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The FRIENDS for Life program is a cognitive-behavioral group program that targets anxiety in children. The main purpose of this study was to analyze the effectiveness of the Portuguese version of the FRIENDS for Life Program, which was implemented in schools to reduce anxiety problems in a group of highly anxious children. The study used a quasi-experimental research design with two groups of children, an intervention (n = 17) and a wait-list control group (n = 21), aged 8 to 12 years old. The impact of the program in reducing anxiety symptoms as assessed by children and mothers was analyzed through the Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders-Revised (SCARED-R). The results show a statistically significant post intervention effect on anxiety symptoms evaluated by the child, but not by the mother. The implications of these results for the prevention of anxiety disorders in Portuguese schools are discussed.

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The object of this research is to exploit the algorithm of Twitter's trending topic (TT) and identify the elements capable of guiding public opinion in the Italian panorama. The underlying hypotheses that guide the whole article, confirmed by the research results, concern the existence of (a) a limited number of elements at the base of each popular hashtag with very high viral power and (b) hashtags transversal to the themes detected by the Twitter algorithm that define specific opinion polls. Through computational techniques, it was possible to extract and process data sets from six specific hashtags highlighted by TT. In a first step through social network analysis, we analyzed the hashtag semantic network to identify the hashtags transversal to the six TTs. Subsequently, we selected for each data set the contents with high sharing power and created a "potential opinion leader" index to identify users with influencer characteristics. Finally, a cross section of social actors able to guide public opinion in the Twittersphere emerged from the intersection between potentially influential users and the viral contents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pervasiveness of technology is affecting also the education field, so it is possible to evaluate whether technology can foster collaboration among students or improve the learning outcomes. A community of practice online is the subject of the present study, it represents a kind of blended learning which is defined as the integration of classroom face-to-face learning with online learning experiences with the objective to increase students' engagement and motivation. A recent experience of blended learning education has been carried out by four Italian Universities and in the present research study we have implemented social network analysis technique in order to observe online interactions of students, thus describing the nodes that exert the most influence in the group and to evaluate if the online interactions can positively affect the learning process. As result we can state that the outcomes of social network analysis are valuable information for teachers and tutors in order to facilitate participation and collaboration, that in turn promote an effective learning process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies have shown that parents' attributions regarding the causality of children´s behavioral problems influence the motivation and the strategies used to solve these problems. The present investigation aims to study, in a sample of parents of anxious children, the parental attributions about children´s anxiety and the strategies used by the parents to deal with this anxiety. The sample was composed by 15 mothers and 1 father of school-age children with anxiety disorders. The parents answered a semi-structured interview to assess their attributions about anxiety (causality, stability and controllability) and the strategies used to deal with it. The qualitative analysis showed that parents consider that they are an important source of influence in the development of anxiety in their children, and, simultaneously, that anxiety is temporary. The parental strategies most frequently used to cope with the children's anxiety were dependency/avoidance reinforcement, encouragement of the confrontation with fears and reassurance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]