Student distress is considered as a specific public health issue as research has shown increased levels of anxiety, depression, and risk behaviors in this population. Students report high levels of daily hassles, workload, lack of meaning, manageability, and understanding throughout their university years. These factors lead to increased academic burnout. In line with these findings, the current study aimed at assessing the mediating role of sense of coherence in the relationship between daily hassles and academic burnout. Furthermore, in order to assess the importance of sense of coherence in the field of academic burnout research, the percentage of variance of academic burnout explained by the sense of coherence was compared with the percentage of variance explained by optimism-a widely studied protection factor in the field of burnout and negative affect. This paper also reports the French validation of the Maslach Burnout Inventory-Student Survey (MBI-SS) used in this study to assess academic burnout. The sample was composed of 328 students from three French universities. Results indicate that the French version of the three-factor model showed comparable reliability, sensitivity, and construct validity to the original MBI-SS. Sense of coherence played a mediating role between daily hassles and burnout. Furthermore, sense of coherence explained a larger portion of academic burnout variance than optimism. Results are discussed in light of past findings on academic burnout, and future prevention and treatment perspectives are suggested.

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Short-term and working memory (WM) capacities are subject to change with ageing, both in normal older adults and in patients with degenerative or non-degenerative neurological disease. Few normative data are available for comparisons of short-term and WM capacities in the verbal, spatial and visual domains. To provide researchers and clinicians with a set of standardised tasks that assess short-term and WM using verbal and visuospatial materials, and to present normative data for that set of tasks. The present study compiled normative French data for three short-term memory tasks (verbal, visual and spatial simple span tasks) and two WM tasks (verbal and spatial complex span tasks) obtained from 445 healthy older adults aged between 55 and 85 years. Our data reveal main effects of age, education level and gender on older adults' short-term and WM performances. Equation-based normalisation can therefore be used to take these factors into account. The results provide a set of cut-off scores for five standardised tasks that can be used to determine the presence of short-term or WM impairment in older adults.

Objective: We investigated cross-lagged relations between leisure activity participation and Trail Making Test (TMT) performance over 6 years and whether those reciprocal associations differed between individuals. Method: We analyzed data from 232 participants tested on performance in TMT Parts A and B as well as interviewed on leisure activity participation in 2 waves 6 years apart. Mean age in the Wave 1 was 73.42 years. Participants were also tested on vocabulary (Mill Hill scale) as a proxy indicator of crystallized intelligence and reported information on early and midlife cognitive reserve markers (education and occupation). Latent cross-lagged models were applied to investigate potential reciprocal activity−TMT relationships. Results: The relation of leisure activity participation predicting TMT performance 6 years later was significantly larger than was the relation of TMT performance predicting later leisure activity participation. Statistically comparing different moderator groups revealed that this pattern was evident both in individuals with low education and in those with high education but, notably, emerged in only young-old adults (but not in old-old adults), in individuals with a low cognitive level of job in midlife (but not in those with a high cognitive level of job in midlife), and in individuals with high scores in vocabulary (but not in those with low scores in vocabulary). Conclusions: Late-life leisure activity participation may predict later cognitive status in terms of TMT performance, but individuals may markedly differ with respect to such effects. Implications for current cognitive reserve and neuropsychological aging research are discussed.