People in Ecuador and the United States conceptualize compassion differently: The role of avoided negative affect.

Even people from frequently studied cultural contexts differ in how they conceptualize compassion, partly because of differences in how much they want to avoid feeling negative. To broaden this past work, we include participants from an understudied cultural context and start to examine the process through which culture shapes compassion. Based on ethnographic and empirical studies that include Ecuadorians, we predicted that Ecuadorians would want to avoid feeling negative less compared to U.S. Americans. Furthermore, we hypothesized that because of these differences in avoided negative affect, compared to U.S. Americans, for Ecuadorians, a compassionate response would contain more emotion sharing, which in turn would be associated with conceptualizing a compassionate face as one that mirrors sadness more and expresses happiness (e.g., a kind smile) less. Using a reverse correlation task, participants in the United States and Ecuador selected the stimuli that most resembled a compassionate face. They also reported how much they wanted to avoid feeling negative and described what a compassionate response would entail. As predicted, compared to U.S. Americans, Ecuadorians wanted to avoid feeling negative less, they conceptualized a compassionate response as one that focused more on emotion sharing, and visualized a compassionate face as one that contained more sadness and less happiness. Furthermore, exploratory analyses suggest that wanting to avoid feeling negative and conceptualizations of a compassionate response as emotion sharing partly sequentially explained the cultural differences in conceptualizations of a compassionate face. What people regard as compassionate differs across cultures, which has important implications for cross-cultural counseling. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Time discrimination and change detection could share a common brain network: findings of a task-based fMRI study.

Introduction: Over the past few years, several studies have described the brain activation pattern related to both time discrimination (TD) and change detection processes. We hypothesize that both processes share a common brain network which may play a significant role in more complex cognitive processes. The main goal of this proof-of-concept study is to describe the pattern of brain activity involved in TD and oddball detection (OD) paradigms, and in processes requiring higher cognitive effort. Methods: We designed an experimental task, including an auditory test tool to assess TD and OD paradigms, which was conducted under functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in 14 healthy participants. We added a cognitive control component into both paradigms in our test tool. We used the general linear model (GLM) to analyze the individual fMRI data images and the random effects model for group inference. Results: We defined the areas of brain activation related to TD and OD paradigms. We performed a conjunction analysis of contrast TD (task > control) and OD (task > control) patterns, finding both similarities and significant differences between them. Discussion: We conclude that change detection and other cognitive processes requiring an increase in cognitive effort require participation of overlapping functional and neuroanatomical components, suggesting the presence of a common time and change detection network. This is of particular relevance for future research on normal cognitive functioning in the healthy population, as well as for the study of cognitive impairment and clinical manifestations associated with various neuropsychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia.

Improving Learning and Study Strategies in Undergraduate Medical Students: A Pre-Post Study.

We aimed to describe the impact of a structured interventional program to improve learning and study skills in undergraduate medical students from a Latin American medical school. The interventional program's design was based on diagnostic/prescriptive assessment test scores measuring ten scales. The program consisted of five tailored workshops. The cohort studied consisted of 81 third-year medical students. The outcome variable was the difference between "pre" and "post" test scores. The unadjusted score percentiles were used to compare improvement in learning and study skills. In addition, a sensitivity analysis was conducted to assess variation in the mean difference of the test scores by the number of workshops attended. The response rate was 100% (81/81) for the pre test and ~77% (62/81) for the post test. After the interventional program, nine out of ten scales showed statistical improvement, except for the scale of motivation. The scales with the highest and lowest percent change improvement were time management (66%, p-value: <0.001) and motivation (14.9%, p-value: 0.06). The students who attended more workshops obtained a higher percent change improvement in the post test. These findings suggest that through a well-designed interventional program, it is possible to improve learning and study skills among medical students.

Relationship between self-care activities, stress and well-being during COVID-19 lockdown: a cross-cultural mediation model.

OBJECTIVES: To examine the mediation role of self-care between stress and psychological well-being in the general population of four countries and to assess the impact of sociodemographic variables on this relationship. DESIGN: Cross-sectional, online survey. PARTICIPANTS: A stratified sample of confined general population (N=1082) from four Ibero-American countries-Chile (n=261), Colombia (n=268), Ecuador (n=282) and Spain (n=271)-balanced by age and gender. PRIMARY OUTCOMES MEASURES: Sociodemographic information (age, gender, country, education and income level), information related to COVID-19 lockdown (number of days in quarantine, number of people with whom the individuals live, absence/presence of adults and minors in charge and attitude towards the search of information related to COVID-19), Perceived Stress Scale-10, Ryff's Psychological Well-Being Scale-29 and Self-Care Activities Screening Scale-14. RESULTS: Self-care partially mediates the relationship between stress and well-being during COVID-19 confinement in the general population in the total sample (F (3,1078)=370.01, p<0.001, R2=0.507) and in each country. On the other hand, among the evaluated sociodemographic variables, only age affects this relationship. CONCLUSION: The results have broad implications for public health, highlighting the importance of promoting people's active role in their own care and health behaviour to improve psychological well-being if stress management and social determinants of health are jointly addressed first. The present study provides the first transnational evidence from the earlier stages of the COVID-19 lockdown, showing that the higher perception of stress, the less self-care activities are adopted, and in turn the lower the beneficial effects on well-being.

The Impact of Strengthening Study Habits for Medical Students During COVID-19 Academic Transition: a Mixed-Methods Study.

PURPOSE: Assess the impact of learner-specific interventions on third-year medical students to cope with quarantine distance learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic. METHODS: We conducted a nested cross-sectional and mixed-methods study in a sample of 81 third-year medical students. Two face-to-face interventions were designed and conducted to offer tools to improve study habits, time management, and prioritizing skills. A nine-item structured questionnaire was administered. Descriptive statistics was performed for the quantitative section and thematic analysis for the qualitative section. RESULTS: Of the study population, 74.1% (60/81) completed the online questionnaire, 65.4% were female, and the mean age of the sample was 21.4±1.2 years old. Overall, ~50% of participants affirmed that the workshops were useful to improve time management, organize tasks and adapt to the new study modality imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. More than 60% of the students found the application of the provided tools during the interventions (SMART and COMPASS) useful to determine personal values and set a proper mindset for coping with distance learning. Further, 93.3% of the respondents applied the SMART strategy learned to set goals at least once during the confinement time. These findings were also seen in the thematic analysis. CONCLUSIONS: Overall, most of the students found the workshops useful and were able to practice what they had learned during this pandemic lockdown. Medical schools and higher education institutions should evaluate the possibility of formally including study habit preparation for undergraduates' students in order to provide resilience and successful academic adaptation during an ever-changing world.

Different Responses to Stress, Health Practices, and Self-Care during COVID-19 Lockdown: A Stratified Analysis.

The aim of the present cross-sectional study was to analyze the differential impact of the first COVID-19 lockdown (3 April 2020) on stress, health practices, and self-care activities across different Hispanic countries, age range, and gender groups. One thousand and eighty-two participants from Spain, Chile, Colombia, and Ecuador took part in this study. Irrespective of the country, and controlling for income level, young people, especially females, suffered a greater level of stress, perceived the situation as more severe, showed less adherence to health guidelines, and reported lower levels of health consciousness, in comparison to their male peers and older groups. However, in the case of self-care, it seems that older and female groups are generally more involved in self-care activities and adopt more healthy daily routines. These results are mostly similar between Colombia, Ecuador, and Spain. However, Chile showed some different tendencies, as males reported higher levels of healthy daily routines and better adherence to health guidelines compared to females and people over the age of 60. Differences between countries, genders, and age ranges should be considered in order to improve health recommendations and adherence to guidelines. Moreover, developing community action and intersectoral strategies with a gender-based approach could help to reduce health inequalities and increase the success of people's adherence to health guidelines and self-care-promoting interventions. Future studies should be addressed to explore the possible causations of such differences in more cultural-distant samples and at later stages of the current outbreak.

An fMRI Study Using a Combined Task of Interval Discrimination and Oddball Could Reveal Common Brain Circuits of Cognitive Change.

Recent functional neuroimaging studies suggest that the brain networks responsible for time processing are involved during other cognitive processes, leading to a hypothesis that time-related processing is needed to perform a range of tasks across various cognitive functions. To examine this hypothesis, we analyze whether, in healthy subjects, the brain structures activated or deactivated during performance of timing and oddball-detection type tasks coincide. To this end, we conducted two independent signed differential mapping (SDM) meta-analyses of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies assessing the cerebral generators of the responses elicited by tasks based on timing and oddball-detection paradigms. Finally, we undertook a multimodal meta-analysis to detect brain regions common to the findings of the two previous meta-analyses. We found that healthy subjects showed significant activation in cortical areas related to timing and salience networks. The patterns of activation and deactivation corresponding to each task type partially coincided. We hypothesize that there exists a time and change-detection network that serves as a common underlying resource used in a broad range of cognitive processes.

Aberrant timing and oddball detection in Schizophrenia: findings from a signed differential mapping meta-analysis.

Schizophrenia (SZ) is associated with deficits in both temporal and salience processing. The underlying neurological dysfunctions in both processes, which are interrelated and share neuroanatomical bases, remain poorly understood. The principal objective of this study was to elucidate whether there are any brain regions that show abnormal response during timing and oddball tasks in patients with SZ. To this end, we conducted a signed differential mapping (SDM) meta-analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies assessing abnormal responses elicited by tasks based on the oddball paradigm in patients with SZ. We conducted a similar SDM meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies of timing tasks in SZ. Finally, we undertook a multimodal meta-analysis to detect the common findings of the two previous meta-analyses. We found that SZ patients showed hypoactivation in cortical and subcortical areas related to timing. The dysfunction observed during timing tasks partially coincided with deficiencies in change-detection functions (particularly in the case of preattentional processing in the mismatch negativity response). We hypothesize that a dysfunctional timing/change detection network underlies the cognitive impairment observed in SZ.