Relation of perceived emotional intelligence and health-related quality of life of middle-aged women

This study examined the relationship between perceived emotional intelligence and health-related quality of life in middle-aged women. 99 middle-aged Spanish women, who studied in two adult schools, volunteered to participate. 49 were premenopausal and 45 were postmenopausal. These women completed the Trait Meta-Mood Scale and Health Survey SF-36. Scores were analyzed according to social, physical, and mental health, menopausal status, and scores on perceived emotional intelligence. Then, the data regarding the mental and physical health of the premenopausal and postmenopausal women were compared after controlling for age. No associations between menopausal status and health-related quality of life were found. Perceived skill at mood repair was significantly associated with scores on health-related quality of life in these middle-aged women. These findings provide empirical evidence that aspects of perceived emotional intelligence may account for the health-related quality of life in midlife including social, physical, and psychological symptoms.     

Sistemas expertos y psicología cognitiva: una visión general

Resumen

El presente trabajo intenta ofrecer una visión sintética del tema de los sistemas expertos que trata de hacer hincapié en aquellos aspectos de este campo que pudieran resultar más relevantes para el psicólogo interesado en la cognición. Se traza un breve esbozo del marco científico-técnico de la inteligencia artificial en general, a partir del cual se intenta caracterizar a los sistemas expertos desde dos puntos de vista principales: en primer lugar, el tipo de problemas y tareas a los que se destinan dichos sistemas y, en segundo lugar, la estructura computacional subyacente que ha permitido abordarlos con éxito. Se discute la relación histórico-científica entre la inteligencia artificial y la psicología cognitiva, observándose que se ha producido un flujo constante y bidireccional de conceptos teóricos, métodos y problemas conceptuales de una a otra, especialmente en el actual marco interdisciplinar de la ciencia cognitiva. Dado este contexto, se argumenta que es muy posible que los sistemas expertos aporten novedades conceptuales y metodológicas significativas para la Psicología. Por último, se especula sobre algunas cuestiones en las que podría tener lugar tal contribución.     

Interacción social y nivel de conflicto sociocognoscitivo en la construcción del esquema de probabilidad

Resumen

En este estudio se analiza la influencia que la interacción social y el conflicto sociocognitivo tienen en la construcción del esquema de probabilidad por medio de un diseño pretest-intervención-postest.

Se muestra cómo las situaciones experimentales de interacción social con conflicto sociocognitivo producen mayores logros durante la fase de intervención, así como mayores avances cognitivos en el postest en el esquema de probabilidad que las condiciones de trabajo individual y las de interacción sin conflicto. Los progresos alcanzados en el postest para el esquema de probabilidad se generalizaron al esquema de proporciones.     

Does<Emphasis Type="SmallCaps">LGHT</Emphasis> prime<Emphasis Type="SmallCaps">DARK</Emphasis>? Masked associative priming with addition neighbors

We present two masked priming lexical decision experiments in which we examined whether a nonword prime word would activate associative/semantic information from its corresponding addition neighbor (e.g.,lght-DARK via the addition neighborlight), producing associative/semantic priming. The rationale was the following: If a nonword prime with a missing letter produced a semantic/associative priming effect, this would clearly indicate that this nonword was activating the lexical/semantic representations of its base word, thereby reinforcing the models of visual-word recognition in which the orthographic representations produced bylght (orligt) andlight are quite similar (e.g., SOLAR, SERIOL, open-bigram, and overlap models). The results showed that the magnitude of the masked associative priming effect with subset primes was remarkably similar to that of the priming effect with the corresponding word prime. Furthermore, the magnitude of the associative priming effect was similar when the deleted letter was a vowel and when the deleted letter was a consonant.     

Group process in short-term outpatient therapy groups for schizophrenics

The short form of the group climate questionnaire (GCQ-S) was used to evaluate process in three 12-session therapy groups for outpatient schizophrenics. Results showed no difference on the Engaged dimension between the short-term schizophrenic groups and either a normative sample of outpatient neurotic groups or the first 26 sessions of a long-term outpatient schizophrenic group. However, the short-term groups scored significantly lower (p<.001) on the Avoiding and Conflict dimensions as compared with either long-term sample. The session-to-session GCQ-S dimension pattern did not support the presence of sequential group stages, but there was a tendency for the Engaged scores to increase and the Avoiding and Conflict scores to decrease as time went on.The authors gratefully acknowledge K. Roy MacKenzie, M.D., and Don Brown, M.D., for their helpful comments regarding this paper. Parts of this paper were presented in a poster session at the American Group Psychotherapy Association Annual Meeting in New York, February 8–12, 1988.     

Social cuing of guilt by anger and of shame by disgust

Scholars have proposed a conceptual structure for the self-critical moral emotions of guilt and shame and the other-critical emotions of anger and disgust. In this model, guilt is linked with anger and shame with disgust. This relationship may express itself in asymmetrical social cuing between emotions: In a social context, other people's angry facial expressions may communicate that the target should feel guilty, and other people's disgusted facial expressions may communicate that the target should feel ashamed. We conducted two experiments, one in the United Kingdom and the other in Spain, in which participants were shown pictures of faces expressing either anger or disgust. Participants rated the degree to which the faces would make them feel guilt or shame in a casual social encounter, and they answered questions about inferences concerning the emotional expressions. In both studies, angry expressions led to greater guilt and less shame than did disgusted expressions. This relationship was explained better by the type of norm violation inferred than by whether the violation was thought to involve the target's action or personality versus the target's character.     

Happiness versus sadness as a determinant of thought confidence in persuasion: a self-validation analysis

The present research introduces a new mechanism by which emotion can affect evaluation. On the basis of the self-validation hypothesis (R. E. Petty, P. Bri?ol, & Z. L. Tormala), the authors predicted and found that emotion can influence evaluative judgments by affecting the confidence people have in their thoughts to a persuasive message. In each study, participants first read a strong or weak persuasive communication. After listing their thoughts about the message, participants were induced to feel happy or sad. Relative to sad participants, those put in a happy state reported more thought confidence. As a consequence, the effect of argument quality on attitudes was greater for happy than for sad participants. These self-validation effects generalized across different emotion inductions, different persuasion topics, and different measures of thought confidence. In one study, happy and sad conditions each differed from a neutral affect control. Most important, these metacognitive effects of emotion only occurred under high elaboration conditions. In contrast, individuals with relatively low motivation to think showed a main effect of emotion on attitudes, regardless of argument quality.