Ginesa Torrente

Jessor's Problem Behavior Theory: Cross-National Evidence From Hungary, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey, and the United States

Jessor (2008) has recently called attention to description versus explanation in cross-cultural and cross-national comparative scholarship on adolescent development, particularly, the etiology of adolescent problem behaviors. In the current study, we were interested in testing to what extent problem behavior theory replicated in samples of 10,310 adolescents from 8 distinct developmental contexts, including Asian, Eastern and Western European, North American, and Eurasian/Muslim cultures. Path analyses by country samples as well as follow-up multigroup analyses provided evidence of great similarities across cultures in the links among two protective factor domains (controls protection and support protection), three risk factor domains (models risk, opportunity risk, and vulnerability risk), and the problem behavior syndrome, operationalized by vandalism, general deviance, school misconduct, theft, and assault measures. This evidence adds to a growing body of scholarship that provides support for similarities in explanation, despite many observed differences in description.

The Effect of Content and Physical Properties of Affective Pictures on Emotional Responses

The aim of this research was to study the influence of both the emotional content and the physical characteristics of affective stimuli on the psychophysiological, behavioral and cognitive indexes of the emotional response. We selected 54 pictures from the IAPS, depicting unpleasant, neutral, and pleasant contents, and used two picture sizes as experimental conditions (120 x 90 cm and 52 x 42 cm). Sixty-one subjects were randomly assigned to each experimental condition. We recorded the startle blink reflex, skin conductance response, heart rate, free viewing time, and picture valence and arousal ratings. In line with previous research (e.g., Bradley, Codispoti, Cuthbert, and Lang, 2001), our data showed an effect of the affective content on all the measurements recorded. Importantly, effects of the size of the affective pictures on emotional responses were not found, indicating that the emotional content is more important than the formal properties of the stimuli in evoking the emotional response.

Psychophysiological, behavioral, and cognitive indices of the emotional response: a factor-analytic study

Previous research on the components of the emotional response employing factor analytic studies has yielded a two-factor structure (Lang, Greenwald, Bradley, & Hamm, 1993; Cuthbert, Schupp, Bradley, Birbaumer, & Lang, 2000). However, the startle blink reflex, a widely employed measure of the emotional response, has not been considered to date. We decided to include two parameters of the startle reflex (magnitude and latency) in order to explore further how this response fits into the two-factor model of emotion. We recorded the acoustic startle blink response, skin conductance response, heart rate, free viewing time, and picture valence and arousal ratings of 45 subjects while viewing 54 pictures from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS; 18 unpleasant, 18 neutral, and 18 pleasant). Factorizations of all measures gave a two-factor solution (valence and arousal) that accounted for 70% of the variance. Although some measurements, including heart rate change, did not behave as predicted, our results reinforce the two-dimension model of the emotion, and show that startle fits into the model.

Brief Report: The Salience of the Family in Antisocial and Delinquent Behaviors among Spanish Adolescents.

The authors examined the relations between self-report measures of parental support, communication, and psychological control and measures of antisocial and delinquent behavior in a sample of 641 Spanish adolescents (M age = 14.35 years, SD = 1.53 years). Findings revealed similarities in the relations between parenting processes and both measures of deviant behavior. The results also demonstrated the need for researchers to consider the parenting effects of mothers and fathers independently. Specifically, maternal support was a negative predictor of antisocial and delinquent behaviors of male adolescents, and maternal psychological control was a positive predictor of antisocial and delinquent behaviors of female adolescents. Paternal parenting efforts did not account for additional variability.

Preattentive processing of feared stimuli in blood-injection-injury fearful subjects.

This research aimed to study the defence responses of blood-injection-injury (BII) fearful subjects elicited by the preattentive processing of their feared objects and by an abrupt acoustic stimulus. We selected 21 BII fearful subjects and 25 non-fearful controls from an initial sample of 128 women, according to their scores on the Fear Survey Scale (damage subscale) and the Mutilation Questionnaire. Subjects were exposed to a burst of white noise to promote a defence response, and to 48 pictures, depicting mutilations, as well as other affective contents, displayed through a backward masking procedure. Heart rate (HR), skin conductance response (SCR) and corrugator supercilii activity were continuously recorded throughout the task. Both groups showed similar SCRs, EMG activity and cardiac defence responses to the acoustic stimulus, though fearful subjects showed greater initial HR deceleration than controls. While BII fearful subjects displayed the usual defence response when exposed to a non-feared threatening stimulus, the preattentive processing of the pictures did not reveal autonomic differences between fearful subjects and controls. Mutilation pictures, however, evoked the greatest EMG activity, but only in the fearful group. These data further extend previous research on conscious perception of blood-related stimuli in BII fearful subjects, by showing a failure to recruit autonomic defence responses when blood-related pictures appear outside of conscious awareness.

Desarrollo de una Escala de Estrés de Aculturación en Autóctonos

Resumen Presentamos una nueva escala para medir el estrés de aculturación de los autóctonos ante la inmigración, concretamente sudamericana. Hemos partido del concepto de amenaza percibida tomado de la Teoría Integrada de la Amenaza (Stephan y Stephan, 1996). Un análisis de componentes principales realizado con una muestra de 770 participantes ofrece una estructura compuesta por dos dimensiones: estrés de interacción y estrés por recursos. La escala final está formada por 16 ítems más tres de control de la deseabilidad social. Los análisis de fiabilidad han encontrado unos índices de consistencia interna muy satisfactorios, de.91 para la escala general de estrés de aculturación y de.91 y.88 para las dos subescalas. Los datos obtenidos permiten ofrecer un instrumento de medida que constituye una contribución en el estudio de los procesos de aculturación.

Effects of social and affective content on exogenous attention as revealed by event-related potentials

ABSTRACT The social content of affective stimuli has been proposed as having an influence on cognitive processing and behaviour. This research was aimed, therefore, at studying whether automatic exogenous attention demanded by affective pictures was related to their social value. We hypothesised that affective social pictures would capture attention to a greater extent than non-social affective stimuli. For this purpose, we recorded event-related potentials in a sample of 24 participants engaged in a digit categorisation task. Distracters were affective pictures varying in social content, in addition to affective valence and arousal, which appeared in the background during the task. Our data revealed that pictures depicting high social content captured greater automatic attention than other pictures, as reflected by the greater amplitude and shorter latency of anterior P2, and anterior and posterior N2 components of the ERPs. In addition, social content also provoked greater allocation of processing resources as manifested by P3 amplitude, likely related to the high arousal they elicited. These results extend data from previous research by showing the relevance of the social value of the affective stimuli on automatic attentional processing.