Paternal Involvement with School-aged Children in Brazilian Families: Association with Childhood Competence

Thirty-eight middle- to lower-income Brazilian fathers in two-parent families provided estimates of different dimensions of their involvement with their school-aged children, assessed children’s social competence, and rated their beliefs on family roles. Analyses showed that fathers and mothers spent similar amounts of time in different activities with children, but did differ in didactic interactions, their responsibility for, and actually disciplining children. There were no significant differences in participation due to gender of child or income. Fathers’ ideological beliefs about gender roles were positively related to involvement in disciplining children and inversely related to engagement in social activities with children. Fathers’ involvement in disciplining children was negatively associated with childhood social competence after controlling for mothers’ contribution.     

Personality and Emotional Intelligence in Older Adults: A Predictive Model Based on Structural Equations Modeling

Recent research on emotions in aging points to emotional intelligence (EI) as a factor that plays an important role in this process, and different conceptualizations of EI show that this construct is closely linked to personality in the general population. The main purpose of this study was to find out whether findings obtained in the general population indicating a predictive relationship between personality and EI are also confirmed during the aging process. A sample of 233 healthy older subjects between 60 and 90?years old was used. Participants answered two self-report scales on EI and personality, respectively. Structural equation modeling was used to test the predictive role of personality in EI. Personality was found to be a predictor of EI in older people, and the weight of the prediction was significant in all the dimensions of the big five personality factors, except the dimension of neuroticism, which is known to vary greatly during the aging process. These results indicate that personality influences EI differently in the older adult population, compared to the general population. This is a relevant finding that should be examined further in order to better understand the influence of personality on positive emotional development in this population.     

The world may not be just for you but you'd better not say it: On the social value of expressing personal belief in a just world

The expression of personal belief in a just world (PBJW) has been discussed as a criterion of excellence in social judgments. In four experimental studies we hypothesized and found that targets who express high versus low PBJW are judged as more: (i) deserving of success and (ii) suited to socio-organizational expectations. The four studies show that suitability to socio-organizational expectations mediates the relation between PBJW expressed and success deservingness, even after controlling for judgments of likability, status, rationality, optimism, and targets as victims. Studies 2 and 3 show this pattern occurs regardless of target performance appraisal. Study 4 indicates that expressing low PBJW decreases the social value of individuals, but expressing high PBJW does not increase it. We discuss the impact of PBJW expression on people's lives, namely on upward social mobility of members of low-status groups, and the influence of the negativity bias on judgments caused by PBJW expression.     

Romantic attachment,dyadic coping,and parental adjustment across the transition to parenthood

This study explored the mediating role of common dyadic coping (common DC) on the longitudinal associations between attachment‐related anxiety and avoidance and parental adjustment to the first year postpartum. A total of 92 Portuguese couples completed self‐report questionnaires of romantic attachment, common DC, parenting stress, and parental confidence. Results showed that more avoidant parents (at mid‐pregnancy) engaged less in common DC (at 6 weeks postpartum), which consequently increased their partner's parenting stress (only in mothers) and decreased their partner's parental confidence (in both parents) at 6–9 months postpartum. Anxious attachment did not predict parents' adjustment directly or indirectly. Interventions aimed at preventing adjustment difficulties to early parenthood in more avoidant parents should focus on enhancing their common DC strategies soon after childbirth.     

Reading Difficulties in Low-SES Children: A Study of Cognitive Profiles

Reading difficulties of children growing up in poverty contexts have not received as much attention as those of children from middle-income families. This paper analyzes the reading-related cognitive profiles of Argentine, Spanish-speaking, low-SES children with reading difficulties (RD), by comparing them with chronological age- (CA) and reading age- (RA) matched children from the same socioeconomic background. Ninety children (30 in each group) participated in the study. Testing included reading, spelling, verbal memory, phonological sensitivity, rapid naming, letter knowledge, and vocabulary measures. Results showed that children from the RD group performed significantly worse than their same-age peers. These findings would suggest the presence of a cognitive vulnerability in children with reading difficulties. Interestingly, when compared with children from the RA-matched control group, children in the RD group only obtained significantly lower scores in phoneme segmentation and letter-sound recognition tasks. Cognitive profiles of low-income children growing in poverty differ from cognitive profiles described for middle-income children with dyslexia. Given that teaching of letter sounds is not included in Argentina’s mandatory curriculum, it is possible that letter-sound teaching constitutes an environmental factor that interacts with other risk factors to produce reading difficulties in poverty contexts.     

An encompassing framework for Paraconsistent Logic Programs

We propose a framework which extends Antitonic Logic Programs [Damásio and Pereira, in: Proc. 6th Int. Conf. on Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning, Springer, 2001, p. 748] to an arbitrary complete bilattice of truth-values, where belief and doubt are explicitly represented. Inspired by Ginsberg and Fitting's bilattice approaches, this framework allows a precise definition of important operators found in logic programming, such as explicit and default negation. In particular, it leads to a natural semantical integration of explicit and default negation through the Coherence Principle [Pereira and Alferes, in: European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 1992, p. 102], according to which explicit negation entails default negation. We then define Coherent Answer Sets, and the Paraconsistent Well-founded Model semantics, generalizing many paraconsistent semantics for logic programs. In particular, Paraconsistent Well-Founded Semantics with eXplicit negation (WFSX_p) [Alferes et al., J. Automated Reas. 14 (1) (1995) 93–147; Damásio, PhD thesis, 1996]. The framework is an extension of Antitonic Logic Programs for most cases, and is general enough to capture Probabilistic Deductive Databases, Possibilistic Logic Programming, Hybrid Probabilistic Logic Programs, and Fuzzy Logic Programming. Thus, we have a powerful mathematical formalism for dealing simultaneously with default, paraconsistency, and uncertainty reasoning. Results are provided about how our semantical framework deals with inconsistent information and with its propagation by the rules of the program.     

Reading and Writing: Psychoanalytical Treatment in a Case of Paranoia

Difficulties encountered in clinical work with psychoses require psychoanalytical approaches different from those used for treating neurosis. The authors use a clinical case of a paranoiac patient to highlight the role played by writing, drawing, and painting in the psychoanalytical treatment of psychosis. They also discuss the role of the reader-analyst in this patient’s transferential process, which led to the emergence of a new subjectivity.     

Load-dependent modulation of affective picture processing

Because of the biological significance of emotional stimuli, their processing is considered largely automatic. In the study reported herein, we tested the alternative hypothesis—namely, that the processing of emotional stimuli requires some level of attention. Our experiments utilized highly negative and arousing visual stimuli comprising mutilated bodies. All experiments employed a single task, which consisted of determining whether two peripheral bars were like oriented or not, thereby eliminating potential task-difference confounds that may have contaminated prior studies. Our results revealed that task-irrelevant unpleasant images slowed reaction time during the performance of the main task. Such interference was modulated by task difficulty as well as by alcohol consumption, showing that the processing of emotional visual stimuli is not immune to attentional manipulations. These results suggest that it is essential to utilize attentional manipulations that more fully consume attentional resources in order to demonstrate that the processing of emotional stimuli is resource limited.