Prevention of Postpartum Depression in Low-Income Women: Development of the Mamás y Bebés/Mothers and Babies Course

A prenatal intervention designed to prevent the onset of major depressive episodes (MDEs) during pregnancy and postpartum was pilot tested at a public sector women’s clinic. The Mamás y Bebés/Mothers and Babies Course is an intervention developed in Spanish and English that uses a cognitive-behavioral mood management framework, and incorporates social learning concepts, attachment theory, and socio-cultural issues. The four goals of this project were to develop the intervention, assess its acceptability, test the feasibility of conducting a randomized trial with public sector patients, and obtain estimates of its effect size. Forty-one pregnant women at high risk for developing MDEs were randomized to the Mothers and Babies Course (n = 21) or a comparison condition (n = 20). Assessments occurred during pregnancy and at 1, 3, 6, and 12 months postpartum. Differences in terms of depression symptom levels or incidence of MDEs between the two groups did not reach statistical significance in this pilot trial. However, the MDE incidence rates of 14% for the intervention condition versus 25% for the comparison condition represent a small effect size (h = 0.28) that will be further examined in a larger scale study. The intervention was well received by the participants and implementation of a randomized trial appeared quite feasible as indicated by our follow-up rate of 91% at 12 months. Implications for the continuing development of preventive interventions for perinatal depression are discussed.     

Consciousness and emotion: ERP modulation and attentive vs. pre-attentive elaboration of emotional facial expressions by backward masking

Facial stimulus processing is an important topic to explain how people comprehend affective disposition in others. The effect of attentive and pre-attentive elaboration of emotional facial expression was explored in the present research by using backward masking procedure. Specifically, unconscious mental process of emotion comprehension was analyzed: pictures presenting a happy, sad, angry, fearful, disgusted, surprised expressions were submitted to 21 subjects in both attentive and pre-attentive conditions and event-related potentials (ERPs) were registered in the two conditions. The two processes, attentive and pre-attentive, seem to be similar in their nature, since they are marked by analogous ERP deflections. In fact, two ERP effects were found, a positive (P300) deflection, maximally distributed on the parietal regions, and a negative (N200) deflection, more localized on the frontal sites. Nevertheless, some differences between the two conditions were found in terms of quantitative modulations of the two peaks. The N200 effect, ampler in attentive condition, may be considered such as an index of conscious processing of emotional faces, whereas the P3 (P3a) effect, higher in pre-attentive condition, was considered a specific marker of the automatic, unconscious process during the emotional face comprehension.     

Mood impact on cardiovascular reactivity when task difficulty is unclear

Research in the context of the mood-behavior-model (Gendolla in Rev Gen Psychol 4:348–408, 2000) has shown that moods can have an impact on effort mobilization due to congruency effects on demand appraisals. However, the mood research literature suggests that mood may also influence effort mobilization by its impact on appraisals of the instrumentality of success. In a single factor (mood valence: negative vs. neutral vs. positive) between-persons design, participants performed a memory task under conditions of unclear task difficulty. By successfully performing the task, participants could earn the chance to win a monetary reward. As predicted for tasks with unclear difficulty, effort mobilization—assessed as cardiovascular reactivity—increased from negative to positive mood. This effect was mediated by the subjective probability of winning the monetary reward for successful performance. These results demonstrate for the first time that mood can influence effort mobilization via the estimated instrumentality of success.     

“I Hope I Will Be Able to Go Back to My Home City”: Narratives of Suffering and Survival of Children in Palestine

Psychological Studies - In light of critical psychology and socio-constructionist theories, the present work aims at analyzing attitudes of political agency, psychological adjustment to trauma, and...     

Social Customs and Demographic Change: The Case of Godparenthood in Catholic Europe

This article analyzes social norms regulating the selection of godparents in Italy and France. Based on Vatican statistics and European Values Study responses, the vast majority of children in Catholic Europe are baptized and birth rituals are considered important even by nonbelievers. Moreover, the dominant custom of selecting godparents from among kinsmen is a recent development, based on historical data. A new survey about the selection of godparents in Italy and France, conducted for this study, shows that godparents are chosen not for religious, but for social‐relational reasons. Selection of kinsmen is the norm, with uncles and aunts being the majority choice. For Italy, choice determinants are explored by means of multinomial regressions. The results are contrasted with demographic change to show that in lowest‐low fertility countries current godparenthood models are bound to disappear.     

Prosociality: the contribution of traits, values, and self-efficacy beliefs

The present study examined how agreeableness, self-transcendence values, and empathic self-efficacy beliefs predict individuals' tendencies to engage in prosocial behavior (i.e., prosociality) across time. Participants were 340 young adults, 190 women and 150 men, age approximately 21 years at Time 1 and 25 years at Time 2. Measures of agreeableness, self-transcendence, empathic self-efficacy beliefs, and prosociality were collected at 2 time points. The findings corroborated the posited paths of relations, with agreeableness directly predicting self-transcendence and indirectly predicting empathic self-efficacy beliefs and prosociality. Self-transcendence mediated the relation between agreeableness and empathic self-efficacy beliefs. Empathic self-efficacy beliefs mediated the relation of agreeableness and self-transcendence to prosociality. Finally, earlier prosociality predicted agreeableness and empathic self-efficacy beliefs assessed at Time 2. The posited conceptual model accounted for a significant portion of variance in prosociality and provides guidance to interventions aimed at promoting prosociality.     

Skepticism: Lehrer versus Mooreanism

I will compare Lehrer??s anti-skeptical strategy from a coherentist point of view with the anti-skeptical strategy of the Mooreans. I will argue that there are strong similarities between them: neither can present a persuasive argument to the skeptic and both face the problem of easy knowledge in one way or another. However, both can offer a complete and self-explanatory explanation of knowledge although Mooreanism can offer the more natural one. Hence, one has good reasons to prefer Mooreanism to Lehrer??s anti-skeptical approach, if one does not prefer coherentism to foundationalism for other reasons.     

Attachment Styles and Construction of Self in a Clinical Group of Aerophobic: A Pilot Study

These constructivist exploratory study set out to explore the relationship between flying phobia and attachment styles, as well as between phobia and construction of self, others and world. We hyphothesised that individual affected by flying phobia would display avoidant and anxious-ambivalent attachment styles, and that their core constructs would be semantically related to primary ??freedom/dependence?? construct. 40 individuals affected by aerophobia were administered with two self reported instruments (AAQ and ASQ) after compiled a self-characterization. The phobic group was significantly connected to an avoidant style. In addition the phobic individuals define themselves as dependant, fearful, powerless and reserved. Clinical implication of this study, limitations and future directions are discussed.     

Selective impairment of living things and musical instruments on a verbal 'Semantic Knowledge Questionnaire' in a case of apperceptive visual agnosia

Semantic memory was investigated in a patient (MR) affected by a severe apperceptive visual agnosia, due to an ischemic cerebral lesion, bilaterally affecting the infero-mesial parts of the temporo-occipital cortices. The study was made by means of a Semantic Knowledge Questionnaire (Laiacona, Barbarotto, Trivelli, & Capitani, 1993), which takes separately into account four categories of living beings (animals, fruits, vegetables and body parts) and of artefacts (furniture, tools, vehicles and musical instruments), does not require a visual analysis and allows to distinguish errors concerning super-ordinate categorization, perceptual features and functional/encyclopedic knowledge. When the total number of errors obtained on all the categories of living and non-living beings was considered, a non-significant trend toward a higher number of errors in living stimuli was observed. This difference, however, became significant when body parts and musical instruments were excluded from the analysis. Furthermore, the number of errors obtained on the musical instruments was similar to that obtained on the living categories of animals, fruits and vegetables and significantly higher of that obtained in the other artefact categories. This difference was still significant when familiarity, frequency of use and prototypicality of each stimulus entered into a logistic regression analysis. On the other hand, a separate analysis of errors obtained on questions exploring super-ordinate categorization, perceptual features and functional/encyclopedic attributes showed that the differences between living and non-living stimuli and between musical instruments and other artefact categories were mainly due to errors obtained on questions exploring perceptual features. All these data are at variance with the 'domains of knowledge' hypothesis', which assumes that the breakdown of different categories of living and non-living things respects the distinction between biological entities and artefacts and support the models assuming that 'category-specific semantic disorders' are the by-product of the differential weighting that visual-perceptual and functional (or action-related) attributes have in the construction of different biological and artefacts categories.