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Embora os estudantes universitários tenham fácil acesso à informação sobre a transmissão do VIH e os comportamentos de risco associados à actividade sexual, esta informação nem sempre é correcta nem se baseia em fontes fiáveis ou conhecimentos específicos. Por outro lado, o nível de conhecimentos nem sempre se traduz numa utilização mais frequante do preservativo. Neste estudo analisaram-se as fontes de informação sobre os métodos contraceptivos e as doenças de transmissão sexual, os conhecimentos sobre a AIDS e o modo de transmissão do VIH e o uso de preservativo em 678 estudantes universitários portugueses e espanhóis. O nível de conhecimento é elevado em ambas as amostras, contudo os estudantes portugueses apresentam um melhor nível. Encontraram-se algumas diferenças no uso do preservativo e na utilização das fontes de informação entre países e sexo. Discutem-se as implicações para as actividades de promoção da saúde assim como o papel dos diferentes agentes educativos

Studies addressing the recognition of emotions in blind or deaf participants have been carried out only with children and adolescents. Due to these age limits, such studies do not clarify the long-term effects of vision and hearing disabilities on emotion recognition in adults. We assessed the ability to recognize basic emotions in 15 deaf adults (aged 32.4 ± 8.1 yrs) and in 15 blind adults (48.3 ± 10.5 yrs). Auditory and visual stimuli expressing six basic emotional states were presented to participants ("Florida Affect Battery"). Participants also performed an empathy test. Deaf participants showed difficulties in emotion recognition tasks compared to the typical hearing participants; however, differences were only statistically reliable for Facial Emotion Discrimination and Naming tasks (specifically, naming expressions of fear). Deaf participants also revealed inferior levels of cognitive empathy. Concerning blind participants, their performance was lower than the controls' only when the task required the evaluation of emotional prosody while ignoring the semantic content of the sentence. Overall, although deaf and blind participants performed reasonably well on tasks requiring recognition of basic emotions, sensory loss may hinder their social perception skills when processing subtle emotions or when the extraction of simultaneous prosodic and semantic information is required.

Disturbances in the ability to recognize emotional faces have been attributed to individuals with specific personality disorders. Considering the importance of the dimensional models of psychopathology, studies involving healthy participants are becoming increasingly relevant in the domain of personality disorders. In this context, our main goal was to assess how clinical personality traits affect the ability to recognize basic emotions in a sample of subclinical participants. Photographs of faces expressing six basic emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust and surprise) were presented to 72 undergraduate students (42 women; M age = 23.3 yr., SD = 3.4), whose dominant personality traits (narcissistic, histrionic and compulsive) were assessed using the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory-III. Data were analyzed using both a whole sample regression approach (relating personality traits with emotion recognition performance) and a group comparison approach (comparing groups of participants with dominant personality - narcissistic, histrionic and compulsive - as well as comparing groups with subclinical symptomatology for anxiety and hypomania). The main results suggested a poor recognition of sadness in narcissistic participants and a higher difficulty for anger recognition in participants with anxiety symptoms. These results are discussed within the theoretical framework suggesting that the difficulties in basic and social emotions recognition have implications in interpersonal interactions experienced in different social contexts., Author(s): Ana Teresa Martins [sup.1] , Antónia Ros [sup.1] , Letícia Valério [sup.1] , Luís Faísca [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (Aff1) 0000 0000 9693 350X, grid.7157.4, Center of Biomedical Research and [...]

Thought suppression increases the persistence of unwanted idiosyncratic worrisome thoughts when individuals try to suppress them. The failure of suppression may contribute to the development and maintenance of emotional disorders. Depressive people seem particularly prone to engage in unsuccessful mental control strategies such as thought suppression. Worry has been reported to be elevated in depressed individuals and a dysphoric mood may also contribute to the failure of suppression. No studies examine, however, the suppression of worrisome thoughts in individuals with depressive symptoms. To investigate the suppression effects of worrisome thoughts, 46 participants were selected according to the cut-off score of a depressive symptomatology scale, and they were divided in two groups (subclinical and nonclinical group). All of the individuals took part in an experimental paradigm of thought suppression. The results of the mixed factorial analysis of variance revealed an increased frequency of worrisome thoughts during the suppression phase, depending on the depressive symptoms. These findings confirm that a depressive mood can reduce the success of suppression., Author(s): Sónia Silva [sup.1] , Luís Janeiro [sup.1] , Marta Brás [sup.1] , Cláudia Carmo [sup.1] , Ana Teresa Martins, Antónia Jiménez-Ros [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (Aff1) 0000 0000 9693 350X, [...]

Initial attraction is one of several factors that influence the ability to form an impression. Attraction is related to physical beauty, implying that we all tend to evaluate attractiveness based on the same characteristics. Adults with larger eyes are perceived as more attractive and receive more positive evaluations. Our purpose was to examine whether eye size would influence warmth and competence because the stereotype content model differs in predictions of attraction. We further analyzed the effect of the observer and stimulus gender on the assessment of warmth and competence. To this end, we tested 360 participants in an experimental visual task, according to a 3 (eye size: small vs. medium vs. large) × 2 (stimulus gender: female vs. male) × 2 (observer gender: female vs. male) factorial design. Our results lend support to the idea that larger eyes lead to more positive perceptions of warmth and competence. However, only the warmth dimension is affected by the observer and stimulus gender. The results are discussed in light of current research in the field of social cognition., Author(s): Gabriela Gonçalves[sup.1] [sup.2] , Alexandra Gomes[sup.1] [sup.2] , Maria Clara Ferrão[sup.1] , Tiago Parreira[sup.1] , Joana Vieira dos Santos[sup.1] [sup.2] , Jean-Christophe Giger[sup.1] [sup.2] , Ana Teresa Martins[sup.3] Author [...]

Cardiovascular diseases are the main cause of mortality worldwide, and childhood excess weight/obesity are strong correlators of accumulated risk in later life. A relationship between maternal preeclampsia and offspring's childhood obesity is recognized, but most studies fail to control for strong confounders. Our goal is to analyze the association between preeclampsia and childhood excess weight/obesity, after accounting for important confounders. We recruited 5133 women with singleton pregnancies during admission for delivery. Sixty-seven pregnancies were complicated by preeclampsia. Maternal and children outcomes were assessed at 10 years of age. We analyzed the association between preeclampsia and childhood excess weight/obesity by fitting a linear regression model (using offspring body mass index (BMI) z-score at 10 years of age) and a logistic regression model (using excess weight/obesity status). We then controlled both models for known confounders, namely maternal prepregnancy BMI, parity, and smoking during pregnancy. At 10 years of age, offspring of preeclamptic mothers had a higher BMI z-score and were more likely classified as overweight/obese, but these differences were not statistically significant. After controlling for maternal prepregnancy BMI, parity, and smoking during pregnancy, there was a high magnitude change in the beta coefficient of preeclampsia in the linear (0.175; −0.014) and the logistic regression models (1.48; 1.23) suggesting that the association between preeclampsia and childhood excess weigh/obesity is significantly confounded by these variables. These confounders also showed a significant association with childhood obesity. This finding suggests that in utero exposure to preeclampsia seems to have less impact in childhood obesity than the previously described confounders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]