Antonio Cándido

University of Granada | UGR · Mind, Brain and Behavior Research Center at University of Granada (CIMCYC-UGR)

Background Although there is broad agreement that perceived risks determine risk-taking behavior, previous research has shown that this association may not be as straightforward as expected. The main objective of this study was to investigate if the levels of impulsivity can explain part of these controversial findings. Method A total of 1579 part...

The human brain contains social areas that become active when interacting with another human. These are located in the ventral prefrontal and mediodorsal cortices, adjacent to areas involved in reward processing and cognitive control. Human behaviour is strongly influenced by the social context. This is particularly evident when observing greater r...

Dispositional mindfulness and emotion regulation are two psychological constructs closely interrelated, and both appear to improve with the long-term practice of mindfulness meditation. These constructs appear to be related to subcortical, prefrontal, and posterior brain areas involved in emotional processing, cognitive control, self-awareness, and...

Two experiments, using rats as the subjects, and flavour aversion learning with an injection of lithium chloride (LiCl) as the unconditioned stimulus (US), examined the effects of a context shift between phases of the procedure on the retardation of learning produced by preexposure to the US. Experiment 1 showed that the US-preexposure effect (the...

Risky decision-making is highly influenced by emotions and can lead to fatal consequences. Attempts to reduce risk-taking include the use of mindfulness-based interventions (MBI), which have shown promising results for both emotion regulation (ER) and risk-taking. However, it is still unclear whether improved emotion regulation is the mechanism res...

Road hazard perception is considered the most prominent higher-order cognitive skill related to traffic-accident involvement. Regional cultures and social rules that govern acceptable behavior may influence drivers’ interpretation of a traffic situation and, consequently, the correct identification of potentially hazardous situations. Here, we aime...

Decision making in risky driving contexts is mainly guided by automatic processes. This requires the previous learning of cognitive rules and heuristics. The acquisition of safer cognitive heuristics depends on previous experience and adequate feedback to our responses. The first aim of this research was to analyze the effect of negative feedback o...

Impulsivity and sensation seeking are considered to be among the most important personality traits involved in risk‐taking behavior. This study is focused on whether the association of these personality traits and brain functional connectivity depends on individuals' risk proneness. Risk proneness was assessed with the DOSPERT‐30 scale and corrobor...

We are often required to make decisions that can have safe or risky consequences. Evaluating the risk of each possible alternative is an important step before making our final decision. The main goal of the present research was to explore the neural basis of risk perception in a naturalistic context (driving). Twenty-two drivers evaluated the perce...

Complex tasks require the learning and integration of multiple cognitive, sensory, and psychomotor skills for correct execution. Driving-related skills are developed step by step through the increase of mileage driven and the accumulation of practice in different traffic situations. The acquisition of these skills should be reflected in the brain s...

The main aim of this research was to study the effects of response feedback on risk behavior and the neural and cognitive mechanisms involved, as a function of the feedback contingency. Sixty drivers were randomly assigned to one of three feedback groups: contingent, non-contingent and no feedback. The participants' task consisted of braking or not...

Impulsivity (and related traits reward/punishment sensitivity and tolerance to delayed rewards) and gambling cognitions have been linked to gambling. However, their independent associations with gambling preferences and clinical status have never been dissociated. The current study applied a data-driven strategy to identify gambling preferences, ba...

The main aim of this study was to look into the effect of feedback contingency on decision making in complex risky situations, using a driving context. Participants had to decide braking or not in a set of risky traffic situations. After the response, a negative non-contingent or contingent feedback was used. The results highlight the importance of...

The aim of the present study was to develop and validate a Spanish version of the short Domain-Specifi c Risk-Taking (DOSPERT- 30) scale, measuring risk-taking behavior, risk perception, and expected benefi cial consequences (from taking risks) in fi ve life domains: ethics, fi nance, health/security, recreational, and social decisions. Method: The...

Validación de la versión española de la escala de toma de riesgos en dominios específicos (DOSPERT-30). Antecedentes: la escala de toma de riesgos en dominios específicos (DOSPERT-30) evalúa la propensión a comportamientos de riesgo, la percepción del riesgo y los benefi cios esperados en 5 dominios (ética, fi nanzas, salud/seguridad, recreativo y...

Correction of erroneous signs in Equation 2 from: Perales, J. C., Catena, A., Cándido, A., & Maldonado, A. (2017). Rules of Causal Judgment: Mapping Statistical Information onto Causal Beliefs. In M. Waldmann (Ed.). The Oxford Handbook of Causal Reasoning. (pp. 29-51). Oxford University Press. [Available at https://goo.gl/R2rQ4b].

Correction of erroneous signs in Equation 2 from: Perales, J. C., Catena, A., Cándido, A., & Maldonado, A. (2017). Rules of Causal Judgment: Mapping Statistical Information onto Causal Beliefs. In M. Waldmann (Ed.). The Oxford Handbook of Causal Reasoning. (pp. 29-51). Oxford University Press. [Available at https://goo.gl/R2rQ4b].

The main aim of this research was to investigate the decision making process in risky situations. We studied how different types of feedback on risky driving behaviors modulate risk evaluation and risk-taking. For a set of risky traffic situations, participants had to make evaluative judgments (judge the situation as risky or not) and urgent decisi...

Objective: The aim of this research was to investigate whether the use of messages with negative emotional content is effective in promoting safe behavior of moped riders and how exactly these messages modulate rider behavior. Methods: Participants received negative feedback when performing risky behaviors using a computer task. The effectivenes...

The aim of the present study was to explore the relationship between evolution of desire/craving and impulsivity/self control in a sample of outpatients with substance use disorders who are in the process of psychological treatment. Through a new tool for the subjective assessment of the evolution of desire and consumption over time (Temporal curve...

The main objective of this article is the psychological analysis, from a behavioural perspective, of the different selfcontrol strategies involved in the various therapeutical approaches (total abstinence, controlled drinking and damage and risk reduction) in alcohol abuse and dependence

An increasing body of research has investigated the effect of emotions on judgments concerning moral transgressions. Yet, few studies have controlled for arousal levels associated with the emotions. High arousal may affect moral processing by triggering attention to salient features of transgressions, independently of valence. Therefore previously...

Dual-process theories have dominated the study of risk perception and risk-taking over the last two decades. However, there is a lack of objective brain-level evidence supporting the two systems of processing in every-day risky behavior. To address this issue, we propose the dissociation between evaluative and urgent behaviors as evidence of dual p...

Injury to pedestrians is a major safety hazard in many countries. Since the beginning of the last century, modern cities have been designed around the use of motor vehicles despite the unfavourable interactions between the vehicles and pedestrians. This push towards urbanization resulted in a substantial number of crashes and fatalities involving p...

Abstract. An increasing body of research has investigated the effect of emotions on judgments concerning moral transgressions. Yet, few studies have controlled for arousal levels associated with the emotions. High arousal may affect moral processing by triggering attention to salient features of transgressions, independently of valence. Therefore p...

This study aims to explore the relationship between impulsivity traits and perceived negative consequences of alcohol consumption and Internet use. More specifically, impulsivity traits – positive and negative urgency, sensation seeking, lack of premeditation, and lack of perseverance – in (1) the occurrence of initial negative consequences linked...

Recent research suggests that utilitarian responses to sacrificial moral dilemmas (i.e., bringing about the greatest total well being by killing someone) are predicted by antisocial personality traits, and abilities to inhibit intuition (Cognitive Reflection Test; CRT). We investigated how these two factors relate to each other, and also with utili...

This research focused on the influence of imaginary passengers on drivers' estimation of the probability of having an accident in traffic situations. Participants had to imagine riding a motorcycle with either a son or a workmate as a passenger. Their task was to assess the risk of accident in a set of traffic scenarios. Risk perception was a funct...

This study aims to explore the relationship between impulsivity traits and perceived negative consequences of alcohol consumption and Internet use. More specifically, impulsivity traits - positive and negative urgency, sensation seeking, lack of premeditation, and lack of perseverance - in (1) the occurrence of initial negative consequences linked...

Risky driving situations require, in most cases, decision-making of an urgent nature, differing in this sense from those behaviours that would be classified as evaluative behaviour, which, for example, an observer may carry out. To explore the distinction between evaluative and urgent behaviours, and study under what conditions these differences ma...

Several recent studies have demonstrated that addicts behave less flexibly than healthy controls in the probabilistic reversal learning task (PRLT), in which participants must gradually learn to choose between a probably rewarded option and an improbably rewarded one, on the basis of corrective feedback, and in which preferences must adjust to abru...

Impulsivity is tightly linked to addiction. However, there are several pathways by means of which impulsive individuals are more prone to become addicts, or to suffer an addiction more intensely and for a longer period. One of those pathways involves an inadequate appraisal or regulation of positive and negative emotions, leading to lack of control...

Emotion is an essential element in the study of driving behavior. In the field of psychology and neuro-economics we currently make a distinction between two forms of emotional modulation of behavior. On the one hand, emotion is commonly defined as a subjective reaction to the environment accompanied by a set of physiological, cognitive and behavior...

Emotional interference on behavior is commonly observed when task-irrelevant negative stimuli appear before behavioral targets. One explanation postulates that affect-laden stimuli readily capture attention, interfering with the processing of the upcoming target. Emotional stimuli might also preactivate motor programs incompatible with the demanded...

The Stimulus Preceding Negativity (SPN) is a non-motor slow cortical potential elicited by temporally predictable stimuli, customarily interpreted as a physiological index of expectancy. Its origin would be the brain activity responsible for generating the anticipatory mental representation of an expected upcoming event. The SPN manifests itself as...

In the last five decades, cognitive scientists and the psychologists of reasoning have dedicated a lot of effort designing usable traffic signs. This study investigated the interference effect produced by the position of the sign elements in traffic signage on response accuracy and reaction time. Sixteen drivers performed a flanker interference rea...

Aim: Impulsivity is a multifaceted construct that has a prominent role in psychiatry and especially in addiction. The objective of the current study is to develop and validate a Spanish version of the short UPPS-P impulsive behavior scale1, which assesses five distinct impulsivity traits (positive urgency, negative urgency, lack of premeditation, l...

In road safety literature the effects of emotional content and salience of advertising billboards have been scarcely investigated. The main aim of this work was to uncover how affect-laden roadside advertisements can affect attention - eye-movements - and subsequent risky decisions - braking - on the Honda Riding Trainer motorcycle simulator. Resul...

Telecare is a type of information and communication technology (ICT) that provides help to dependents, especially older adults, by providing access to teams of professionals who can attend to the client's needs 24 hours a day, 365 days a year via a telephonic network. Previous studies have shown that design and motivational factors are related to u...

En este estudio se aborda desde las teorías del aprendizaje, el rol de la impulsividad y el deseo de consumo en pacientes con diagnóstico de dependencia de sustancias en abstinencia, consumo habitual y recaída. Para ello, se presenta un nuevo método de valoración del deseo basado en las �curvas de descuento�, en el que los pacientes deben describir...

This study demonstrated that task features are important factors for the understanding of risk behavior under emotional conditions in driving scenarios. We introduce a distinction between urgent and evaluative behaviors. Urgent behaviors are performed under high time-pressure and, when successful, they will help to avoid high negative outcomes. Acc...

Motorcyclist deaths and injuries follow the trend in sales rather than in growth in the number of motorcycles, suggesting that fatalities are related to the lack of driver experience with recently purchased motorcycles. The aim of the present investigation was to assess the effects of experience and training in hazard perception. We compared first-...

Reducción alta Univ. de Granada, Departamento de Psicología Experimental y Fisiología del Comportamiento. Leída el 25-06-87

This study addresses, from theories of associative learning, the impulsivity and craving in patients with a diagnosis of substance dependence in abstinence, habitual use and relapse. We present a new method for the assessment of desire based on discount curve self description, in which patients describe how they perceive the temporal evolution and...

Recent development of systems for assisted driving has raised questions about what features of the stimuli perceived by a driver may improve driving behaviour and road safety. The present study aimed to uncover whether emotional auditory stimuli can affect risky behaviour in hazardous situations. Forty-nine volunteers rode a motorcycle in a virtual...

Female inbred Roman high- (RHA-I) and low- (RLA-I) avoidance rats show differences in one-way avoidance learning only when the task implies a highly aversive situation (1s in the "non-shock"-associated safe compartment, as opposed to 30s). These between-strain differences seem to depend on strain differences in emotionality, given that: (i) they ar...

We present data from an ongoing research project on the cognitive, emotional and neuropsychological basis of risk behaviour. The main aim of the project is to build a model of risk behaviour so that if we know certain cognitive, behavioural and emotional variables, we will be able to predict decisions made in the face of uncertainty and risk, with...

The goal of the present experiment was to study the performance of inbred Roman high- (RHA-I) and low- (RLA-I) avoidance rats in one-way avoidance learning and to relate the behaviour of the animals to cellular density in the basolateral amygdala (BLA), a brain region related to fear and anxiety. Thus, females from both strains were exposed either...

The main aim of this work was to show the impact of preexisting causal beliefs on causal induction from cause-effect co-occurrence information, when several cues compete with each other for predicting the same effect. Two different causal scenarios -- one social (a), the other medical (b) -- were used to check the generality of the effects. In Expe...

La corteza prefrontal ventromedial (VMPFC) ha sido implicada en la toma de decisiones emocionales debido a su posible participación en el aprendizaje de inversión afectivo, la propensión al riesgo y la impulsividad. Su especial entramado de conexiones con otras áreas de la corteza y con estructuras subcorticales como la amígdala justifican que pued...

The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) have been implied in emotional decision making, because it seems to have a role in affective reversal learning, risk proneness, and impulsive behaviour. The variety of connections of the VMPFC with several cortical and subcortical areas, as the amygdala, make likely that it can play a significant function...

The main aim of this work was to look for cognitive biases in human inference of causal relationships in order to emphasize the psychological processes that modulate causal learning. From the effect of the judgment frequency, this work presents subsequent research on cue competition (overshadowing, blocking, and super-conditioning effects) showing...

The present study is aimed at identifying how prior causal beliefs and covariation information contribute to belief updating when evidence, either compatible or contradictory with those beliefs, is provided. Participants were presented with a cover story with which it was intended to activate or generate a causal belief. Variables related to the pr...

In this study we focus on the influence of emotions on causal learning In two experiments, we show that subjective estimates of causal strength between a potential cause (a fertilizer) and an effect (the blooming of a plant) are hampered by concurrent negative emotions, elicited by means of emotional pictures (IAPS). In Experiment 1, participants w...

The goal of this experiment was to study the influence of the time spent in the safe compartment (30 vs. 1 s) and of an intraperitoneal injection of diazepam (1 mg/kg vs. vehicle) on one-way avoidance learning, in inbred female roman high-avoidance and roman low-avoidance rats. Rats learned to run from a danger compartment, where they received a wa...

The inbred Roman High- (RHA-I) and Roman Low-Avoidance (RLA-I) rats, psychogenetically selected for rapid (RHA-I) vs. extremely poor (RLA-I) acquisition of two-way active avoidance, exhibit a lower or a higher level of fearfulness, respectively, that can be observed in many laboratory anxiety models. The present study analyzed the performance of fe...

Uno de los aspectos del aprendizaje causal menos estudiado es el papel que las emociones juegan en dicho aprendizaje. El principal objetivo de esta investigación fue estudiar el impacto que ejercen las emociones sobre una tarea de detección de relaciones causales de carácter afectivo neutral. La inducción de emociones negativas hizo que los partici...

This study examined the influence of diazepam upon the successive positive contrast effect in one-way avoidance learning. The results showed that when injected with vehicle, a safety-time increment (from 1 to 30sec in the contrast group) during one-way avoidance learning led to a performance improvement, surpassing that of two control groups receiv...

The inbred RLA (Roman Low-Avoidance) and RHA (Roman High-avoidance) rat strains have been psychogenetically selected for rapid (RHA) vs. extremely poor acquisition (RLA) of two-way active avoidance. As a consequence of this selective breeding, RLA animals exhibit a higher level of emotionality that can be observed in many anxiety models. The presen...

Early life experiences may affect adult learning ability. In two experiments we tested the effect of early learning failure on adult performance in Wistar rats. In the first experiment 17-day-old rats (PN17), but not 25-day-old rats (PN25), trained in a hidden platform water maze task showed deficits in tone-shock avoidance learning when they were...

Early life experiences may affect adult learning ability. In two experiments we tested the effect of early learning failure on adult performance in Wistar rats. In the first experiment 17-day-old rats (PN17), but not 25-day-old rats (PN25), trained in a hidden platform water maze task showed deficits in tone-shock avoidance learning when they were...

In one experiment half of the animals were trained to avoid a signaled footshock by jumping (30 or 160 trials), whereas the rest of the animals received the same events as yoked. For all of them the termination of the warning signal and of the shock was followed by a safety signal. Several tests were conducted to assess the ability of the stimuli t...

Two experiments, using rats as subjects, examined the role of contextual cues in producing the unconditioned stimulus (US) pre-exposure effect in conditioned taste aversion. Experiment 1 showed a significant US pre-exposure effect, when the pre-exposure was conducted in a familiar context, and that a change of context between the pre-exposure and c...

The relevance of the early learning failure in a water maze task related with early stages of hippocampal development on general adult learning abilities was studied using preweanling (P18) and postweanling Wistar rats. The results point to a general and long lasting learning deficit induced specifically by the early failure in an hippocampal task.

In one experiment using conditioned taste aversion and the unconditioned stimulus (US) preexposure procedure, one group of rats was given LiCl exposure for 3 days, whereas two other groups received saline. Following this phase, all groups were given a novel flavour (saccharine) to drink following either LiCl (group preexposed and one of the control...