Time (also) flies from left to right

Everyday linguistic expressions in many languages suggest that back and front space is projected onto temporal concepts of past and future (as in the sentencewe are years ahead of them). The present experiment tested the psychological reality of a different space-time conceptual metaphor—projecting the past to left space and the future to right space—for which there are no linguistic traces in any language. Participants categorized words as referring to the past or to the future. Irrelevant to this task, words appeared either to the left or right of the screen, and responses were given by keypresses of the left or right hand. Judgments were facilitated when word position and response mapping were congruent with the left-past right-future conceptual metaphor. These results are discussed in the context of current claims about the embodiment of meaning and the possible mechanisms by which conceptual metaphors can be acquired.     

Difficulties,skills and therapy strategies in interventions with court-ordered batterers in Spain

As a consequence of its coercive context, psychological interventions with men convicted of intimate partner violence in Spain involve a series of challenges in the design and development of the therapy program. This article reviews the main international contributions that have considered the difficulties produced by the context and analyzes the most important skills that the therapist can utilize in order to facilitate the therapeutic process. The difficulties have been grouped in accordance with origin: (a) difficulties derived from the context of the intervention; (b) the characteristics of the offender; (c) the therapist. The principal skills and strategies of the therapist seem to be related to the clear definition of the intervention context, the management of therapeutic relationship and the therapist's capacity for analysis and reflection. Finally, this work recognizes the need for research projects that focus on the therapist and aspects of the therapeutic process that could optimize the implementation of therapist training actions and improve treatment results.     

Enhancing Immediate Retention with Clickers Through Individual Response Identification

Classroom audience response systems, in which students respond to class questions via a remote ‘clicker’ unit, are widely used as a method for increasing student participation and providing immediate feedback in the form of a group frequency distribution. The phenomenon of social facilitation shows that task performance can be enhanced with co‐action of others or with the presence of an audience. To enhance the audience effect, we employed a unique feedback system that displays each individual's response. After reading a text passage, participants responded via a remote clicker to a series of comprehension questions. Participants were provided with no feedback regarding other respondents' answers, group feedback, or individual feedback. The results demonstrated significantly higher test performance with individual response identification. Implications are discussed in terms of applied classroom settings and social facilitation with enhanced options for displaying different types of feedback with clickers during instruction. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The nature of epistemic feelings

Among the phenomena that make up the mind, cognitive psychologists and philosophers have postulated a puzzling one that they have called “epistemic feelings.” This paper aims to (1) characterize these experiences according to their intentional content and phenomenal character, and (2) describe the nature of these mental states as nonconceptual in the cases of animals and infants, and as conceptual mental states in the case of adult human beings. Finally, (3) the paper will contrast three accounts of the causes and mechanisms of epistemic feelings: the doxastic account; the mental scanner account; and the heuristic mechanism account. The paper will argue in favor of the heuristic mechanism account.     

Study of empathy in a Spanish sex offender sample

International research has emphasised that empathy is a relevant factor of sex offending. The main goal of this study is to explore, in a Spanish sex offender sample, the relationship between empathy deficits and sex crime for various types of victims. This study also analyses the positive effect that psychological treatment could have on empathy. For this purpose, 118 non-sex offenders were compared on an adapted version of Rape Empathy Measure to 39 treated rapists and 34 untreated rapists. Results show that the untreated rapists have lower empathy levels than non-sex offenders. Nevertheless, the treated rapists scored higher on empathy than the other two groups assessed, untreated rapists and non-sex offenders. Lastly, some suggestions are provided for future research in terms of the assessment of empathy and other factors related to sexual aggression.     

Two Levels of Metacognition

Two main theories about metacognition are reviewed, each of which claims to provide a better explanation of this phenomenon, while discrediting the other theory as inappropriate. The paper claims that in order to do justice to the complex phenomenon of metacognition, we must distinguish two levels of this capacity—each having a different structure, a different content and a different function within the cognitive architecture. It will be shown that each of the reviewed theories has been trying to explain only one of the two levels and that, consequently, the conflict between them can be dissolved. The paper characterizes the high-level as a rationalizing level where the subject uses concepts and theories to interpret her own behavior and the low-level as a controlling level where the subject exploits epistemic feelings to adjust her cognitive activities. Finally, the paper explores three kinds of interaction between the levels.     

Making Sense of Work Life: A Structural Model of Burnout

Hospital-based nurses ( N  = 832) and doctors ( N  = 603) in northern and eastern Spain completed a survey of job burnout, areas of work life, and management issues. Analysis of the results provides support for a mediation model of burnout that depicts employees' energy, involvement, and efficacy as intermediary experiences between their experiences of work life and their evaluations of organizational change. The key element of this model is its focus on employees' capacity to influence their work environments toward greater conformity with their core values. The model considers 3 aspects of that capacity: decision-making participation, organizational justice, and supervisory relationships. The analysis supports this model and emphasizes a central role for first-line supervisors in employees' experiences of work life.     

Effects of anisomycin on inhibitory avoidance in male and female CD1 mice

The antibiotic anisomycin inhibits protein synthesis, which much research has suggested is required for the formation of long-term memory. The present work studied the effects of acute subcutaneous administration of anisomycin on the consolidation of memory in an inhibitory avoidance task in CD1 mice of both sexes. The animals were separated by sex and randomly distributed into three groups: two groups were injected with 150 mg/kg anisomycin, one immediately after the training phase and the other 24 h later, while the control group received saline. The interval between training and test was four days. Anisomycin administrated immediately after training produced statistically significant impairment of memory, which was not observed when the drug was administered 24 h after training. No sex differences were observed in the effects of anisomycin. These results extend to female mice the memory impairing effects of anisomycin previously observed in males and endorse the hypothesis that the establishment of long-term memory depends on protein synthesis shortly after training.