APPARENT COVARIATION BETWEEN CHILD HABIT DISORDERS: EFFECTS OF SUCCESSFUL TREATMENT FOR THUMB SUCKING ON UNTARGETED CHRONIC HAIR PULLING

We evaluated the effects of aversive taste treatment of thumb sucking on untreated trichotillomania (habitual hair pulling) in two children who chronically pulled their hair and sucked their thumbs. A combination of withdrawal and nonconcurrent multiple baseline designs showed that, concomitant with the successful treatment of thumb sucking, hair pulling was also eliminated. The results suggest an efficient method for changing behaviors that are difficult to treat directly.     

Synchronization with competing visual and auditory rhythms: bouncing ball meets metronome

Synchronization of finger taps with periodically flashing visual stimuli is known to be much more variable than synchronization with an auditory metronome. When one of these rhythms is the synchronization target and the other serves as a distracter at various temporal offsets, strong auditory dominance is observed. However, it has recently been shown that visuomotor synchronization improves substantially with moving stimuli such as a continuously bouncing ball. The present study pitted a bouncing ball against an auditory metronome in a target–distracter synchronization paradigm, with the participants being auditory experts (musicians) and visual experts (video gamers and ball players). Synchronization was still less variable with auditory than with visual target stimuli in both groups. For musicians, auditory stimuli tended to be more distracting than visual stimuli, whereas the opposite was the case for the visual experts. Overall, there was no main effect of distracter modality. Thus, a distracting spatiotemporal visual rhythm can be as effective as a distracting auditory rhythm in its capacity to perturb synchronous movement, but its effectiveness also depends on modality-specific expertise.     

Disability Cosmology: The Practice of Making Disability Worlds

The practice of making disability worlds is investigated both theoretically, in the context of developments in disability studies, in particular in the cultural model of disability, and practically in two examples, namely inclusive education environments and public environments. Theoretically, we argue that disability worlds can be better understood by introducing the notion of disability cosmology as the largest possible perspective on the making of disability worlds. A cultural model research perspective of disability consists then of the complementary study of disability identity, culture and cosmology. The practical examples work out the particularities of making and understanding disability worlds. In the making of disability worlds, much attention goes to the ways in which disability worlds relate to the normative world; for example in the formation of boundaries and transgressions, but also fundamentally how disability adds to becoming human.     

Cool and Hot Aspects of Executive Function in Childhood Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

Aspects of executive functioning (EF) have been put forward as endophenotypes in obsessive- compulsive disorder (OCD) and meta-analyses support EF underperformance in adult samples. Childhood-onset OCD has been suggested to constitute a separate neurodevelopmental subtype of the disorder but studies on neuropsychological functioning in childhood OCD are limited. The aim of the present study was to investigate performance-based EF in pediatric OCD using observed and latent variable analyses. A case-control design was applied including 50 unmedicated children and adolescents with OCD aged 7–17 years of which 70% were female, 50 pairwise age and gender matched non-psychiatric controls (NP) and 38 children and adolescents with mixed anxiety disorders (MA). Participants underwent structured diagnostic interviews and assessment with a battery encompassing cool EF tasks of working memory, set shifting, inhibition, and planning, and hot EF tasks of decision making and dot probe paradigm affective interference. First, groups were compared on observed variables with multilevel mixed-effects linear regression and analysis of variance. Then the latent structure of cool EF was tested with confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and groups were compared on the CFA scores. No significant differences between groups appeared on individual cool EF tasks. On the hot EF tasks the OCD group displayed significant interference effects on the dot probe paradigm OCD-specific stimuli relative to NP, but not compared to MA and no group differences emerged for decision making. In the CFA a one-factor solution showed best fit, but the groups did not differ significantly on the resulting latent variable. The present study does not support cool or hot EF impairments in childhood OCD.     

Gaze behavior in audiovisual speech perception: the influence of ocular fixations on the McGurk effect

We conducted three experiments in order to examine the influence of gaze behavior and fixation on audiovisual speech perception in a task that required subjects to report the speech sound they perceived during the presentation of congruent and incongruent (McGurk) audiovisual stimuli. Experiment 1 showed that the subjects' natural gaze behavior rarely involved gaze fixations beyond the oral and ocular regions of the talker's face and that these gaze fixations did not predict the likelihood of perceiving the McGurk effect. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that manipulation of the subjects' gaze fixations within the talker's face did not influence audiovisual speech perception substantially and that it was not until the gaze was displaced beyond 10 degrees - 20 degrees from the talker's mouth that the McGurk effect was significantly lessened. Nevertheless, the effect persisted under such eccentric viewing conditions and became negligible only when the subject's gaze was directed 60 degrees eccentrically. These findings demonstrate that the analysis of high spatial frequency information afforded by direct oral foveation is not necessary for the successful processing of visual speech information.     

Postural stabilization of perceptual but not cognitive performance

In 2 experiments, the authors independently varied the degree of cognitive and perceptual difficulty of suprapostural tasks. Participants were 23 students in Experiment 1 and 15 in Experiment 2. Increases in perceptual difficulty tended to be correlated with decreases in the variability of postural sway, consistent with the hypothesized functional integration of postural control with suprapostural tasks. Sway variability was not influenced by changes in the cognitive difficulty of tasks when perceptual difficulty was held constant, contrary to predictions derived from the perspective that postural and suprapostural activities compete for a limited pool of central processing resources. The results underscore the need for researchers to differentiate between suprapostural tasks that require perceptual contact with the environment and those that do not.     

Musical groove modulates motor cortex excitability: A TMS investigation

Groove is often described as a musical quality that can induce movement in a listener. This study examines the effects of listening to groove music on corticospinal excitability. Musicians and non-musicians listened to high-groove music, low-groove music, and spectrally matched noise, while receiving single-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) over the primary motor cortex either on-beat or off-beat. We examined changes in the amplitude of the motor-evoked potentials (MEPs), recorded from hand and arm muscles, as an index of activity within the motor system. Musicians and non-musicians rated groove similarly. MEP results showed that high-groove music modulated corticospinal excitability, whereas no difference occurred between low-groove music and noise. More specifically, musicians’ MEPs were larger with high-groove than low-groove music, and this effect was especially pronounced for on-beat compared to off-beat pulses. These results indicate that high-groove music increasingly engages the motor system, and the temporal modulation of corticospinal excitability with the beat could stem from tight auditory–motor links in musicians. Conversely, non-musicians’ MEPs were smaller for high-groove than low-groove music, and there was no effect of on- versus off-beat pulses, potentially stemming from suppression of overt movement. In sum, high-groove music engages the motor system, and previous training modulates how listening to music with a strong groove activates the motor system.     

Athletic Identity and Well-Being among Young Talented Athletes who Live at a Dutch Elite Sport Center

The effects of a systematic cognitive-behavioral intervention program were examined upon the further appraisals (i.e., emotional orientation) of four golfers who interpreted their emotions as debilitative towards upcoming performance and the subsequent effect on actual performance. A systematic, theoretically underpinned, multiple-baseline single-subject design was employed, with four main phases adopted over a 34-week period: Phase I involved baseline monitoring of emotion and performance data; Phase II included the education and acquisition of the cognitive-behavioral technique; Phase III entailed the integration of technique within actual competitive performance; an immediate and 3-month post intervention phase was incorporated for social validation data. An instant intervention effect on emotional orientation was observed with interpretations changing from debilitative to facilitative or unimportant. Improved and more consistent subjective and objective performances were also reported. Social validation during (open-ended questionnaires) and post-intervention (interviews) indicated changes in performers’ focus from their emotions and negative thoughts towards the task in hand. Indeed, the intervention was suggested to promote a change in focus to play the best shot possible and confidence to perform during problem holes.     

Higher realities and the inner self: One quest? Transcendence and the significance of the body in the new age circuit

Can New Age be religious? In this article it is argued that New Age should not be treated as just one meaning system. It is possible to discern several different meaning systems in the New Age networks, even though they share a common language. Before examining whether these meaning systems are religious or, in other words, whether they contain transcendent elements, the concept of transcendence is ‘de‐christianised’. For it is precisely the Christian interpretation, namely the idea that the transcendent reality has to be ‘outside’, that makes the concept useless for the study of New Age meaning systems. The analysis then shows that sometimes there is a higher reality, and sometimes not. Even in one and the same meaning system this difference can occur, since central notions are interpreted in different ways.