Stop yelling: interparental conflict and adolescents’ self-representations as mediated by their perceived relationships with parents

Adolescents’ perceptions of their relationship with both parents were examined as mediators linking interparental conflict to their self-representations (SR). Portuguese adolescents (N = 214; 58.4% girls), aged 10-16 years old (M = 13.39), attending public elementary and secondary schools, filled out self-report measures. Multi-mediator path analysis models revealed that interparental conflict predicted less favorable SR in most evaluated domains. This association was mediated by adolescents’ perceptions of (a) support in the mother–adolescent relationship, related to instrumental, social, emotional, physical appearance, and intelligence SR; (b) negative interactions in the mother–adolescent relationship, related to instrumental and physical appearance SR; (c) support in the father–adolescent relationship, related to social and physical appearance SR; and (d) negative interactions in the father–adolescent relationship, related to instrumental SR. This study emphasizes the relevance of interparental conflict and adolescents’ perceptions of their relationship with both parents in their SR construction. Practical implications point to promoting constructive conflict and improving parent–adolescent relationships.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Maltreatment experiences and psychopathology in children and adolescents: the intervening role of domain-specific self-representations moderated by age

Background: Associations between maltreatment experiences and psychopathology symptoms in children and adolescents are well established. However, the role of domain-specific self-representations (SR) in those associations remains unexplored. Objective: This multi-informant study aimed to explore the indirect associations between maltreatment experiences and children's and adolescents’ psychopathology symptoms (i.e., internalizing and externalizing problems), through domain-specific self-representations, and the moderating role of age in those indirect associations. Participants and setting: Participants were 203 children/adolescents (52.7 % boys), aged 8–16 years old (M = 12.64; SD = 2.47), referred to child/youth protection commissions, their parents, and case workers. Method: Case workers reported on child/adolescent maltreatment, children/adolescents reported on SR, and parents reported on psychopathology symptoms. Results: Controlling for chronicity of maltreatment and child/adolescent sex effects, multiple mediation path analysis revealed that: 1) higher levels of physical and psychological abuse were associated with less externalizing problems through more negative social SR; 2) higher levels of physical neglect were associated with more externalizing problems through more positive opposition SR; 3) higher levels of psychological neglect were associated with less externalizing problems through more negative physical appearance SR, and 4) associated with more externalizing problems through more negative opposition SR. Moreover, the indirect effects of physical and psychological abuse on internalizing and externalizing problems through instrumental SR were conditional on child/adolescent age. Conclusion: Findings signal the relevance of preventing child/adolescent maltreatment and promoting the construction of positive and, foremost, realistic and adaptive self-representations as protection against maladjustment.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Alteracoes limnologicas no Rio Paraguai ("dequada") e o fenomeno natural de mortandade de peixes no Pantanal Mato-Grossense - MS.

No Pantanal, ocorre um fenomeno natural de deterioracao da qualidade da agua, denominado regionalmente como "Dequada", relacionado a decomposicao da grande massa de materia organica submersa no inicio do processo de inundacao. Sua magnitude e dependente das caracteristicas do pulso de inundacao, ou seja, caracteristicas da fase de seca anterior e do periodo de inundacao subsequente (volume e velocidade). De acordo com essa magnitude, pode provocar mortandade massiva de peixes (podendo alcancar a ordem de milhares de toneladas), docorrente da deplecao de oxigenio e do aumento da concentracao de gas carbonico, resultantes dos processos de oxidacao da materia organica, tanto nos campos inundados, quanto na coluna d'agua dos rios. Os peixes moribundos apresentam comportamento tipico de estresse respiratorio. Outros fatores, como gas sulfidrico, amonia, aluminio, sodio e potassio (solidos dissolvidos), alteracoes de pH e compostos provenientes da atividade fitoplanctonica foram descardados, pois nao foram encontrados em niveis considerados toxicos para peixes. Pesticidas e matais pesados nao foram analisados, mas seus niveis dificilmente poderiam ser responsaveis por mortandades tao grandes em uma area tao extensa, onde a atividade antropica ainda e reduzida. Em 1995, o fenomeno foi muito expressivo, devido a rapidez e ao grande volume da onda de cheia, chegando a provocar a total anoxia e/ou manter sub hipoxia o rio Paraguai por mais dois meses e apresentar valores de gas carbonico dissociado de ate 79mg/L, nunca antes obtidos.bitstream/item/37450/1/BP07.pd

‘I always say what I think’: a rights-based approach of young people’s psychosocial functioning in residential care

Adolescents in residential care tend to be socially devalued and are psychosocially vulnerable. For that reason, a rights-based approach must be adopted to empower them and promote their participation. Focus group discussions were developed with 29 adolescents aiming to explore their rights perceptions during the placement in residential care and how it could be related to their well-being. Results from the grounded model showed that youth’s perceptions on the non-fulfilment of their rights are related to perceived emotional and behavioral difficulties. Their psychological functioning seems to be particularly affected when a set of dimensions are perceived as not fulfilled, namely, education, private life, non-discrimination, perceived social image and respect for themselves and their families by the protection system. Also, a set of individual, relational and socio-cognitive variables were identified as conditions and processes that provide additional explanatory potential to this model. These results underpin the relevance of adopting a rights-based approach to understand psychosocial functioning in residential care, strengthening the importance of social influences to human development. Implications for practice are also explored in the present work.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Sentiment classification of consumer generated online reviews using topic modeling

The development of the Internet and mobile devices enabled the emergence of travel and hospitality review sites, leading to a large number of customer opinion posts. While such comments may influence future demand of the targeted hotels, they can also be used by hotel managers to improve customer experience. In this article, sentiment classification of an eco-hotel is assessed through a text mining approach using several different sources of customer reviews. The latent Dirichlet allocation modeling algorithm is applied to gather relevant topics that characterize a given hospitality issue by a sentiment. Several findings were unveiled including that hotel food generates ordinary positive sentiments, while hospitality generates both ordinary and strong positive feelings. Such results are valuable for hospitality management, validating the proposed approach.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Resilience of green roofs to climate change

The successful management of cities growth rely in part on the maximization of the benefits delivered by the built environment while minimizing the environmental degradation. Circular and resourceful cites are the mainstream for climate change resilience. Green roofs, as a nature-based solution, contribute to climate change adaptation and mitigation through the provision of several ecosystem services. Value of green roofs can be achieved at the level of environmental (e.g., air quality enhancement, carbon sequestration, biodiversity promotion stormwater management, acoustic insulation, and noise reduction), social (e.g., esthetic integration, well-being and life quality, rooftop gardens), and economic (e.g., life span extension, energetic efficiency, energy production, real-state valorization, business development) spheres. Buildup green roof resilience maybe underpinned by the selection of efficient and sustainable components for its installation. This chapter aims at giving an overview on the role of green roofs resilience to climate change, highlighting the provision of services and the mitigation and adaption capacity.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Parental attitudes in child maltreatment

An information-processing approach to maladaptive parenting suggests that high-risk and maltreating parents are likely to hold inaccurate and biased preexisting cognitive schemata about child development and child rearing. Importantly, these schemas, which may include values, beliefs, expectations, and attitudes, are known to influence the way parents perceive and subsequently act toward their children. However, the few studies specifically addressing parental attitudes only considered global maltreatment, not distinguishing abuse from neglect. Moreover, few have considered dual-process models of cognition, relying mostly on the explicit level of parental attitudes that can be prone to various biases. Based on the Social Information Processing (SIP) model of child abuse and neglect, this study examines the association of parents preexisting cognitive schemata, namely explicit and implicit parental attitudes, and child abuse and neglect. A convenience sample of 201 mothers (half with at least one child referred to child protection services) completed a measure of explicit parental attitudes and a speed-accuracy task related to parenting. Abuse and neglect were measured with self-report and professionals-report instruments. Overall, the results support the hypothesis that maladaptive parenting is related with more biased preexisting cognitive schemas, namely attitudes related to parenting, but only for neglect and particularly when reported by professionals. Moreover, the results observed with both the explicit and implicit measures of attitudes were convergent, with mothers presenting more inadequate explicit attitudes also exhibiting an overall lower performance in the implicit attitudes task. This study is likely to contribute to the SIP framework of child abuse and neglect, particularly for the elucidation of the sociocognitive factors underlying maladaptive parenting, while also providing relevant cues for prevention and intervention programs.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Implicit measures of child abuse and neglect: a systematic review

Interest in child maltreatment research has been growing in the last two decades. The main approach underlying this research has relied upon self and family reports. These methods may be problematic because they often require conscious awareness, generate socially desirable over accurate responses or can be biased by parents' unrealistic expectations, misattributions and perceptual errors. Simultaneously, research has been adapting methods from social cognition research in an attempt to access the implicit and spontaneous processes underlying the information processing related to parent–child interactions, exploring parental cognitions and emotions that may constitute important contributions to explain abusive and neglectful parenting. In this paper we review the research on child abuse and neglect using implicit measures. Using combinations of words related with child abuse and neglect, and with autonomic and affective variables assessed by the implicit measures, we have conducted a systematic review of 33 studies, and we examined the variables explored, the type of measures used and the results obtained. The research reviewed points out the importance of assessing parental representations in parent–child interactions and analyzing the differences between maltreating and non-maltreating parents. Specifically, physically abusive parents tend to show more difficulties in recognizing children's emotions, reveal more biases in their perceptions and attributions about children and behave more aggressively. Further research with maltreating parents, namely neglectful, using implicit measures is still requiredinfo:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Recognizing children's emotions in child abuse and neglect

Past research has suggested that parents' ability to recognize their children's emotions is associated with an enhanced quality of parent–child interactions and appropriateness of parental caregiving behavior. Although this association has also been examined in abusive and neglectful parents, the results are mixed and do not adequately address child neglect. Based on the Social Information Processing model of child abuse and neglect, we examined the association between mothers' ability to recognize children's emotions and self- and professionals-reported child abuse and neglect. The ability to recognize children's emotions was assessed with an implicit valence classification task and an emotion labeling task. A convenience sample of 166 mothers (78 with at least one child referred to Child Protection Services) completed the tasks. Child abuse and neglect were measured with self-report and professionals-report instruments. The moderating role of mothers' intellectual functioning and socioeconomic status were also examined. Results revealed that abusive mothers performed more poorly on the negative emotions recognition task, while neglectful mothers demonstrated a lower overall ability in recognizing children's emotions. When classifying the valence of emotions, mothers who obtained higher scores on child neglect presented a higher positivity bias particularly when their scores in measures of intellectual functioning were low. There was no moderation effect for socioeconomic status. Moreover, the results for child abuse were mainly observed with self-report measures, while for child neglect, they predominantly emerged with professionals-report. Our findings highlight the important contribution of the social information processing model in the context of child maltreatment, with implications for prevention and intervention addressed.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Perspectivas de estudos ecologicos sobre o Pantanal.

Este trabalho originou-se das discussoes realizadas no "Curso de Ecologia de Areas Alagaveis", ministrado pelo Dr. Wolfgang J. Junk, do Max-Planck Institute fur limnologie - Alemanha e pela Dra Carolina Joana da Silva do Departamento de Biologia da Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso (Cuiaba), em agosto de 1991, no Centro de Pesquisa Agropecuaria do Pantanal - EMBRAPA/CPAP. Sua leitura leva ao entendimento de que, aprofundando-se os conhecimentos e reunindo-se as informacoes, e possivel formar uma base tecnico-cientifica solida para que acoes de manejo possam ser encontradas na regiao dentro dos principios do desenvolvimento sustentavel. Reeditado de forma ampliada quatro anos depois da realizacao daquele evento, este documento foi elaborado em duas partes interdependentes. Na primeira parte sao apresentadas informacoes sobre a regiao - algumas bastantes recentes, com enfase no Pantanal, como forma de atualizar e subsidiar recomendacoes a pesquisa ecologica, que constituem a segunda parte deste trabalho. Algumas dessas questoes ja fazem parte dos objetivos das pesquisas que vem sendo conduzidas pelas diferentes instituicoes que atuam na regiao. Outras necessitam ser incluidas ou implementadas. A organizacao desse curso visou inicialmente promover a troca e a atualizacao de conhecimentos teoricos e metodologicos em Limnologia para profissionais atuantes na regiao da Bacia Hidrografica do Alto Paraguai, em particular na planicie pantaneira/chaquenha, pertencente ao Brasil, Bolivia e Paraguai.bitstream/item/37750/1/DOC18.pd