Quality of life, burden and emotion regulation difficulties in relatives of borderline personality disorder patients.

Treball Final de Grau en Psicologia. Codi: PS1048. Curs: 2018/2019Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is a mental disorder characterized by dominant patterns of emotional instability, in addition to presenting alterations of self-image, instability in interpersonal relationships, marked impulsiveness and suicidal behaviors (suicidal ideation and attempts) causing a great interference in the life of the individual. There are several factors involved in BPD, including the family. Thus, relatives play an important role in the onset and development of the disorder, while at the same time the diagnosis of BPD and the associated symptoms influence the status of relatives. Some studies show high levels of burden, difficulties in emotion regulation and a deterioration in the well-being of the relatives of patients with BPD. The objective of this work was to study the level of burden and difficulties in emotional regulation in a sample of 49 relatives of patients with BPD, as well as to determine their levels of quality of life. In addition, the possible relation among these variables was also studied. The Quality of Life Index (QLI), the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS) and the Burden Assessment Scale (BAS) were used to carry out the study. Regarding the results, relatives showed burden scores above the average, moderate difficulties in emotion regulation and also a moderate level of quality of life. Moreover, a significant and negative correlation was obtained between burden and quality of life, and a significant and positive correlation was shown between the difficulties in emotion regulation and burden. These data provide evidence about the importance of taking into account families in the BPD intervention processes to improve the well-being of both patients and relatives.El Trastorno Límite de la Personalidad (TLP) es un trastorno mental caracterizado por patrones dominantes de inestabilidad emocional, además de presentar alteraciones de la auto-imagen, inestabilidad en las relaciones interpersonales, una marcada impulsividad y conductas suicidas (ideación e intentos suicidas) causando una gran interferencia en la vida del individuo. En el TLP intervienen varios factores, entre los cuales se encuentra la familia. Así, la familia juega un papel importante en la aparición y el desarrollo del trastorno, mientras que al mismo tiempo el diagnóstico de TLP y los síntomas asociados influyen en el estado de los familiares. Algunos estudios muestran niveles altos de carga, dificultades en la regulación emocional y un deterioro en el bienestar de los familiares de pacientes con TLP. El objetivo de este trabajo consistió en estudiar cuál era el nivel de carga y de dificultades en la regulación emocional en una muestra de 49 familiares de pacientes con TLP, así como determinar sus niveles de calidad de vida. Además, se estudió la posible relación entre estas variables. Para llevar a cabo el estudio se utilizaron las escalas de Quality of Life Index (QLI), Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS) y Burden Assessment Scale (BAS). Respecto a los resultados, se obtuvieron puntuaciones de carga por encima de la media, dificultades en regulación emocional moderadas y un nivel de calidad de vida también moderado. Por otra parte, se obtuvo una relación significativa y negativa entre la carga y la calidad de vida, y una relación significativa y positiva entre las dificultades en la regulación emocional y la carga. Estos datos aportan evidencias acerca de la importancia de tener en cuenta a las familias en los procesos de intervención del TLP para mejorar tanto el bienestar de los pacientes como el de sus familiares

Ranking Journals Following a Matching Model Approach. An Application to Public Economics Journals

Journal rankings based on citation indexes are widely used in the economics field for global top journals. We propose an alternative way to rank journals based on the publishing behavior of top ranked authors. We justify this approach by depicting the scientific publishing market as following a matching process. Compared to the citation approach, the methodology that we propose has comparative advantages in terms of time effort to produce national and subdiscipline rankings, and it makes it possible to compare them with global rankings. It also corrects the impact underestimation that the citation approach tends to produce in new and re-founded journals. We propose an empirical application to the case of public economics journals.

Protection against Spin Gap in 2-d Insulating Antiferromagnets with a Chern-Simons Term

We propose a novel mechanism for the protection against spin gapped states in doped antiferromagnets. It requires the presence of a Chern-Simons term that can be generated by a coupling between spin and an insulator. We first demonstrate that in the presence of this term the vortex loop excitations of the spin sector behave as anyons with fractional statistics. To generate such term, the fermions should have massive Dirac spectrum coupled to the emergent spin field of the spin sector. The Dirac spectrum can be realized by a planar spin configuration arising as the lowest-energy configuration of a square lattice antiferromagnet Hamiltonian involving a Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction. The mass is provided by a combination of dimerization and staggered chemical potential. We finally show that for realistic parameters, anyonic vortex loop condensation will likely never occur and thus the spin gapped state is prevented. We also propose real magnetic materials for an experimental verification of our theory.Comment: To appear in Physical Review

Site-centered impurities in quantum spin chains

The magnetic behavior of antiferromagnetic spin 1/2 chains with site-centered impurities in a magnetic field is investigated. The effect of impurities is implemented by considering different situations of both diagonal and off-diagonal disorder. The resulting magnetization curves present a wide variety of plateaux, whose position strongly depends on the kind of disorder considered. The relevance of these results to experimental situations is also discussed.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figure

Relativistic dissipative hydrodynamics with spontaneous symmetry breaking

In this paper we consider dissipative hydrodynamic equations for systems with continuous broken symmetries. We first present the case of superfluidity, in which the symmetry U(1) is broken and then generalize to the chiral symmetry $SU(2)_L \times SU(2)_R$. The corresponding new transport coefficients are introduced.Comment: 5 pages, RevTeX Minor changes, version accepted for publicatio

Dynamical obstruction in a constrained system and its realization in lattices of superconducting devices

Hard constraints imposed in statistical mechanics models can lead to interesting thermodynamical behaviors, but may at the same time raise obstructions in the thoroughfare to thermal equilibration. Here we study a variant of Baxter's 3-color model in which local interactions and defects are included, and discuss its connection to triangular arrays of Josephson junctions of superconductors and \textit{kagom\'e} networks of superconducting wires. The model is equivalent to an Ising model in a hexagonal lattice with the constraint that the magnetization of each hexagon is $\pm 6$ or 0. For ferromagnetic interactions, we find that the system is critical for a range of temperatures (critical line) that terminates when it undergoes an exotic first order phase transition with a jump from a zero magnetization state into the fully magnetized state at finite temperature. Dynamically, however, we find that the system becomes frozen into domains. The domain walls are made of perfectly straight segments, and domain growth appears frozen within the time scales studied with Monte Carlo simulations. This dynamical obstruction has its origin in the topology of the allowed reconfigurations in phase space, which consist of updates of closed loops of spins. As a consequence of the dynamical obstruction, there exists a dynamical temperature, lower than the (avoided) static critical temperature, at which the system is seen to jump from a ``supercooled liquid'' to a ``polycrystalline'' phase. In contrast, for antiferromagnetic interactions, we argue that the system orders for infinitesimal coupling because of the constraint, and we observe no interesting dynamical effects

Correlation functions for the 2D random bonds Potts Models

We study the spin-spin and energy-energy correlation functions for the 2D Ising and 3-states Potts model with random bonds at the critical point. The procedure employed is the renormalisation group approach of the perturbation series around the conformal field theories representing the pure models. For the Ising model, we obtain a crossover in the amplitude for the correlation functions which doesn't change the critical exponent. For the $3$-state Potts model, we found a shift in the critical exponent produced by randomness. A comparison with numerical data is discussed briefly.Comment: To appear in the Proccedings of the Trieste Conference on Recent Developments in Statistical Mechanics and Quantum Field Theory, April 1995, 9 pages, latex, no figures, espcrc2.st