Individual differences in the linguistic competence of referential and expressive subjects

The aim of this work was to examine individual differences in referential and expressive style through a longitudinal study. The composition of the first 50 words, communicative gestures, the conversational style of dyads and the percentage of vocabulary produced from 12 to 24 month-olds were analyzed. The vocabulary was collected through interviews to parents and sessions of mother-infant interaction in the laboratory. Significant differences in the proportion of common nouns and frozen phrases between referential and expressive children in the frequency of communicative gestures and style conversation were found. Thus, referential children and their mothers used more pointing gestures than the expressive children and their mothers. Additionally, mothers of referential children used completing more frequently.     

Gender,Dependency and Guilt in Intimate Relationship Conflict Among Spanish Couples

Conflict is inherent to all types of interpersonal relationships. The interdependence that characterizes romantic relationships is related to the way that men and women perceive intimate partner conflict. The emotion of guilt also plays an important role in the perception of conflict. In the present research we study how, in a conflictive situation, dependency in the relationship is related to guilt in men and women. A total of 116 young Spaniards (half men and half women) were exposed to a plausible conflict situation with their partners. Fifty-eight were undergraduate Psychology students who came to the laboratory with their partners (also mainly college students). The perceived seriousness of the conflict was manipulated, and the study explored how this perception affected the emotion of guilt. We also analyzed the effect of dependency on the intensity of experienced guilt. Results showed that women with high dependency felt guiltier than women with low dependency in high-conflict situations.     

Discourse-based emotional consistency modulates early and middle components of event-related potentials

In this study, participants read stories describing emotional episodes with either a positive or negative valence (Experiment 1). Following each story, participants were exposed to short sentences referring to the protagonist, and the event-related potential (ERP) for each sentence's last word was recorded. Some sentences described the protagonist's emotion, either consistent or inconsistent with the story; others were neutral; and others involved a semantically anomalous word. Inconsistent emotions were found to elicit larger N100/P200 and N400 than consistent emotions. However, when participants were exposed to the same critical sentences in a control experiment (Experiment 2) in which the stories had been removed, emotional consistency effects disappeared in all ERP components, demonstrating that these effects were discourse-level phenomena. By contrast, the ordinary N400 effect for locally anomalous words in the sentence was obtained both with and without story context. In conclusion, reading stories describing events with emotional significance determines strong and very early anticipations of an emotional word.     

Moderating role of family and friends’ factors between disocial behavior and consumption in adolescents

This study analyzes the relation between dissocial behaviors and substances consumption in adolescents, and tests the moderating role of social risk factors from family and peers in this relation. 1,239 adolescents of Secondary school, 612 boys and 627 girls, from 11-18 (M = 14.39; SD = 1.43) from state and private schools completed an adapted questionnaire from the State survey on risk activities for health in adolescents (ESTUDES) and the FRIDA questionnaire about social risk factors. We found that disocial behaviors and consumption are common and are closely related. MHMR analysis confirm the moderate role of two risk family factors (indifference family reaction against drugs consumption and a permissive and tolerant parental educative style) besides tolerant attitude towards consumption on friends and easily access to drugs. That moderation is higher for girls than for boys. The results of this work highlight the influence of family and friends’ factors between dissocial behaviors and drug consumption and contribute to the knowledge of an operational model for the development of preventing programs.     

Phonological false recognition produced by bottom-up automatic activation in young and older people

ABSTRACT

Two experiments explored a new procedure to implicitly induce phonological false memories in young and older people. On the study tasks, half of the words were formed from half of the letters in the alphabet, whereas the remaining words were formed from all the letters in the alphabet. On the recognition tests, there were three types of non-studied new words: critical lures formed from the same half of the letters as the studied words; distractors formed from the other half of the letters not used, and distractors formed from all the letters in the alphabet. In both experiments, the results showed that, in both young and older people, critical lures produced more false recognitions than distractors composed of all the letters in the alphabet, which, in turn, produced more false alarms than distractors composed of the letters not used during the study. These results support the predictions of the activation/monitoring models, which assume that false memories are partly due to activation spreading from items (semantically or phonologically) related to the critical words.     

Staffing Services Quality and Innovativeness in Pharmaceutical Companies

This paper examines whether the main dimensions of staffing services quality have any effect on innovativeness. A resource‐based view of human resource management is used as theoretical approach. A questionnaire was sent to the CEOs of an international sample of pharmaceutical companies. A regression analysis was used to test hypotheses about the influence of the staffing services quality dimensions on innovativeness. The main findings are that all but one of the staffing services quality dimensions considered have significant, positive effects on innovativeness. Candidate quality is the dimension that affects innovativeness most, while timeliness has no significant effect.     

Cross‐Situational Learning of Phonologically Overlapping Words Across Degrees of Ambiguity

Cross‐situational word learning (XSWL) tasks present multiple words and candidate referents within a learning trial such that word–referent pairings can be inferred only across trials. Adults encode fine phonological detail when two words and candidate referents are presented in each learning trial (2 × 2 scenario; Escudero, Mulak, & Vlach, 2016a ). To test the relationship between XSWL task difficulty and phonological encoding, we examined XSWL of words differing by one vowel or consonant across degrees of within‐learning trial ambiguity (1 × 1 to 4 × 4). Word identification was assessed alongside three distractors. Adults finely encoded words via XSWL: Learning occurred in all conditions, though accuracy decreased across the 1 × 1 to 3 × 3 conditions. Accuracy was highest for the 1 × 1 condition, suggesting fast‐mapping is a stronger learning strategy here. Accuracy was higher for consonant than vowel set targets, and having more distractors from the same set mitigated identification of vowel set targets only, suggesting possible stronger encoding of consonants than vowels.     

Development of a questionnaire to assess user satisfaction of a penal mediation program (CSM-P)

The aim of the present study is to elaborate an instrument (CSM-P), valid for victims and aggressors, to assess satisfaction of individuals participating in a penal mediation program (VOM). The instrument was administered to a sample of 213 subjects, randomly chosen from the pool of participants in a VOM program of Catalonian Justice Department. Data analysis of the questionnaire shows an internal consistency of .88 (Cronbach's alpha). The dimensionality of the questionnaire is structured in a single factor that accounts for 61.45% of the variance. The instrument has proven its utility for assessing the satisfaction of the participants in a penal mediation program. Validation of the instrument in similar populations should be performed and it should be adapted to other contexts where assessing user satisfaction in a mediation program is necessary.     

Building Alliances with (In)Voluntary Clients: A Study Focused on Therapists’ Observable Behaviors

This study aimed to compare therapists’ observable behaviors to promote alliances with involuntary and voluntary clients during brief family therapy. The therapists’ contributions to fostering alliances were rated in sessions 1 and 4 using videotapes of 29 families who were observed in brief therapy. Using the System for Observing Family Therapy Alliances, trained raters searched for specific therapist behaviors that contributed to or detracted from the four alliance dimensions: engagement in the therapeutic process, an emotional connection with the therapist, safety within the therapeutic system, and a shared sense of purpose within the family. The results showed that when working with involuntary clients, therapists presented more behaviors to foster the clients’ engagement and to promote a shared sense of purpose within the family. However, in the fourth session, the therapists in both groups contributed to the alliance in similar ways. The results are discussed in terms of (a) the therapists’ alliance‐building behaviors, (b) the specificities of each client group, and (c) the implications for clinical practice, training, and research.     

Gender in Spanish Daily Newspapers

The purpose of this study was to examine the portrayal of women and men in a Spanish daily newspaper and to find whether there were gender differences among the authors of the articles in said newspaper. A content analysis was conducted of 4,060 articles and advertisements from 24 issues of a randomly selected, large-circulation, Spanish newspaper. Men were found to be more commonly featured in the articles, photographs, and advertisements than women, and they would usually be soldiers, athletes or high-rank businessmen much more often than women were. Furthermore, we determined that the reporters writing the articles were more likely to be men than women. And, in addition, men were more likely to be cited as sources than women.