Introduction: Low adherence to treatment is a common problem in the care of patients with severe mental illnesses. Motivational interviewing is a directive, client-centered counseling therapeutic approach designed to elicit behavior change by helping clients to explore and resolve ambivalence. Nurses use motivational interviewing, although it has not been defined from a nursing perspective nor with nursing language. Thus, nursing research on the use of these techniques is being carried out, supported by their effectiveness in many health problems. The development of motivational interviewing as a standardized nursing intervention for inclusion in the Nursing Interventions Classification (NIC) may promote its use by mental health nurses in their daily work and thus improve the quality of care.Objectives: To validate a proposed motivational interviewing nursing intervention for inclusion in the NIC. Materials and methods:We followed the validation methodology of the NIC of the Iowa and the Intervention Normalization for Nursing Practice projects. The study comprised theoretical (scientific and expert validation) and empirical (terminological and clinical validation) phases. Results:There is ample evidence supporting the efficiency of the motivational interviewing to improve the therapeutic adherence of people with severe mental illness. The group of experts agreed on the label name "motivational interviewing" for the NIC based on the modified model by Miller & Röllnick (2015), which includes 28 associated activities through the phases of engaging, focusing, evoking, and planning. Development of the NANDA International and the Nursing Outcomes Classification nursing language was completed. Knowledge and drug attitude improved in the motivational intervention group. Conclusions:We validated the nursing intervention motivational interviewing for inclusion in the NIC that will help improve therapeutic adherence. The intervention may be used for other behavioral changes.

Objective: Several studies have investigated the negative toll the pandemic has had on people’s mental health. However, there is limited research on the pandemic’s effect on positive mental health variables. This article reports on the levels of self-esteem and well-being (flourishing and happiness) in a sample of adults living in Ecuador and their relationships with the characteristics of their personal situation and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic had on their personal lives.Methods: A total of 766 adults completed an anonymous online survey between March and August 2020.Results: Participants reported average scores in the flourishing scale, the majority considered themselves to be happy or very happy people, and more than half presented high levels of self-esteem. Age, education, socioeconomic status, time spent using mobile phones and on hobbies, among others, explained self-esteem, happiness, and flourishing.Conclusion: The relationships between sociodemographic and situational variables of confinement during the pandemic are discussed, as well as the possible predictors of happiness, flourishing, and self-esteem.

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The smartphone revolution has placed powerful, multipurpose devices in the hands of youth across the globe, prompting worries about the potential negative consequences of these technologies on mental health. Many assessment tools have been created, seeking to classify individuals into problematic and non-problematic smartphone users. These are identified using a cutoff value: a threshold, within the scale range, at which higher scores are expected to be associated with negative outcomes. Lacking a clinical assessment of individuals, the establishment of this threshold is challenging. We illustrate this difficulty by calculating cutoff values for the Short Version of the Smartphone Addiction Scale (SAS-SV) in 13 Spanish-speaking samples in 11 countries, using common procedures (i.e., reliability, validity, ROC methodology). After showing that results can be very heterogeneous (i.e., they lead to diverse cutoff points and rates of addiction) depending on the decisions made by the researchers, we call for caution in the use of these classifications, particularly when researchers lack a clinical definition of true addiction—as is the case with most available scales in the field of behavioral addictions—which can cause an unnecessary public health alert.

Para prevenir el avance de la COVID-19, países como Ecuador adoptaron medidas de confinamiento obligatorio, el teletrabajo y la educación remota. Durante estos periodos, las personas recurrieron al uso de sus teléfonos móviles, al igual que a otros dispositivos, con el fin de informarse, socializar y trabajar. Este estudio buscó identificar los efectos del uso de estos dispositivos sobre los niveles de malestar psicológico. Se reclutó una muestra de 766 personas quienes respondieron una encuesta en línea durante la primera fase de confinamiento por COVID-19 en Ecuador. Los resultados sugieren que las personas estuvieron aproximadamente 9.75 horas al día conectadas a sus dispositivos tecnológicos, incluido el teléfono móvil. Igualmente, se encontró que el nivel de malestar de las personas aumenta conforme incrementa el uso problemático del teléfono móvil, el número total de minutos empleados por día conectados a dispositivos tecnológicos y el número de minutos empleados en redes sociales. Asimismo, el uso problemático del teléfono móvil, usarlo para distraerse de algo incómodo y para expresar o buscar afecto se asociaron con mayores niveles en cuanto al grado de malestar de los participantes. Por el contrario, el uso del teléfono móvil para hacer compras en línea y percibir mayores niveles de control del uso se asoció con una disminución del malestar. Se discuten las implicaciones de estos hallazgos a la luz de las condiciones actuales de la pandemia, las nuevas variantes del coronavirus y las cuarentenas obligatorias para aquellas personas diagnosticadas con el virus.