Revista Iberoamericana de Psicologia y Salud最新文献

Poor adherence to treatment is a problem of great importance and striking magnitude. Its consequences are increased health care costs and poor health outcomes. It defined the objective of this research, which is the study of psychological characteristics of patients with different degrees of adherence to rehabilitation treatment after coronary bypass surgery. Ninety male and female patients with CHD, aged 46–71, were examined. The study was carried out using the questionnaire of ways of coping and the technique for diagnosing the types of attitude toward the disease, and the study of medical history. The analysis of the types of attitude toward the disease revealed that adherent patients show higher values on the harmonious type; patients with poor adherence show higher values on the apathetic, as well as the melancholic type of attitude toward illness. This study shows that wide range of psychological characteristics is significant for the definition of adherence to treatment. It is essential to consider the patient's personality and his characteristics, such as attitude toward the disease, because they influence the adherence and, therefore, the effectiveness of therapy in the postoperative period.

The loss of a loved one may provoke complicated grief, which is characterized by intense symptoms of yearning, sadness, or loss of life meaning. Identifying those at risk of developing complicated grief is crucial to provide adequate treatment. However, little is known about the symptom profile or the influence that the type of loss may have on grief intensity. A descriptive design was carried out. A total of 68 participants that have lost a loved one due to death, at least six months ago, took part on the research. They completed a range of emotional self-report measures. All psychopathological variables showed high and significant relations with the intensity of grief. The centrality perceived and feelings of hostility predicted the score of complicated grief. Finally, the loss of a son was associated with complicated grief and with higher scores on the experiences of loss and emotional psychopathology. Symptom profile of those with complicated grief is associated with a large number of psychopathological variables, including depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. The loss of a son seems to be an important risk factor for developing complicated grief.

In recent years, research on the families of persons with Intellectual Disability (ID) has focused on the factors that contribute to the improvement of their Family Quality of Life (FQoL), such as the support they get and their partnership with professionals. However, due to the complexity of the variables related to FQoL and support needs and adequacy, measuring these constructs is difficult and multidimensional. To do this, the aim of this study is to generate new indexes through a series of instruments and assess their feasibility to improve the evaluation process and not reduce the situation to single measurements. We applied 3 instruments adapted to the Spanish population – Service Inventory, Beach Center Family-Professional Partnership Scale, and Beach Center FQOL – to a sample of 202 families of children with ID and we studied the indexes. The results show that the new indexes were designed to make FQoL measurements more easily manageable and interpretable. In fact, we found a statistical significant correlation between partial indexes (p < .001) in relation to the total score and very high sensibility of the indexes in relation to the degree of disability (p < .001). They also facilitate conducting complex analyses without having to discard any relevant measurement dimension.

Adherence to adequately prescribed medications is essential for an effective psychopharmacotherapy. Non-adherence to psychoactive medications is a significant barrier to the successful treatment of psychiatric disorders in the clinical practice and has been linked to poor treatment outcomes such as increased risk of relapse and recurrence, as well as increased healthcare costs. Adherence to prescribed treatments in psychiatric practice is a multifactorial issue that includes patient-centered factors, therapy-related factors, healthcare system factors, social and economic factors, and disease factors. However, despite the relevance of the contribution of that group of variables in predicting adherence, a considerable level of unexplained variance still remain. Moreover, there is no ‘gold standard’ measure of medication adherence since all available methods have their limitations. This paper focuses on the difficulties involved in evaluating psychiatric patients’ adherence in real clinical world and describes the most relevant methods to assess adherence.

The role of ideas of reference (IR) in psychopathology is studied for the purpose of evaluating worry or distress when IR are present. We analyze whether worry about IR is related to psychotic symptoms, whether it differentiates among diagnostic classes as prominent in schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders, whether worry about IR differentiates among specific diagnoses, as high in paranoid schizophrenia, whether assessment of worry is sufficiently sensitive and specific, and whether it discriminates between controls and patients of diagnostic class schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders. The sample was made up of 666 patients (59.16% women), M_age = 34.45 years (SD = 12.56) and 3842 controls (67.28% women), M_age = 27.15 years (SD = 11.38). Worry about IR was related to psychotic indicators, discriminates among diagnostic classes (partial η² = .14) and among specific diagnoses (partial η² = 12), and is mainly featured in paranoid schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder. Sensitivity and specificity were adequate, as was separation of controls from the diagnostic class schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders. The assessment of IR is relevant, but it is even more important to assess the level of worry or distress about them.

The forced swimming test is a method used in the assessment of depressive-like behavior in rodents. Changes in the original forced swimming test procedure developed by Porsolt et al. and their influence in the results is a controversial issue and has been discussed in many studies. Animal's behavior is usually recorded by partial interval recording, dividing the total recording time into equal intervals and manually recording the predominant behavior. Despite the influence of the recording method in the subsequent results, this issue has not been further studied nor normalized. The aim of this study was to assess whether the representativeness of the data is influenced by the recording interval length, by recording behaviors (immobility, swim and climbing) in the same subjects at 3, 5 and 10 s recording intervals. We used a non-pathological sample of male and female adult Wistar rats. Our results show no differences in the use of these three recording intervals in the registration method of the forced swimming test, for the main three behaviors measured.

Alcohol consumption prevalence in Bolivia is one of the highest in the region and the most degrading practices faced by the society. To apply the changes, social policy makers require objective, accurate, and complete information about the factors that could be considered both guards and risky. Hence, links between socio-demographics, family, personal/behavioral and social variables and youth alcohol use were analyzed in order to know their particular contributions to the explanation of drinking behavior. The study was carried out with a sample of 1,023 young students (13–23 years old), of both sexes (515 male and 508 female) recruited from local high schools and university initial undergraduate courses. The results showed strong ties between such variables and adolescent alcohol drinking behavior. The predictive model (linear regression model) fitted relatively well including variables such as age, parental monitoring, father–adolescent relationship, peer pressure, antisocial behavior and risk perception. Nevertheless, only social and parental variables proved a good fit with the empirical data when a theoretical model was proposed through a structured equation modeling. Although this model seems to be in good shape, it should be adjusted to a more comprehensive approach to a risk/protection conceptual framework.

With the aim of comparing in the forensic assessment of the psychosocial injury in intimate partner violence cases, the efficacy of the psychometric measure with the content analysis of the clinical interview, a study was designed. For this, forensic assessment not only must provide a diagnostic of the psychological injury, but also a differential diagnosis of malingering. 101 mentally healthy and with no-history of intimate partner violence (IPV) females answered, under malingering instructions of psychological injury consequence of IPV, to the MMPI-2, and were submitted to a free narrative interview, the forensic-clinical interview (Arce & Fariña, 2001). The results showed that participants had a very high capacity, 79.6%, to malinger in the psychometric measure, the MMPI-2. As for the differential diagnosis of malingering, the validity scales and configurations classified correctly as malingerers to the 80.2% of the protocols, failing in the remaining 19.8%. As in forensic assessment, the Type II Error (classification of malingered injury as real) is not admissible; the psychometric measure is not sufficient evidence of psychological injury. The content analysis of the forensic-clinical interview revealed that 3% of the participants were capable to malinger the psychological injure, while in 97% were detected non-normative narratives, that is, were classified as false. Although the content analysis of the interview makes malingering significantly more difficult and detects more malingering than the psychometric measure, fails to comply with full control of the Type II Error. Thus, the content analysis of the clinical-forensic interview is not in itself sufficient forensic evidence. The implications of the results for forensic practice are discussed.

Dating violence, as a widespread social problem in Spain, has given rise to the creation of several victims’ assistance services. Nonetheless, previous research has shown that experiencing violence does not necessary lead the subject to be self-labelled as a victim. This dissociation between victimization and self-labelling might be hindering their access to these resources. This study analyses the relationship between dating violence, measured behavioural indicators, and the use of various labels (i.e., abuse, fear, being trapped) to describe aforementioned relationships. The sample was composed by 6,731 students, aged between 15 and 26 years (M = 18.2; SD = 2.1), 39% males and 61% females. The majority of the sample (70%) reported not having felt abused, frightened or trapped. Only 1.1% of males and 3.1% of females responded positively to the three questions, and 25% answered affirmative, at least, one of the issues. Regarding the victimization experience, it was confirmed that fear and feeling trapped were associated with lower abuse levels than those found in subjects self-labelled as abused, but they were statistically higher than those participants who responded negatively to the three questions (p < 0,001). Besides, different types of violence were differently associated to fear and being trapped, with a linear upward trend for the different forms of violence assessed by Dating Violence Questionnaire, in both males and females. Thus, results are discussed in respect to the ease that being properly labelled as a victim of dating violence may suppose in help seeking behaviour.

The aims of this study were to estimate the internal consistency and contrast the invariance (between a clinical sample and a general population sample) of the 4-factor model for the 24 items of the Anger Expression scale of the revised State-Trait-Anger Expression Inventory, and explore alternative models if there appears problems of internal consistency and factor definition. The scale was applied to 200 women living with HIV, and 120 women and 120 men from the general population. Items 3 and 17 showed problems of internal consistency. The correlation between anger-in factor and anger-out factor was unique in the confirmatory factor analysis. Horn's parallel analysis and Velicer's criterion indicated that the number of factors is three. After their extraction, the 2 expected factors of anger control and a factor of anger expression (union of anger-in factor and anger-out factor without items 3 and 17) were configured. The internal consistency of these 3 factors varied from .76 to .89. The fit to the data and the invariance properties of 3-factor model were acceptable from four indexes: χ2/df (<3), RMSEA and SRMR (<.10), and CFI (>.80, except for the model constrained on structural variances-covariances and the model constrained on measurement residuals when the invariance was contrasted). It is concluded that the scale should be reduced to 22 items and has a structure of three correlated factors with acceptable cross-validity.