Attachment representations in adults with congenital blindness: association with maternal interactive behaviors during childhood

This study explores how maternal interactive behaviors experienced during the childhood of adults with congenital blindness are associated with their subsequent development and personality. Many researchers have found a high frequency of maternal directiveness and overprotection in sighted mother-congenitally blind child relationships. One open question is whether these behaviors may have negative effects on congenitally blind children's subsequent development, or whether they may have a functionally adaptive-strategic role. The purpose of this study was to discriminate between the two hypotheses. This objective was pursued by adopting the theory of attachment and administering the Adult Attachment Interview to 15 participants with congenital blindness. Results suggested that directive and overprotective maternal behaviors are experienced by the persons with congenital blindness as encouraging and functional as long as they are accompanied by an affective, loving, and supportive attitude. Results did not support the hypothesis that directive and overprotective maternal interactive behaviors have a necessarily negative effect on the development of persons with congenital blindness.     

Tools for remote usability evaluation of Web applications through browser logs and task models

The dissemination of Web applications is extensive and still growing. The great penetration of Web sites raises a number of challenges for usability evaluators. Video-based analysis can be rather expensive and may provide limited results. In this article, we discuss what information can be provided by automatic tools able to process the information contained in browser logs and task models. To this end, we present a tool that can be used to compare log files of user behavior with the task model representing the actual Web site design, in order to identify where users’ interactions deviate from those envisioned by the system design.     

Religious and Spiritual Practices Used by Children and Adolescents to Cope with Cancer

Journal of Religion and Health - This study consists of an integrative review of the scientific literature that aimed to know the religious and spiritual practices used by children and adolescents...     

Greater family identification—but not greater contact with family members—leads to better health: Evidence from a Spanish longitudinal study

We investigated the effect of family identification (one's subjective sense of belonging to and commonality with the family) on self‐reported ill‐health in 206 Valencian undergraduates, with eight months between Time 1 (T1) and Time 2 (T2). While greater family identification T1 predicted lower ill‐health T2, ill‐health T1 did not predict family identification T2. Family contact T1 (one's intensity of interaction with family) was unrelated to ill‐health T2. This shows that family identification impacts positively on health over time (rather than health impacting positively on family identification over time), and this is not reducible to effects exerted by family contact. These findings indicate that encouraging patients to engage in group activities might produce negligible health gains unless the patient identifies with the group in question.     

The Map and the Territory: Complexity in Biology

In business administration or in economics it is absolutely relevant not to consider indexes like profit growth rate or gross domestic product as exhaustive indexes for economic wealth. Likewise, in biology it is important not to confuse the representation of life with life itself. The most important concepts in biology are information, memory, structure, plasticity, and robustness. Information is the difference that makes the difference. Memories are information registered in an organism. Plasticity is the capacity of a living organism to change its own structure/sets of behaviors for having a competitive advantage. Robustness is the ability of a living organism to resist environmental changes without changing its own structure/sets of behavior, and fragility is when a living organism undergoes changes in its own structure without being able to resist non-adaptive changes.     

Beyond Death’s (and Conception’s) Door: The Unsettling Limitations of Incarnate Existence

The psychological effects of contemplating one’s death have received much empirical attention, but the impact of thinking about one’s conception—the other temporal endpoint of physical existence—has not. Across three experiments, reflecting on conception or death (vs. a neutral topic) led to increased framing of sexual reproduction as miraculous and sacred, intensified belief in discarnate immortality, and a greater desire to experience a discarnate state that offered no direct assurance of literal immortality. Thinking about death uniquely evoked greater anxiety as well as greater desire for an experience that offered assurance of literal immortality, congruent with the tenets of terror management theory. Nevertheless, the parallel effects evoked by reflecting on conception and death also suggest that both amplify the aversive salience of the limitations inherent to physical existence, such that people respond by seeking experiences and adjusting attitudes/beliefs to divert attention from the physical body.