This descriptive and transversal study, carried out on an intentional sample of 211 subjects who were split in terms of their consumption of psychoactive substances over the last month and who were aged between 18 and 28 (M = 21.36, and SD = 1.90), aimed to explore the emotional intelligence, perceived socio-family support and academic performance of university students vis-à-vis their consumption of drugs and to examine the link between them. The goal was to define university student consumer profile through a regression model using the multidimensional Perceived Social Support Scale (EMAS) and the Trait Meta Mood Scale-24 (TMMS-24) as instruments, together with academic performance and gender. The results report alcohol, tobacco, and cannabis consumption rates that are above the levels indicated by the Spanish household survey on alcohol and drugs in Spain (EDADES 2019) for the 15–34-year-old age range in Castilla y León. A certain link was observed between the consumption of substances and academic performance, although no differences were seen in academic performance in terms of consumer type. There was also no clear link observed between emotional intelligence and academic performance or between social support and academic performance. The predictive contribution of the variables included in the regression model was low (9%), which would advocate completing the model with other predictive variables until more appropriate predictability conditions can be found.

Images of emotional facial expressions are often used in emotion research, which has promoted the development of different databases. However, most of these standardized sets of images do not include images from infants under 2 years of age, which is relevant for psychology research, especially for perinatal psychology. The present study aims to validate the edited version of the Tromsø Infant Faces Database (E-TIF) in a large sample of participants. The original set of 119 pictures was edited. The pictures were cropped to remove nonrelevant information, fitted in an oval window, and converted to grayscale. Four hundred and eighty participants (72.9% women) took part in the study, rating the images on five dimensions: depicted emotion, clarity, intensity, valence, and genuineness. Valence scores were useful for discriminating between positive, negative, and neutral facial expressions. Results revealed that women were more accurate at recognizing emotions in children. Regarding parental status, parents, in comparison with nonparents, rated neutral expressions as more intense and genuine. They also rated sad, angry, disgusted, and fearful faces as less negative, and happy expressions as less positive. The editing and validation of the E-TIF database offers a useful tool for basic and experimental research in psychology.

This study examined whether large language models (LLMs) can generate clinically realistic profiles of cognitive decline and whether simulated deficits reflect architectural constraints rather than superficial role-playing artifacts. Using GPT-4o-mini, we generated synthetic cohorts (n = 10 per group) representing healthy aging, mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and Alzheimer’s disease (AD), assessed through a conversational neuropsychological battery covering episodic memory, verbal fluency, narrative production, orientation, naming, and comprehension. Experiment 1 tested whether synthetic subjects exhibited graded cognitive profiles consistent with clinical progression (Control > MCI > AD). Experiment 2 systematically manipulated prompt context in AD subjects (short, rich biographical, and few-shot prompts) to dissociate robust from manipulable deficits. Significant cognitive gradients emerged (p < 0.001) across eight of thirteen domains. AD subjects showed impaired episodic memory (Cohen’s d = 4.71), increased memory intrusions, and reduced narrative length (d = 3.07). Critically, structurally constrained memory tasks (episodic recall, digit span) were invariant to prompting (p > 0.05), whereas generative tasks (narrative length, verbal fluency) showed high sensitivity (F > 100, p < 0.001). Rich biographical prompts paradoxically increased memory intrusions by 343%, indicating semantic interference rather than cognitive rescue. These results demonstrate that LLMs can serve as in silico test benches for exploring candidate digital biomarkers and clinical training protocols, while highlighting architectural constraints that may inform computational hypotheses about memory and language processing.

The aim of this study is to compare the effectiveness of two exposure procedures on habituation of emotional responses to food stimuli: (a) exposure to external cues (food images) without eating forbidden food (CE) and (b) exposure to external cues eating forbidden food (with purge prevention). The influence of craving-trait and mood state on the habituation process is also studied. Emotional modulation of the defense startle reflex was assessed in 26 women at risk of bulimia nervosa. After four exposure trials, changes in the following variables were measured: (a) food craving-state; (b) physiological measures: hearth rate (HR) and skin conductance response (SCR); (c) motivational patterns towards food (defense startle response); and (d) valence, arousal and dominance of the emotional response to food images. After treatment, subjects tended to show non-significant lower SCR and heart orientation responses (vs. defense responses); defense startle response was also significantly lower. The exposure procedure, the induced emotional state and the number of exposure trials are analyzed.