Comportements d’automédication et infirmières Recherche qualitative exploratoire

In everyday life, self-medication is a usual mean of self-care either with drugs or alternative medicines that calls for attention from health psychologists. The aim of this qualitative study is to explore and understand self-medication among experts in the health and illness world. Semi-structured interviews with nurses have been analysed using Grounded Theory model. Results show that self-medication is a pragmatic behaviour embedded in the history of the individual, sensitive to his socioeconomic and professional context. As experts for their own health, nurses’ strategies to deal with their minor ailments raise the question of “pharmacologisation” of everyday life.     

Blood magic in the age of psychopathy,mass shootings and ecological catastrophe*

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis - This paper is an effort to locate blood magic in the age of psychopathy. Taking as a starting point Michael Eigen’s observation that psychopathic...     

Ideal Objects for Set Theory

Journal of Philosophical Logic - In this paper, we argue for an instrumental form of existence, inspired by Hilbert’s method of ideal elements. As a case study, we consider the existence of...     

Psychopathology, characteristics of violence and dropout in male batterers treatment programs: results of an intervention service

This paper deals with male violence toward female partners and the analysis of some variables related to this aggressive behavior. We study the type of violence perpetrated and some indicators of psychopathology, such as personality disorders, previous psychiatric or psychological care, substance abuse and jealous behavior, among others. In addition, we examine the relationship between these variables and the fact that the men do not complete the treatment program. For this purpose, we employed a sample of 118 men who voluntarily participated in an intervention service, and we carried out an ex post facto analysis. With regard to possible relations of dependence or independence among the variables considered, the results show dependence between the possibility of dropping out of the treatment and the presence of psychological or psychiatric history, and patterns of alcohol consumption and consumption of other drugs. In contrast, the existence of personality disorders, jealous behavior, type of violence used, onset or duration of violent behavior are independent of the possibility of dropping out of the treatment program.     

Can conceptual congruency effects between number,time, and space be accounted for by polarity correspondence?

Conceptual congruency effects have been interpreted as evidence for the idea that the representations of abstract conceptual dimensions (e.g., power, affective valence, time, number, importance) rest on more concrete dimensions (e.g., space, brightness, weight). However, an alternative theoretical explanation based on the notion of polarity correspondence has recently received empirical support in the domains of valence and morality, which are related to vertical space (e.g., good things are up). In the present study we provide empirical arguments against the applicability of the polarity correspondence account to congruency effects in two conceptual domains related to lateral space: number and time. Following earlier research, we varied the polarity of the response dimension (left-right) by manipulating keyboard eccentricity. In a first experiment we successfully replicated the congruency effect between vertical and lateral space and its interaction with response eccentricity. We then examined whether this modulation of a concrete-concrete congruency effect can be extended to two types of concrete-abstract effects, those between left-right space and number (in both parity and magnitude judgment tasks), and temporal reference. In all three tasks response eccentricity failed to modulate the congruency effects. We conclude that polarity correspondence does not provide an adequate explanation of conceptual congruency effects in the domains of number and time.     

Can contextual cues control consummatory successive negative contrast?

Rats exposed to incentive downshift show behavioral deterioration. This phenomenon, called successive negative contrast (SNC), occurs in instrumental and consummatory responses (iSNC, cSNC). Whereas iSNC is related to the violation of reward expectancies retrieved in anticipation of the goal (cued-recall), cSNC involves reward rejection and may require only recognition memory retrieved at consumption. The three within-subject experiments reported here suggest that cued-recall memory can also operate in cSNC under some conditions. A small but significant cSNC effect was obtained when animals were exposed to the conditioning context during an average 90-s interval before the introduction of the incentive (either 16% or 2% sucrose solutions), rather than being given immediate access to the sucrose upon entry into the context (Experiment 1). Neither simultaneous contrast (Experiment 2) nor simple sequential effects (Experiment 3) contribute to this within-subject version of cSNC. These results suggest that cSNC can be shifted to a cued-recall mode with appropriate training parameters.     

Efficacy of a psychological treatment for sex offenders

The aims of the present paper are the following: firstly, to describe the psychological treatment administered to sexual offenders in Spain; secondly, to assess the effectiveness of the application of this psychological treatment in the prison of Brians (Barcelona). For this purpose, two equivalent groups were selected: a treatment group of 49 subjects who received the whole treatment program, and an untreated control group of 74 subjects. These groups were selected taking into account various risk factors in order to guarantee group comparability. The main results not only show the efficacy of the cognitive-behavioural program for sexual offenders but also that the effectiveness of this program exceeds the average of similar programs in the meta-analytic reviews performed to date.