Maria Fernandez

As interest in women’s roles in agriculture increases, research on women livestock-keepers remains limited. Advances in feminist scholarship highlight farming women’s dual roles in agricultural production and biological and socio-cultural reproduction, including women’s uncompensated labor in child-bearing, child-rearing and home-making. To expand knowledge about women pastoralists’ lived experiences, we conducted life-history interviews with 25 herder women in two regions of Mongolia, following-up with participatory workshops in each region. As mothering and carework emerged as key themes, we drew on feminist care ethics and the anthropology of mothering and motherhood to analyze interview data and co-interpret results with workshop participants. Our findings reveal three caring conflicts experienced by Mongolian herder women: between caring for nutag (homeland) and caring for herds, between caring for herds and caring for children, and between caring for family, herd and nutag and caring for self. These conflicts highlight contradictions between normative Mongolian motherhood as depicted in cultural images and narratives, and the lived reality of herder mothers, and between public valorization of and incentives for motherhood and the lack of sufficient public support for mothers and carework in rural Mongolia. Unmet needs for care, resulting risks to maternal and child health, and the extraordinary workload associated with mothers’ multiple caring tasks likely contribute to rural–urban migration and increasing masculinization of the Mongolian countryside. Although Mongolian culture frames mothers as leaders who unify their communities through their wisdom, many herder-mothers today live isolated lives where their multiple caring responsibilities preclude active participation in community development and governance.

In this article, we present results from a literature review of intrinsic, instrumental, and relational values of nature conducted for the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, as part of the Methodological Assessment of the Diverse Values and Valuations of Nature. We identify the most frequently recurring meanings in the heterogeneous use of different value types and their association with worldviews and other key concepts. From frequent uses, we determine a core meaning for each value type, which is sufficiently inclusive to serve as an umbrella over different understandings in the literature and specific enough to help highlight its difference from the other types of values. Finally, we discuss convergences, overlapping areas, and fuzzy boundaries between different value types to facilitate dialogue, reduce misunderstandings, and improve the methods for valuation of nature's contributions to people, including ecosystem services, to inform policy and direct future research. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Institute of Biological Sciences.

Subjects may be aware in each moment of the content of a given scene and/or internal state. However, the vivid reality of the scene is a by-product of the complex processing of external and internal information in the brain. This point is more evident in the hallucinatory phase of psychosis or during dreaming. There is complex internal processing for the recreation of certain contents which are unconscious for the subject, whilst the content is experienced, the process to arrive at the contents is not perceived at all. Therefore, an important question that naturally arises is if process and content are served by different neural mechanisms. The possibility that postsynaptic potentials arranged in an open-field configuration would be more related to the content, experienced (or not) by the subject, and transmission-transformation of information along neural networks would be related to processing would be proposed. The proposal has some important implications for clinical applications, given that depression, psychosis, anxiety, and others are experienced as defined contents or states, while more possibly the underpinnings are related to abnormal information processing. Therefore, any clinical application should be primarily directed to psychological, pharmacological, or neural stimulation modification of information processing. However, if the content is related to activation of defined neural nets, possibly defined as engrams in a broad sense, the activation of those engrams (content) would only be able to modify processing through action on the processes. A handful of psychological therapies, more or less, explicitly tacitly successfully focus on processes (i.e., cognitive therapy in psychosis) rather than on contents, while others also focus on contents (flooding therapy in anxiety). These ideas are being implicitly running from the beginning of Psychology and made explicit in the field of motivation in organizational psychology. It is important to clarify the different Physiological underpinnings of content and process, and how each intervention is more or less focused on one or the other to justify their odds for success. From an educational point of view, this topic refers to educational strategies more biased to memory (content) vs. educational strategies where the solving tasks approach (processes) is primed.

Background: The high level of satisfaction of users of a health service is largely due to the fact that they receive excellent care from healthcare professionals. Compassionate care is an essential component of excellent care. But what do nurses understand compassion to be? Research objectives: To analyse the concept of compassion from the perspective of nurses in the Andalusian Public Health System, Spain. Research design: This is a qualitative study following the grounded theory model. Four focus groups and 25 in-depth interviews were conducted. Participants and research context: A total of 68 nursing professionals working in the Andalusian Public Health System (Spain) participated. Theoretical sampling was used, with participants being recruited using the snowball technique. Ethical considerations: This research was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the Centro-Almería Health District (CEICA 27/9/17). Findings: From the analysis of the data, four themes emerged that helped to understand the concept of compassion according to nurses: ‘Negative perception of the term compassion’, ‘Compassion and empathy as synonyms’, ‘Beyond empathy’, and ‘Effects of having a compassionate attitude’. Discussion: Nurses perceive the concept of compassion differently to each other and even contradictorily. This concept is imbued with cultural elements, which adds confusion to understanding it, and is even perceived as something negative similar to pity. Conclusion: Nurses confuse the concepts of empathy and compassion as if they were synonymous. Before considering training in compassion for healthcare professionals, it is essential to clarify the concept of compassion through educational interventions.

La literatura es, y ha de ser, un punto de referencia obligado e imprescindible a la hora de entender la situación social y cultural de la mujer a lo largo de la historia. Este trabajo es fruto del ciclo de conferencias, celebrado en marzo de 1992 y que tuvo por título "La imagen de la mujer en la literatura", y reunió a nueve especialistas en el tema, agrupadas en cinco bloques, a saber, literatura latina, literatura inglesa, literatura catalana, literatura española e hispanoamericana, y, por último, literatura francesa. El objetivo último perseguido era comprobar el grado de comunión existente entre distintas literaturas occidentales en lo que se refiere al estereotipo femenino o a los tópicos sobre la mujer, así como analizar la antigüedad de los mismos y su evolución a través del devenir histórico y cultural.

The informed consent is an ethical and legal requirement for potential participants to enroll in a study. There is ample of evidence that understanding consent information and enrollment is challenging for participants in clinical trials. On the other hand, the reasoning process behind decision-making in HIV clinical trials remains mostly unexplored. This study aims to examine the decision-making process of people living with HIV currently participating in antiretroviral clinical trials and their understanding of informed consent. We conducted a qualitative socio-constructivist study using semi-structured interviews. Eleven participants were selected by purposive sampling in Argentina until data saturation was reached. A content analysis was performed. The findings highlight the fact that some participants decided to enroll on the spot, while others made the decision a few days later. In all cases, the decision was based on different aspects of trust (in doctors, in the clinical research site, in the clinical trials system) but also on emotions associated with HIV and/or treatment. Moreover, while people living with HIV felt truly informed after the consent dialogue with a researcher, consent forms were unintelligible and unfriendly. The immediacy of patient decision-making has rarely been described before. Enrollment in an HIV clinical trial is mainly a trust-based decision but this does not contradict the ethical values of autonomy, voluntariness, non-manipulation, and non‐exploitation. Thus, trust is a key issue to be included in reshaping professional practices to ensure the integrity of the informed consent process.

The island of Ibiza is a western Mediterranean destination known internationally for its nightlife. The aim of this paper is to make a proposal to classify the different types of premises in the Ibiza nightlife offer. This involves making a first definition that allows to delimit which businesses are parts of the sector. The methodology used is based on the case study and specifically, on the review of the promotional actions and activities carried out, completed with the visit to the premises. The classification has been made based on the offer marketed and not only on the legal forms used, as innovation goes ahead of the existing legal classifications. Although it is a particular application, due to the international importance of Ibiza, it is a good starting point to classify the nightlife offer of many other tourist destinations. The resulting typology divides the sector into two large groups: nightclubs and other premises. While nightclubs have musical parties as their main activity declared, the other premises have accommodation or catering as their main activity, with music being an element of differentiation. Nightclubs are divided into several subgroups, depending on their size and relevance. The other premises are subdivided into Beach Clubs, Hotel Clubs, Party Boats, Lounge Clubs, Disco Pubs, among others.

As Social Economy financial institutions, credit unions have traditionally been considered less efficient than traditional banking entities. However, like banks and savings banks, they have to be as efficient and competitive as possible to survive in today’s business environment, especially at times of crisis. To date, there have been very few studies on their efficiency and practically none for the crisis period. Moreover, almost all the existing studies assess only financial efficiency, without considering their social function. This study examines the levels of both financial and social efficiency in Spanish credit unions as well as their main determinants during the recent crisis. We apply the two-stage double bootstrap data envelopment analysis methodology based on panel data corresponding to all the credit unions active in Spain between 2008 and 2013. The empirical results indicate that financial and social efficiency achieved an acceptable level, although on average the former was slightly greater than the latter. We also find that both age and merger and acquisition activity were positively influential on the financial efficiency of credit unions but had a significant negative effect on their social efficiency. Moreover, the regional location of such entities and the financial crisis were also crucial determinants of both types of efficiency. Our findings are therefore useful for all the stakeholders of credit unions to know if these entities have been efficient according to a double bottom line accounting in the crisis period and hence to maintain successful social management that is compatible with satisfactory financial efficiency.

Recent research has found that the omission of accent marks in Spanish does not produce slower word identification times in go/no-go lexical decision and semantic categorization tasks [e.g., cárcel = carcel], thus suggesting that vowels like á and a are represented by the same orthographic units during word recognition and reading. However, there is a discrepant finding with the yes/no lexical decision task, where the words with the omitted accent mark produced longer response times than the words with the accent mark. In Experiment 1, we examined this discrepant finding by running a yes/no lexical decision experiment comparing the effects for words and non-words. Results showed slower response times for the words with omitted accent mark than for those with the accent mark present, thus suggesting a bias toward a “word” response for accented items in the yes/no lexical decision task. To test this interpretation, Experiment 2 used the same stimuli with a blocked design and a go/no-go lexical decision task. Results showed similar response times to words regardless of whether the accent mark was omitted. This pattern strongly suggests that the longer response times to words with an omitted accent mark in yes/no lexical decision experiments are a task-dependent effect rather than a genuine reading cost.

The disease brought about by the SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19 coronavirus has had an unprecedented global impact. Confinement to control the outbreak may have mental health consequences for the most vulnerable in the population, including adolescents. This study aims to describe and analyze the relationships between the stress variables, Emotional Intelligence and the intention to use cannabis in healthy adolescents, before and after the end of the COVID-19 pandemic containment stage. A comparative correlational study was carried out with validated self-completed questionnaires through an online platform. The sample is made up of adolescents aged 13–17 from two different schools in Ponferrada. The analysis of correlation and differences between the groups indicate that confinement has had effects on the mental health of the adolescents, specifically on the emotional manifestations of stress. Furthermore, significant gender differences were found for stress values and Emotional Intelligence. However, no differences have been found for cannabis use intention.