Family policies to reduce conflict in work-life balance and promote gender equality advanced significantly at the legislative level in Spain in the first decades of the twenty-first century. These ...advances include the 2007 Law for Equality between Men and Women and the extension of paternity leave to 16 weeks in 2020. However, advances in care work and at the professional level have been limited. The COVID-19 pandemic has intensified existing imbalances in family-work responsibilities in general and the ICT gender gap in particular. In crisis situations, women adopt the role of caregivers more easily than men, and women with fewer educational, economic, and job resources are more likely to assume this role, contributing to increasing gender inequalities at work and in the family. COVID-19 has exposed these imbalances, highlighting the need for new narratives and laws that encourage gender equality. Post-COVID-19 scenarios thus present an opportunity for reflection and progress on Spanish family policy. From this perspective, the paradigm of work-family conflict, although interesting, must be examined and resignified. This article proposes to critically resignify the paradigm of work-family conflict based on the new narrative generated by COVID-19. The present analysis suggests a resignification that should involve changing the expectations and practices around work-family balance, based on family diversity, job insecurity, the technological revolution, and new masculinities. It is proposed a prior reflection to clarify definition of the indicators and indexes that enable operationalization of the concept of work-family reconciliation. It is expected that these measures will help to facilitate practical application of reconciliation in areas such as public or/and private organizations, while also enabling international comparative analysis.
Automatic imitation, in which one person's movement is affected by the observation of another person's movements, has been widely reported. However, it remains unclear how automatic imitation changes ...over a wide age range, particularly during childhood. In this study, we examined the differences in the tendency for automatic imitation between adults and children and the cross-sectional age-related changes in children aged 5-12 years, using a stimulus-response conflict paradigm. In this task, participants perform a choice-reactive finger movement corresponding to a given response stimulus while observing another participant's compatible or incompatible movement stimuli. The tendency for automatic imitation was assessed based on the reaction time, correct rate, and inverse efficiency score. The results showed that the degree of automatic imitation was weak until the children were 7 years old. Interestingly, our results show that the tendency for automatic imitation during childhood changed to an inverted U-shape, indicating nonlinear changes in automatic imitation during childhood.
Public Significance Statement
People tend to imitate the movements of others unconsciously. This tendency is considered to be a fundamental process in learning, empathy, and other interpersonal interactions. However, it is still unclear whether automatic imitation is innate or acquired, and if acquired, at what age it appears. We examined the difference in the tendency of automatic imitation between adults and children, and developmental changes in automatic imitation in children. The tendency toward automatic imitation in children aged 5-6 years was weak. In addition, between the ages of 7 and 12 years, the tendency for automatic imitation increased gradually and then weakened, approaching the tendency in adults. These results suggest that automatic imitation undergoes nonlinear developmental changes during childhood. We interpret our results as a consequence of the interaction between the representation of others' movements and inhibitory control. Our findings have important implications for understanding the developmental process of identifying oneself and others.
This paper presents a new technique for jointly optimizing energy consumption and quality of service (QoS) in heterogeneous cellular networks employing fractional frequency reuse (FFR) in the ...macrocell tier. The proposed technique combines radio resource management (RRM) and network routing principles to produce an effective way of utilizing the spectrum. Based on a novel method of interference mapping, the RRM is invoked, in distributed or centralized manner, to allocate the resource. In the case of centralized RRM, network routing is applied to maximize spectrum utilization. It will be shown through matching mathematical analysis and computer simulations that, relative to existing well known techniques, the proposed technique offers significant QoS improvements, in terms of guaranteed data rate per user, as well as, enhancements in the overall energy efficiency of the network.
A comparative study between two drugs acting on the GABA
A receptor, alprazolam and alpidem was undertaken, using simple tests such as measurement of spontaneous locomotor activity, four plates test ...and rotarod in mice. Additional conflict test was further performed using a new conflict paradigm where the opportunity existed for rats to choose during punished periods between immediate, punished reinforcement and delayed non-punished reinforcement. The benzodiazepine alprazolam, demonstrated, as expected, strong anxiolytic effects in mice and increased punished response in rats at non sedative doses (0.5, 1 mg/kg). High doses of alprazolam decreased spontaneous locomotor activity and induced myorelaxant effects in mice. Alpidem, an imidazopyridine derivative, induced motor impairment in mice and only very weak anxiolytic effects in the four plates test in mice (4 mg/kg) and in punished procedure in rats (32 mg/kg). As alprazolam is a full agonist for the GABA
A receptor complex and alpidem is a partial agonist acting with specificity on ω1 GABA
A receptor subtypes, the results are discussed. Activity on ω1 receptor subtypes is perhaps not sufficient in order to obtain a true anti-conflict effect and compounds such as alpidem only relieve some of the symptoms of anxiety disorders.
The performance of freely moving rats (
n=18) in a decision-making reaction time task was analyzed to provide data that can be compared with noise-compatibility paradigms previously obtained in ...humans. Rats were first trained in an auditory pitch discrimination task involving a Go/Nogo response choice. In a subsequent phase, the two tones used in the previous phase were simultaneously presented in different combinations from two locations. Only the presence of the correct tone from the correct location was predictive of the reward. The observed behavioral strategies suggest a competition between two processes: one involving stimulus evaluation, response preparation and execution, the other involving recognition of the stimulus features associated with inhibition of the Go-response. The reaction times in the most adopted strategies towards the end of the experiment suggest an effect of stimulus congruence. Perceptual processes are affected by the congruence of ‘pitch’ and ‘location’ stimulus dimensions and the duration of the response may, but need not, be affected by overlapping dimensions. The analysis of error and aborted trials also suggest that subject’s reaction and subsequent motor action may depend on whether stimulus identification processes can pass information to the response activation system prior to completion of sensory processing. The data are discussed in the framework of processing stages theory and dimensional overlap model.
1. Recent studies have demonstrated that antidepressant drugs are actually more effective than BZ's in the treatment of anxiety states. The role of two major neurochemical substrates that may be ...implicated in the anxiolytic activity of antidepressants, the benzodiazepine (BZ)-GABA receptor chloride ionophore complex and central serotonergic pathways, are focused on in this review. 2. A wide range of antidepressants elicit a reduction in BZ receptors and display anxiolytic effects within a conflict paradigm. 3. The anxiolytic activity of antidepressants, however, does not appear to be mediated via the BZ receptor, but possibly via another component of the complex such as the chloride channel-associated with the GABAA receptor. 4. Additionally, as possible candidates for the mechanism of anxiolytic activity of these compounds, results of pharmacological, behavioral and clinical studies point to the importance of serotonin (5-HT)1A receptors and 5-HT transporter sites as targets for the action of antidepressants, triazolobenzodiazepines and anxioselective piperazine derivatives.
Male Fischer 344 rats were examined for an age-dependent sensitivity to the anticonflict and central nervous system (CNS) depressant effects of diazepam. A conflict paradigm was used to measure the ...ability of single intravenous injections of diazepam to attenuate punishment-induced suppression of behavior and to elicit CNS depression in young, mature, and senescent rats. Senescent rats had the lowest behaviorally active threshold dose. However, diazepam at the behaviorally active threshold dose produced a simultaneous increase in punished and unpunished responding in all three age groups. Punished responding was increased more and over a wider dose range in the young and mature rats than in the senescent rats. Sensitivity to the CNS depressant effects of diazepam was over four times greater in the senescent rats than in the other two age groups. In summary, the results indicate that the behavioral effects of diazepam vary with dosage and age of the rat. The male Fischer 344 rat may be a useful animal model for exploring how diazepam elicits age-related behavioral effects in humans.
A conflict paradigm was designed which uses water as the reinforcer and incremental footshock as the punishment. It is easy to initiate responding and to maintain stable baselines over long periods ...of time. This paradigm proved selective for clinically effective anxiolytic compounds while a number of psychotropic compounds, which have no clinical anxiolytic activity, were not effective.
This chapter provides a review of the research on contextual influences on cognitive control in conflict paradigms. It focuses selectively on one manipulation that has been influential in this line ...of research, namely, that of proportion congruence. The utility of the proportion congruence manipulation lies in its flexibility, especially the opportunity to isolate what appear to be qualitatively different mechanisms of cognitive control by varying the level at which the proportion congruence manipulation is implemented. The chapter illustrates the rationale behind a separate set of experimental approaches that has been particularly effective in elucidating the conditions under which the item‐specific proportion congruence effect can be comfortably interpreted as indexing reactive control independent of contingency learning. The contingency account differs from a reactive control perspective that attributes the effect to the learning of stimulus‐attention associations as opposed to stimulus‐response associations.
