Analysis of attentional biases in anxiety using 24 facial priming sequences.

The processing of emotional facial expressions helps people to adjust to the physical and social environment. Furthermore, mental disorders such as anxiety have been linked to attentional biases in the processing of this type of information. Nevertheless, there are still contradictory results that might be due to the methodology used and to individual differences in the manifestation of anxiety.

Role of Surprise in the Discrimination of the Facial Expression of Fear.

The facilitating role of the facial expression of surprise in the discrimination of the facial expression of fear was analyzed. The sample consisted of 202 subjects that undertook a forced-choice test in which they had to decide as quickly as possible whether the facial expression displayed on-screen was one of fear, anger or happiness. Variations were made to the prime expression (neutral expression, or one of surprise); the target expression (facial expression of fear, anger or happiness), and the prime duration (50 ms, 150 ms or 250 ms).

The Effect of Mortality Salience and Type of Life on Personality Evaluation.

Mortality salience, or awareness of the inevitability of one's own death, generates a state of anxiety that triggers a defense mechanism for the control of thinking that affects different human activities and psychological processes. This study aims to analyze the effect of mortality salience on the formation of impressions. The sample comprised 135 women who made inferences about a woman's personality from information about her life (type of life, LT: positive, negative), provided through five words, all positive or negative, that appeared surrounding a photograph, together with a sixth word that indicated whether she was "dead" or "alive" at the time (mortality manipulation, MM: dead, alive).

[The role of experience in the neurology of facial expression of emotions].

Introduction: Facial expression of emotion has an important social function that facilitates interaction between people. This process has a neurological basis, which is not isolated from the context, or the experience of the interaction between people in that context. Yet, to date, the impact that experience has on the perception of emotions is not completely understood.

Speech in Alzheimer's disease: can temporal and acoustic parameters discriminate dementia?

Aims: The study explores how speech measures may be linked to language profiles in participants with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and how these profiles could distinguish AD from changes associated with normal aging.

Methods: We analysed simple sentences spoken by older adults with and without AD. Spectrographic analysis of temporal and acoustic characteristics was carried out using the Praat software.

[Expressive prosodic patterns in individuals with Alzheimer's disease].

This paper describes a useful technique for quantifying the degree of speech deficits in dementia of GDS 4 Alzheimer's type (DAT). Production of prosodic speech in DAT patients and healthy older controls was analysed using variation in fundamental frequency (F0) measures on a reading task. The prosogram computational model was used to analyze the prosodic contours of the speech samples, using melodic styling of F0 based on perceptual principles and prominence detection of spectral and amplitude fluctuations in the speech signal.

[Effectiveness of pre-operative education in reducing anxiety in surgical patients].

Objective: To evaluate the effectiveness of a structured pre-operative interview conducted by operating room nurses in order to reduce the pre-operative anxiety of patients, and to determine the profile of patients who can benefit from it.

Material And Methods: A randomised double-blind and prospective trial was conducted on a sample of 335 patients scheduled for surgery in two regional hospitals in the Basque Region of Spain, Alto Deba Hospital and Mendaro Hospital. We compared the alternative of using a structured briefing (test group) with the current situation without any formal intervention (control group).

The effect of personality variables in the prediction of the execution of different prospective memory tasks in the laboratory.

The study of prospective memory (ProM), the remembering of the delayed execution of intentions, has been growing in recent years, and we know quite a bit about the cognitive variables that affect it. But the performance of a task depends on personality variables as well as on cognitive ones, and the role of personality variables in ProM has only been partially studied, the results being less conclusive. We sought to address two main objectives: (1) to quantify the joint influence of cognitive and personality variables on three ProM tasks in the laboratory (two based on events and the other on time), and (2) to identify the personality profiles of those who perform well in these three ProM tasks as opposed to those who do not.

Motivational versus volitional mediation of passivity in institutionalized older people.

The relationship between perceived loss of control and passivity in social activities in a non-handicapped institutionalized elderly population was assessed. Perceived loss of control was assessed from three different types of expectancies: low action-outcome expectancies, high situation-outcome expectancies, and low efficacy expectancies. Passivity scores were reported by the staff.