Elena Constantinou

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The Cypriot Dialect in the Greek Language Lesson: Its Effects on Adolescent Students’ Learning, Identity Construction and Critical Thinking

Elena Constantinou

This research study examined the effects of Greek Cypriot Dialect (GCD) on bidialectal Greek Cypriot (GC) students in the context of Modern Greek Language (MGL) lessons at Lyceum B level. GCD is the native variety and students’ mother tongue whereas MGL is the standard and target variety. This study aimed to inform opinion on the use and the role of GCD in the MGL lesson, the influence of attitudes towards GCD on students’ identity construction, and whether the use or suppression of GCD in class influences students’ expression of critical thought. The study focused on the spoken language and examined students’ speech. In order to theorise and deepen understanding of the effects of GCD on students’ performance and learning of MGL, social constructivism and Language Awareness (LA) were considered. Qualitative research was conducted through a case study focused on 7 Lyceum B level classrooms of two state secondary schools in Cyprus. An interpretive paradigmatic stance was taken and a combination of methodological tools was employed. Classroom observations of MGL lessons, group task observations with students, and group interviews with MGL teachers and students were conducted. The findings revealed that GCD appeared to be used frequently in lesson-focused and non-lesson-focused incidents, by most of the students and some of the teachers. GCD served as a means facilitating expression but its unplanned use did not seem to enhance mastery of MGL. It did, however, aid learning of the subject content. GCD was said to be central in defining students’ identity and some students claimed that negative attitudes towards it did not influence how they perceived their identity. The group task observation findings demonstrated that GCD exclusion and SMG imposition stifled the process of developing and expressing critical thinking (CT) whereas GCD use enhanced it. This was also expressed in students’ interviews whereas teachers considered that excluding GCD might hinder students to express CT but only to some extent. Overall, the findings revealed the need for implementing a bidialectal approach rooted in LA for teaching MGL as well as training teachers and raising their awareness of language variation. The potential role of Ancient Greek in enhancing Lyceum students’ knowledge of GCD and while at the same time improving their performance in MGL lessons is discussed.

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Modeling Data Access Legislation with Gorgias

Lecture notes in computer science (2017)

Nikolaos I. Spanoudakis Elena Constantinou Adamos Koumi Antonis Kakas

10.1007/978-3-319-60045-1_34

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Citations (9)

8 THE HERITABILITY OF FEAR CONDITIONING AS A MODEL FOR ANXIETY DISORDER AND TREATMENT RESPONSE

European Neuropsychopharmacology (2019)

Kirstin L. Purves Georgina Krebs Thomas McGregor Elena Constantinou Kathryn J. Lester

Low-density polyethylene

10.1016/j.euroneuro.2019.07.149

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Large‐scale remote fear conditioning: Demonstration of associations with anxiety using the FLARe smartphone app

Depression and Anxiety (2021)

Thomas McGregor Kirstin L. Purves Elena Constantinou Johanna M.P. Baas Tom J. Barry

Objectives We aimed to examine differences in fear conditioning between anxious and nonanxious participants in a single large sample. Materials and methods We employed a remote fear conditioning task (FLARe) to collect data from participants from the Twins Early Development Study (n = 1,146; 41% anxious vs. 59% nonanxious). Differences between groups were estimated for their expectancy of an aversive outcome towards a reinforced conditional stimulus (CS+) and an unreinforced conditional stimulus (CS−) during acquisition and extinction phases. Results During acquisition, the anxious group (vs. nonanxious group) showed greater expectancy towards the CS−. During extinction, the anxious group (vs. nonanxious group) showed greater expectancy to both CSs. These comparisons yielded effect size estimates (d = 0.26–0.34) similar to those identified in previous meta-analyses. Conclusion The current study demonstrates that remote fear conditioning can be used to detect differences between groups of anxious and nonanxious individuals, which appear to be consistent with previous meta-analyses including in-person studies.

Extinction (optical mineralogy)

10.1002/da.23146

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Citations (20)

P.1.b.013 Opioid and dopamine transmission in chronic pain and health are diametrically opposed: a phMRI study

European Neuropsychopharmacology (2015)

Julius Bourke Georgina Lyons Theresa Wodehouse Elena Constantinou P. Knopp

10.1016/s0924-977x(15)30177-2

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Attentional processing of unpleasant stimuli in alexithymia: Early avoidance followed by attention maintenance bias

Cogent Psychology (2022)

Chrysanthi Leonidou Elena Constantinou Maria Panteli Georgia Panayiotou

Alexithymia is a multifaceted personality trait linked to increased risk for psychological, psychosomatic, and physical health problems. One hypothesized mechanism through which alexithymia predisposes individuals to such problems is the interference of alexithymic characteristics in processing affective, particularly unpleasant content. This study aimed to investigate the relationship between alexithymia and biases in attentional processing of threatening vs. neutral pictorial stimuli, disentangling early (vigilance) from late (maintenance) attentional biases. One hundred participants (77 female; 18–35 years old) completed the Toronto Alexithymia Scale and underwent a free viewing task with picture pairs presenting illness, fear and neutral content, during which dwell time on each picture was recorded at time intervals of 0–500 ms, 501–1000 ms and 1001–6500 ms of exposure. Results from multilevel modeling showed that alexithymia interacted with time interval and picture type. Higher alexithymia scores were related to less dwell time towards fear pictures at 501 ms-1000 ms, but more dwell time at 1001 ms-6500 ms after stimulus onset. This effect was particularly observed for the externally oriented thinking and the difficulty in describing feelings facets of alexithymia, but not the difficulty in identifying feelings. There was no effect of alexithymia on early vigilance at 0–500 ms. This study provides evidence on the association between alexithymic traits and early avoidance, along with late maintenance bias to fear, which appears consistent with the view that alexithymia is associated with avoidant emotion regulation processes, but also greater requirements of cognitive resources for processing affective information.

Toronto Alexithymia Scale

Vigilance (psychology)

Attentional Bias

Stimulus (psychology)

Association (psychology)

10.1080/23311908.2022.2054531

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Citations (6)

Emotion dysregulation in alexithymia: Startle reactivity to fearful affective imagery and its relation to heart rate variability

Psychophysiology (2017)

Georgia Panayiotou Elena Constantinou

Alexithymia is associated with deficiencies in recognizing and expressing emotions and impaired emotion regulation, though few studies have verified the latter assertion using objective measures. This study examined startle reflex modulation by fearful imagery and its associations with heart rate variability in alexithymia. Fifty-four adults (27 alexithymic) imagined previously normed fear scripts. Startle responses were assessed during baseline, first exposure, and reexposure. During first exposure, participants, in separate trials, engaged in either shallow or deep emotion processing, giving emphasis on descriptive or affective aspects of imagery, respectively. Resting heart rate variability was assessed during 2 min of rest prior to the experiment, with high alexithymic participants demonstrating significantly higher LF/HF (low frequency/high frequency) ratio than controls. Deep processing was associated with nonsignificantly larger and faster startle responses at first exposure for alexithymic participants. Lower LF/HF ratio, reflecting higher parasympathetic cardiac activity, predicted greater startle amplitude habituation for alexithymia but lower habituation for controls. Results suggest that, when exposed to prolonged threat, alexithymics may adjust poorly, showing a smaller initial defensive response but slower habituation. This pattern seems related to their low emotion regulation ability as indexed by heart rate variability.

Startle response

Orienting response

10.1111/psyp.12887

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Citations (29)

A Wavelet-based Approach for Multimodal Prediction of Alexithymia from Physiological Signals

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON MULTIMODAL INTERACTION (2022)

Valeria Filippou Nikolas Theodosiou Mihalis A. Nicolaou Elena Constantinou Georgia Panayiotou

Alexithymia is a trait reflecting a person's difficulty in identifying and expressing their emotions that has been linked to various forms of psychopathology. The identification of alexithymia might have therapeutic, preventive and diagnostic benefits. However, not much research has been done in proposing predictive models for alexithymia, while literature on multimodal approaches is virtually non-existent. In this light, we present, to the best of our knowledge, the first predictive framework that leverages multimodal physiological signals (heart rate, skin conductance level, facial electromyograms) to detect alexithymia. In particular, we develop a set of features that primarily capture spectral-information that is also localized in the time domain via wavelets. Subsequently, simple classifiers are utilized that can learn correlations between features extracted from all modalities. Via several experiments on a novel dataset collected via an emotion processing imagery experiment, we further show that (i) one can detect alexithymia in patients using only one stage of the experiment (elicitation of joy), and (ii) that our simpler framework outperforms compared methods, including deep networks, on the task of alexithymia detection. Our proposed method achieves an accuracy of up to 92% when using simple classifiers on specific imagery tasks. The simplicity and efficiency of our approach makes it suitable for low-powered embedded devices.

Modalities

Discriminative model

10.1145/3536220.3558076

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Citations (3)

Validating the Use of a Smartphone App for Remote Administration of a Fear Conditioning Paradigm

Kirstin L. Purves Elena Constantinou Thomas McGregor Kathryn J. Lester Tom J. Barry

Fear conditioning models key processes related to the development, maintenance and treatment of anxiety disorders and is associated with group differences in anxiety. However, laboratory administration of tasks is time and cost intensive, precluding assessment in large samples, necessary for analysis of individual differences. This study introduces a newly developed smartphone app that delivers a fear conditioning paradigm remotely. Three groups of participants (total n=152) took part in three studies involving a differential fear conditioning experiment to assess the reliability and validity of a smartphone administered fear conditioning paradigm. This comprised of fear acquisition, generalisation, extinction, and renewal phases. We show that smartphone app delivery of a fear conditioning paradigm results in a pattern of fear learning comparable to traditional laboratory delivery, and is able to detect individual differences in performance that show comparable associations with anxiety to the prior group differences literature.

Extinction (optical mineralogy)

10.31234/osf.io/r9qtj

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Influences of mood on information processing styles in high and low symptom reporters

Health Psychology Report (2015)

Elena Constantinou Katleen Bogaerts Ilse Van Diest Omer Van den Bergh

Background Negative mood, which has been strongly linked to the presence of medically unexplained symptoms (MUS), is also suggested to modulate the way information is processed (analytic vs. schematic processing style). The present study investigated whether negative mood influences the information processing style differentially in people reporting frequent MUS in daily life. Participants and procedure Forty female participants (22 low, 18 high habitual symptom reporters) completed a semantic priming task, as an index of schematic processing, after positive and after negative mood induction in a counterbalanced order. The priming task consisted of neutral or unpleasant body-related and body-unrelated words to assess the specificity of processing style shifts. Results The analyses indicated a non-significant tendency for negative mood to increase priming effects compared to positive mood for the high habitual symptom reporters, while the opposite pattern was found for the low symptom reporters. This differential effect of mood was only seen for neutral body-related words. Conclusions The current findings suggest that negative mood can trigger schematic processes assumed to be crucial for the emergence of MUS, which may explain the profound link between unpleasantness and elevated symptom reporting in high symptom reporters.

Priming (agriculture)

10.5114/hpr.2016.55402

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Citations (1)