Mariana Sebastião Machado

• Master of Criminology
• Invited Lecturer at University of Porto

A evidência científica tem realçado o papel dos processos cognitivos no estudo dos comportamentos agressivos em crianças, evocando como uma das molduras conceptuais o Modelo da Teoria do Processamento de Informação Social (PIS) de CRICK E DODGE (1994). Assim, a presente investigação teve como principais objetivos analisar os padrões de PIS em crian...

Aggressive behaviors have serious social, economic, and emotional consequences. Prior research has highlighted the heterogeneous nature of aggression and its situational stability. Within this scope, aggressive driving behavior is understood as a specific manifestation of aggression, and in a dynamic environment as driving, cognitive processes, suc...

This study aims to explore the joint contribution of personality, driving anger, and passion in the prediction of driving violations. In addition, a profile of drivers more prone to commit driving violations was characterized. To achieve these ends, 569 drivers completed a self-report questionnaire. It was found that psychoticism, impulsivity, sens...

Questions such as “Are people always aggressive?” or “Is it only inside the car?” have been studied in previous research. However, the focus is mostly on anger and anger expression and not on an interpersonal perspective. The current study aims to explore this gap in the research by analyzing aggressive driving behavior through the application of S...

Despite the interactive driving environment and conflicts among road users, research from an interpersonal perspective in this domain still needs to be explored. Nevertheless, cognitive processes (e.g., hostile attribution of intent) can shape aggressive responses in this dynamic environment. Thus, this study addresses this gap by applying the Soci...

Security guards operate largely in places attended by youth in contemporary urban areas, which is conducive to different interactions between both. However, prior research has mainly focused on youngsters’ contacts with the police, and little is known about their encounters with security officers. Using a survey, this study aims to analyse two fund...

Aggression is a complex and multi-determined behavior, influenced by biological and situational factors, and psychological processes. The Social Information Processing Theory (SIP) states that cognitive process (e.g., attribution) can influence if an individual behaves aggressively in a given situation. Previous research has stablished a strong lin...

Taking into consideration the framework of the general theory of crime, research has been exploring the role of low self-control in the explanation of both crime perpetration and personal victimization. Moreover, while several studies have been analysing the role of victimization experiences in the fear of crime, less is known about how an individu...

Objectives: This exploratory study aims to add to previous literature and to analyze how perceived neighborhood and family features, directly and indirectly, influence parenting practices and externalizing behaviors in a Portuguese sample of children, youth and their families. Methods: A cross-sectional design was adopted. Three age groups were cre...

Aggressive driving behavior, as a form of antisocial behavior, consists of a risk factor for the occurrence of road accidents. Besides the problematization of this phenomenon, there is not a consensual definition about aggressive driving behavior, existing an overlap of conceptualizations (e.g., aggressive driving, road rage, aggressive driving beh...

The present study aims to characterize the family, socioeconomic, and social support situation of citizens who used social emergency services during the COVID-19 pandemic. The participants were 230 individuals that resort to Social Work of a Northern Portuguese institution. The participants were mostly women (77,8%; n = 179), aged between 20 and 85...

Externalizing behaviours have been associated with several negative long-term outcomes. Recent research pointed to the influence of neighbourhood factors, such as socioeconomic deprivation, in the explanation of such behaviours, but only few studies accounted for the mediational role that other variables, such as family factors, might play in this...

Nowadays, driving violations and traffic accidents are considered social problems, being a product of cognitive, emotional, situational, and individual processes. Research has been showing that human factors are responsible for most traffic accidents. Aggressive driving behavior, as a form of antisocial behavior, constitutes a risk factor for the o...

Externalizing behaviours have been associated with several negative long-term outcomes. Recent research have highlighted the influence of neighbourhood factors in the explanation of such behaviours, but only a relatively small number of studies accounted for the mediational role that other variables, such as family factors, might play this relation...

A investigação científica tem demonstrado que a violência escolar acarreta múltiplas consequências (escolares, sociais, psicológicas e físicas) para os jovens e crianças perpetuadoras, para as vítimas, famílias, escolas e comunidade em geral. Não obstante a vasta problematização social do fenómeno, o conhecimento relativamente à violência escolar é...

Previous research suggested that poor/biased Social Information Processing [SIP] and aggressive behavior are associated. Children with aggressive behaviors tend to encode more hostile cues, interpret ambiguous situations as hostile and access and choose more aggressive responses, once they see them as positive. The current study aimed to explore th...

This research aimed to analyze the relationship between the different steps of social information processing and reactive and proactive aggressive behavior, and adapt, in an exploratory way, a measurement of Social Information Processing. This study was conducted with primary school children aged 7-10. At first, the Social Information Processing In...