Francisco Esteves

Surgery is a highly stressful event for children and caregivers. Extensive effort has been made to improve preoperative care in order to alleviate worry about the surgical procedure itself. This study tested the impact of an educational multimedia intervention on the cognitive, emotional, and physiological responses of children undergoing surgery, as well as on parental state anxiety. Children (n = 90) were assigned to three different groups: an educational multimedia intervention (experimental group), an entertainment video game intervention (comparison group), and a control group (no intervention). Children who received the educational multimedia intervention reported lower level of worries about hospitalization, medical procedures, illness, and negative consequences than those in the control and in the comparison groups. Parental state anxiety was also lower in the both the educational and the entertainment video game interventions compared to the control group. These findings suggest that providing information to children regarding medical procedures and hospital rules and routines is important to reduce their preoperative worries, and also relevant for parental anxiety.

It has long been recognized that behavior evolves as do other traits and
that it may have great impact on evolution. It tends to be conservative when survival
and fast responding are at stake, and because of that, similar patterns can
be found across populations or species, typical in their form and intensity, and
often also typical in context and consequence. Such fixed stereotypic patterns that
evolved to communicate are known as displays, and their phylogenies can virtually
be traced. In this chapter, we contrast and discuss two coexisting trends in the
study of the meaning and origins of human facial expression: one, with a tradition
of exploring cross-cultural commonalities in the recognition of facial expression,
that may indicate species-specific displays of emotion (prototypical facial
expressions) and another that builds upon the growing evidence that such expressive
prototypes are outnumbered by a diversity of facial compositions that, even
in emotional situations, vary in relation to culture, context, group, maturation, and
individual factors. We present behavioral studies that look at links between basic
emotion and facial actions in both human and non-human primates and discuss the
role of multiple factors in facial action production and interpretation.

Emotional processing of food-related pictures was studied in four experiments, comparing participants who revealed unhealthy attitudes toward food, dieting and body shape with control groups. All subjects were female and responses to pictures of low and of high calorie foods were compared to responses to other emotional stimuli. The first three experiments measured verbal and autonomic responses and Experiment 4 was a classical conditioning study. In Experiments 2-4, pictures were presented backward masked in order to observe automatic, non-conscious responses. The results showed that, in general, food pictures were processed in the same way as other emotional material, both verbally and psychophysiologically. Although there were some results indicating a difference between groups, the general pattern was that participants selected for being more worried about food and dieting did not show higher reactivity to food cues.

An experimental study was conducted to investigate the impact of violent computer games on State Hostility, State Anxiety, and Arousal. Participants were undergraduate students, aged from 18 to 25 years old. Before the experimental sessions, participants filled in self-report measures concerning their video game habits and were also pre-tested for aggressiveness and trait anxiety. Physiological responses (heart rate and skin conductance) were measured during the experiment. After playing, information about State Hostility and State Anxiety was collected. The results showed that participants who played the violent game reported significantly higher State Hostility and thus supporting the assumption that an aggressive personality moderates the effect of playing a violent game on state hostility.

This study examined the psychometric properties of the Portuguese version of the ISMI scale in a sample of 253 adult psychiatric outpatients. The exploratory factor analysis replicated the five factor structure of the scale. The results revealed good internal consistency. Criterion-related validity supported the variability in response to stigma across clinical diagnoses. Thus, the Portuguese version of the ISMI scale can be considered appropriate to measure and differentiate between stigmatization experiences. Also, in order to design more focused approaches aimed to reduce the negative effects of internalized stigma, its use in institutional and in community-based mental health services is recommended.

Using a Pavlovian procedure, human subjects were conditioned to pic-tures of angry faces with a mild electric shock as the unconditioned stim-ulus. They were then tested with backward masking conditions prevent-ing conscious recognition of the facial stimuli. In the first experiment a ...

The use of eye movements is a usual method of measuring attentional and emotional response in laboratory. However, when it comes to clinical practice, it is seldom applied. Two studies were conducted to examine whether extraocular and intraocular movements can be used as indices of attentional bias and autonomic activation. In the first study, a free-viewing task, combined with subliminal exposure, showed that high-fear individuals tend to orient more their attention toward the visual space where threat-stimuli (snakes) were presented. The findings suggest a reflexive overt attentional orienting bias for subliminal snakes in comparison with subliminal control stimuli. The differentiation between participants with high and low fear of snakes suggested that a disposition to fear snakes affects the initial ocular saccades. In the second study, participants were instructed to discriminate a sign that was randomly displayed at the center of the display while subliminal images were peripherally presented. The results revealed larger pupil dilation for threatening stimuli subliminally presented; again, high-fear individuals showed larger pupillary dilations, independently of the stimulus category. Our results are in line with the assumption that a predisposition to fear is relevant for extraocular and intraocular movements when exposed to threat stimuli. These findings suggest that eye measurements, combined with subliminal exposure techniques, could be a reliable and nonintrusive aid tool to be used for the assessment and treatment of fear and phobias