Las familias biológicas en el proceso de adopción de un menor: características y rasgos sociales

It is about making visible and showing the characteristics of the biological families of the boys and girls who are adopted in the Autonomous Community of the Region of Murcia between the period 1987-2007. To verify these data, an exhaustive study of a total of 29 adoption files provided by the General Directorate of Families, as well as 4 interviews with adoptive parents. They constitute a sample and a significant example of the characteristics and social traits of biological families. Through case studies, we reflect on whether they have been excluded from the adoption process due to the characterization that emerges from them, as they are framed in serious problematic contexts that accentuate the risk that the minors entail living in these families. Se trata de visibilizar y mostrar las características de las familias biológicas de niños y niñas que son adoptados en la Comunidad Autónoma de la Región de Murcia entre el periodo 1987-2007. Para constatar estos datos se ha realizado un estudio exhaustivo de un total de 29 expedientes de adopción facilitados por la Dirección General de Familias, así como 4 entrevistas a padres adoptantes. Constituyen una muestra y un ejemplo significativo de las características y rasgos sociales de las familias biológicas. A través de estudios de caso reflexionamos sobre si éstas han sido excluidas del proceso de adopción por la caracterización que se desprende de ellas, al estar enmarcadas en contextos problemáticos graves que acentúan el riesgo que supone para los menores vivir en esas familias.

Attitudinal Judgments of Dialect Traits and Colorism in African Americans

This study demonstrates how language and complexion influence professional and social perceptions of African Americans. This study contains an online verbal-guise survey where participants either saw a photo of a lighter skin-toned African-American male and female or an electronically darkened version. Audio was attached to each photo, which contains traits of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) in the case of the male and Standard American English for the female. The results suggest African-American females are more likely to experience colorism in professional traits while African-American males are more likely to experience colorism in social traits. Additionally, the respondent’s race influences perceptions of AAVE.

Facial Expressions and Emotion Labels Are Separate Initiators of Trait Inferences From the Face

Facial inferencing research began with an inadvertent confound. The initial work by Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen identified the six now-classic facial expressions by the emotion labels chosen by most participants: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. These labels have been used by most of the published facial inference research studies over the last 50 years. However, not all participants in these studies labeled the expressions with the same emotions. For example, that some participants labeled scowling faces as disgusted rather than angry was seen in very early research by Silvan Tomkins and Robert McCarty. Given that the same facial expressions can be paired with different emotions, our research focused on the following questions: Do participants make different personality, temperament, and social trait inferences when assigning different emotion labels to the same facial expression? And what is the stronger cause of trait inferences, the facial expressions themselves, or the emotion labels given to the expressions? Using an online survey format participants were presented with older and younger female and male smiling or scowling faces selected from a validated facial database. Participants responded to questions regarding the social traits of attractiveness, facial maturity, honesty, and threat potential, the temperament traits of positiveness, dominance, excitability, and the Saucier Mini-marker Big Five personality trait adjective scale, while viewing each face. Participants made positive inferences to smiling faces and negative inferences to scowling faces on all dependent variables. Data from participants labeling the scowling faces as angry were compared to those who labeled the faces as disgusted. Results indicate that those labeling the scowling faces as angry perceived the faces significantly more negatively on 11 of the 12 dependent variables than those who labeled the same faces as disgusted. The inferences made by the “disgust” labelers were not positive; just less negative. The results indicate that different emotion labels made to scowling faces can either intensify or reduce negativity in inferences, but the facial expressions themselves determine negativity or positivity.

The end of the Ice Age in southern Europe: Iberian images in the Palaeolithic to Post-Palaeolithic transition

The documentation of Palaeolithic art in the open air, together with direct dates for parietal art and the study of territories marked by the last hunter groups in southern Europe, supports new interpretations of Palaeolithic art and its continuity in the early Holocene. We provide updated information about the graphic representations in that time of transition, grouped under the term Style V. We also reflect on the chronological framework of some themes and techniques for which dates are available, from the Upper Palaeolithic to the Neolithic. These topics reveal the strength of the Palaeolithic background in more recent versions of prehistoric art, especially the schematic art associated with the first farmers. These new considerations are added to the presence of ­Palaeolithic and Post-Palaeolithic art throughout Europe and all over the world, which shows how symbols are social traits of communication associated with human groups. The study of con­nections through these archaeological items, with their undeniable materiality, is a future challenge that will ­undoubtedly produce interesting results.

The neural control of volitional vocal production—from speech to identity, from social meaning to song

The networks of cortical and subcortical fields that contribute to speech production have benefitted from many years of detailed study, and have been used as a framework for human volitional vocal production more generally. In this article, I will argue that we need to consider speech production as an expression of the human voice in a more general sense. I will also argue that the neural control of the voice can and should be considered to be a flexible system, into which more right hemispheric networks are differentially recruited, based on the factors that are modulating vocal production. I will explore how this flexible network is recruited to express aspects of non-verbal information in the voice, such as identity and social traits. Finally, I will argue that we need to widen out the kinds of vocal behaviours that we explore, if we want to understand the neural underpinnings of the true range of sound-making capabilities of the human voice. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Voice modulation: from origin and mechanism to social impact (Part II)’.

Keeping the personality in the information societies

The purpose of the paper is to define how the sociopolitical thought of J. Habermas – his theory of communicative action and the concept of deliberative democracy – guarantees the protection and keeping of an independent human personality in modern information societies. In order to solve this problem, the author seeks to determine what is meant by a “personality”. Analyzing this issue, the author distinguishes two different understandings of a personality among J. Habermas’s works: philosophical-personalistic and public-sociological. When integrating these understandings, the author gives an original socio-philosophical definition of a personality, in which the personality retains both individualistic and social traits. It is especially emphasized that for the affirmation of the personality and his/her development, an equal, subject-subject dialogue with Others is necessary. The paper reveals that the development of personality, first of all, is interrelated with the maintenance of a cultural, normative and valuable “life-world”, which is violated by the mechanisms of systematic technocratic regulation in modern times, in a society. The principles of this regulation are justified in a system-functional approach. The advantages of J. Habermas’s approach, capable of ensuring the development of a genuine normative essence of personality, are determined

Ethnocultural Specificity of Phraseological Units with Zoocomponent in German and Ukrainian Languages

The article presents a comparative analysis of phraseology with zoonymic components in the German and Ukrainian worldviews, which are closely related to national culture. In most phraseologies with the component-zoonym there is a type of metaphorical transfer, which uses the names of animals to describe the characteristics of man, the designation of certain qualities, appearance, character, mental abilities. In addition, zoonyms are often symbols of moral and intellectual qualities of man. The purpose of research is to study phraseological systems with zoomorphic components in a pair of German - Ukrainian, which allows to identify important values of each nation. Results of research. During the study of zoonyms in phraseology, it was noted that the metaphorical nature of zoomorphic phraseology, their inherent subjective-evaluative connotation, the specificity of their semantic parameters and syntactic structure is largely due to their scope, based on their expressed anthropocentrism as a manifestation of traditions of attributing to animals certain traits of human character. In the ethnoculture of different peoples, phraseology, including the names of animals - is primarily a statement about man, his spiritual and social traits. Thus, phraseology with the names of animals can reflect: physical qualities, capabilities; appearance; mental qualities (character traits); intelligence; habits, abilities, skills. Also, the paper explores the common and distinctive features of phraseology of the Ukrainian and German languages, namely the zoocomponents that form complete equivalents. Such phraseological units are equivalent, ie their lexical volume, semantic meaning and meaning are symmetrical. The second group includes partial equivalents. In German and Ukrainian, such phraseological units have the same meaning, but differ in the composition of lexical components, and, consequently, the internal form. The third group includes phraseologies that have no equivalents in another language and are characterized by the fact that these concepts do not have a common object. Such phraseological units often remain outside the scope of bilingual phraseological dictionaries, which is why it is only possible to explain the meaning. Originality is determined by the fact that our study makes a contribution to the development of phraseology in terms of studying phraseological units, namely the animalism of the German and Ukrainian languages. Conclusion. The presence of common and distinctive features in the structures of phraseology of the studied languages, the nature and content of associations are determined not by the properties of animals, but by their life in the national folklore-mythological and literary contexts of each nation, its worldview, human existence.

Balancing quality and quantity of social relationships in volatile social environments

Cooperative interactions do not occur in a vacuum, but develop over time in social groups that undergo demographic changes. Intuition suggests that stable social environments might favour individuals that develop few but strong reciprocal relationships (a 'focused' strategy), while volatile social environments do the opposite and favour individuals with more but weaker social relationships (a 'diversifying' strategy). We model reciprocal investments under a tradeoff between quantity and quality of social relationships, and reveal that this intuition is fallible. We find that volatile social environments particularly favour a focused cooperative strategy. This result can be explained by applying the theory of antagonistic pleiotropy, originally developed for senescence, to cooperative strategies. Diversifying social investments benefits late-life individuals that already have their social network built up, but is detrimental early in life when networks must be built from scratch. Under volatile social environments, the age structure of a population remains generally young, and this emphasizes strategies that do well early in life: a focused strategy which makes the individual form its first few social bonds happen quickly. Overall, our model highlights the importance of pleiotropy and population age structure for the evolution of cooperative strategies and other social traits.