Francisco J. Román

Universidad Autónoma de Madrid | UAM · Biological and Health Psychology

Sexualized drug use (SDU) has been identified as a health risk factor among gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (GBMSM). This study aimed to analyze the associations between SDU frequency and a broad set of substances, motives, consequences, and self-perceptions. Sampling was conducted through an online survey. The final sample consi...

El objetivo de esta investigación es adaptar y validar la Escala de Personalidad de los Cinco Grandes OPERAS (Vigil-Colet et al., 2013a) en dos muestras independientes de seis universidades de Chile (validación cruzada): N=444, 74.5% de mujeres de 20.33 años y N=466, 76.0% de mujeres de 19.18 años. La evidencia de validez interna indica la presenci...

Purpose Current study aimed to empirically test the Hemmingsson’s theoretical model of childhood obesity which emphasizing the importance of family environment and the emotional distress of parents as influential variables in the emotional distress of the child and subsequent weight gain. This study also tested the hypothesis that the emotional dis...

Sexualized drug use (SDU) has been poorly studied among heterosexuals. The purpose of the present study was to analyze the prevalence of and gender differences in types of substances, risky sexual practices, sexually transmitted infections (STIs), motivations, and psychological adjustment among heterosexual women and men who engage in SDU. The stud...

Purpose The aim of this article was to validate the Spanish version of the Home Environment Survey (HES-S) and was divided in two studies: (1) to assess the reliability, convergent validity of HES-S in a survey of 145 parents of children with overweight/obesity; (2) to study the magnitude of the association between children’s BMI status with the la...

El abuso sexual online de menores es el proceso a través del cual un adulto consigue victimizar sexualmente a un menor valiéndose de Internet. Este estudio tiene como objetivos analizar los mitos y las creencias erróneas que muestran los menores sobre el abuso sexual online, y desarrollar y evaluar la eficacia de un programa de prevención específic...

El estado de alarma declarado por el Gobierno de España durante la pandemia de la COVID-19, ha afectado en gran medida al estado y a las actividades de la vida diaria de una población especialmente vulnerable son las personas mayores. El objetivo de este estudio es explorar el impacto de la pandemia en las personas mayores en cuanto a sus actividad...

Biological (BA) and chronological (CA) age may or may not fit. The available evidence reveals remarkable individual differences in the overlap/mismatch between BA and CA. Increased mismatch can be interpreted as delayed (BA/CA<1) or accelerated biological aging (BA/CA>1). Body and brain health are correlated and both predict aging outcomes associat...

Resting state functional connectivity research has shown that general cognitive ability (GCA) is associated with brain resilience to targeted and random attacks (TAs and RAs). However, it remains to be seen if the finding generalizes to structural connectivity. Furthermore, individuals showing performance levels at the very high area of the GCA dis...

Emotional intelligence (EI) is related to better performance in sports. To measure this construct , many tools have been developed and validated in the sports context. However, these tools are based on an individual's ability to manage their own emotions, but do not consider the emotions of the rest of the team (teammates, coaches, etc.). In this r...

Purpose The prevalence of childhood obesity continues to increase worldwide. The aims of this study were to (1) assess the psychological well-being and rates of teasing of Spanish children with obesity (OG) and compare them with their non-overweight peers (NG), and (2) analyze the mediating role of weight-related teasing on the relation between chi...

Based on the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model, this diary study investigated the mediator role of academic resources in the relationship between personal resources and variables of well-being. The study postulates that the perceived level of academic support received by students during the day mediates the relationship between the levels of self-...

Objective: The aim of this study is to compare the levels of physical activity and sedentary behaviours in children with obesity and normal weight through accelerometer measures, and analyze the family environment related to physical activity. Design: Case-control study. Location: A health center and colleges of the Community of Madrid. Participant...

Background: Are cognitive and biological variables useful for predicting future behavioral outcomes? Method: In two independent groups, we measured a set of cognitive (fl uid and crystallized intelligence, working memory, and attention control) and biological (cortical thickness and cortical surface area) variables on two occasions separated by six...

Throughout childhood and adolescence, humans experience marked changes in cortical structure and cognitive ability. Cortical thickness and surface area, in particular, have been associated with cognitive ability. Here we ask the question: What are the time-related associations between cognitive changes and cortical structure maturation. Identifying...

Although cognitive neuroscience has made remarkable progress in understanding the neural foundations of goal-directed behavior and decision making, neuroscience research on decision making competence, the capacity to resist biases in human judgment and decision making, remain to be established. Here, we investigated the cognitive and neural mechani...

Video games are among the most popular leisure activities in current Western societies. Psychology research has shown correlations, at the latent level, between intelligence and video games ranging from 0.60 to 0.93. Here we analyze whether video games genre can account for this range of correlations by testing one hundred and thirty-four participa...

Cortical surface area variations within the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex are better predictors of future cognitive performance than fluid ability and working memory Abstract Here we ask if a set of cognitive and biological variables measured in two times separated by six months, predict behavioral outcomes of interest measured twelve and eighteen...

Despite the literature suggesting that body dissatisfaction is increasing among males, only few measures on specific body image concerns in men have been validated in Spanish male populations. The aim of this study was to reassess the factor structure of the Spanish versions of the Muscle Dysmorphic Disorder Inventory (MMDI) and the Adonis Complex...

The analysis of the relationships between cortical and intellectual development is a complex matter. Greater brain plasticity in brighter individuals has been suggested, but the associations between developmental cortical changes and variations in the general factor of intelligence (g) across time at the latent level have not been addressed. For fi...

Research aimed at testing whether short-term training programs can enhance intelligence is mainly concentrated on behavior. Expected positive effects are found sometimes, but the evidence is far from conclusive. It is assumed that training must evoke changes in the brain for observing genuine improvements in behavior. However, behavioral and brain...

While an extensive literature in decision neuroscience has elucidated the neurobiological foundations of decision making, prior research has focused primarily on group-level effects in a sample population. Due to the presence of inherent differences between individuals' cognitive abilities, it is also important to examine the neural correlates of d...

Building on evidence for embodied representations, we investigated whether Spanish spatial terms map onto the NEAR/FAR perceptual division of space. Using a long horizontal display, we measured congruency effects during the processing of spatial terms presented in NEAR or FAR space. Across three experiments, we manipulated the task demands in order...

The shared family environment is an important risk factor in the development of childhood obesity. This study aims to examine differences in maternal psychopathology, family functioning, expressed emotion and coping skills between families of a child with obesity and those with a normal ‐ weight child. This case–control study consisted of 50 mother...

Global structural brain connectivity has been reported to be sex-dependent with women having increased interhemispheric connectivity (InterHc) and men having greater intrahemispheric connectivity (IntraHc). However, (a) smaller brains show greater InterHc, (b) larger brains show greater IntraHc, and (c) women have, on average, smaller brains than m...

Personality neuroscience defines the scientific study of the neurobiological basis of personality. This field assumes that individual differences in personality traits are related with structural and functional variations of the human brain. Gray and white matters are structural properties considered separately in previous research. Available findi...

The structural connectome provides relevant information about experience and training-related changes in the brain. Here, we used network-based statistics (NBS) and graph theoretical analyses to study structural changes in the brain as a function of cognitive training. Fifty-six young women were divided in two groups (experimental and control). We...

This paper reviews the use of video games for measuring intelligence differences and reports two studies analyzing the relationship between intelligence and performance on a leisure video game. In the first study, the main focus was to design an Intelligence Test using puzzles from the video game. Forty-seven young participants played “ Professor L...

Here we analyze gray matter indices before and after completing a challenging adaptive cognitive training program based on the n-back task. The considered gray matter indices were cortical thickness (CT) and cortical surface area (CSA). Twenty-eight young women (age range 17-22 years) completed 24 training sessions over the course of 3 months (12 w...

The study presents self-report and psychophysiological data obtained in response to short film clips representing scenes related to different emotions. This was done in order to obtain evidence on the structure of positive and negative affective states following a combined dimensional/categorical approach to emotion and based on responses to stimul...

Neuroimaging research involves analyses of huge amounts of biological data that might or might not be related with cognition. This relationship is usually approached using univariate methods, and, therefore, correction methods are mandatory for reducing false positives. Nevertheless, the probability of false negatives is also increased. Multivariat...

Here we analyze changes in gray matter volumes following a challenging adaptive cognitive training program based on the n-back task. Twenty-six young healthy women completed twenty-four cognitive training sessions across twelve weeks showing substantial average improvements in cognitive performance. High-resolution MRI scans were obtained before an...

Memorizing emotional stimuli in a preferential way seems to be one of the adaptive strategies brought on by evolution for supporting survival. However, there is a lack of electrophysiological evidence on this bias in working memory. The present study analyzed the influence of emotion on the updating component of working memory. Behavioral and elect...

IQ summary scores may not involve equivalent psychological meaning for different educational levels. Ultimately, this relates to the distinction between constructs and measurements. Here, we explore this issue studying the standardization of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Fourth Edition (WAIS-IV) for Spain. A representative sample of 743 ind...

People differ in their cognitive functioning. This variability has been exhaustively examined at the behavioral, neural and genetic level to uncover the mechanisms by which some individuals are more cognitively efficient than others. Studies investigating the neural underpinnings of interindividual differences in cognition aim to establish a reliab...

As a general rule, the repeated administration of tests measuring a given cognitive ability in the same participants reveals increased scores. This brings to life the well-known practice effect and it must be taken into account in research aimed at the proper assessment of changes after the completion of cognitive training programs. Here we focus i...

Here we analyze how performance differences in an adaptive cognitive training regime based on the n-back task interact with emotional stimuli (scenes and faces) varying in their valence (negative, positive, and neutral). One hundred and three participants completed four training sessions across 2 weeks showing remarkable improvements from time to t...

The precuneus has received considerable attention in the last decade, because of its cognitive functions, its role as a central node of the brain networks, and its involvement in neurodegenerative processes. Paleoneurological studies suggested that form changes in the deep parietal areas represent a major character associated with the origin of the...

Intelligence is composed of a set of cognitive abilities hierarchically organized. General and specific abilities capture distinguishable, but related, facets of the intelligence construct. Here, we analyze gray matter with three morphometric indices (volume, cortical surface area, and cortical thickness) at three levels of the intelligence hierarc...

Neuroimaging studies have revealed associations between intelligence and brain morphology. However, researchers have focused primarily on the anatomical features of the cerebral cortex, whereas subcortical structures, such as the basal ganglia (BG), have often been neglected despite extensive functional evidence on their relation with higher-order...

Neuroimaging techniques are now widely used to understand relationships between brain features and cognitive performance. Nevertheless, studies do not always implicate the same anatomical neural networks in intellectual function. Here we used T1-weighted brain MRI scans obtained from a sample of 82 healthy young adults to study four potential sourc...

Neuroimaging studies provide evidence for organized intrinsic activity under task-free conditions. This activity serves functionally relevant brain systems supporting cognition. Here, we analyze changes in resting-state functional connectivity after videogame practice applying a test-retest design. Twenty young females were selected from a group of...

The possibility that facial expressions of emotion change the affective valence of faces through associative learning was explored using facial electromyography (EMG). In Experiment 1, EMG activity was registered while the participants (N = 57) viewed sequences of neutral faces (Stimulus 1 or S1) changing to either a happy or an angry expression (S...

Properties of the brain's structural networks can be analyzed by applying fiber-tracking techniques and network analysis to diffusion MRI. Here we applied exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to anatomical connectivity matrices, to identify brain networks whose properties predicted higher-order cognitive function. Using diffusion MRI scans from 104 he...

This study was designed to test whether videogame performance requires intelligence even when practice periods are much longer than previously reported (Quiroga, Herranz, Gómez-Abad, Kebir, Ruiz, & Colom, 2009a). The study involved 27 university female undergraduates. Intelligence was measured using several tests both before and after videogame pra...

Current accounts of spatial cognition and human-object interaction suggest that the representation of peripersonal space depends on an action-specific system that remaps its representation according to action requirements. Here we demonstrate that this mechanism is sensitive to knowledge about properties of objects. In two experiments we explored t...

Here gray and white matter changes after four weeks of videogame practice were analyzed using optimized voxel-based morphometry (VBM), cortical surface and cortical thickness indices, and white matter integrity computed from several projection, commissural, and association tracts relevant to cognition. Beginning with a sample of one hundred young f...

Modulation of early perceptual processing by emotional expression and the affective valence of faces was explored in an event-related potential (ERP) study. An associative procedure was used where different neutral faces changed to happy, to angry or, in a control condition, stayed the same. Based on these changes in expression, participants had th...

Much is written regarding the associations between human intelligence and cognition. However, it is unusual to find comprehensive studies. Here twenty four measures tapping eight cognitive abilities and skills are considered for assessing a sample of one hundred and eighty five young adults. The simultaneous relationships among fluid, crystallized,...

The results of two studies on the relationship between evaluations of trustworthiness, valence and arousal of faces are reported. In Experiment 1, valence and trustworthiness judgments of faces were positively correlated, while arousal was negatively correlated with both trustworthiness and valence. In Experiment 2, learning about faces based on th...

This study was designed to test whether videogame performance requires intelligence even when practice periods are much longer than previously reported (Quiroga, Herranz, Gómez-Abad, Kebir, Ruiz, & Colom, 2009a). The study involved 27 university female undergraduates. Intelligence was measured using several tests both before and after videogame pra...

The role of different spatial frequency bands on face gender and expression categorization was studied in three experiments. Accuracy and reaction time were measured for unfiltered, low-pass (cut-off frequency of 1 cycle/deg) and high-pass (cutoff frequency of 3 cycles/deg) filtered faces. Filtered and unfiltered faces were equated in root-mean-squ...

The acknowledged high relationship between working memory and intelligence suggests common underlying cognitive mechanisms and, perhaps, shared biological substrates. If this is the case, improvement in working memory by repeated exposure to challenging span tasks might be reflected in increased intelligence scores. Here we report a study in which...