Parental Mediation of COVID-19 News and Children’s Emotion Regulation during Lockdown

Journal of Child and Family Studies - The COVID-19 outbreak resulted in a large amount of emotionally charged messaging that is believed to have a tremendous psychological impact, particularly on...     

Effects of semantic relationship and preactivation on memory updating

Cognitive Processing - Semantic relationship modulates working memory (WM) processes by promoting recall but impairing recognition. Updating is a core mechanism of WM responsible for its stability...     

Unraveling the Relationship between Well-Being,Sustainable Consumption and Nature Relatedness: a Study of University Students

Many empirical studies have found an association between sustainable consumption and well-being. However, the direction of causality between these constructs remains unclear. Well-being could be an antecedent of sustainable consumption or, sustainable consumption a driver of well-being; also, there could be a reciprocal relationship between these two constructs. Alternatively, both well-being and sustainable consumption could be outcomes of another construct that could be masking a relationship between well-being and sustainable consumption. This study aims to advance the well-being and sustainable consumption research by testing these three relationships in a longitudinal study with young consumers (n = 369). The findings show that when controlling for the constructs at Time 1, the relationship between the focal constructs is no longer significant. Results lead to support the hypothesis that sustainable consumption and well-being are explained by a particular trait of the individual, nature relatedness, so that individuals with greater nature relatedness are more likely to adopt a sustainable lifestyle and have greater well-being. Nature relatedness thus acts as a predictor of both focal constructs. This result implies that by nurturing nature relatedness, societies will achieve the double dividend of well-being and sustainability.

     

Fibromyalgia in men and women: comparison of the main clinical symptoms

The prevalence of fibromyalgia (FM) in males is much lower than in women. Thus, current knowledge about the syndrome has been developed from research with women. The aim of the present study is to analyze whether FM manifestations differ as a function of sex. Two clinical groups with FM (21 males and 21 women) and a control group of healthy men (n= 21) participated in the study. Several aspects of pain, sleep, fatigue, psychopathology, emotional distress and functional impact of FM were evaluated with an algometer and questionnaires. The clinical groups showed a significantly greater impairment than the control group in all the self-report measures. However, the FM patients only showed significant differences in the sensibility threshold to the pain, which was lower in the women. In addition, the best predictor of the experience of pain in males was sleep quality, and in the women, catastrofying pain. Our results suggest that the most effective therapeutic strategies to control pain may be different for men and women.     

Are all Semitic languages immune to letter transpositions? The case of Maltese

Recent research using the rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigm with English sentences that included words with letter transpositions (e.g., jugde) has shown that participants can readily reproduce the correctly spelled sentences with little cost; in contrast, there is a dramatic reading cost with root-derived Hebrew words (Velan & Frost, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 14:913-918, 2007, Cognition 118:141-156, 2011). This divergence could be due to (1) the processing of root-derived words in Semitic languages or (2) the peculiarities of the transitional probabilities in root-derived Hebrew words. Unlike Hebrew, Maltese is a Semitic language that does not omit vowel information in print and whose morphology also has a significant non-Semitic (mostly Romance) morphology. Here, we employed the same RSVP technique used by Velan and Frost (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 14:913-918, 2007, Cognition 118:141-156, 2011), this time with Maltese (and English) sentences. The results showed that Maltese-English bilinguals were able to reproduce the Maltese words-regardless of whether they were misspelled (involving the transposition of two letters from the consonantal root) or not, with no reading cost-just as in English. The apparent divergences between the RSVP data with Hebrew versus Maltese sentences are likely due to the combination of the characteristics of the Hebrew orthographic system with the Semitic morphology.     

Parental knowledge and adolescent adjustment: substance use and health-related quality of life

This study analyses two models (maternal and paternal) in which parental care and sources of parental knowledge moderated the relationship between parents' knowledge about their adolescents' lives and adolescents' substance use and health-related quality of life. The sample was made up of 15942 Spanish adolescents who participated in the 2006 edition of Health Behavior in School-aged Children Study. Results showed that increased parents' knowledge about their adolescents' lives reduced adolescents' substance use and increased their quality of life. With respect to the moderation relationship, a limited effect was found. However, parental care and sources of parental knowledge used by both parents generally had main effects on adolescents' substance use and health-related quality of life, with care being the most relevant variable in the health-related quality of life, while knowledge was the most relevant one for substance use.     

A motivational model for environmentally responsible behavior

This paper presents a study examining whether self-efficacy and intrinsic motivation are related to environmentally responsible behavior (ERB). The study analysed past environmental behavior, self-regulatory mechanisms (self-efficacy, satisfaction, goals), and intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in relation to ERBs in a sample of 156 university students. Results show that all the motivational variables studied are linked to ERB. The effects of self-efficacy on ERB are mediated by the intrinsic motivation responses of the participants. A theoretical model was created by means of path analysis, revealing the power of motivational variables to predict ERB. Structural equation modeling was used to test and fit the research model. The role of motivational variables is discussed with a view to creating adequate learning contexts and experiences to generate interest and new sensations in which self-efficacy and affective reactions play an important role.     

Pure versus guided mirror exposure to reduce body dissatisfaction: a preliminary study with university women

While effectiveness of mirror exposure to reduce body dissatisfaction has been demonstrated, the exposure was almost always combined with other interventions. The aim of the study was to evaluate the effectiveness of a pure mirror exposure intervention compared with a guided mirror exposure (participants are guided to describe their body shape in a non-evaluative manner) and an imagery exposure intervention (participants are guided to describe their body through mental representation). Thirty-one women with high body dissatisfaction received five sessions of treatment under one of the three conditions. All interventions reduced body dissatisfaction, but only the mirror exposures successfully reduced the frequency of negative thoughts and feelings of ugliness. Pure mirror exposure was more effective than guided exposure for reducing body discomfort within and between sessions. Pure mirror exposure, based on the traditional extinction paradigm, led to strong emotional activation followed by a fast decrease in emotional reactivity.