Program of training in solution of practical problems applied to people with intellectual disability

The lack of programs to train people in practical problem-solving is one of the challenges that professionals who attend people with mental deficiency must cope with. The main goal of this study is to assess the effects of a program designed to improve these skills, aimed at people with intellectual discapacity. The sample was made up of 66 subjects, aged between 17 and 36 years old. The program was based on the use of examples of fictitious characters who undergo situations that are similar to those of the subjects to whom the program is administered, and techniques to improve skills were generated from these situations. In order to achieve the goal, a classic pre- posttest design was used, with an experimental and a control group. The results show positive effects in most of the variables considered as a consequence of the administration of the program.     

Multimodal intervention program to improve attention deficits

Is it possible to learn to attend? The purpose of this article is to provide information about the development, administration, and contrast of an intervention program to improve selective and sustained attention in students from 5 to 19 years of age, all attending school, and with difficulties to learn the academic materials corresponding to their age. Two groups participated in the study: one with difficulties in selective attention and the other with difficulties in sustained attention. The group with selective attention difficulties was made up of 102 students, of whom 59 made up the experimental group and 43 the control group. The group of students with difficulties in sustained attention was made up of 106 students, of whom 58 participated as the experimental group and 48 as the control group. The results indicate that this kind of intervention (which combines visual therapy, cortical activation, and training with activity banks) is effective to improve attentional deficits, both at the level of selective attention and of sustained attention.     

Evaluation of communicative and linguistic development using the Spanish version of the MacArthur-Bates inventories

The MacArthur-Bates Inventories are a valid and reliable method for assessing communicative and linguistic skills in infants (8-15 months) and young children (16-30 months), and have been adapted to many languages. This paper presents their adaptation to Spanish. Structure, innovations included in the Spanish version, and the standardisation process are described, and some results obtained from the analysis of a sample of 1150 children are presented. The advantages and limitations of the use of parental report inventories are highlighted. For children before three years of age, there are very few assessment tools of language and communicative development with sufficient guarantees produced and edited in Spain. The Spanish version of the MacArthur-Bates Inventories represents an important contribution for early identification of language delays or disorders, and for follow-up of these cases.     

Effect of incentives on retention in an outpatient treatment for cocaine addicts

The high drop-out rate in treatment programs is one of the most important problems in the area of drug addictions. This study evaluated the effect of the use of incentives on retention in an outpatient program for cocaine addicts. The effect of individual variables on program drop-out was also analysed. Participants were 66 subjects who were randomly assigned to one of three treatment groups: standard treatment, treatment with incentives I, and treatment with incentives II. The patients of these two groups received incentives contingent on cocaine abstinence with two different magnitudes. Retention rate at six months was 35% in the standard treatment, 78.6% in the treatment with incentives I, and 53.3% in the treatment with incentives II. The global prognostic capacity of the individual variables (sociodemographic, history and consumption pattern, psychopathological variables, and EuropASI scores) was 85.7%, with the psychopathological variables being more closely related to retention. These results suggest that the use of incentives may be an effective strategy to improve retention in outpatient treatments for cocaine addiction.     

Relationship between burnout, job strain, and sleep characteristics

The purpose of the present study is to analyse the relationship between sleep, burnout, and job strain in a sample of 316 healthy workers from various professional sectors. Multiple significant correlations between the principal sleep parameters, the dimensions of burnout, and job strain were found. The regression analyses show that sleep quality and various dimensions of job strain are significant predictors of several aspects of burnout. Sleep quality explains an even higher percentage of the variance in emotional exhaustion than the variance explained by more well-known variables such as job demands. Moreover, sleep quality interacts with aspects of job strain in its influence on the dimensions of burnout, although the exact relationship between these variables needs to be investigated in future longitudinal studies. Our results suggest that interventions to optimise sleep habits could prevent or alleviate burnout and could be a part of organisational work.     

Benevolent Sexism Toward Men and Women: Justification of the Traditional System and Conventional Gender Roles in Spain

The present study aimed to explore sexist attitudes in young people and to investigate the role of these ideologies in the contribution of boys and girls to housework. For this purpose, 139 Spanish high school students (67 females and 72 males) responded to the ASI and AMI scales (Glick and Fiske in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 70:491–512, 1996, Psychology of Women Quarterly 23:519–536, 1999) and assessed their contribution to housework in tasks considered traditionally done by women (highly gender-typed) or more neutral tasks (sex-neutral). Results showed that girls contributed significantly more to housework than boys. In addition, correlation analyses showed that benevolent sexism toward women, men and hostility toward men were significant related to highly gender typed tasks only in the female sample. This result shows the relevance of sexist ideologies in maintaining established differences between genders.     

Emotions,Public Opinion,and U.S. Presidential Approval Rates: A 5‐Year Analysis of Online Political Discussions

This article examines how emotional reactions to political events shape public opinion. We analyze political discussions in which people voluntarily engage online to approximate the public agenda: Online discussions offer a natural approach to the salience of political issues and the means to analyze emotional reactions as political events take place in real time. We measure shifts in emotions of the public over a period that includes 2 U.S. presidential elections, the 9/11 attacks, and the start of military action in Afghanistan and Iraq. Our findings show that emotional reactions to political events help explain approval rates for the same period, which casts novel light on the mechanisms that mediate the association between agenda setting and political evaluations.