Age-related Assessment of Postural Control Development: A Cross-sectional Study in Children and Adolescents

Abstract

The aim of this study was to outline an age-dependent range of posturography measures obtained from healthy children. One hundred and fifty healthy 4–18-year-old children underwent video Head Impulse Test and static posturography testing. Surface, length and power spectra values were compared between each group of pupils and 32 healthy adults. As well as a significant (p?<?0.025) increase in surface and length, when compared to healthy adults, increased values within the low/middle frequency domain and within the high frequency domain were also observed in 4–13 and 4–7-year-old children, respectively. In conclusion, although the nature of postural control development remains largely undetermined, this study represents a first attempt to outline an age-dependent normal range of the relative contribution of inputs in typically developing children.     

Review of Family Relational Stress and Pediatric Asthma: The Value of Biopsychosocial Systemic Models

Asthma is the most common chronic disease in children. Despite dramatic advances in pharmacological treatments, asthma remains a leading public health problem, especially in socially disadvantaged minority populations. Some experts believe that this health gap is due to the failure to address the impact of stress on the disease. Asthma is a complex disease that is influenced by multilevel factors, but the nature of these factors and their interrelations are not well understood. This paper aims to integrate social, psychological, and biological literatures on relations between family/parental stress and pediatric asthma, and to illustrate the utility of multilevel systemic models for guiding treatment and stimulating future research. We used electronic database searches and conducted an integrated analysis of selected epidemiological, longitudinal, and empirical studies. Evidence is substantial for the effects of family/parental stress on asthma mediated by both disease management and psychobiological stress pathways. However, integrative models containing specific pathways are scarce. We present two multilevel models, with supporting data, as potential prototypes for other such models. We conclude that these multilevel systems models may be of substantial heuristic value in organizing investigations of, and clinical approaches to, the complex social–biological aspects of family stress in pediatric asthma. However, additional systemic models are needed, and the models presented herein could serve as prototypes for model development.     

Fear detection and visual awareness in perceiving bodily expressions

Many research reports have concluded that emotional information can be processed without observers being aware of it. The case for perception without awareness has almost always been made with the use of facial expressions. In view of the similarities between facial and bodily expressions for rapid perception and communication of emotional signals, we conjectured that perception of bodily expressions may also not necessarily require visual awareness. Our study investigates the role of visual awareness in the perception of bodily expressions using a backward masking technique in combination with confidence ratings on a trial-by-trial basis. Participants had to detect in three separate experiments masked fearful, angry and happy bodily expressions among masked neutral bodily actions as distractors and subsequently the participants had to indicate their confidence. The onset between target and mask (Stimulus Onset Asynchrony, SOA) varied from -50 to +133 ms. Sensitivity measurements (d-prime) as well as the confidence of the participants showed that the bodies could be detected reliably in all SOA conditions. In an important finding, a lack of covariance was observed between the objective and subjective measurements when the participants had to detect fearful bodily expressions, yet this was not the case when participants had to detect happy or angry bodily expressions.     

The role of source memory in older adults' recollective experience

Younger adults' "remember" judgments are accompanied by better memory for the source of an item than "know" judgments. Furthermore, remember judgments are not merely associated with better memory for individual source features but also with bound memory for multiple source features. However, older adults, independent of their subjective memory experience, are generally less likely to "bind" source features to an item and to each other in memory (i.e., the associative deficit). In two experiments, we tested whether memory for perceptual source features, independently or bound, is also the basis for older adults' remember responses or if their associative deficit leads them to base their responses on other types of information. The results suggest that retrieval of perceptual source features, individually or bound, forms the basis for younger but not for older adults' remember judgments even when the overall level of memory for perceptual sources is closely equated (Experiment 1) and when attention is explicitly directed to the source information at encoding (Experiment 2).     

Work–family interface from a life and career stage perspective: The role of demands and resources

Work–family conflict and enrichment are experiences that occur daily and have substantial consequences for employees, their families, and the organizations that employ them. The aim of the current review is to make a link between life and career stage, work and family conditions, and the work–family interface. The basic proposition is that life stages partly determine career development, and consequently the specific working conditions (job demands and job resources) and family conditions (family demands and family resources) that individuals are exposed to. As a result, the specific demands and resources in the work and family domains determine to what extent individuals experience that work and family are conflicting or enriching life domains. In this review we suggest that individuals in early adulthood will experience high inter‐role conflict and low facilitation due to high demands and low resources in both life domains, while individuals in late adulthood will experience the opposite pattern; that is, low conflict and high facilitation due to low demands and high resources in both domains. Individuals in middle adulthood will experience high work–family conflict but also high family–work facilitation due to the presence of high job demands and resources in both life domains. Integrating life and career stage perspectives and the experience of work–family interface is of notable practical utility because it provides a mechanism to make more informed decisions about the relative need for and corresponding benefits of work–family programs.     

Metaphonological abilities of adult illiterates: New evidence of heterogeneity

Abstract

Adult illiterate and literate subjects with at most second-grade education, from the same poor settlement in Brazil, were tested on rhyme judgement, initial syllabic vowel deletion and initial consonant deletion. Corrective feedback was provided continuously throughout the tests. The literate subjects were proficient on all three tasks. Illiterates achieved non-negligible performance on vowel deletion and rhyme judgement, but performed poorly on consonant deletion. These results bring additional support to the notion that metaphonological competence involves separate components which obey different developmental mechanisms.     

Partnership longevity and personality congruence in couples

Evidence of assortative mating according to personality was reported in a previous SOEP-based study (Rammstedt & Schupp, 2008). Based on population representative data of almost 7000 couples, high levels of congruence between spouses were found, which increased with marriage duration. Almost 5000 of these couples were tracked over a five-year period with personality assessed at the beginning and end of this time, which allowed us to investigate the relationship between personality congruence and marriage duration longitudinally. Using this data, we investigated (a) whether personality congruence is predictive for partnership longevity and whether congruence therefore differs between subsequently stable and unstable couples, (b) if stable couples become more congruent, and (c) if separated couples become less congruent with regard to their personality over time. The results provide initial evidence of personality congruence as a predictor for partnership longevity: the more congruent couples are in the personality domain of Openness, the more stable their partnership. In addition, we found no indications of an increase in personality congruence over time within the stable couples; within the separated couples, however, a strong decrease in congruence was detectable.