This study examines how confinement measures established during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis affected the emotions of the population. For this purpose, public sentiment on social media and digital ecosystems in Spain is analyzed. We identified affective tones towards media and citizens published on social media focusing on six basic emotions: anger, fear, joy, sadness, disgust and uncertainty. The main contribution of this work is the evidence of contagious sentiments and, consequently, the possibility of using this new dimension of social media as a form of a “collective therapy”. This paper contributes to understanding the impact of confinement measures in a pandemic from the point of view of emotional health. This analysis provides a set of practical implications that can guide conceptual and empirical work in health crisis management with an alternative approach, especially useful for decision-making processes facing emergency responses and health crises, even in an unprecedented global health crisis such as the traumatic events caused by the COVID-19 disease.

De acuerdo con datos del Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo – BID, Ecuador se encuentra entre los países más ineficientes en el campo de la salud, ubicándose en el puesto 54 de un total de 71 países analizados. El informe del BID deja en evidencia la realidad de la atención médica y la contrasta con los recursos invertidos. La metodología utilizada para el presente trabajo de investigación, se enmarca dentro de una revisión bibliográfica de tipo documental. La técnica para la recolección de datos está constituida por materiales electrónicos, estos últimos como Google Académico, PubMed, Science direct, entre otros, apoyándose para ello en el uso de descriptores en ciencias de la salud o terminología MESH. La información aquí obtenida será revisada para su posterior análisis. Uno de los problemas que más han resaltado dentro de la bibliografía consultada es la rotación de las autoridades tanto en el Ministerio de Salud Pública como en el Instituto Ecuatoriano de los Seguros Sociales, que no ha logrado una política coherente en el tiempo, de unos años hacia los actuales una creciente escasez de medicamentos, la pandemia del Covid 19 desnudo problemas de salud en cuanto a oferta de camas hospitalarias, lo que se tradujo en el desbordamiento de sus capacidades operativas. En cuanto a los desafíos son muchos, ya que los sistemas de salud están estrechamente ligados a las políticas de salud y sociales del Estado, en este contexto la reducción de las tasas de malnutrición, obesidad y sobrepeso, muerta materna, enfermedades vectoriales, embarazo de adolescentes, tasa de mortalidad infantil, entre otros son claves porque de alguna manera este tipo de problemáticas generan otras comorbilidades y demandan la atención de las instituciones de salud

Neuromarketing, consumer neuroscience and neuroaesthetics are a broad research area of neuroscience with an extensive background in scientific publications. Thus, the present study aims to identify the highly cited papers (HCPs) in this research field, to deliver a summary of the academic work produced during the last decade in this area, and to show patterns, features, and trends that define the past, present, and future of this specific area of knowledge. The HCPs show a perspective of those documents that, historically, have attracted great interest from a research community and that could be considered as the basis of the research field. In this study, we retrieved 907 documents and analyzed, through H-Classics methodology, 50 HCPs identified in the Web of Science (WoS) during the period 2010–2019. The H-Classic approach offers an objective method to identify core knowledge in neuroscience disciplines such as neuromarketing, consumer neuroscience, and neuroaesthetics. To accomplish this study, we used Bibliometrix R Package and SciMAT software. This analysis provides results that give us a useful insight into the development of this field of research, revealing those scientific actors who have made the greatest contribution to its development: authors, institutions, sources, countries as well as documents and references.

Innovations in dental sciences are potentially disruptive; however, the language barrier in the case of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) limits access to scientific studies. There is a necessity to measure the development of dental research across the LAC region, where economic power and postgraduate education access vary significantly. This article aims to analyze documents, citations, and journals and compare the SJR, H-Index, citation rates, and Co-occurrence Networks (Keywords) between dental journals published in LAC and the rest of the world, according to the report of Scimago Journal and Country Rank, between the years 1996 and 2020. Results show that Brazil leads dental research in the LAC, scoring the highest number of published documents, citations, and SJR metrics. The mean H-index and SJR of LAC dentistry journals are significantly lower than those of other regions (p < 0.03); however, there are no significant differences in the mean total citations in the last 3 years between LAC and other regions (p > 0.15). This suggests that the articles published in dentistry journals from LAC are being cited in similar proportions to the journals of other regions, but a large portion of these citations came from publications with low scientific impact.

Most of the tools and diagnosis models of Masticatory Efficiency (ME) are not well documented or severely limited to simple image processing approaches. This study presents a novel expert system for ME assessment based on automatic recognition of mixture patterns of masticated two-coloured chewing gums using a combination of computational intelligence and image processing techniques. The hypotheses tested were that the proposed system could accurately relate specimens to the number of chewing cycles, and that it could identify differences between the mixture patterns of edentulous individuals prior and after complete denture treatment. This study enrolled 80 fully-dentate adults (41 females and 39 males, 25 ± 5 years of age) as the reference population; and 40 edentulous adults (21 females and 19 males, 72 ± 8.9 years of age) for the testing group. The system was calibrated using the features extracted from 400 samples covering 0, 10, 15, and 20 chewing cycles. The calibrated system was used to automatically analyse and classify a set of 160 specimens retrieved from individuals in the testing group in two appointments. The ME was then computed as the predicted number of chewing strokes that a healthy reference individual would need to achieve a similar degree of mixture measured against the real number of cycles applied to the specimen. The trained classifier obtained a Mathews Correlation Coefficient score of 0.97. ME measurements showed almost perfect agreement considering pre- and post-treatment appointments separately (κ ≥ 0.95). Wilcoxon signed-rank test showed that a complete denture treatment for edentulous patients elicited a statistically significant increase in the ME measurements (Z = -2.31, p < 0.01). We conclude that the proposed expert system proved able and reliable to accurately identify patterns in mixture and provided useful ME measurements.