Objectives: To examine the mediation role of self-care between stress and psychological well-being in the general population of four countries and to assess the impact of sociodemographic variables on this relationship. Design: Cross-sectional, online survey. Participants: A stratified sample of confined general population (N=1082) from four Ibero-American countries—Chile (n=261), Colombia (n=268), Ecuador (n=282) and Spain (n=271)—balanced by age and gender. Primary outcomes measures: Sociodemographic information (age, gender, country, education and income level), information related to COVID-19 lockdown (number of days in quarantine, number of people with whom the individuals live, absence/presence of adults and minors in charge and attitude towards the search of information related to COVID-19), Perceived Stress Scale-10, Ryff’s Psychological Well-Being Scale-29 and Self-Care Activities Screening Scale-14. Results: Self-care partially mediates the relationship between stress and well-being during COVID-19 confinement in the general population in the total sample ( F (3,1078)=370.01, p<0.001, R ² =0.507) and in each country. On the other hand, among the evaluated sociodemographic variables, only age affects this relationship. Conclusion: The results have broad implications for public health, highlighting the importance of promoting people’s active role in their own care and health behaviour to improve psychological well-being if stress management and social determinants of health are jointly addressed first. The present study provides the first transnational evidence from the earlier stages of the COVID-19 lockdown, showing that the higher perception of stress, the less self-care activities are adopted, and in turn the lower the beneficial effects on well-being.

A substantial minority of patients with terminal illness hold unrealistically hopeful beliefs about the severity of their disease or the nature of its treatment, considering therapy as curative rather than palliative. We propose that this attitude may be understood as self-deception, following the current psychological theories about this topic. In this article we suggest that the reason these patients deceive themselves is to preserve their belief systems. According to some philosophical accounts, the human belief system (HBS) is constituted as a web with a few stable central nodes –deep seated beliefs– intimately related with the self. We hypothesize that the mind may possess defensive mechanisms, mostly non-conscious, that reject certain sensory inputs (e.g., a fatal diagnosis) that may undermine deep-seated beliefs. This interpretation is in line with the theory of cognitive dissonance. Following this reasoning, we also propose that HBS-related self-deception would entail a lower cognitive load than that associated with confronting the truth: whereas the latter would engage a myriad of high cognitive functions to re-configure crucial aspects of the self, including the setting of plans, goals, or even a behavioral output, the former would be mostly non-conscious. Overall, we believe that our research supports the hypothesis that in cases of terminal illness, (self-)deceiving requires less effort than accepting the truth.

In this article we introduce the hypothesis that neuropsychological adolescent maturation, and in particular emotional management, may have opposing explanations depending on the interpretation of the assumed brain architecture, that is, whether a componential computational account (CCA) or a dynamic systems perspective (DSP) is used. According to CCA, cognitive functions are associated with the action of restricted brain regions, and this association is temporally stable; by contrast, DSP argues that cognitive functions are better explained by interactions between several brain areas, whose engagement in specific functions is temporal and context-dependent and based on neural reuse. We outline the main neurobiological facts about adolescent maturation, focusing on the neuroanatomical and neurofunctional processes associated with adolescence. We then explain the importance of emotional management in adolescent maturation. We explain the interplay between emotion and cognition under the scope of CCA and DSP, both at neural and behavioral levels. Finally, we justify why, according to CCA, emotional management is understood as regulation, specifically because the cognitive aspects of the brain are in charge of regulating emotion-related modules. However, the key word in DSP is integration, since neural information from different brain areas is integrated from the beginning of the process. Consequently, although the terms should not be conceptually confused, there is no cognition without emotion, and vice versa. Thus, emotional integration is not an independent process that just happens to the subject, but a crucial part of personal growth. Considering the importance of neuropsychological research in the development of educational and legal policies concerning adolescents, we intend to expose that the holistic view of adolescents is dependent on whether one holds the implicit or explicit interpretation of brain functioning.