Ana Cancela

Universidad Villanueva · Psychology

Background: The effect of indirect (versus direct) exposure to a traumatic event on the quality of life of terrorist attack victims has received considerable attention in the literature. However, more research is required to examine whether the symptoms and underlying processes caused by both types of exposure are equivalent. Our main hypothesis i...

Background Although health public services recommend prevention strategies for COVID-19 some of these recommendations have not been taken seriously by young people. Understanding why some people comply with these recommendations and others do not seem to be crucial in helping public health services to predict behavior and compliance with rules, esp...

Problem gambling has recently been reclassified as a non-substance-associated behavioral addiction. To the associated vital impact (family, social, labor, and economic), we must add its increasing incidence in recent years, which has led to prioritizing the problem from the point of view of public health. Although the effects of advertising on gamb...

Increasing incidence of problem gambling has led to prioritizing the problem from the point of view of public health. Additionally, gambling disorder has been recently classified as a behavioral addiction, with implications for both its diagnosis and treatment. However, the shared neural substrate of addictions, to substances and behavioral, is sti...

The successful impact of healthy eating campaigns often depends on the extent to which messages are effective in changing attitudes and behaviors over time. The present work proposes that healthy eating campaigns can be designed taking into consideration elaboration and validation processes so that the degree of attitude change is maximally influen...

Practitioners and researchers interested in designing wise interventions often recommend increasing personal involvement to be successful. Early research demonstrated that personal involvement increases elaboration leading to more persuasion for strong arguments, but to reduced persuasion if the arguments presented are specious. In most prior work,...

It is well established that the physical attractiveness of the source of a message can influence recipients' attitudes about the message proposal. The current research is the first to examine if attractiveness is also capable of affecting attitude confidence and resistance to change. Experiment 1 revealed that an attractive source decreased recipie...

Alcohol consumption represents a major problem for public health. As a consequence, there is a growing interest in understanding which communication strategies have the ability to increase the persuasive power of anti-alcohol campaigns. Many designers of health campaigns use both actors and real people interchangeably to deliver their messages. Nev...

Positive emotions can validate either positive or negative thoughts. Previous research has demonstrated that people use their thoughts more when they recall past episodes of happiness and when they are induced to smile. This study was designed to evaluate whether a new induction of a happy mood (a joke) can influence thought use in response to a pe...

: Social entrepreneurship (SE) refers to the development of innovative projects whose main aim is not individual profit but the transformation of society. The issue is particularly important for promoting youth development and participation. This research offers insights from two studies designed from a multi-dimensional perspective analysing attit...

Background: This research explores the extent to which attitudes towards an environmentally-friendly topic (a green company) are affected by a “tip of the tongue” (TOT) experience. Method: In this experiment, participants were first exposed to a description of a green company that elicited mostly positive or negative thoughts. As part of an appa...

Introduction.-Many efforts are invested in promoting healthy attitudes and behaviors; nonetheless there is no clear, definitive evidence of sustained effectiveness of those efforts in all cases. Objective.-The present study examined the role of perceived attention in changing attitudes toward vegetable consumption as well as the perceived stability...

The successful impact of health campaigns often depends on the extent to which interventions are effective in changing attitudes. The goal of the present research was to examine to what extent the ease adolescents experience in generating thoughts can influence persuasion in the domain of a health-relevant topic. Method: Participants were asked to...

Desde que comenzó la crisis económica en 2007, la tasa de desempleo ha sido una de las preocupaciones principales de la población española. De esta situación nacen alternativas como el emprendimiento y la esperanza de que dichas alternativas sirvan para mejorar la tasa de desempleo. Esta preocupación ha llevado a que el gobierno intente fomentar la...