Associations between burnout and personal and professional characteristics: a study of Portuguese teachers

Social Psychology of Education - Recent research has suggested that teachers’ burnout is growing and, consequently, affecting their overall satisfaction with life and professional...     

New Reflections on the Mirror: the Interests Proximity Bias Solution

Philosophia - We worry about becoming non-existent, but not about coming into being. But both events are similarly bad according to Deprivationism; hence, it seems that we should display symmetric...     

Variation, repetition, and choice

Experiment 1 investigated the controlling properties of variability contingencies on choice between repeated and variable responding. Pigeons were exposed to concurrent-chains schedules with two alternatives. In the REPEAT alternative, reinforcers in the terminal link depended on a single sequence of four responses. In the VARY alternative, a response sequence in the terminal link was reinforced only if it differed from the n previous sequences (lag criterion). The REPEAT contingency generated low, constant levels of sequence variation whereas the VARY contingency produced levels of sequence variation that increased with the lag criterion. Preference for the REPEAT alternative tended to increase directly with the degree of variation required for reinforcement. Experiment 2 examined the potential confounding effects in Experiment 1 of immediacy of reinforcement by yoking the interreinforcer intervals in the REPEAT alternative to those in the VARY alternative. Again, preference for REPEAT was a function of the lag criterion. Choice between varying and repeating behavior is discussed with respect to obtained behavioral variability, probability of reinforcement, delay of reinforcement, and switching within a sequence.     

Avoidance and depression: the construction of the cognitive-behavioral avoidance scale

Previous research has demonstrated a relationship between avoidance and depression, although the nature of this relationship has been confused by inconsistent definitions of avoidance. Following a review of the construct of avoidance and an examination of past research, a new multidimensional measure of avoidance was developed and validated using an undergraduate student sample (245 females and 146 males). Four reliable factors reflecting combinations of cognitive/behavioral and social/nonsocial dimensions of avoidance were obtained from the factor analysis of the new scale, entitled the "Cognitive-Behavioral Avoidance Scale" (CBAS). The scale showed the predicted relationships with convergent and divergent measures used for construct validation. As predicted, subscales of the CBAS, as well as the overall scale score, were significantly related to the depression and anxiety criterion measures. The findings from this study suggest that avoidance may be an important construct in the psychosocial conceptualization of depression. In addition, this integrated measure of avoidance has potential utility for depression researchers. Suggestions for further scale development and research are provided.     

Why 8-year-olds cannot tell the difference between Steve Martin and Paul Newman: factors contributing to the slow development of sensitivity to the spacing of facial features

Children are nearly as sensitive as adults to some cues to facial identity (e.g., differences in the shape of internal features and the external contour), but children are much less sensitive to small differences in the spacing of facial features. To identify factors that contribute to this pattern, we compared 8-year-olds' sensitivity to spacing cues with that of adults under a variety of conditions. In the first two experiments, participants made same/different judgments about faces differing only in the spacing of facial features, with the variations being kept within natural limits. To measure the effect of attention, we reduced the salience of featural information by blurring faces and occluding features (Experiment 1). To measure the role of encoding speed and memory limitations, we presented pairs of faces simultaneously and for an unlimited time (Experiment 2). To determine whether participants' sensitivity would increase when spacing distortions were so extreme as to make the faces grotesque, we manipulated the spacing of features beyond normal limits and asked participants to rate each face on a "bizarreness" scale (Experiment 3). The results from the three experiments indicate that low salience, poor encoding efficiency, and limited memory can partially account for 8-year-olds' poor performance on face processing tasks that require sensitivity to the spacing of features, a kind of configural processing that underlies adults' expertise. However, even when the task is modified to compensate for these problems, children remain less sensitive than adults to the spacing of features.     

The effects of depression on the emotional responses of Spanish-speaking Latinas

Emotional responses (physiology, self-report, and facial expression) of 12 depressed and 10 nondepressed Spanish-speaking Latinas during sad and amusing film clips of human and animal content were compared. Depressed Latinas demonstrated less electrodermal reactivity across all the film clips and displayed fewer social smiles during the amusing-human film clip than nondepressed Latinas. No differences emerged for cardiovascular measures, reports of emotion, or facial expressions of happiness and negative emotion. Observed differences in electrodermal reactivity are similar to results from previous studies of Anglo Americans, suggesting that reduced electrodermal activity may be linked to depression across cultures. The findings also suggest that, for Latinas, depression may selectively alter expressions that serve interpersonal functions.     

Unified framework for recognition, localization and mapping using wearable cameras

Monocular approaches to simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) have recently addressed with success the challenging problem of the fast computation of dense reconstructions from a single, moving camera. Thus, if these approaches initially relied on the detection of a reduced set of interest points to estimate the camera position and the map, they are currently able to reconstruct dense maps from a handheld camera while the camera coordinates are simultaneously computed. However, these maps of 3-dimensional points usually remain meaningless, that is, with no memorable items and without providing a way of encoding spatial relationships between objects and paths. In humans and mobile robotics, landmarks play a key role in the internalization of a spatial representation of an environment. They are memorable cues that can serve to define a region of the space or the location of other objects. In a topological representation of the space, landmarks can be identified and located according to its structural, perceptive or semantic significance and distinctiveness. But on the other hand, landmarks may be difficult to be located in a metric representation of the space. Restricted to the domain of visual landmarks, this work describes an approach where the map resulting from a point-based, monocular SLAM is annotated with the semantic information provided by a set of distinguished landmarks. Both features are obtained from the image. Hence, they can be linked by associating to each landmark all those point-based features that are superimposed to the landmark in a given image (key-frame). Visual landmarks will be obtained by means of an object-based, bottom-up attention mechanism, which will extract from the image a set of proto-objects. These proto-objects could not be always associated with natural objects, but they will typically constitute significant parts of these scene objects and can be appropriately annotated with semantic information. Moreover, they will be affine covariant regions, that is, they will be invariant to affine transformation, being detected under different viewing conditions (view-point angle, rotation, scale, etc.). Monocular SLAM will be solved using the accurate parallel tracking and mapping (PTAM) framework by Klein and Murray in Proceedings of IEEE/ACM international symposium on mixed and augmented reality, 2007.     

Psychological variables in the control of brain-computer interfaces

BCI (Brain-Computer Interface) is a system that allows interaction between the human brain and a computer. It is based on analyzing electroencephalographic signals (EEG) and processing them to generate control commands. The study analyzed the possible influence of psychological variables, such as the imaginative kinesthetic capacity and anxiety, in relation to performance in a BCI. All participants (4 male and 19 female students) completed the questionnaires and carried out a session of BCI to control their EEG signals in a virtual setting of a car along a straight road. The group was divided into two subgroups according to their EEG signals or differential responses obtained in the left-right discrimination. Study results showed no significant differences in cognitive variables of imagination or in anxiety. By comparing the degree of participants' BCI control, a new quantitative parameter for comparing performances and making decisions in signal processing was found. The findings, the ongoing research process to refine the control of a BCI, and the interaction of psychological and computer procedures are discussed.