A Study of the Ethical Dilemmas Experienced by School Psychologists in Portugal

This study examines the ethical dilemmas and difficulties encountered by Portuguese school psychologists. As part of a larger survey, participants were asked about ethical issues faced in daily practice and asked to describe ethical incidents. Of the 477 respondents, 274 reported 441 ethically troubling or challenging situations. Responses were coded into a six-category system based on the code of ethics of Portuguese psychologists. Most of the reported dilemmas concerned privacy and confidentiality principles (53%). Results are discussed in light of relevant literature and international findings. Implications for the development of the profession and future research are provided.     

A walk through time: What you should have read by now or will read soon about psychotherapy

In this paper a five years analysis of psychotherapy is done. The sample, taken from the PsycLIT was composed of 2694 books and book's chapters which deal with psychotherapy from many perspectives. Results are offered about first author's sex, institutional affiliation and country. Besides, the content of each book and chapter is analyzed in terms of the therapeutic approach followed, the pathology and sample treated, and the specific theme or author's work reviewed. The paper ends with a thorough discussion of the most relevant results found and brief comments about the future of psychotherapy.     

Perceived intergroup competition and adolescents’ behavioural intentions toward minorities: the role of threat,stereotypes and emotions

The main purpose of this study was to analyse the effect of perceived intergroup competition on majority adolescents’ behavioural intentions toward two relevant immigrant groups in the Spanish context, Ecuadorians and Moroccans. We proposed an integrative path model in which perceived intergroup competition led to perception of outgroup threat, which in turn affected warmth stereotypes (morality and sociability). Perceived warmth further fostered positive and negative emotions, which in turn predicted facilitative and harmful interpersonal behavioural tendencies. Following a between subject design, participants (N = 231, M_age = 15.39, SD = 1.09) evaluated Moroccans (n = 114) or Ecuadorians (n = 117) on the examined variables. Results indicate that Ecuadorians were perceived as more moral and sociable and elicited less negative emotions than Moroccans. The model had a good fit for both groups. Perceived intergroup competition predicted perceived outgroup threat which, in turn, fostered perceived morality and sociability. Only perceived morality predicted both positive and negative emotions, whereas sociability elicited only positive emotions. Finally, facilitation intentions were predicted by both positive and negative emotions, while harm intentions were triggered only by negative ones. Results highlight the distinctive role of morality for intergroup relations during adolescence and extend previous literature regarding perceived intergroup competition, stereotype content, emotions and perceived outgroup threat.

     

European Portuguese Validation of the Thought Control Questionnaire Insomnia-Revised (TCQI-R)

Journal of Rational-Emotive & Cognitive-Behavior Therapy - Individuals with insomnia complaints often report intrusive thoughts. In this sense, strategies to cope with cognitive arousal are a...     

Improving Written Argumentative Synthesis by Teaching the Integration of Conflicting Information from Multiple Sources

The goal of this study was to assess the effectiveness of 2 different types of intervention aimed at improving written argumentative synthesis by integrating conflicting information from different sources. Both interventions combined the use of a guide with collaborative practice, but one of them also included explicit strategy instruction. Only students who received additional explicit instruction showed an improved ability to integrate conflicting information and increased the number of arguments they selected from the sources.     

Creation and Validation of an English-Language Version of the Multifaceted Empathy Test (MET)

The measurement of cognitive and emotional empathy, reflecting abilities to understand and to experience or ‘feel’ the emotional states of others, is important for many studies pertaining to clinical conditions as well as normative personality characteristics. The Multifaceted Empathy Test (MET) has been shown to be a useful and efficient instrument for indexing impaired empathy in different diagnostic groups, in particular due to its measurement of both cognitive and emotional components of empathy within the same task set. This makes the MET a valuable means for assessing empathy with implications for conditions such as autism and psychopathy. However, up to this point the MET has only been available in German, and has not been investigated in regard to specific facets of psychopathy. This report describes (a) the translation of the MET into English to allow its use in a wider range of populations, and (b) efforts undertaken to refine the measure itself and evaluate its relationship with distinct facets of psychopathy (i.e., boldness, meanness, disinhibition). As expected, MET emotional empathy showed its strongest association with the meanness component of psychopathy (r?=??.31, p?<?.01). The resulting instrument was then validated in a sample of 80 healthy control subjects, where it showed expected associations with other empathy measures and psychopathic tendencies. Findings also highlighted some issues pertaining to evaluation of scale reliability. Results from this study indicate that this translated version of the MET can serve as an effective tool for assessing emotional and cognitive empathy in English-speaking samples.     

Spelling development in the Spanish language

This study focused on spelling development in Spanish children from elementary grades. A sample of 1045 was selected from 2nd to 6th grade belonging to four schools in Tenerife Island with an age range between 7 and 12 years old (M = 113.8, SD = 17.6). We administered a standardized writing test that includes diverse subtests to assess spelling, ruled and not ruled, and various written composition tasks (i.e., writing a story based on vignettes, describing a character and writing a story). We calculated the average of correct spellings in each variable and school level, and we also analyzed the type of misspellings that children made across different writing tasks. We found that spelling is acquired by 4th-grade children when it is not ruled, whereas the spelling of ruled words is acquired by 5th-grade children. When we analyzed the misspellings in a dictation task, we found that the children confused spelling of the graphemes c/s/z/x. Across different writing tasks, we found that students committed more misspellings with the graphemes b/v, h y c/s/z/x before they finished the 4th elementary grade.     

Holistic processing of faces: perceptual and decisional components

Researchers have used several composite face paradigms to assess holistic processing of faces. In the selective attention paradigm, participants decide whether one face part (e.g., top) is the same as a previously seen face part. Their judgment is affected by whether the irrelevant part of the test face is the same as or different than the relevant part of the study face. This failure of selective attention implies holistic processing. However, the authors show that this task alone cannot distinguish between perceptual and decisional sources of holism. The distinction can be addressed by the complete identification paradigm, in which both face parts are judged to be same or different, combined with analyses based on general recognition theory (F. G. Ashby & J. T. Townsend, 1986). The authors used a different paradigm, sequential responses, to relate these 2 paradigms empirically and theoretically. Sequential responses produced the same results as did selective attention and complete identification. Moreover, disruptions of holistic processing by systematic misalignment of the faces corresponded with systematic and significant changes in the decisional components, but not in the perceptual components, that were extracted using general recognition theory measures. This finding suggests a significant decisional component of holistic face processing in the composite face task.