Are facial displays social? Situational influences in the attribution of emotion to facial expressions

Observers are remarkably consistent in attributing particular emotions to particular facial expressions, at least in Western societies. Here, we suggest that this consistency is an instance of the fundamental attribution error. We therefore hypothesized that a small variation in the procedure of the recognition study, which emphasizes situational information, would change the participants' attributions. In two studies, participants were asked to judge whether a prototypical "emotional facial expression" was more plausibly associated with a social-communicative situation (one involving communication to another person) or with an equally emotional but nonsocial, situation. Participants were found more likely to associate each facial display with the social than with the nonsocial situation. This result was found across all emotions presented (happiness, fear, disgust, anger, and sadness) and for both Spanish and Canadian participants.     

Lens on International Clinical Supervision: Lessons Learned from a Cross-National Comparison of Supervision

Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy - Clinical supervision is an essential mechanism for training psychologists internationally. But although it is performed globally, scholarship has primarily...     

Movement Variability Increases With Shoulder Pain When Compensatory Strategies of the Upper Body Are Constrained

This cross-sectional study analyzed the influence of chronic shoulder pain (CSP) on movement variability/kinematics during humeral elevation, with the trunk and elbow motions constrained to avoid compensatory strategies. For this purpose, 37 volunteers with CSP as the injured group (IG) and 58 participants with asymptomatic shoulders as the control group (CG) participated in the study. Maximum humeral elevation (Emax), maximum angular velocity (Velmax), variability of the maximum angle (CVEmax), functional variability (Func_var), and approximate entropy (ApEn) were calculated from the kinematic data. Patients' pain was measured on the visual analogue scale (VAS). Compared with the CG, the IG presented lower Emax and Velmax and higher variability (i.e., CVEmax, Func_var, and ApEn). Moderate correlations were achieved for the VAS score and the kinematic variables Emax, Velmax and variability of curve analysis, Func_varm, and ApEn. No significant correlation was found for CVEmax. In conclusion, CSP results in a decrease of angle and velocity and an increased shoulder movement variability when the neuromuscular system cannot use compensatory strategies to avoid painful positions.     

Functioning of integration in Secondary School according to the teachers' perception

The main purpose of this article is to analyse integration in Compulsory Secondary School and the variables that teachers perceive as its indicators. More specifically, we wished to determine teachers' experience, their perceptions of integration students' achievement, participation, acceptance and involvement, and their appraisal of various measures in order to improve integration. Various preferred means of schooling and teachers' perception of the functioning of integration are analysed with a Likert-scaled questionnaire made up of 114 items. The sample comprised 242 secondary education teachers. The results show that the most poorly integrated group of students had behavioural problems and that a significant percentage of the teachers would prefer not to have these students in their classrooms. According to the teachers, integration does not work effectively with some groups of students, mainly due to the lack of resources and adequate strategies.     

The cognitive locus of distraction by acoustic novelty in the cross-modal oddball task

Unexpected stimuli are often able to distract us away from a task at hand. The present study seeks to explore some of the mechanisms underpinning this phenomenon. Studies of involuntary attention capture using the oddball task have repeatedly shown that infrequent auditory changes in a series of otherwise repeating sounds trigger an automatic response to the novel or deviant stimulus. This attention capture has been shown to disrupt participants' behavioral performance in a primary task, even when distractors and targets are asynchronous and presented in distinct sensory modalities. This distraction effect is generally considered as a by-product of the capture of attention by the novel or deviant stimulus, but the exact cognitive locus of this effect and the interplay between attention capture and target processing has remained relatively ignored. The present study reports three behavioral experiments using a cross-modal oddball task to examine whether the distraction triggered by auditory novelty affects the processing of the target stimuli. Our results showed that variations in the demands placed on the visual analysis (Experiment 1) or categorical processing of the target (Experiment 2) did not impact on distraction. Instead, the cancellation of distraction by the presentation of an irrelevant visual stimulus presented immediately before the visual target (Experiment 3) suggested that distraction originated in the shifts of attention occurring between attention capture and the onset of the target processing. Possible accounts of these shifts are discussed.     

The role of chronic physical exercise and selective attention at encoding on implicit and explicit memory

Despite the evidence revealing benefits of chronic cardiovascular exercise on executive functions, little research has been conducted on long-term memory. We aimed to investigate the effect of physical exercise on implicit and explicit memory when attention was modulated at encoding in two groups of active and sedentary participants. With this purpose, attention was manipulated in a similar way in the implicit and explicit memory tasks by presenting picture outlines of two familiar objects, one in blue and the other in green, and participants were asked to pay attention only to one of them. Implicit memory was assessed through conceptual priming and explicit memory through a free recall task followed by recognition. The results did not reveal significant differences between groups in conceptual priming or free recall. However, in recognition, while both groups had similar discrimination for attended stimuli, active participants showed lower discrimination between unattended and new stimuli. These results suggested that exercise may have effects on specific cognitive processes, that is, that active participants may suppress non-relevant information better than sedentary participants, making the discrimination between unattended and new items more difficult.     

An experimental study about the congruence between type A behavior pattern and type of task

This paper is an experimental study, the basic aim of which is to check whether the congruence between personality characteristics and task characteristics has positive effects for performance and satisfaction on individuals. The results obtained reveal that Type A behavior pattern individuals get better results in cases of congruence than in cases of incongruence, while the performance of Type B behavior pattern individuals is not related to the (in)congruence between personal needs/aims and the task's demands. Besides, we have found that Type A behavior pattern individuals also have greater levels of satisfaction in cases of congruence than in cases of incongruence. However, Type B behavior pattern individuals show the same levels of satisfaction in both cases.     

Validation of the modified version of the Conflict Tactics Scale (M-CTS) in a Spanish population of youths

The modified version of the Conflict Tactics Scale (M-CTS), originally created by Straus in 1979, is one of the most extensively used instruments to detect violent verbal and physical behaviours in youths' and adolescents' dating relations. The aim of the present work was to analyze the psychometric properties of the instrument and to validate its adequacy in the Spanish population. The sample was made up of 5,355 Spanish youths from the Community of Madrid, ages between 16 and 26 years. By means of confirmatory factor analysis, four factors that were consistent with the theory and with previous research were identified: arguments, psychological/verbal aggression, slight physical aggression, and severe physical aggression. It is concluded that the scale assesses the presence of various types of aggression in youths' and adolescents' dating relationships with sufficient psychometric guarantees.