The Role of Psychology in Media During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Cross-National Study

Dealing with COVID-19 and with the preventative measures that have been taken to mitigate the transmission of the virus causing the pandemic has posed a great challenge to the population. While psychologists have expertise with regard to preventive behavior change and to dealing with the mental health impact of measures, their expertise needs to be effectively communicated to the public. Mass media play a critical role in times of crisis, in many cases being the only source of information. While most research focuses on the importance of information content as a factor affecting psychological responses to a collective traumatic event, the way information is framed in the media is likely to influence the way health professionals are perceived as trustworthy. This study aimed to analyze the media framing of information from psychology during the COVID-19 pandemic in six countries from America and Europe, identifying the most recurrent topics in the news (n news items = 541) related to psychology and mental health. In all six countries the media address the psychological needs of the population, which vary depending on the imposed restrictions. The news content is influenced by the scientific sources used by the media. While the most prevalent topics focus on psychological risk and the need to seek mental health care, the least prevalent topics relate to counseling and behavioral guidelines for managing the psychological consequences of the pandemic. The study findings provide insight into how psychological knowledge contributes to the understanding and mitigation of COVID-19 consequences in different countries and identified fields where psychologists were consulted to respond to a health emergency. They also show a preference to consult other experts when searching for contextual or more macro-social explanations of critical situation.     

The phenomenology of embodied attention

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences - This paper aims to conceptualize the phenomenology of attentional experience as ‘embodied attention.’ Current psychological research, in...     

Functional connectivity abnormalities during contextual processing in schizophrenia and in Parkinson’s disease

Functional connectivity was evaluated in patients with schizophrenia (SC) and in patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) during the performance of a local contextual processing paradigm, to investigate the proposition that functional disconnection is involved with contextual processing deficits in these populations. To this end, we utilized event-related EEG signals, synchronization likelihood and graph theoretical analysis. Local context was defined as the occurrence of a predictive sequence of stimuli before the presentation of a target event. In the SC patients, we observed a decrease in path length (L) in the beta band, for the predictive sequence and for predicted and random targets, compared with controls. These abnormalities were associated with weaker frontal-temporal-parietal connections. In the PD patients we found longer L (theta band) for predicted targets, and higher cluster coefficients for both the predictive sequence (theta band) and predicted targets (alpha and theta bands), compared with controls. Detection of predicted targets was associated with weaker frontal-parietal connections in PD. No group differences were found for randomized standard stimuli in both SC and PD patients. These findings provide evidence of task-specific functional connectivity abnormalities within frontal networks during local contextual processing.     

Opening Scenarios: A Relational Perspective on How to Deal with Multiple Therapeutic Views

The aim of this work is to provide therapists with a conceptual outline to help them utilize theoretical and methodological perspectives from different psychotherapy models. More specifically, we will start with three basic assumptions from the social constructionist paradigm, particularly effective in bringing together different perspectives in therapy and providing therapists with useful criteria for selecting among them. The assumptions are as follows: (1) the psychological world of the individual is constructed within relational processes, mainly through dialogue; (2) in general, discourse can be classified as either generative or degenerative; and (3) individuals construct their life narratives based also on a common-sense that can derive from psychological theories developed within specific cultural traditions. These assumptions derive mainly from Gergen??s relational perspective (2009) and lead us to foresee a set of implications for clinical practice, where therapist and client are seen as ??multi-beings??, consequently endowed with multiple views, not one.     

How many lives can bloody and shocking road safety advertising save? The case of Spain

At the beginning of the 21st century, the punishment strategies used by the Spanish administration were considerably hardened to achieve a reduction in road accidents. This hardening could also be seen in the mass-media public advertising campaigns, with a marked shift from gentle messages to threat-based advertisements.The goal of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of this radical change in terms of main road accident indicators and the time that the effects last using multivariate unobserved component models set up in a state space framework applied to monthly series for the 1980–2008 period. The main conclusion is that the effect on reducing road accidents is no greater when citizens are subjected to a greater level of threats in advertising campaigns than would on average be achieved using campaigns with a low level of threats. Secondly, the impact of bloody advertising in Spain is limited to the most serious accidents, those that cause deaths, either on highways or in built-up areas. Moreover, the positive effects progressively decrease as the average lifespan for significant effects of medium and high level campaigns on deaths on highways or in built-up areas was 8 months and almost 12 days. The results show that a reduction in numbers of deaths and injuries is always achieved when the level of harshness in the messages is increased after a period of several years of mild advertising.     

On the Mind Dependence of Truth

The claim that truth is mind dependent has some initial plausibility only if truth bearers are taken to be mind dependent entities such as beliefs or statements. Even on that assumption, however, the claim is not uncontroversial. If it is spelled out as the thesis that “in a world devoid of mind nothing would be true”, then everything depends on how the phrase ‘true in world w’ is interpreted. If ‘A is true in w’ is interpreted as ‘A is true of w’ (i.e. ‘w satisfies A’s truth conditions’, the claim need not be true. If on the other hand it is interpreted as ‘A is true of w and exists in w’ then the claim is trivially true, though devoid of any antirealistic efficacy. Philosophers like Heidegger and Rorty, who hold that truth is mind dependent but reality is not, must regard such principles as “A if and only if it is true that A” as only contingently true, which may be a good reason to reject the mind dependence of truth anyway.     

Depressed mothers’ infants show less negative affect during non-contingent interactions

Infants of depressed and non-depressed mothers were videotaped interacting with their mothers in the [Nadel, J., Carchon, I., Kervella, C., Marcelli, D., & Reserbat-Plantey, D. (1999). Report: Expectancies for social contingency in 2-month-olds. Developmental Science, 2, 164–173] paradigm which consists of three segments including: (1) a free play, contingent interaction, (2) a non-contingent replay of the mothers’ behavior that had been videotaped during the first segment, and (3) a return to a free play, contingent interaction. As compared to infants of non-depressed mothers, infants of depressed mothers showed less negative change (less increase in frowning) in their behavior during the non-contingent replay segment. This finding was interpreted as the infants of depressed mothers being more accustomed to non-contingent behavior in their mothers, thus experiencing less violation of expectancy in this situation.