Jose Martinez

ObjectiveThis study aimed to analyse how stereotypes towards older people moderate the relationship between burnout and quality of life of professionals working in nursing homes.MethodA total of 312 professionals were asked to complete questionnaires of burnout Maslach Burnout Inventory quality of Life and aging stereotypes. The moderation effects were tested using linear regression models.ResultsA negative association was observed between burnout and QoL. It was also found a statistically significant moderator effect of the total score of stereotypes and the health stereotypes, besides a marginally statistically significant moderator effect for motivational stereotypes. The moderator effects were different for people with low and high negative stereotypes. QoL was more affected under conditions of high burnout, in which people with more negative stereotypes tended to present higher QoL than people with lower negative stereotypes.ConclusionHighly burned-out professionals in nursing homes may avoid their negative feelings projecting them to residents through stereotypes, as a way of coping with burnout and increasing their QoL. However, this mechanism is an “aggressive reaction” and may have negative effects for both the older adult and the professional. The comprehension of these variables is essential for developing adequate intervention programs.

This paper explores the link between the case for indeterminism in an epistemological fashion and methodological individualism in the thought of two defenders of both stances: Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek. The relation between these issues has not received much attention before and even less so with regard to these two thinkers. First, Popper’s defence of indeterminism from an epistemic viewpoint and Hayek’s views about the indeterminism of action are studied. Second, their positions about methodological individualism are considered. Finally, several comparative questions are aired.

El Nuevo Constitucionalismo Latinoamericano supuso una inédita fuente de esperanza para los pueblos del Continente, al implicar la colocación en la cúspide del ordenamiento jurídico del conjunto de derechos básicos y vías de participación política directa imprescindibles para lograr una auténtica democracia y un respeto efectivo a la dignidad del ciudadano. Lamentablemente, el Nuevo Constitucionalismo Latinoamericano llevaba dentro de sí una serie de rémoras que lo malograron en gran medida. Mediante el presente trabajo reivindicamos la Constitución como herramienta insustituible para lograr una democracia real y una auténtica justicia social, exponiendo los logros del Nuevo Constitucionalismo Latinoamericano y proponiendo alternativas a sus puntos débiles.

We investigate the emergence of iconicity, specifically a bouba-kiki effect in miniature artificial languages under different functional constraints: when the languages are reproduced and when they are used communicatively. We ran transmission chains of participant dyads who played an interactive communicative game and individual participants who played a matched learning game. An analysis of the languages over six generations in an iterated learning experiment revealed that in the Communication condition, but not in the Reproduction condition, words for spiky shapes tend to be rated by naive judges as more spiky than the words for round shapes. This suggests that iconicity may not only be the outcome of innovations introduced by individuals, but, crucially, the result of interlocutor negotiation of new communicative conventions. We interpret our results as an illustration of cultural evolution by random mutation and selection.