
Carlos Fernandes SilvaUniversity of Aveiro | UA · Department of Education and Psychology
Carlos Fernandes Silva
PhD In Clinical Psychology
About
327
Publications
95,297
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Introduction
Additional affiliations
January 2005 - April 2016
January 2000 - present
University of Coimbra (Faculty of Medicine)
Position
- Invited Teacher
Description
- Biological Rhythms, Performance and Shiftwork. Sleep Disorders: evaluation and treatment. Work ability and psychosocial factors.
Education
September 2001 - July 2002
September 1988 - July 1994
September 1984 - October 1984
Publications
Publications (327)
The aim of the present study was to evaluate the work ability of nurses and nursing assistants in relation with the individual characteristics and occupational variables of patient handling tasks in a private hospital. The Work Ability Index and a questionnaire, belonging to the Intervention Evaluation Tool, concerning the professional’s perception...
Acrophobia is a chronic, highly debilitating disorder preventing sufferers from engaging with high places. Its etiology is linked to the development of mobility during infancy. We evaluated the efficacy of various types of movement in the treatment of this disorder within a virtual reality (VR) environment. Four men and four women who were diagnose...
Chronotype and Time of Day (ToD) can modulate several aspects of cognitive performance. However, there is limited evidence about the effect of these variables on face recognition performance, so the aim of the present study is to investigate this influence. For this, 274 participants (82.5% females; age 18-49 years old, mean = 27.2, SD =1.82) were...
This study aimed to adapt the Compassion Fatigue-Short Scale to Portugal and examine the reliability and validity of the Portuguese version of the scale (Pt-CF-Short Scale) among Portuguese firefighters. The factor structure of the Pt-CF-Short Scale was compared to the one-factor model fit and a two-factor model and second-order factor model in a s...
Firefighters have high exposure to traumatic events and have an increased risk of developing symptoms related to trauma. The current study assessed the psychological morbidity, empathy and alexithymia of volunteer firefighters compared to career firefighters and to non-firefighter comparators from the general population. Group differences were asse...
In its early stage, the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent public health measures brought several challenges to people in general, with adolescents being one of the most affected groups. To assess the psychological reactions of Portuguese adolescents in that early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, we conducted an online survey that was filled by a...
A psicofarmacologia representa, cada vez mais, uma área de conhecimento com importantes implicações na atuação profissional dos psicólogos. Em vários países, tem-se assistido, ao longo dos últimos anos, a uma crescente importância dada à formação em psicofarmacologia para psicólogos. O objetivo deste trabalho foi realizar um levantamento dos planos...
Emotion regulation strategies affect the experience and processing of emotions and emotional stimuli. Chronotype has also been shown to influence the processing of emotional stimuli, with late chronotypes showing a bias towards better processing of negative stimuli. Additionally, greater eveningness has been associated with increased difficulties i...
To achieve the goal of sustainable employment, considering the profile of the Portuguese working population (PWP), is needed a range of strategies to ensure long, productive, and sustainable careers allied with a better quality of working life, health, and wellbeing, but also with public health policies grounded on scientifically validated and reli...
The literature has shown that the COVID-19 pandemic has indelibly affected student performance. However, this deterioration is not the same for all students, with students of a lower socio-economic status (SES) being the most affected. The present study aims to understand if the pandemic lockdown in the last year of pre-school impacted the learning...
Sleep has a major impact on a variety of human biological and cognitive functions. In particular, its impact on memory has attracted extensive research and has been amply demonstrated. However, it is still unclear whether sleep, or lack thereof, affects the ability to recognize faces. To clarify this, we conducted a scoping review on studies that i...
inScience Press is delighted to publish this book entitled Education Applications & Developments VII as part of the Advances in Education and Educational Trends series. These series of books comprise authors’ and editors’ work to address global research, although focused in specific sections, in the Education area. In this 7th volume, a dedicated s...
Classification and treatment of psychiatric disorders have known striking developments over the last decades as findings originating from neuroscience opened new avenues of research [1–3]. Stressed by Schwartz et al. [4], neuroscience has come to dominate the world of psychopathology. Since the mid-1980s, with the advent of positron emission tomogr...
Background
Individual differences in one’s perceived vulnerability to infectious diseases are implicated in psychological distress, social and behavioral disease avoidance phenomena. The Perceived Vulnerability to Disease Questionnaire (PVD) is the most extensively used measure when it comes to assessing subjective vulnerability to infectious disea...
Although face recognition is a pervasive and important ability in daily life, recognition of unfamiliar faces is difficult and highly error prone. The present study aimed to understand how chronotype and time-of-day (TOD) influence early electrophysiological activity associated with the recognition of faces. Twenty-seven participants (15 morning-ty...
Virtual Reality (VR) has been identified as one of the most promising resources for developing empathy towards stigmatized groups as it allows individuals to experience a situation close to reality from another person’s perspective. This quasi-experimental study aimed to examine the impact on empathy, knowledge, and attitudes towards people with sc...
A third version of the Copenhagen Psychosocial Questionnaire (COPSOQ III) was developed internationally aiming to respond to new trends in working conditions, theoretical concepts, and international experience. This article aims to present the preliminary validation studies for the Portuguese middle version of COPSOQ III. This is an exploratory cro...
Fear is a powerful emotion that can influence future behavior. This study investigates how fear influences the relationship between vicarious violence at work and employees' work ability. This is a quantitative cross-sectional study. Self-report data were collected from 154 Portuguese nurses who completed an online survey. Statistical significance...
Background
Individual differences in one’s perceived vulnerability to disease are implicated in psychological distress, social and behavioral disease avoidance phenomena. The Perceived Vulnerability to Disease Questionnaire (PVD) is the most extensively used measure when it comes to assessing subjective vulnerability to infectious diseases. However...
Many students when entering higher education, mainly in courses of exact or natural sciences and engineering, have difficulties in following the initial contents taught, due in part to the lack of knowledge arising from unique traditional methodology applied during their training. Some graduations even promote leveling courses in order to try reduc...
Introduction
The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is affecting numerous dimensions of our society since the beginning of the outbreak. A significant increase in emotional distress was expected in the general population, particularly among the high-risk groups such as the oldest, chronic patients, healthcare professionals, and psychopathology vulnerable people....
Psychological aggression perpetrated by customers, coworkers, and supervisors is a behavior frequently experienced in the workplace with negative consequences for an individual’s health. The aim of this systematic review was to examine the personal outcomes of overt workplace psychological aggression and summarize empirical evidence on how to preve...
Os campos do design e da saúde, nem sempre parecem estar próximos, do ponto de vista de atuação. Durante vários anos considerou-se que o design surge como sendo um processo de criação de serviços e ou objetos, com base numa linha criativa com enfase na beleza. Com a introdução da noção do design thinking, o processo de criação do designer passou a...
Background and Purpose
A violence prevention climate is critical for nurses’ well-being but also for nursing practice and the quality of care. This study examined the reliability and factor validity of the European Portuguese version of the 12-item Violence Prevention Climate Scale (VPCS).
Methods
Data came from a sample of 120 nurses providing ca...
Policing is a stressful occupation, which impairs police officers' physical/mental health and elicits burnout, aggressive behaviors and suicide. Resilience and coping facilitate the management of job stress policing, which can be operational or organizational. All these constructs are associated, and they must be assessed by instruments sensitive t...
Like previous pandemics, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has direct and indirect effects, including in mental health. To evaluate the immediate psychological impact of COVID-19, we conducted an online survey in Portugal (24–27 March 2020), using the Impact of Event Scale-Revised (IES-R) and the Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale (DASS-21)...
Research has demonstrated that policing is a stressful occupation and that this stress has a negative impact on police officers’ mental and physical health, performance, and interactions with citizens. Mental health at the workplace has become a concern due to the costs of depression, anxiety, burnout, and even suicide, which is high among police o...
This study focus on the impact of chronic disease over the childrens psychological adjustment, based on the different types of diseases, their characteristics and parents perception. The sample is composed of 176 children, aged between 3 and 10 years, distributed in four groups: children with asthma, cancer, uro-nephrological pathology and free f...
Previous studies have highlighted the influence of conditional mating strategies in attractiveness preferences. “Good genes” and dominance cues are perceived as attractive when considering short-term relationships. In contrast, cues for better parenting abilities and trustworthiness are considered more attractive when participants ponder a long-ter...
Individuals of African and Caucasian descent show different chemical signatures in their body odors (BO). Does such biological difference have a perceptual correlate? We tested BO donors and raters of Afro-Portuguese (AP) and Caucasian (C) descent to investigate whether olfactory ratings reveal an ethnic bias and whether olfactory ethnic discrimina...
The social learning theory proposed by Albert Bandura is exclusively revisited as conceptual basis for the learning method of conversational skills training. This theory defines that the human development and functioning result from a reciprocal triadic relationship between internal stimuli, external stimuli, and behavior.
Observational learning i...
Objectives:
To fully understand the dynamics of Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) it is necessary to understand the role of personality. The current understanding of which personality characteristics are associated with IPV victimization is, however, far from comprehensive. Given this gap in the literature, our objective was to examine the associati...
Assessing morningness-eveningness preferences (chronotype), an individual characteristic that is mirrored in daily mental and physiological fluctuations is crucial given their overarching influence in a variety of domains. The current work aimed to investigate the best factor structure of an instrument recently presented to asses this variable: the...
Our work aimed to provide a validated reduced form of the Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire to Portuguese adolescents (ages: 12-14 years). Using the dataset from the initial validation study of the full questionnaire (19 items) to Portuguese adolescents, we derived a 10-item reduced form – aMEQ-R (Phase 1); this was the smallest set of items th...
This work reports the initial psychometric characterization of the Morningness-Eveningness-Stability-Scale improved (MESSi) for Portuguese young-adults (N=466). A Confirmatory Factor Analysis confirmed a three-factor model (i.e., Morning Affect, Eveningness and Distinctness) in our data, as originally proposed. Furthermore, construct validity evide...
Executive control and its modulation of attentional mechanisms allow us to detect and adapt to conflicting information. According to recent studies, executive control functions may be modulated by unconsciously perceived information, although the available evidence is not consistent. In this study, we used a Flanker Task and employed Chromatic Flic...
Accurate identification of encoded contextual details depends on recapitulation processes during retrieval. Encoding and retrieval conditions are known to influence the sensory material stored and its recapitulation, however, little is known about such processes in olfaction. Here, we capitalized on the uniqueness of body odors which, similarly to...
Sexual dimorphism has been proposed as one of the facial traits to have evolved through sexual selection and to affect attractiveness perception. Even with numerous studies documenting its effect on attractiveness and mate choice, the neurophysiological correlates of the perception of sexual dimorphism are not yet fully understood. In the present s...
The number of studies analyzing the emotional interference based on communicational prosody is reduced. This gap is due to the
complexity of auditory stimuli, and the difficulty to ensure that every word that is said triggers a congruent emotional response. This study
aimed to constitute a database of emotional words in audio format. 120 visual for...
The number of errors in eyewitness testimony is very large and can have catastrophic social consequences, when an innocent is convicted.
The present study aimed to identify psychophysiological markers of performance in lineup identification based on facial electromyography.
Since criminals are emotionally negative and salient for eyewitnesses, a gr...
O presente estudo teve como objetivo analisar de que forma os níveis de autoaversão (sentimentos de repulsa dirigidos para o próprio)
podem influenciar a memória para estímulos emocionais e os correlatos psicofisiológicos deste processo, através do registo de ECG. Era
pedido aos participantes que memorizassem e posteriormente recordassem faces de a...
Biological functions, such as deep body temperature, vary rhythmically throughout the day and in synchrony with the individual's
chronotype. The same happens with cognitive functions such as attention, or memory. While participants performed the encoding phase of a
memory task, the ECG was recorded with the objective of examining the effect of the...
Although many investigations have focused on the relationship between circadian typology and cognitive performance, little is known about
its influence on specific cognitive tasks such as facial recognition. In this study, eye movement measures were used to explore the effect of
chronotype and time-of-day on participants’ performance in a relationa...
The executive control of attention is crucial to detect and deal with interference or conflict, even, reportedly, at an unconscious level. Recent research on the effects of videogames suggests improvements in the attentional skills of videogame players (VGPs), compared to non-videogame players (NVGPs). However, no study has yet investigated whether...
Many studies have indicated that the chemical cues from body odors (BOs) of donors experiencing negative emotions can influence the psychophysiological and behavioral response of the observers. However, these olfactory cues have been used mainly as contextual information for processing visual stimuli. Here, for the first time, we evaluate how emoti...
Immigrant students attending schools in the host country have different cognitive, cultural and linguistic backgrounds that might influence their inclusion process. This process is enhanced by success attained in academic context and by psychological adaptation. Academic difficulties and limited proficiency could motivate psychological distress and...
The present study aimed to provide a comprehensive review of psycho-education in adults with formally diagnosed anxiety disorders, assessing its effectiveness in reducing the severity of anxiety symptoms, psychological distress, depression and pain, and improving quality of life and satisfaction with treatment. A systematic search was conducted usi...
The privileged processing of threat stimuli, even in the absence of visual awareness, has been associated with a subcortical superior colliculus (SC)—pulvinar pathway to the amygdala, bypassing the visual cortex. However, this has been heavily disputed by studies showing that cortical activity cannot be ruled out in fear processing. A recent study...
A necessidade de avaliação e monitorização dos factores de risco de natureza psicossocial tem sido estabelecida como uma prioridade pelos organismos internacionais e definida como uma meta ao nível nacional no âmbito das políticas de Segurança e Saúde do Trabalho. Os modelos e métodos de avaliação são diversos e frequentemente multidimensionais. Em...
Neste artigo, mencionamos as estratégias terapêuticas que julgamos mais apropriadas ao tratamento do medo de alturas. Comparamos vários estudos que usaram várias técnicas e referimos a nossa experiência clínica e de investigação. Considerámos, igualmente, os novos tratamentos que usam ambientes de realidade virtual para o tratamento da acrofobia. A...
Neste artigo, mencionamos as estratégias terapêuticas que julgamos mais apropriadas ao tratamento do medo de alturas. Comparamos vários estudos que usaram várias técnicas e referimos a nossa experiência clínica e de investigação. Considerámos, igualmente, os novos tratamentos que usam ambientes de realidade virtual para o tratamento da acrofobia. A...
Studying music is associated with improving the quality of life for those who practise it, while providing a range of opportunities and experiences (Johnson and Memmott 2006). These stem from the process of teaching and learning music and can enhance people’s abilities to achieve positive musical experiences (Reimer 1999). Thus, music provides a va...
Objective:
The association between sleep quality and quality of life (QoL) in clinical samples diagnosed with sleep disorders, mental disorders, or other medical conditions has been widely investigated. However, few studies focused on this relationship in samples of mostly young and healthy adults. This study analyzed the associations between slee...
Errors in eyewitness testimony are frequent and problematic, due to the ethical and social impact of false positives. As an attempt to reduce the number of errors, it has been suggested that identification markers based on methodologies like ERPs should be developed. Twenty-nine participants viewed crime videos, each followed by an interference tas...
The influence of the synchrony effect (congruence between chronotype and time-of-day) on the mnesic and attentional performance is well documented. However, studies that relate the synchrony effect with identification performance on lineups are few and focused on recognition. Thirty-four participants watched eight theft videos, each followed by an...
Sexual dimorphism, which corresponds to the phenotypic difference between males and female from the same
species, is one of the main factors that was proven to influence facial attractiveness in humans. Although there are several studies about the impact of sexual dimorphism perception in mate choice, the underlying neurophysiological mechanisms ar...
OUR AIM: To contribute to the understanding of the relation between chronotype, sleep and sports performance in elite football players.
A recent study claimed face skin color as a sexually dimorphic variable that influences attractiveness preferences in mate choice. Thereby, skin color may assume the role of a mate quality signal influencing attractiveness preferences. As body odor is linked to attractiveness, this study aimed to explore whether the odors of men with more masculine...
As exigências laborais parecem aumentar cada vez mais, fazendo com que as condições de saúde mentais e físicas dos trabalhadores se tornem cada vez mais precárias o que, por sua vez, tem grande influência negativa na capacidade para o trabalho e nas funções executivas.
Esta investigação foi orientada para a compreensão fenomenológica das correlaçõe...
The labor requirements seem to be increasing more and more, causing the physical and mental health of workers to become increasingly precarious which, in turn, has a great negative influence on work ability and executive functions. This research aims at understand the phenomenological correlations between the variables studied, giving an important...
Recent research on cognitive and academic performance assessment of immigrant students evidences inconsistencies in teachers’ practice regarding performance assessment of L2 students. We aim to verify whether students classified by schools as having different proficiency levels in accordance to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languag...
The electrocardiogram (ECG) signal has been widely used to study the physiological substrates of emotion. However, searching for better filtering techniques in order to obtain a signal with better quality and with the maximum relevant information remains an important issue for researchers in this field. Signal processing is largely performed for EC...
Snakes and spiders constitute fear-relevant stimuli for humans, as many species have deleterious and even fatal effects. However, snakes provoked an older and thus stronger evolutionary pressure than spiders, shaping the vision of earliest primates towards preferential visual processing, mainly in the most complex perceptual conditions. To the best...
Research investigating the effect of lighting and viewpoint changes on unfamiliar and newly learnt faces has revealed that such recognition is highly image dependent and that changes in either of these leads to poor recognition accuracy. Three experiments are reported to extend these findings by examining the effect of apparent age on the recogniti...