Perception of health, well-being, and quality of life in female caregivers: Comparative study of a sample of adult and older women in Spain.

In a study on informal or unpaid care, it is difficult to identify the consequences and effects of care provision on the caregiver's daily life. Thus, it is important to analyze the perceptions of the individual caregiver. This study describes the perceptions of health, well-being, support networks, and quality of life of 13 women aged between 45 and 70 years after completing an intervention program. The data indicate that caregivers' health and quality of life worsen with the intervention, and their well-being and social relations (through new technologies) improve.

Enhancing emotion-based learning in decision-making under uncertainty / Mejora del aprendizaje basado en emociones en la toma de decisiones en ambiente de incertidumbre

BACKGROUND: The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) is widely used to study decision-making differences between several clinical and healthy populations. Unlike the healthy participants, clinical participants have difficulty choosing between advantageous options, which yield long-term benefits, and disadvantageous options, which give high immediate rewards but lead to negative profits. However, recent studies have found that healthy participants avoid the options with a higher frequency of losses regardless of whether or not they are profitable in the long run. The aim of this study was to control for the confounding effect of the frequency of losses between options to improve the performance of healthy participants on the IGT. METHOD: Eighty healthy participants were randomly assigned to the original IGT or a modified version of the IGT that diminished the gap in the frequency of losses between options. RESULTS: The participants who used the modified IGT version learned to make better decisions based on long-term profit, as indicated by an earlier ability to discriminate good from bad options, and took less time to make their choices. CONCLUSIONS: This research represents an advance in the study of decision making under uncertainty by showing that emotion-based learning is improved by controlling for the loss-frequency bias effect

ANTECEDENTES: la Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) es ampliamente utilizada para estudiar la toma de decisiones entre poblaciones clínicas y saludables. A diferencia de los participantes sanos, los participantes clínicos tienen dificultades para elegir entre opciones ventajosas, que producen beneficios a largo plazo, y opciones desventajosas, que dan altas recompensas inmediatas, pero conducen a beneficios negativos. Estudios recientes han encontrado que los participantes sanos evitan las opciones con mayor frecuencia de pérdidas, independientemente de si son rentables a largo plazo. El objetivo de este estudio fue controlar el sesgo de la frecuencia de pérdidas entre las opciones, para mejorar el desempeño de los participantes sanos en la IGT. MÉTODO: ochenta participantes sanos fueron asignados aleatoriamente a la IGT original o una versión modificada que disminuye la brecha en la frecuencia de pérdidas entre opciones. RESULTADOS: los participantes que usaron la IGT modificada aprendieron a tomar mejores decisiones basadas en el beneficio a largo plazo, discriminando antes las opciones buenas de las malas, y tardando menos tiempo en realizar elecciones. CONCLUSIONES: esta investigación avanza en el estudio de la toma de decisiones bajo incertidumbre, mostrando que el aprendizaje basado en emociones mejora mediante el control del sesgo de la frecuencia de pérdidas