Psychosocial Variables Associated With Verbal Abuse as a Form of Intimate Partner Violence Against Women in a Spanish Sample

This article aims to analyze psychosocial variables associated with verbal abuse in women who suffer intimate partner violence. The following factors, taken from the scientific literature, were examined: social and family isolation; low self-esteem; an excess of empathy for the abuser; submission; psychological dependence on the abuser; and, self-blame as internal attribution for the cause of abuse. Our results show that low self-esteem has a direct relationship with verbal abuse. Additionally, family (including in-laws) and social (from friends, workmates, and neighbors), isolation are significantly and positively related to verbal abuse. The results of our study raise questions about the adoption of gender roles and their consequences when stereotyped tendencies are acquired. Implications, as well as ideas future research, are discussed.     

Norms for 10,491 Spanish words for five discrete emotions: Happiness,disgust, anger,fear, and sadness

The discrete emotion theory proposes that affective experiences can be reduced to a limited set of universal “basic” emotions, most commonly identified as happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust. Here we present norms for 10,491 Spanish words for those five discrete emotions collected from a total of 2,010 native speakers, making it the largest set of norms for discrete emotions in any language to date. When used in conjunction with the norms from Hinojosa, Martínez-García et al. (Behavior Research Methods, 48, 272–284, 2016) and Ferré, Guasch, Martínez-García, Fraga, & Hinojosa (Behavior Research Methods, 49, 1082-1094, 2017), researchers now have access to ratings of discrete emotions for 13,633 Spanish words. Our norms show a high degree of inter-rater reliability and correlate highly with those from Ferré et al. (2017). Our exploration of the relationship between the five discrete emotions and relevant lexical and emotional variables confirmed findings of previous studies conducted with smaller datasets. The availability of such large set of norms will greatly facilitate the study of emotion, language and related fields. The norms are available as supplementary materials to this article.     

Victim blaming and exoneration of the perpetrator in domestic violence: the role of beliefs in a just world and ambivalent sexism

The existence of domestic violence is closely linked to several ideological factors that include sexism and other beliefs about society in general, namely the belief in a just world. In this study, which involved 485 people of both sexes aged between 18 and 70 years, we analyzed the influence of these ideological variables of the perceivers and characteristics of the situation on judgments of a gender aggression--blaming the victim and exonerating the perpetrator. Results showed differences in the reactions of observers depending on the cause that triggered the aggression. Participants blamed the victim and exonerated the aggressor more when no cause of the aggression was mentioned than when a cause was mentioned (the woman wanted to separate, to see an old male friend, or simply to take a trip with her female friends). We also found clear effects of hostile sexism and just world beliefs on the dependent variables. Results showed that the influence of just world beliefs depended on the fact of mention or not a cause for the aggression.     

Specifying the self for cognitive neuroscience

Cognitive neuroscience investigations of self-experience have mainly focused on the mental attribution of features to the self (self-related processing). In this paper, we highlight another fundamental, yet neglected, aspect of self-experience, that of being an agent. We propose that this aspect of self-experience depends on self-specifying processes, ones that implicitly specify the self by implementing a functional self/non-self distinction in perception, action, cognition and emotion. We describe two paradigmatic cases - sensorimotor integration and homeostatic regulation - and use the principles from these cases to show how cognitive control, including emotion regulation, is also self-specifying. We argue that externally directed, attention-demanding tasks, rather than suppressing self-experience, give rise to the self-experience of being a cognitive-affective agent. We conclude with directions for experimental work based on our framework.     

Prevalence and associated factors with body image dissatisfaction among adults in southern Brazil: A population-based study

We investigated the prevalence of body image dissatisfaction (BID) and associated factors in Florianopolis, Brazil. BID was analyzed in a sample (N = 1720) of adults through the Figure Rating Scale. The independent variables were sociodemographic factors, health behaviors, and morbidities. A multinomial logistic regression analysis was used. More men (14.2%) than women (6.1%) presented BID by being lighter than ideal (LI). Conversely, more women (66.6%) than men (46.3%) showed BID by being heavier than ideal (HI). BID by being HI was higher among older women, those with high BMI and those with a partner. In men, lower BMI and the presence of common mental disorders were associated with BID due to being LI. Advanced ages, alcohol abuse, physical inactivity, and obesity were associated with BID due to being HI. We must consider different public health interventions for men and women to reduce BID in Brazilian adults.     

Maintenance and Transformation of Problematic Self-Narratives: A Semiotic-Dialogical Approach

This study focuses on how the emergence of innovative moments (IMs), which are exceptions to a person’s dominant self-narrative (i.e., his or her usual way of understanding and experiencing), progresses to the construction of a new self-narrative. IMs challenge a person’s current framework of understanding and experiencing, generating uncertainty. When uncertainty is excessively threatening, a semiotic strategy to deal with it often emerges: attenuation of novelty’s meanings and implications by a quick return to the dominant self-narrative. From a dialogical perspective, a dominant voice (which organizes one’s current self-narrative) and a non-dominant or innovative voice (expressed during IMs) establish a cyclical relation, mutual in-feeding, blocking self-development. In this article, we analyze a successful psychotherapeutic case focusing on how the relation between dominant and non-dominant voices evolves from mutual in-feeding to other forms of dialogical relation. We have identified two processes: (1) escalation of the innovative voice(s) thereby inhibiting the dominant voice and (2) dominant and innovative voices negotiating and engaging in joint action.     

Prenatal depression effects on the fetus and newborn: a review

A review of research on prenatal depression effects on the fetus and newborn suggests that they experience prenatal, perinatal and postnatal complications. Fetal activity is elevated, prenatal growth is delayed, and prematurity and low birthweight occur more often. Newborns of depressed mothers then show a biochemical/physiological profile that mimics their mothers' prenatal biochemical/physiological profile including elevated cortisol, lower levels of dopamine and serotonin, greater relative right frontal EEG activation and lower vagal tone. Elevated prenatal maternal cortisol is the strongest predictor of these neonatal outcomes. Moderate pressure massage can alleviate these effects including reducing prematurity.     

Training higher education students in mathematics learning strategies

The present research focuses on the design and testing of a training program in learning strategies for Mathematics in Higher Education students. This research displays a quasiexperimental-sequential design with a non-equivalent control group. The research aims at revealing the effect of this training program both on the student's competence in learning strategies and on academic performance in this curricular area. There have been 176 students taking part in this research (74 students forming the experimental group and 72 forming the control group). The obtained results permit to assess the program efficiency as regards both trained strategies handling and specific performance improvement.     

Critical issues in psychological autopsy studies

This paper reviews research based on the psychological autopsy (PA) method applied to the study of suicide. It evidences the presence of a number of methodological problems. Shortcomings concern sampling biases in the selection of control subjects, confounding influences of extraneous variables, and reliability of the assessment instruments. The absence of homogeneity among studies in the procedure employed, as well as the lack of defined guidelines for performing this type of inquiry are emphasized. Questions needing empirical investigation in the future are pointed out. It is concluded that the validity and reliability of findings emerging from the use of this method of investigation would benefit from a standardization of its application.