Trauma and Religiousness

Victims of traumatic events who experience re-traumatization often develop a highly ambivalent relationship to God and all religiosity as extremely conflictual. On the one hand, they may choose to blame God for not having protected them, for having left them to feel so alone, for having been indifferent to them or they may even turn their wrath upon God, as the source of cruelty. Often though, the traumas experienced by individuals prompt them to turn to God and religion in search of help. This gives reason for the need of new and up-to-date research that can help elucidate why some people choose to seek help in religion and others turn away from it.     

Are there limits to scientists’ obligations to seek and engage dissenters?

Dissent is thought to play a valuable role in science, so that scientific communities ought to create opportunities for receiving critical feedback and take dissenting views seriously. There is concern, however, that some dissent does more harm than good. Dissent on climate change and evolutionary theory, for example, has confused the public, created doubt about existing consensus, derailed public policy, and forced scientists to devote resources to respond. Are there limits to the extent to which scientific communities have obligations to seek and engage dissenting views? We consider the two main criteria that have been offered for what constitutes “normatively appropriate dissent” or the sort of dissent that ought to have the opportunity to be heard and taken seriously. Many have argued that dissenters must (1) engage in uptake of criticism against their own views and (2) share some standards for theory appraisal. We argue these criteria ultimately are unsuccessful.     

History of the Hospital Real y General de Nuestra Señora de Gracia in Saragossa: Occupational Therapy Pioneer in Neurology and Psychiatry in Spain

In this article the authors describe the program of the Hospital Real y General de Nuestra Señora de Gracia in Saragossa (Spain) and its importance in the history of occupational therapy. It is believed to be the first hospital in the world to use occupations as therapy for psychiatric patients. Pinel knew about this new trend through a report by Iberti and wrote about it in his book Medico-Philosophical Treatise on Mental Alienation.     

Well-Being and Social Justice Among Moroccan Migrants in Southern Spain

The decision to migrate is normally based on expectations of improving one’s actual living conditions and therefore, one’s well-being. However, these expectations are not usually met in receiving contexts that relegate newcomers to lower power positions. From a liberating community psychology approach, this study aims to develop a predictive model of the well-being of Moroccan migrants living in southern Spain. Data were collected from a survey sample of 633 migrants (the average age was 31.9 years and 51.8 % were women) from 20 territorial units of Andalusia. Through a process of multilevel regression analysis, this study reveals that the well-being of the Moroccan community is closely determined by the following: (a) the level of social justice in the receiving context (openness to diversity of receiving communities, cultural sensitivity of community services, and residential integration); and (b) the individual strengths of the population (use of active coping strategies, satisfaction with the receiving context, and temporal stability in the new environment). These results empirically support the impact that different ecological levels of analysis have on well-being. Major theoretical contributions of the model and useful suggestions for improving migrant well-being are discussed.     

Perpetuating Gender Inequality via the Internet? An Analysis of Women’s Presence in Spanish Online Newspapers

This study examines women’s representation in Spanish national online newspapers. For this purpose, we developed an automatic content analysis method to analyze an extensive sample of 34,235 news articles gathered from March to May 2006. Our general objective was to investigate possible gender bias in Spanish online news. To do so we focused on three journalistic routines, one at the individual level of the reporter (gender) and two at the media routine level (sections, publication day, and article length). The results of the estimated multivariate models revealed that women are still linked to traditionally “female” sections, such as people, society, and culture. Analysis of article length and publication day showed that women appear more frequently in shorter news items and in the Sunday news, which we interpreted as indicators of male association with newsworthiness. We also found differences in gender reporting since female journalists tend to include more women in the news they report than their male peers. These results provide evidence that online newspapers continue to perpetuate underrepresentation, stereotyping, and discrimination of women in web news thereby reinforcing gender inequality.     

Gender and Leadership in Spain: a Systematic Review of Some Key Aspects

As Spain experienced rapid societal and gender equality changes after the end of the dictatorship in 1975, the development of gender equality in Spain has differed from other European countries and the United States. Therefore, the results of Spanish studies conducted on gender and leadership might differ from those conducted in countries with other historical backgrounds such as other European countries or the United States. We systematically reviewed the current theoretical and empirical literature on gender and leadership with a special emphasis on this comparison. Thereby, we focused on four essential aspects: (a) the underlying mechanism of gender inequality (e.g., traditional gender roles), (b) gender and leadership behavior, (c) the relation of female representation in top management and on boards with organizational performance, and d) female representation and non-performance-related organizational outcomes. Further, Spain is currently experiencing a severe economic crisis. On the one hand, such a crisis might provide a chance for gender equality development; on the other hand, it might trigger a regression toward traditional gender roles in society. Thus, in our discussion, we relate the results of our comparison to these two different but possible consequences of the crisis. To conclude, we outline directions for future research that we hope will provide answers to important questions in this area of research.     

Uncovering Substantive Patterns in Student Responses in International Large-Scale Assessments—Comparing a Latent Class to a Manifest DIF Approach

In this study, we contrast results from two differential item functioning (DIF) approaches (manifest and latent class) by the number of items and sources of items identified as DIF using data from an international reading assessment. The latter approach yielded three latent classes, presenting evidence of heterogeneity in examinee response patterns. It also yielded more DIF items with larger effect sizes and more consistent item response patterns by substantive aspects (e.g., reading comprehension processes and cognitive complexity of items). Based on our findings, we suggest empirically evaluating the homogeneity assumption in international assessments because international populations cannot be assumed to have homogeneous item response patterns. Otherwise, differences in response patterns within these populations may be under-detected when conducting manifest DIF analyses. Detecting differences in item responses across international examinee populations has implications on the generalizability and meaningfulness of DIF findings as they apply to heterogeneous examinee subgroups.     

Effects of negative content on the processing of gender information: An event-related potential study

Previous research on emotion in language has mainly concerned the impact of emotional information on several aspects of lexico-semantic analyses of single words. However, affective influences on morphosyntactic processing are less understood. In the present study, we focused on the impact of negative valence in the processing of gender agreement relations. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants read three-word phrases and performed a syntactic judgment task. Negative and neutral adjectives could agree or disagree in gender with the preceding noun. At an electrophysiological level, the amplitude of a left anterior negativity (LAN) to gender agreement mismatches decreased in negative words, relative to neutral words. The behavioral data suggested that LAN amplitudes might be indexing the processing costs associated with the detection of gender agreement errors, since the detection of gender mismatches resulted in faster and more accurate responses than did the detection of correct gender agreement relations. According to this view, it seems that negative content facilitated the processes implicated in the early detection of gender agreement mismatches. However, gender agreement violations in negative words triggered processes involved in the reanalysis and repair of the syntactic structure, as reflected in larger P600 amplitudes to incorrect than to correct phrases, irrespective of their emotional valence.     

Dissociable yet tied inhibitory processes: The structure of inhibitory control

Cognitive and neural models have proposed the existence of a single inhibitory process that regulates behavior and depends on the right frontal operculum (rFO). The aim of this study was to make a contribution to the ongoing debate as to whether inhibition is a single process or is composed of multiple, independent processes. Here, within a single paradigm, we assessed the links between two inhibitory phenomena—namely, resistance to involuntary visual capture by abrupt onsets and resolving of spatial stimulus–response conflict. We did so by conducting three experiments, two involving healthy volunteers (Exps. 1 and 3), and one with the help of a well-documented patient, R.J., with selectively weakened inhibition following a lesion of the rFO. The results suggest that resistance to capture and stimulus–response conflict are independent, because (a) additive effects were found (Exps. 1 and 3), (b) capture did not correlate with compatibility effects (Exp. 1), (c) dual tasking affected the two phenomena differently (Exp. 3), and (d) a dissociation was found between the two in patient R.J. (Exp. 2). However, the results also show that these two phenomena may share some processing components, given that (a) both were affected in patient R.J., but to different degrees (Exp. 2), and (b) increasing the difficulty of dual tasking produced an increasingly negative correlation between capture and compatibility (Exp. 3), which suggests that when resources are withdrawn from the control of the former, they are used to control the latter.