cattell-Horn-Carroll framework treats intelligence as a hierarchy in which broad domain abilities, such as verbal comprehension or working memory, carry distinct clinical information beyond the general factor, and this logic underpins how many practitioners interpret index-level scores. The new results suggest an important boundary condition: when test indicators are heavily saturated by g, as the WISC-V subtests are, domain-level scores may add little incremental value, and the Full-Scale IQ remains the most informative single summary of a child’s cognitive ability. The authors are careful to note that this does not invalidate the broader theory, but it does challenge the routine clinical practice of narrating detailed strengths-and-weaknesses profiles from WISC-V index scores in neurodevelopmental evaluations.

For clinicians, the practical message is clear. Index scores on the WISC-V alone cannot be used to assign a child a cognitive subtype, and efforts to individualize support should instead draw on a comprehensive battery that includes speech and language assessment, executive function measures, adaptive functioning, and input from caregivers and educators. The authors acknowledge limitations, including the absence of a neurotypical comparison group in the latent profile analysis, a clinical sample that was not nationally representative, and the exclusion of children too profoundly affected to complete standardized testing. They also stress that the null result is theoretically meaningful rather than inconclusive: it directly supports dimensional models of cognition in clinical populations. Future work, they argue, should explore constructs beyond IQ, such as executive function, metacognition, academic enablers, and adaptive behavior, and should track cognitive strengths and weaknesses developmentally over time. Until such measures mature, the quest for a characteristic autistic cognitive profile on the WISC-V appears to be over, replaced by a simpler, more honest picture of intelligence as a continuum.

Subject of Research: Cognitive subtyping in children with autism and neurodevelopmental disabilities using WISC-V intelligence testing and latent profile analysis

Article Title: In Search of Subtypes of Children With Developmental Disabilities Using the WISC-V: A Latent Profile Analysis

Article References: Esprit, J. L., Youngstrom, E. A., Kim, S. Y., Norris, M., Levine, A., Butter, E. M., & Stephenson, K. G. (2026). In Search of Subtypes of Children With Developmental Disabilities Using the WISC-V: A Latent Profile Analysis. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-026-07506-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10803-026-07506-x

Keywords: autism spectrum disorder, WISC-V, latent profile analysis, neurodevelopmental disabilities, cognitive profiles, general intelligence, processing speed, Full-Scale IQ, bifactor model, measurement invariance, child psychology, psychological assessment