Luís Faísca

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at University of Algarve

Behavioral research has shown that inconsistency in spelling-to-sound mappings slows visual word recognition and word naming. However, the time course of this effect remains underexplored. To address this, we asked skilled adult readers to perform a 1-back repetition detection task that did not explicitly involve phonological coding, in which we ma...

Object recognition memory allows us to identify previously seen objects. This type of declarative memory is a primary process for learning. Despite its crucial role in everyday life, object recognition has received far less attention in ADHD research compared to verbal recognition memory. In addition to the existence of a small number of published...

Behavioral inhibition (BI) is a temperamental trait characterized by a consistent pattern of behavioral and emotional responses to unfamiliar people and novel situations. BI exhibits moderate stability across development and is considered a risk factor for the emergence of emotional disorders in adolescence and adulthood, making early assessment cr...

Based on within-person combinations of self-oriented perfectionism (SOP) and socially prescribed perfectionism (SPP), the 2 × 2 model asserts four personality subtypes: Non-Perfectionism, Pure SOP, Pure SPP, and Mixed Perfectionism. We tested whether these subtypes can be distinctively associated with perceived distress, cognitive emotion regulatio...

Developmental dyslexia is characterized by a profile of reading- and writing-related difficulties which stands out as a core deficit in phonological processing. Although these difficulties seem to persist into adulthood, it is still an open question to what extent they are immune, or not, to the extensive training resulting from extended schooling....

The Children’s Interpretation Bias Measure – Ambiguous Story-Stems (CIBM): Portuguese adaptation for preschool children.

Stress affects the cognitive and emotional processes involved in moral decisions, leading to less utilitarian choices. Our study examines whether specific negative (dark) personality traits – narcissism and Machiavellianism – moderate the impact of stress on moral decision-making. Forty undergraduate volunteers were classified into three trait gr...

What is the hallmark of a good speller? Spelling is a critical component in learning to become literate, but how it works in literate adults remains poorly explored. We examined word and pseudoword spelling in 214 adults in relation to general cognitive abilities, vocabulary, reading history, reading performance, phonological processing and rapid a...

The main objective of this study was to examine how parental characteristics, such as social anxiety (SA) and parental overprotection, and child’s behavioral inhibition (BI) interact and contribute to the manifestation of SA symptoms in preschoolers. Parents (Mothers: n = 319; Fathers: n = 263) of children aged between 3 and 6 years answered to sel...

Individualised information in substance misuse treatment complements standardised outcome measures. However, few studies investigate the use of individualised measures and their robustness in terms of quantifying outcomes. In this study, we analysed the psychometrics and feasibility of two individualised outcome measures (PQ and PSYCHLOPS). We foll...

Effects of emotional valence have been observed in lexical decision tasks, suggesting that valence information modulates early word recognition. However, is still unclear the processing advantage of the different valence categories, and how these advantages might be modulated by word frequency and arousal. To clarify this question, a lexical decisi...

Idiographic patient‐reported outcome measures (I‐PROMs) are a growing set of individualized tools for use in routine outcome monitoring (ROM) in psychological therapies. This paper presents a position statement on their conceptualization, use, and analysis, based on contemporary evidence and clinical practice. Four problem‐based, and seven goal‐bas...

Research on the predictors of reading comprehension has been largely focused on school-aged children and mainly in opaque orthographies, hindering the generalization of the results to adult populations and more transparent orthographies. In the present study, we aim to test two versions of the Simple View of Reading (SVR): the original model and an...

Objective Few studies report the psychometric properties of individualized patient‐reported outcome measures (I‐PROMs) combining traditional analysis and Item Response Theory (IRT). Methods Pre‐ and posttreatment PSYCHLOPS data derived from six clinical samples (n = 939) were analyzed for validity, reliability, and responsiveness; caseness cutoffs...

Perfectionism is a significant transdiagnostic process related to the development and maintenance of several psychological disorders. The main models of the development of perfectionism focus on early childhood experiences and postulate that parental relation is an important factor for understanding this construct in children. The purpose of this s...

Purpose This study aims to analyse the effectiveness of a static promotional banner located on a hotel reservation website in terms of capturing the visitor’s visual attention by exploring how this impact depends on the user’s degree of internet experience. Design/methodology/approach An experiment was conducted using the eye-tracking methodology,...

Background: In borderline personality disorder, attentional bias to emotional stimuli may be a fundamental component in their origin and maintenance. However, the authors seem divided between the hypothesis of hypervigilance for negative stimuli and the hypothesis of over-reactivity against any type of stimuli. Aims: We aimed to observe the associa...

The assessment of behaviorally inhibited children is typically based on parent or teacher reports, but this approach has received criticisms, mainly for being prone to bias. Several researchers proposed the additional use of observational methods because they provide a direct and more objective description of the child's functioning in different co...

The assessment of behaviorally inhibited children is typically based on parent or teacher reports, but this approach has received criticisms, mainly for being prone to bias. Several researchers proposed the additional use of observational methods because they provide a direct and more objective description of the child's functioning in different co...

The assessment of behaviorally inhibited children is typically based on parent or teacher reports, but this approach has received criticisms, mainly for being prone to bias. Several researchers proposed the additional use of observational methods because they provide a direct and more objective description of the child's functioning in different co...

An individual diagnosed with dyslexia in childhood typically remains dyslexic throughout his/her life. However, the cognitive profile of adults with dyslexia has been less explored than that of children. This meta-analytic study is intended to clarify three questions: (1) To what extent, and in what manner, do adults with reading difficulties (dysl...

There has been an increasing call for service users to be more actively involved with the evaluation of treatment outcomes. One strategy to impove such involvement is to ask service users to contribute with their own criteria for evaluation by sharing their personal story and perspective about their clinical situation. In this cross-sectional study...

Background Cognitive models of obsessive-compulsive disorder attribute a causal role to maladaptive beliefs. Aims To test this hypothesis, we manipulated Overimportance of Thoughts (OT) beliefs and experimentally evaluated their effect on the response to an induced aggressive impulse. Method Eighty-five participants completed a battery of self-re...

Documento que oferece guias de orientação para a aplicação e interpretação dos resultados da escala SOCRATES 8D

[50 free copies: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1Zbpt3SU~VdyoP] This article focuses on the role played by the images that hotels use on their websites. Under this approach, this study analyses the main image used in a hotel website, considered an area of outstanding interest, which can help to improve the first impression when arriving at the webs...

Disturbances in the ability to recognize emotional faces have been attributed to individuals with specific personality disorders. Considering the importance of the dimensional models of psychopathology, studies involving healthy participants are becoming increasingly relevant in the domain of personality disorders. In this context, our main goal wa...

The present study investigated the influence of lexical word properties on the early stages of visual word processing (<250 ms) and how the dynamics of lexical access interact with task-driven top-down processes. We compared the brain’s electrical response (event-related potentials, ERPs) of 39 proficient adult readers for the effects of word frequ...

This study presents a meta-analytic review of serial rapid automatized naming (RAN) deficits in individuals with dyslexia relative to typical readers (based on 216 effect sizes comprising 8335 dyslexic readers, 14,083 age-matched controls, and 921 reading-matched controls). A random-effects model analysis indicated a large impairment in speeded RAN...

The Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) is a screening instrument for the assessment of global cognitive function with proven diagnostic accuracy for the earlier stages of dementia. MoCA is an open access instrument adapted and validated in 36 countries. In the present study a new version of MoCA was adapted to Cape-Verdean population (MoCA-CV). M...

Purpose A better therapeutic alliance at the beginning of treatment for addictive behaviours has been found to prevent dropout. In this pilot study, it was evaluated how the development of therapeutic alliance dimensions were associated with the dropout prevention. Design/methodology/approach The 23 participants presented a substance use disorde...

This study investigates the implicit sequence learning abilities of dyslexic children using an artificial grammar learning task with an extended exposure period. Twenty children with developmental dyslexia participated in the study and were matched with two control groups—one matched for age and other for reading skills. During 3 days, all particip...

A better therapeutic alliance at the beginning of treatment for addictive behaviours has been found to prevent dropout. In this pilot study we evaluated how the development of therapeutic alliance dimensions were associated with the dropout prevention. Overall, to prevent dropout, therapists should (1) pay especial attention to residents who manife...

This study aimed to analyse the psychometric properties and dimensionality of the Portuguese version of the Multidimensional Scale of Frost Perfectionism (FMPS) using the confirmatory factor analysis. The sample consisted of 832 high school and college students (65.0% female) with a mean age of 19.5. The adjustment indexes of confirmatory factor an...

Background: The mechanisms and triggers of the attentional bias in social anxiety are not yet fully determined, and the modulating role of personality traits is being increasingly acknowledged. Aims: Our main purpose was to test whether social anxiety is associated with mechanisms of hypervigilance, avoidance (static biases), vigilance-avoidance...

During oral reading, the eyes tend to be ahead of the voice (eye-voice span, EVS). It has been hypothesized that the extent to which this happens depends on the automaticity of reading processes, namely on the speed of print-to-sound conversion. We tested whether EVS is affected by another automaticity component – immunity from interference. To tha...

Naming speed deficits are well documented in developmental dyslexia, expressed by slower naming times and more errors in response to familiar items. Here we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine at what processing level the deficits in dyslexia emerge during a discrete-naming task. Dyslexic and skilled adult control readers performed a pr...

Background: Developmental concepts of 'Theory of Mind' (ToM) suggest that this cognitive domain is an innate human capacity requiring input from the social environment to mature. Research suggests substantial individual differences in ToM, depending on childhood experiences, genetics, and the presence or absence of a neuropsychiatric disorder. Non...

This study investigates the interaction between surface and colour knowledge information during object recognition. In two different experiments, participants were instructed to decide whether two presented stimuli belonged to the same object identity. On the non-matching trials, we manipulated the shape and colour knowledge information activated b...

Regular words that are read for the first time are typically processed via the sublexical pathway (Coltheart et al, 2001), a serial grapheme-phoneme recoding process that leads to longer reading times. However, over time, these items become familiar, meaning that a lexical representation is created and reading times become shorter. This process is...

In the present study, we adapted the Stage of Change Readiness and Treatment Eagerness Scale (SOCRATES, version 8D) to the European Portuguese and we examined its factor structure and psychometric properties. The scale was applied to a sample of 100 adults, mostly heroin addicts, in outpatient or inpatient treatment. A Principal Component Analysis...

Este trabajo investiga el impacto del proceso de entrenamiento militar de resistencia psicológica en la resiliencia de los reclutas, considerando el papel moderador de la cohesión de grupo militar, de la autoestima y de la predisposición para la ansiedad. Una muestra de conveniencia de 104 militares fue evaluada antes y después del Curso de Formaci...

Two different forms of parafoveal dysfunction have been hypothesized as core deficits of dyslexic individuals: reduced parafoveal preview benefits (Btoo little parafovea^) and increased costs of parafoveal load (Btoo much parafovea^). We tested both hypotheses in a single eye-tracking experiment using a modified serial rapid automatized naming (RAN...

The main aim of the present study was to investigate the presence of a set of risk factors relating to childhood life events and other psychosocial factors that may be associated with criminal indicators and with the prevalence of internalizing psychopathology in a sample of adolescent offenders. Fifty male adolescents in the custody of the Portugu...

This paper presents the metric-frequency calculator (MF Calculator), an online application to analyze similarity. The MF Calculator implements a metric-frequency similarity algorithm for the quantitative assessment of similarity in ill-structured data sets. It is widely applicable as it can be used with nominal, ordinal, or interval data when there...

Skilled readers preprocess word n+1 while fixating word n. This allows them to shorten gaze times for word n+1 and it is called a parafoveal preview (PP) benefit. Dyslexics seem to lack PP benefit, but it is unclear whether parafoveal input is ignored, or if it is attended but generates visual-attentional interference (crowding). In the latter case...

Evidence that rapid naming skill is associated with reading ability has become increasingly prevalent in recent years. However, there is considerable variation in the literature concerning the magnitude of this relationship. The objective of the present study was to provide a comprehensive analysis of the evidence on the relationship between rapid...

Temporal processing in the range from milliseconds to seconds is predominantly explained by two distinct models/mechanisms (Internal Clock vs. State-Dependent Networks). The interactions between both are not yet clear, with a significant impairment in the comprehension on temporal processing in the range from 400ms to 800ms, as well as in the funct...

Recent studies have emphasized that developmental dyslexia is a multiple- deficit disorder, in contrast to the traditional single-deficit view. In this context, cognitive profiling of children with dyslexia may be a relevant contribution to this unresolved discussion. The aim of this study was to profile 36 Portuguese children with dyslexia from th...

Introduction: Standard tools used in the assessment of aphasic patients are normally extensive and exhaustive, so as to allow for detailed results and an accurate diagnosis. However these tests are often inappropriate for assessment in acute and subacute stroke. Patients with this condition are not able to collaborate in long and complex tasks. In...

The aim of the present study was to investigate whether reading failure in the context of an orthography of intermediate consistency is linked to inefficient use of the lexical orthographic reading procedure. The performance of typically developing and dyslexic Portuguese-speaking children was examined in a lexical decision task, where the stimulus...

The purpose of this study is to analyse the factorial structure of the Job Diagnostic Survey, designed to assess the Model of Work Characteristics (Hackman & Oldham, 1975, 1980), using five dimensions of job characteristics: Variety, identity, significance, autonomy and feedback. We used a heterogeneous sample of 552 workers from a variety of occup...

Introduction: Standard tools used in the assessment of aphasic patients are normally extensive and exhaustive, so as to allow for detailed results and an accurate diagnosis. However these tests are often inappropriate for assessment in acute and subacute stroke. Patients with this condition are not able to collaborate in long and complex tasks. In...

Tendo por base o trabalho de Entwistle e colaboradores sobre a forma como os estudantes do ensino superior percecionam e vivenciam as experiências de aprendizagem, foram objetivos centrais do presente trabalho avaliar os significados atribuídos à aprendizagem, ao estudo e às preferências por tipos de ensino e compreender se serão divergentes as abo...

A obesidade é uma condição crónica que, além do impacto ao nível da saúde, tem sido relacionada com dificuldades cognitivas, nomeadamente no funcionamento executivo. Na presente investigação pretende-se comparar as funções executivas de dois grupos de obesos: 30 indivíduos candidatos a cirurgia bariátrica e 30 indivíduos sujeitos este tratamento ci...

In this study, we investigated the level of visual processing at which surface colour information improves the naming of colour diagnostic and noncolour diagnostic objects. Continuous electroencephalograms were recorded while participants performed a visual object naming task in which coloured and black-and-white versions of both types of objects w...

This paper presents a statistical evaluation of two theoretical fitting methods — logarithmic and power law — commonly used to extrapolate velocities to unmeasured areas of a vertical profile, such as near-bottom velocities. Analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) was used to test the models' performance when applied to velocity data collected with a boat-...

Previous research has shown an association between emotions, particularly social emotions, and moral judgments. Some studies suggested an association between blunted emotion and the utilitarian moral judgments observed in pa-tients with prefrontal lesions. In order to investigate how prefrontal brain damage affects moral judgment, we asked a sample...

Obesity has been linked to cognitive difficulties in executive functions. This study aims to compare the executive functioning of two groups: 30 obese subjects seeking bariatric surgery and 30 bariatric surgery patients. In order to study the influence of weight on cognition, we compare obese subjects and subjects who had lost weight after surgery....

Previous research showed an important association between reading and writing skills (literacy) and the phonological loop. However, the effects of literacy on other working memory components remain unclear. In this study, we investigated performance of illiterate subjects and their matched literate controls on verbal and nonverbal working memory ta...

This study tried to investigate if intuitive ideas about the continuation of the Self after death determine the way people represent the state of being dead, and, in this way, investigate possible psychological origins of afterlife beliefs, which constitute a recurrent cultural phenomenon. A semi-structured interview and a self-report questionnaire...

Changes in social and emotional behaviour have been consistently observed in patients with traumatic brain injury. These changes are associated with emotion recognition deficits which represent one of the major barriers to a successful familiar and social reintegration. In the present study, 32 patients with traumatic brain injury, involving the fr...

Concerning the model Attitudes-Intentions of behaviour (Bagozzi, 1992) and the comprehensive model of Turnover (Griffeth & Hom, 2001), the present study intends to analyze the mediating role of three attitudes (affective commitment, general satisfaction and satisfaction oriented towards the client) in the relationship that variables characterizing...

En este artículo se sintetizan algunos de los resultados más relevantes de la investigación destinada a evaluar la relación entre problemas en el nombramiento rápido y las diferencias individuales en el rendimiento de lectura. Una evidencia considerable muestra que los lectores disléxicos tienen problemas en el nombramiento visual rápido. Las inves...

In this study, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to evaluate the contribution of surface color and color knowledge information in object identification. We constructed two color-object verification tasks - a surface and a knowledge verification task - using high color diagnostic objects; both typical and atypical color versions of the same ob...

The current study investigated which time components of rapid automatized naming (RAN) predict group differences between dyslexic and non-dyslexic readers (matched for age and reading level), and how these components relate to different reading measures. Subjects performed two RAN tasks (letters and objects), and data were analyzed through a respon...

In this study, we systematically review the scientific literature on the effect of color on object recognition. Thirty-five independent experiments, comprising 1535 participants, were included in a meta-analysis. We found a moderate effect of color on object recognition (d=0.28). Specific effects of moderator variables were analyzed and we found th...

Adequate emotion recognition is relevant to individuals’ interpersonal communication. Patients with frontal traumatic brain injury (TBI) exhibit a lower response to facial emotional stimuli, influencing social interactions. In this sense, the main goal of the current study was to assess the ability of TBI patients in recognizing basic emotions. Pho...

Based on the work of Entwistle and colleagues about how students perceive and live learning experiences, the main aims of the present study were: first, to understand and to analyze meanings attributed to learning, to study and preferences for types of teaching, in order to understand how students conceptualize what is required from them in terms o...

In the present study, the authors investigate how some visual factors related to early stages of visual-object naming modulate naming performance in dyslexia. The performance of dyslexic children was compared with 2 control groups-normal readers matched for age and normal readers matched for reading level-while performing a discrete naming task in...

Based on the work of Entwistle and colleagues about how students perceive and live learning experiences, the main aims of the present study were: first, to understand and to analyze meanings attributed to learning, to study and preferences for types of teaching, in order to understand how students conceptualize what is required from them in terms o...

The psychometric properties of a Portuguese version of the Adolescent Psychopathology Scale–Short Form (APS-SF) were studied in a sample of 656 Portuguese adolescents, aged 12 to 19 years, assessed in school context. Also, the aim of the study was to gather data concerning age-and gender-related differences in the expression of psychopathological p...

Uma questão crítica no entendimento da assimetria inter-hemisférica para a linguagem diz respeito ao desenvolvimento da especialização hemisférica esquerda para o processamento do discurso em função da idade. Numerosas investigações realizadas sobre esta temática têm oscilado entre uma perspectiva inata e estanque da lateralização cerebral e uma pe...

Recentemente, alguns autores demonstraram que o desempenho em provas de memória não verbal pode envolver o recurso simultâneo a estratégias verbais e visuo-espaciais para codificar a informação. A leitura tem sido apontada como um factor que pode contribuir para o desenvolvimento destas estratégias de dupla codificação. Neste estudo, fomos investig...

INTRODUÇÃO É difícil imaginar uma empresa que, pretendendo ser altamente competitiva e com requisitos de qualidade, não procure adoptar políticas e práticas de gestão que garantam um desenho adequado do trabalho e fomentem a satisfação e implicação dos seus membros com vista a gerar resultados individuais e organizacionais favoráveis. No entanto, o...

Based on the work of Entwistle and colleagues about how students perceive and live learning experiences, the main aims of the present study were: first, to understand and to analyze meanings attributed to learning, to study and preferences for types of teaching, in order to understand how students conceptualize what is required from them in terms o...

In the present study, the authors explore in detail the level of visual object recognition at which perceptual color information improves the recognition of color diagnostic and noncolor diagnostic objects. To address this issue, 3 object recognition tasks with different cognitive demands were designed: (a) an object verification task; (b) a catego...

In order to clarify whether the influence of color knowledge information in object recognition depends on the presence of the appropriate surface color, we designed a name-object verification task. The relationship between color and shape information provided by the name and by the object photo was manipulated in order to assess color interference...