Juan C Melendez

University of Valencia | UV · Departamento de Psicología Evolutiva y de la Educación

Dementia is a significant public health problem. One non-pharmacological therapy that has shown its effectiveness is reminiscence, which is a psychological intervention designed to address issues of particular relevance to older adults. The aim of this study was to examine the benefits of an integrative reminiscence program in elderly people with d...

Objectives: A characteristic task in aging is the process of reevaluating and reflecting on one's life in order to give it meaning. The successful resolution of this task is defined as ego-integrity, and it is related to various psychological phenomena that foster the person's adaptation to change. The objective was to adapt an ego-integrity scale...

Introduction Mild neurocognitive disorder (mNCD), a pre-dementia stage close to Mild Cognitive Impairment, shows a progressive and constant decline in the memory domain. Of the non-pharmacological therapeutic interventions that may help to decelerate the neurodegenerative progress, transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) shows beneficial eff...

Care staff in nursing homes work in a challenging environment, and the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated those challenges in an unprecedented way. On the other hand, the sense of coherence (SOC) is a competence that could help these professionals perceive the situation as understandable, manageable and meaningful. This study aims to analyse the ext...

Background: Autobiographical memory (AM) presents components related to the type of memory and may present an associated emotional valence. Comparing healthy older adults, adults with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and adults with Alzheimer's disease (AD) gives contradictory results. We examined AM in these groups to analyze differences and prov...

The aim of this paper is to establish which parenting style is associated with optimum outcomes among adolescents of Spanish families considering adolescents with low vs. high self-efficacy. Although classical studies identify the authoritative parenting style (based on warmth and strictness) as the best parental strategy, emerging research serious...

Aims Finding out whether there are differences in the levels of stress and burnout between workers providing care to dependent adults and those caring for independent older adults would provide comparative information about two different models of care. During the COVID‐19 pandemic, workers caring for older adults were subjected to maladaptive situ...

Objectives: The aim of this research was to confirm whether internal coping strengths, depressive symptomatology and gratitude disposition are significant predictors of integrity in older adults. Methods: Participated 394 Ecuadorian older adults with ages between 60 and 91 years old. Self-report were applied to assess the different variables und...

Caregivers experience great stress, and coping can be one of the factors, which determine the extent of stress. The aim of the present paper is to analyze the effects of coping strategies on distress of the older adult’s caregiver, including guilt as a mediating factor in those maladaptive strategies. The sample consisted of 201 informal caregivers...

Antecedentes y objetivo: La experiencia de los cuidadores familiares tras el ingreso en una residencia de personas mayores ha recibido escasa atención, probablemente porque muchos cuidadores experimentan una sensación inicial de alivio emocional inicial. Sin embargo, para algunos cuidadores el ingreso en una residencia de mayores es un factor de es...

Aging and major depressive disorders have been associated with impaired cognitive control. These deficits are also influenced by the affective valence and by the type of stimulus processed. Using an emotional Stroop task, the current study aims to examine cognitive control deficits and their association with emotion regulation in depression and the...

Background Delaying the transition from minimal cognitive impairment to Alzheimer’s dementia is a major concern in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) therapeutics. Pathological signs of AD occur years before the onset of clinical dementia. Thus, long-term therapeutic approaches, with safe, minimally invasive, and yet effective substances are recommended. The...

Background: Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has emerged as a prevention method or minimizer of the normal cognitive deterioration that occurs during the aging process. tDCS can be used to enhance cognitive functions such as immediate memory, learning, or working memory in healthy subjects. The objective of this study was to analyze...

Background: The basic discrete emotions, namely, happiness, disgust, anger, fear, surprise, and sadness, are present across different cultures and societies. Facial emotion recognition is crucial in social interactions, but normal and pathological aging seem to affect this ability. The present research aims to identify the differences in the capac...

Objective: Recognition memory is widely accepted as a dual process-based model, namely familiarity and recollection. However, the location of their specific neurobiological substrates remains unclear. Similar to hippocampal damage, fornix damage has been associated with recollection memory but not familiarity memory deficits. To understand the neur...

There is a high prevalence of insomnia in older adults, which has negative consequences for their well-being and quality of life. The recommendation for first-line treatments is to administer non-pharmacological interventions. The objective of this research was to verify the effectiveness of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy in older adults with...

Aims and objectives: This paper aims to examine the satisfaction and depressed mood experienced by nursing home workers during the COVID-19 pandemic and associated variables. Specifically, to analyse the factors that may contribute to nursing home workers developing adaptive behaviours that promote satisfaction or, on the contrary, show characteri...

Objectives The aim of the present study was to determine the effects of performing a dual task on the sway density plot parameters in Parkinson's disease and control subjects. Methods A cross-sectional design was used to establish differences in the mean peak, mean time, and mean distance between a group with Parkinson's disease and a control grou...

Background: Cognitive stimulation is one of the non-pharmacological therapies recommended for intervention in dementia, consisting of activities involving different cognitive domains and involving brain activation. New technologies can be very useful in this field, favoring intervention tasks. Objective: The objective of this work is to test the...

Cognitive stimulation is one of the non-pharmacological therapies recommended for dementia intervention. The present study evaluated the efficacy of an intervention based on cognitive stimulation in people with moderate Alzheimer’s disease. Fifty-nine subjects with moderate dementia were randomly assigned to the stimulation group ( N = 36) and the...

El uso de instrumentos para evaluar la personalidad es una práctica común en psicología, de ahí que su validación y adaptación a diferentes grupos poblacionales sea fundamental. El objetivo de la presente investigación fue evaluar la validez de constructo del NEO Five Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) en un grupo de 617 personas adultas mayores en Bogotá,...

Resumen Antecedentes y objetivo La desesperanza se caracteriza por un conjunto de esquemas cognitivos negativos sobre el futuro, conceptualizándose en base a 3 dimensiones: afectiva, motivacional y cognitiva. Este constructo se encuentra vinculado a la soledad cuya incidencia en adultos mayores es cada vez más alta. El objetivo de esta investigaci...

Background Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has emerged as a prevention method or minimizer of the normal cognitive deterioration that occurs during the aging process. tDCS can be used to enhance cognitive functions such as immediate memory, learning, or working memory in healthy subjects. Objective The purpose of this study was to a...

Background: Effective coping strategies facilitate older adults' optimal adaptation and contribute to their well-being. Problem-focused strategies are associated with active styles and enhance well-being. This study analyzes the role of coping strategies in Colombian older adults' subjective well-being (SWB) using structural equation modelling. Ad...

The purpose of the study was to explore the nature of the relationship between Divergent Thinking and Well-being. Two theoretical models about the relationship between Divergent thinking, Psychological well-being and Life Satisfaction were tested. A total of 152 subjects between 65 and 84 years old participated in the study. Final model emphasises...

Background: The main objective of this study was to analyze the evolution of autobiographical memory (both episodic and semantic) in patients with mild cognitive impairment, patients with Alzheimer's disease, and a healthy control group. We compared these groups at two time points: first, at baseline, and in a follow-up after 18 months. Method:...

Current research on older adults considers psychological and emotional aspects of successful aging. Erikson’s epigenetic model of psychosocial development indicates that the Ego-Integrity vs. Despair stage is fundamental at this time of life. In this regard, the aim of this article is to validate an Ego-Integrity scale in an Ecuadorian context and...

- Un segundo apartado, lo dedica a población adulta; se enfoca en la investigación neuropsicológica y las reflexiones en salud mental. Enfatiza que la evaluación nunca puede separarse del proceso de intervención y, desde la teoría de Luria, se la denomina evaluación interventiva, que constituye un proceso dinámico, único, indisoluble y dialéctico....

Background: No studies have been conducted to date on the dimensional and discrete classification of emotions to study the emotional reactivity of older adults with Alzheimer's disease (AD). Additionally, the presentation of film clips with affective content is currently one of the most effective and widely used Mood Induction Procedures (MIPS). H...

Introduction Emotional Intelligence (EI) involves a set of emotional skills (attention, clarity, and emotional regulation) for the effective use of emotional information (Mayer & Salovey, 1997). The lack of emotional skills has been associated with multiple disruptive emotional phenomena, such as hopelessness. It has been observed that EI can be a...

Introduction From the life cycle perspective, the aging is described as the strengthening of adaptive resources and the capacity for recovery or compensation for losses. These skills are grounded in the coping strategies that individuals apply in order to effectively adapt to diverse situations. Emotion-focused, passive coping strategies are consid...

Introduction Emotional regulation, understood as the emotional ability to repair emotional states, is a skill closely linked to adaptation during aging. People who are capable to manage their emotions have greater control over moods, applying adaptive regulation strategies that allow them to maintain positive moods and modify or regulate negative o...

Background: False memories tend to increase in healthy and pathological aging, and their reduction could be useful in improving cognitive functioning. The objective of this study was to use an active-placebo method to verify whether the application of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) improved true recognition and reduced false memori...

Autobiographical memory consists of a person’s personal history and contributes to building a feeling of identity and continuity. Aging affects episodic autobiographical memory negatively, whereas semantic autobiographical memory is preserved or even enhanced in older adults. Although the performance of patients with amnesic mild cognitive impairme...

Background. False memories tend to increase in healthy and pathological aging, and their reduction could be useful in improving cognitive functioning. The objective was to use an active-placebo method to verify whether the application of tDCS in improving true recognition and reducing false memories in healthy older people. Method. Participants wer...

Background Currently, there is a discrepancy regarding whether CSF biomarkers (BM) in Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) should be applied generally in daily clinical practice, performed in high‐level clinical centres, or reserved for research only. The main objective is to assess the influence of these BM on the diagnosis of AD in daily clinical practice, a...

Background Autobiographical memory (AM) refers to memories from one’s past that are characterized by a sense of subjective time and autonoetic consciousness which involves a feeling of re‐experiencing or reliving the past. Cognitive aging research indicates age‐related deficits in episodic AM, whereas semantic AM is unimpaired in healthy older adul...

The confinement situation experienced as a result of COVID-19 will have consequences at a psychological level. These consequences can affect emotion recognition because, due to isolation, interactions and social contacts have been drastically reduced. The aim of this study was to find out if there were differences in facial emotion recognition in t...

Objectives Emotional intelligence (EI) is a strong predictor of negative mood. Applying emotional skills correctly can help to increase positive emotional states and reduce negative ones. This study aims to implement EI intervention designed to improve clarity, repair EI dimensions and coping strategies, and reduce negative mood in older adults. D...

Background: Thirty healthy older people, 20 Alzheimer's disease patients (matched on age and education level) and 33 young people, participated in an experiment to implicitly induce phonological false memories, allowing us to obtain estimates of their recollection, familiarity, and false recognition. Method: In the study task, words were selecte...

Introduction: The conflict monitoring system exerts an influence on centers responsible for cognitive control, causing them to intervene more strongly in processing when conflict occurs. These mechanisms are usually investigated through specific tasks where there is an inherent interference elicited by the congruency or incongruency between the sti...

Emotional intelligence has been shown to be a relevant resource associated with better personal and social adaptation. In older adults, it has been associated with constructs such as life satisfaction and resilience, which are of interest in the field of gerontology because of their impact during the aging process. The objective of this study is to...

Coping strategies used play an essential role in the adaptation to changes in older adults, and personality traits are important predictors of these strategies. The aim of this study is to analyse what traits predict different coping strategies in older adults. Participants were 226 older adults (60 to 88 years old). Data on personality and coping...

Objectives Reminiscence promotes the acceptance of oneself and others, a sense of meaning, and the integration of the present and the past. The currently accepted classification contains eight reminiscence functions grouped in three broader functions: self-positive functions (identity, problem-solving, and death preparation); self-negative function...

Resumen Antecedentes y objetivo Adaptarse con éxito al envejecimiento facilita la consecución de la integridad. Las estrategias de afrontamiento son clave en este proceso de adaptación, y dependiendo del tipo de estrategias que se apliquen, se puede conseguir la integridad o bien caer en la desesperación. El objetivo de este estudio fue analizar l...

Background: Impairments in the ability to recognize facial affective expressions may lead to social dysfunction and difficulties with interpersonal communication. Objective: The objective was to compare the attentional responses on a Stroop emotional task using words and faces by testing whether the two stimuli differ in the degree of interferen...

The objective of this research was to study attentional tendencies, specifically the effect of inhibition of return (IOR), comparing a sample of young adults (N = 72) and elderly (N = 74). A task of attention discrimination was used in combination with SOAs (Stimulus Onset Asynchrony) of 300, 750,100 and 1500 ms are used. The results showed that bo...

Well-being is a complex construct related to sociodemographic and cultural aspects that vary across cultures. Latin America is a region with high social inequalities among population groups, although this varies significantly depending on the country. This article proposes a model that seeks to establish the relationship between psychosocial variab...

There is little information on how personality traits can affect psychological well-being. Studies suggest that the traits with the strongest associations with psychological well-being are neuroticism and extraversion to. The present study investigated associations between personality traits and the six dimensions of psychological well-being in a s...

Background and objective: Aging implies important adaptive changes for people. Emotional intelligence can be a key factor in the development of adaptive strategies. This research aimed to study whether emotional intelligence could predict the resilience capacity of older adults. Materials and methods: Resilience and the dimensions of emotional inte...

Recent research on emotions in aging points to emotional intelligence (EI) as a factor that plays an important role in this process, and different conceptualizations of EI show that this construct is closely linked to personality in the general population. The main purpose of this study was to find out whether findings obtained in the general popul...

The executive functions play an important role in storing and recovering autobiographical memories, especially episodic memories. These types of memories provide information about solutions and experiences from the past that can be utilized as examples in the present when seeking solutions to any problem. In addition, a close relationship between d...

Two experiments explored a new procedure to implicitly induce phonological false memories in young and older people. On the study tasks, half of the words were formed from half of the letters in the alphabet, whereas the remaining words were formed from all the letters in the alphabet. On the recognition tests, there were three types of non-studied...

Autobiographical memory consists of a person’s personal history and contributes to building a feeling of identity and continuity. Aging affects episodic autobiographical memory negatively, whereas semantic autobiographical memory is preserved or even enhanced in older adults. The study aim was to analyze whether these hypotheses continue to find su...

The aim of the current study is to examine the effects of stimuli repetition and age in false recognition using the Deese–Roediger–McDermott experimental paradigm. Two matched samples of 32 young adults and 32 healthy older adults studied 10 lists of six words associated with three non-presented critical words. On half of the lists, the words were...

Objectives: The main aim was to test a causal relations model of the problem-focused and emotion-focused coping styles, depressed mood, and divergent thinking (DT) in older adults. It was hypothesized that both forms of coping would have a significant effect on predicting depressed mood, and that problem-focused coping and depressed mood would have...

Reminiscence is a psychological intervention that uses the recall of past events, feelings, and thoughts to facilitate pleasure, quality of life, and adjustment to present life. The main goal of this study was to investigate the effect of a reminiscence intervention programme on coping strategies. One hundred fifty healthy older adults attended the...

It is widely accepted that older people need to perceive and understand their feelings and believe in their ability to adapt to negative situations or losses that occur in aging. In this study, we examined the relationships among emotional intelligence, coping, and depressed mood, measuring these relationships through a structural equation model (S...

The changes that occur with cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's disease could affect psychological aspects unrelated to memory. The purpose of this study is to compare 32 healthy older adults, 31 amnestic mild cognitively impaired (aMCI) adults, and 32 patients diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease (AD), in order to determine whether there are differ...

El bienestar es un constructo complejo que se refiere a la experiencia óptima y el funcionamiento. El bienestar subjetivo, basado en la perspectiva hedónica, es la valoración general de la vida y el bienestar psicológico, fundamentado en la perspectiva eudaimónica, se asocia al desarrollo personal y realización del potencial de uno mismo. Este trab...

The aim of the current study is to examine the effects of motivated forgetting and aging on true and false memory. Sixty young and 54 healthy older adults were instructed to study two lists of 18 words each. Each list was composed of three sets of six words associated with three non-presented critical words. After studying list 1, half of the parti...

Objectives: Hopelessness is a key element of suicidal intent. It can instill a pessimistic outlook on the future, leading an individual to believe that suicide is the only answer to their problems. Hopelessness operates as a modulating variable between depression and suicidal behavior. The aim of this study was to confirm the factor structure of t...

El bienestar es un constructo complejo que se refiere a la experiencia óptima y el funcionamiento. El bienestar subjetivo, basado en la perspectiva hedónica, es la valoración general de la vida y el bienestar psicológico, fundamentado en la perspectiva eudaimónica, se asocia al desarrollo personal y realización del potencial de uno mismo. Este trab...

Patients with Parkinson’s disease may show certain cognitive impairments, although it is unclear how these deficits can affect their learning potential. The study aims to use the testing-the-limits technique to compare the potential for cognitive plasticity in a group of Patients with Parkinson’s disease (N = 33) and a group of healthy older adults...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the extent to which a reminiscence intervention reduces depressed mood and improves life satisfaction and psychological well-being. 160 healthy elderly people participated in a 10-session intervention. An experimental design with pretest and posttest evaluations was applied, comparing a control group to...

Antecedents: Given the contradictions of previous studies on the changes in attentional responses produced in aging a Stroop emotional task was proposed to compare young and older adults to words or faces with an emotional valence. Method: The words happy or sad were superimposed on faces that express the emotion of happiness or sadness. The emo...

Background: Given the uneven results about the role self-referencing plays in false recognition, we planned an experiment that would allow us to analyze whether self-referencing affects false recognition, and its relationship with healthy aging. Method: A sample of healthy older people (n = 30) and another sample of young people (n = 38) rated w...

BACKGROUND: Aging is a process during which important changes occur in different areas of development and emotional intelligence plays an essential role. The objective of this study was twofold: first, to validate the TMMS-24 in an older population; and second, to examine the mediating role of life satisfaction in the relationship between emotiona...

The aim of the current study was to examine if recollection and familiarity decline in nondemented Parkinson's patients. To do so we compared a sample of older people with Parkinson's disease (n = 32) to a control sample of healthy older people (n = 32) on an associative recognition task in which we manipulated the repetition of the pairs during th...

The objective is to examine the effects of reminiscence therapy (RT) on total, episodic and semantic autobiographical memory in amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) and Alzheimer's disease (AD) groups, testing the effects of RT on different stages of autobiographical memory, and its effectiveness at follow-up. A sample composed of 43 aMCI (27...

The purpose of the study was to test a model of causal relationships among cognitive reserve (CR), personality variables such as Neuroticism and Openness to experience, and divergent thinking (DT), independently evaluating performance in different domains (verbal and graphic). It was hypothesized that CR, Openness, and Neuroticism would each direct...

Aim: The present study distinguishes three memory stages across the lifespan, and aims to compare episodic and semantic autobiographical memory in healthy older adults, with amnesic mild cognitive impairment, and with Alzheimer's disease. This information can offer evidence about the way semantic and episodic autobiographical memory work, and how...

Objetivo. Evaluar las diferencias en las dimensiones del bienestar psicológico en función de los grupos de edad, sexo y su interacción. Método. Se obtuvo una muestra de 706 participantes, dividida en tres grupos de edad (jóvenes, adultos y adultos mayores), quienes respondieron a las escalas de bienestar psicológico de Ryff. Se calculó un Manova te...

Well-being is one of the keys to successful and optimal development across the lifespan. Based on the idea that development involves changes in individuals' adaptive capacity to meet their needs over time, the changes that occur in the second half of life require effort to adapt to the new reality. This study used a structural model to test the eff...

Given the uneven experimental results in the literature regarding whether or not familiarity declines with healthy aging and cognitive impairment, we compare four samples (healthy young people, healthy older people, older people with amnestic mild cognitive impairment -aMCI-, and older people with Alzheimer's disease -AD-) on an associative recogni...