Alvaro Vergés

Universidad de los Andes

This article explores the analysis and interpretation of wording effects associated with using direct and reverse items in psychological assessment. Previous research using bifactor models has suggested a substantive nature of this effect. The present study uses mixture modeling to systematically examine an alternative hypothesis and surpass recogn...

The negative impact of ageism on the mental health of older persons has been well studied, but the mechanisms underlying this relationship have not been explored in detail. The present study examines the relationship of ageism with depressive and anxious symptoms in older people, evaluating the indirect effect via loneliness. The analysis was carri...

Background: Early Psychological First Aid (PFA) has been widely recommended for preventing posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). However, its lack of empirical evidence of safety and effectiveness has been criticized. Objectives: To assess the effectiveness of PFA-ABCDE, an original PFA protocol, for preventing PTSD one month after the intervent...

Objetivo: Describir y analizar si el apoyo social percibido modera la relación entre antecedente de depresión (AD) o síntomas de trastorno de estrés postraumático (TEPT) y desarrollo de síntomas de depresión posparto (SDPP), evaluado prospectivamente. Método: Diseño longitudinal de tres tiempos: antes del parto (n = 458), primer mes posparto (n =...

Adolescence represents a fundamental stage for interactions between excessive food intake and drug consumption. The association between obesity and drug use is unclear, but inhibitory control has been proposed as a common mechanism. The current study aimed to examine differences in inhibitory control measures in adolescents with overweight and/or s...

The aim is to analyse the relationship between social influence for Internet use and Internet addiction (IA) in older women, considering the use of Internet-based social networks as a mediator. The participants were 480 older women Internet users. Social influence, frequency of use of social networks and IA (including loss of control and emotional...

This article examines wording effects when positive and negative worded items are included in psychological assessment. Wordings effects have been analyzed in the literature using statistical approaches based on population homogeneity assumptions (i.e., CFA, SEM), commonly adopting the bifactor model to separate trait variance and wording effects....

Objectives: This study aims to evaluate a comprehensive model that includes predictors of use, types of internet use, and psychological well-being outcomes in the older population. Methods: The total sample comprised 650 older Internet users. Structural equation modeling was used to estimate the effect of predictors (i.e., effort expectancy, per...

The motives for Internet use are crucial to understanding why people get and stay online despite negative consequences. This study aimed to develop and evaluate the psychometric properties of a questionnaire of Internet use motives in Spanish and its relationship with Internet addiction. The sample (N = 417) was divided into two subsamples: the fir...

Empirical studies show that leisure activities are relevant to the well-being of the older population. Thus, online leisure, or E-leisure, can be a useful tool for engagement in leisure activities, providing multiple possibilities. In this way, the study of those factors that promote or hinder E-leisure is relevant, since it will allow the generati...

Objective: Recent studies have examined the extent to which alcohol dependence (AD) criteria prospectively predict the course of AD. Critically, these studies have lacked a developmental perspective. However, the differential performance of criteria by age might indicate overendorsement in younger individuals. The current study examined AD criteri...

Dopamine neurotransmission has been consistently associated with individual differences in impulsive choice. Clinical and preclinical evidence suggests that low striatal dopamine D2 signaling predisposes to engage in impulsive behaviors. Although dopamine D2 signaling controls dopamine (DA) extracellular levels, the relationship between striatal do...

Home visiting programs are evidence-based interventions that have a myriad outcomes for mothers and newborns. Chile offers these services as part of the Chile Crece Contigo, a nationwide program. However, implementing home visiting programs in community settings is difficult. In this study, we report clinic, provider, and participant engagement wit...

Objective: Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD) has traditionally been viewed as a chronic, progressive, relapsing disorder (Jellinek, 1960; National Institute on Drug Abuse, 2018). However, little is known about the course of individual AUD criteria. To the extent that individual symptoms represent the focus of some treatments (e.g., withdrawal, craving), u...

Caregivers’ mentalization has gained importance in recent years, but most studies only include parental figures. Given empirical evidence showing the importance of educators in the development of preschoolers, this paper aims to assess how the mentalization and stress levels of parents and educational staff are related to attachment, ToM and social...

The addiction to technology of older persons is an emerging field, because the literature tends to focus only on the benefits of the use of technology in this age group. Along with this, there is interest in how participation improves the quality of life of older persons. In this context, the present study aims to examine the association between th...

Objectives Negative ageism impacts on the well-being of older persons; therefore, its identification is important to generate interventions that allow its decrease. CENVE is a widely used instrument to evaluate stereotypes towards old age in Spanish. However, its factor structure in older population and its invariance between those over and under 6...

Although the world has witnessed substantial progress in the reduction of poverty during the last decades, extreme poverty is still a reality for millions of individuals worldwide. Moreover, increased levels of income inequality and other forms of social inequity are a matter of concern even among developed countries. Research on the mental health...

Para la OPS-OMS, Washington DC Consultoría para el desarrollo de un marco de monitoreo y acompañamiento técnico a la implementación del programa "Planet Youth" para la prevención del uso de sustancias psicoactivas, dirigido a población adolescente en Santiago de Chile

Background: The externalizing spectrum contains a range of disinhibition-related conditions, such as conduct disorder, antisocial personality disorder, and substance use disorders. Comorbidity among externalizing disorders is commonly investigated at the syndromal and trait level precluding insight into the relationship of symptoms across external...

Background: Fibromyalgia and major depression frequently co-occur. Patients with both conditions have a worse prognosis and higher disability, and their treatment options are scarce. Behavioral activation (BA) may be an especially useful intervention for these patients, as it targets mechanisms of action that seem to be common to both disorders. N...

Several types of impulsivity have been linked to various substance use outcomes. The UPPS-P framework has received major focus within the field of substance use research. However, this framework is not without limitation. An alternative framework is the Two-Factor Model of impulsivity, which posits that rash impulsivity and reward drive are the cen...

Objective: Dual-systems models hypothesize that individuals who tend to be drawn to risky behavior and are low in self-control are at greatest risk for alcohol use disorder (AUD). Importantly, these models assume that behavioral approach tendencies and self-control are distinct. This study investigated hypotheses and assumptions central to dual-sy...

Background Daily drinking is an important public health concern and informative for evaluating diagnostic classification. In particular, daily binge drinkers might be considered as the prototype of some forms of alcoholism, as this drinking pattern may drive many alcohol use disorder (AUD) symptoms. However, daily drinking potentially captures a wi...

Background Alcohol withdrawal (AW) is an important clinical and diagnostic feature of alcohol dependence. AW has been found to predict a worsened course of illness in clinical samples, but in some community studies AW endorsement rates are strikingly high, suggesting false positive symptom assignments. Little research has examined the validity of t...

Trait markers, or intermediate phenotypes linking different units of analysis (self-report, performance) from the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) matrix across populations is a necessary step in identifying at-risk individuals. In the current study, 150 healthy controls (HC) and 456 individuals with bipolar disorder (BD) Type I or II, NOS (not othe...

Key to an understanding of alcohol use disorder (AUD) are the drinking-related reductions that begin in young adulthood and continue throughout the adult lifespan. Research is needed to precisely characterize the form of these reductions, including possible developmental differences across the lifespan. Using U.S.-representative data, we estimated...

Texas Christian University Model for Assessment and Treatment of Substance Use Disorders. This article aims to present a critical review of the literature regarding the Texas Christian University (TCU) Model in the field of assessment and treatment of substance use disorders (SUD). First, the background that prompted the development of the TCU Mode...

Después de lo que algunos autores han llamado una " experiencia cercana a la muerte " , ocurrida a fines de la década de los´60s (y extendiéndose hasta los´80s), la psicología de la personalidad ha experimentado un renacimiento sorprendente en las últimas décadas, generando un renovado interés en diversas áreas de la psicología. Uno de los ámbitos...

We present neuroimaging markers of the remitted state of major depressive disorder (rMDD) during facial emotion perception in 84 individuals during fMRI. Participants comprised 47 individuals (aged 18-23) diagnosed with rMDD and 37 healthy controls (HC). Participants classified emotional faces or animals (control condition) in the Facial Emotion Pe...

Alcohol-related problems have traditionally been conceptualized and measured by an effect indicator model. That is, it is generally assumed that observed indicators of alcohol problems are caused by a latent variable. However, there are reasons to think that this construct is more accurately conceptualized as including at least some causal indicato...

Socio-emotional processing is an essential part of development, and age-related changes in its neural correlates can be observed. The late positive potential (LPP) is a measure of motivated attention that can be used to assess emotional processing; however, changes in the LPP elicited by emotional faces have not been assessed across a wide age rang...

The purpose of this study was to examine whether published findings regarding the association of personality disorders (PDs) with the persistence of substance use disorders (SUDs) are attributable to an artifact due to time of assessment of the PD. Two previous studies analyzed data from the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Cond...

Objective Functional connectivity MRI (fcMRI) studies of individuals currently diagnosed with major depressive disorder (MDD) document hyperconnectivities within the default mode network (DMN) and between the DMN and salience networks (SN) with regions of the cognitive control network (CCN). Studies of individuals in the remitted state are needed t...

The article describes and analyzes the personal, academic, and professional life of Sergio Yulis, pioneer of the behavioral tradition in Chile, in order to understand the past and present of this approach and to disseminate Yulis’ legacy in Chilean psychology. A thorough review was conducted of his articles, publications about him, and interviews w...

Objectives: Our aim was to determine if the decrease in drug use disorders with age is attributable to changes in persistence, as implied by the notion of maturing out. Also, we examined the association between role transitions and persistence, recurrence, and new onset of drug use disorders. Methods: We performed secondary analysis of the 2 wav...

Recent studies using data from the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC) have found that some personality disorders (PDs) increase the persistence of several Axis I disorders. However, these effects are potentially confounded with the data collection wave in which PDs were assessed. Our aim was to extend published...

Numerous dual-systems models of personality have been posited, which propose that behavior is influenced by two complementary systems. A bottom-up system is characterized by emotion-based drive (e.g., urge for rewarding experience), and a top-down system is characterized by the ability to control those urges. Although evidence suggests that these t...

Cox, Clara, Worobec, and Grant (2012) recently presented results from a series of analyses aimed at identifying the factor structure underlying the DSM-IV-TR (APA, 2000) personality diagnoses assessed in the large NESARC study. Cox et al. (2012) concluded that the best fitting model was one that modeled three lower-order factors (the three clusters...

This study used a person-centered approach to test whether drinking motive typologies could be identified. Longitudinal study of college students within the Intensive Multivariate Prospective Alcohol College-Transitions (IMPACTS) data set. University campus in the United States. University students (baseline n reporting alcohol motives = 2158; base...

We examined the latent structure underlying the criteria for DSM-IV-TR (American Psychiatric Association, 2000, Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (4th ed., text revision). Washington, DC: Author.) personality disorders in a large nationally representative sample of U.S. adults. Personality disorder symptom data were collected us...

Although correlated changes between personality and alcohol involvement have been shown, the functional relation between these constructs is also of theoretical and clinical interest. Using bivariate latent difference score models, we examined transactional relations (i.e., personality predicting changes in alcohol involvement, which in turn predic...

Alcohol use has significant effects on behavior; these can be both acute (e.g., drunken comportment) and chronic (e.g., alcohol-induced depression). However, it is well established that there are large, individual differences in how drinkers react to alcohol. Additionally, different types of drinking contexts tend to elicit different effects and ar...

To estimate ethnic differences in three components of alcohol use disorder and alcohol dependence course (onset, persistence and recurrence) in a developmental framework. Longitudinal data from The National Epidemiologic Survey of Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC), collected using face-to-face interviews. Civilian non-institutionalized US pop...

Epidemiological studies have consistently demonstrated that heavy alcohol use and alcohol dependence (AD) tend to increase in adolescence and emerging adulthood and then show a large decline in the late 20s, a phenomenon called maturing out. This decline has been explained as an effect of "role incompatibility" in which involvement in new roles and...

Two nationally representative epidemiological samples (the National Longitudinal Alcohol Epidemiological Survey and the National Epidemiological Survey of Alcohol and Related Conditions) have been used to track changes in the prevalence of alcohol use disorders (AUDs) between 1992 and 2002 in the United States. Strikingly, estimates from these two...

Substance-use disorder (SUD) diagnoses are critically important for research and clinical practice. Unlike the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition (DSM-IV), the draft diagnostic criteria for SUDs in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) define a single SUD for variou...

A recent debate regarding the theoretical distinction between explicit and implicit cognitive processes relevant to alcohol-related behaviors was strongly shaped by empirical findings from dual-process models (Moss & Albery, 2009; Wiers & Stacy, 2010; Moss & Albery, 2010). Specifically, as part of a broader discussion, Wiers & Stacy (2010) contende...

Many issues in ethics arise in relation to the contexts in which psychologists work. However, most ethical decision-making models reproduce the way in which psychologists tend to approach ethics by focusing on ethical dilemmas and proposing a step-by-step response to deal with them. Although these models might be useful, their emphasis on reactive...

The validity of the abuse-dependence distinction within alcohol use disorders (AUDs) has been increasingly questioned on psychometric and conceptual grounds. Two types of findings are often cited as support for the validity of this distinction: (a) Dependence is more persistent than abuse, and (b) dependence is more highly comorbid with other Axis...

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV), currently uses a polythetic classification system for defining alcohol use disorders (AUD; alcohol abuse and dependence). This classification results in individuals who are subthreshold for an official AUD diagnosis but still endorse one or two criteria of dependenc...