Repositório Institucional
Repositório de Publicações Científicas
Preservar, Divulgar e Dar Acesso à Produção Intelectual
DA UNIVERSIDADE PORTUCALENSE
Entradas recentes
Children and the Administration of Criminal Justice: The Perfection of Imperfections
2026-04-27 - Guimarães, Ana Paula; Rebelo, Fernanda; Silva, Maria Manuela Magalhães
The Portuguese Constitution enshrines, in Article 60, the right of children to protection by society and the State. It imposes on the legislator and on public and private entities an active duty in terms of prevention, intervention, and the promotion of public policies aimed at protecting childhood against all forms of abandonment, discrimination, and oppression, as well as the abusive exercise of authority within the family and other institutions. The administration of justice may — although it should not — involve unacceptable practices when it places children in situations of particular vulnerability. The risk becomes more acute in criminal jurisdiction, especially when the restriction of a minor’s freedom is at stake. In our discussion, we analyzed the concept of child and minor, establishing a dialogical relationship between fundamental rights, personality rights, and non-imputability due to age for legal-criminal purposes. We have seen that the transposition of Directive (EU) 2016/800 of the European Parliament and of the Council has led to some changes in the Code of Criminal Procedure aimed at providing greater protection for minors when facing criminal justice. The Code of Criminal Procedure, while inherently focused on guaranteeing rights, still lacked amendments to strengthen the protection of accused minors, notably by granting parents or legal representatives the right to information, as well as the minor's right to be accompanied by them during procedural acts. Important steps have been taken, although it is a path constantly under construction.
The emotional movie database (EMDB): an expanded toolkit for emotion research
2026-03-16 - Carvalho, Sandra; Coelho, Catarina Gomes; Mendes, Augusto J.; Gonçalves, Óscar F.; Leite, Jorge
Emotion-eliciting film clips are widely used in psychological, neuroscientific, and affective computing research as standardized stimuli for the study of emotional responses. The Emotional Movie Database (EMDB) was originally developed to provide silent film clips for emotion research; however, limitations in stimulus diversity motivated its expansion. The present study extends the EMDB by introducing four additional emotional categories—social exclusion, social inclusion, unpleasant landscapes, and extreme sports—together with an expanded set of neutral film clips. Two complementary validation experiments were conducted. Experiment 1 (laboratory-based; n = 117) assessed social exclusion, social inclusion, unpleasant landscapes, and extreme sports clips, whereas Experiment 2 (web-based; n = 128) evaluated social exclusion, social inclusion, and newly recorded neutral clips. Participants rated each clip on valence, arousal, and dominance using the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) and reported the discrete emotions experienced. The results provide descriptive normative data for the newly added categories. Social exclusion clips were associated with negative valence (M = 2.16, SD = 1.07) and moderate-to-high arousal (M = 5.97, SD = 2.06), whereas social inclusion clips showed positive valence (M = 7.17, SD = 0.92) and moderate arousal (M = 4.68, SD = 1.72). Unpleasant landscape clips were rated as negatively valenced (M = 2.77, SD = 0.99) with relatively low arousal (M = 4.53, SD = 2.01). Extreme sports clips showed positive valence (M = 6.25, SD = 1.12) and intermediate arousal (M = 5.34, SD = 1.95). Newly recorded neutral clips consistently elicited near-neutral valence (M = 5.11, SD = 0.42) and low arousal (M = 2.31, SD = 1.36), supporting their use as baseline control stimuli. This work provides initial validation evidence and descriptive norms for an expanded set of EMDB film clips, broadening the affective space covered by the database and supporting its use in experimental research on emotion across laboratory-based and online settings.
Mind-wandering facilitates creative performance in a musical improvisation task
2026-04-01 - Palhares, Pedro T.; Branco, Diogo; Gonçalves, Óscar F.
Mind-wandering is widely assumed to impair ongoing task performance, yet findings from creative cognition research suggest that it can be beneficial under some conditions — an inconsistency rooted in coarse mental state classifications and low-ecological-validity tasks. We tested whether mind-wandering during active creative production facilitates or impairs real-time creative output in the ecologically valid setting of live jazz improvisation. 52 musicians performed a musical improvisation task while random thought-probes sampled ongoing mental states: focused attention, mind-wandering, mind-blanking, and task-related interference. Expert judges rated each performance for creativity and overall improvisational quality. Mental states were phenomenologically distinct across dimensions of intentionality and meta-awareness, and critically, this phenomenological heterogeneity translated into functional heterogeneity in their associations with creative output. Mind-wandering predicted higher creativity than focused attention, task-related interference suppressed creativity, and mind-blanking was neutral to modestly positive. Overall quality was mainly driven by expertise. State × expertise interactions revealed that the creative benefits of mind-wandering were strongest for less- and mid-experienced improvisers. These findings show that during improvisatory creative action, mind-wandering need not derail performance. Instead, it may mark adaptive loosening of cognitive control that supports generative spontaneity and flexibility crucial to creative expression.