Newborns modulate their crawling in response to their native language but not another language

Human newborns can propel themselves to their mother's breast when positioned skin to skin on her abdomen just after birth. For decades, researchers have considered this primitive crawling behavior a spinal reflex, immune to supra spinal control. However, recent research suggests that neonatal crawling is already responsive to visual and olfactory stimuli processed at a supra spinal level. Here we report that a few hours post birth, French newborns can also modulate their crawling in response to their native language – a source of information that is processed supra-spinally. The crawling patterns of 23 French-born newborns were recorded on video and via an infrared motion capture system during two randomly ordered 2-min trials. The newborns were secured on a mini skateboard to facilitate arm and leg movements during their crawling propulsion. They heard a repetitive sequence of the same sentences either in French, their native language, or in English, a rhythmically different and hence discriminable unfamiliar language, on each trial. In French, compared to English, crawling was enhanced, with significantly more arm and leg steps and significantly more and larger trunk rotations in the cephalo-caudal axis. Moreover, newborns rotated their heads and trunk toward the appropriate loud speaker when hearing French but not English. These preliminary findings suggest that newborn crawling is not a simple stereotyped reflex under spinal control, but a complex pattern that can be modulated in response to higher-order, supra-spinally processed stimuli. The findings open fascinating questions about the range of stimuli to which newborn crawling is responsive.     

Children's recognition of emotions from vocal cues

Emotional cues contain important information about the intentions and feelings of others. Despite a wealth of research into children's understanding of facial signals of emotions, little research has investigated the developmental trajectory of interpreting affective cues in the voice. In this study, 48 children ranging between 5 and 10 years were tested using forced‐choice tasks with non‐verbal vocalizations and emotionally inflected speech expressing different positive, neutral and negative states. Children as young as 5 years were proficient in interpreting a range of emotional cues from vocal signals. Consistent with previous work, performance was found to improve with age. Furthermore, the two tasks, examining recognition of non‐verbal vocalizations and emotionally inflected speech, respectively, were sensitive to individual differences, with high correspondence of performance across the tasks. From this demonstration of children's ability to recognize emotions from vocal stimuli, we also conclude that this auditory emotion recognition task is suitable for a wide age range of children, providing a novel, empirical way to investigate children's affect recognition skills.     

Students’ Need Satisfaction Profiles: Similarity and Change over the Course of a University Semester

Self-determination theory positions the satisfaction of students’ needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness as important determinants of various educational outcomes. In this study, we identify subpopulations of students characterized by distinct configurations of need satisfaction in the educational context, and assess the extent to which the nature of these configurations, and students’ individual profiles, remain stable over the course of a university semester. We also examine the role of perfectionism in the prediction of profile membership, and how these profiles relate to a variety of educational outcomes. A total of 521 first-year undergraduate university students completed our measures at the beginning and end of a university semester. We identified five need satisfaction profiles, which remained unchanged over the course of the study. Students characterized by higher levels of self-oriented perfectionism were more likely to be a member of a profile characterized by high levels of relatedness and global needs satisfaction associated with average levels of competence need satisfaction (“Globally Satisfied and Highly Connected” profile) relative to the other ones, and into the “Globally Satisfied” profile relative to the “Globally Dissatisfied, Highly Connected, and Competence Deficient” profile. Finally, the “Globally Dissatisfied, Highly Connected, and Competence Deficient” profile was associated with the least desirable outcomes (the lowest levels of students’ interest toward their studies, satisfaction, and attendance, and the highest levels of dropout intentions).     

Infants’ sense of approximate numerosity: Heritability and link to other concurrent traits

The ability to perceive approximate numerosity is present in many animal species, and emerges early in human infants. Later in life, it is moderately heritable and associated with mathematical abilities, but the etiology of the Approximate Number System (ANS) and its degree of independence from other cognitive abilities in infancy is unknown. Here, we assessed the phenotypic specificity as well as the influence of genetic and environmental factors on the ANS in a sample of 5-month-old twins (N = 514). We found a small-to-moderate but statistically significant effect of genetic factors on ANS acuity (heritability = 0.18, 95% CI: 0.02, 0.33), but only when differences in numerosity were relatively large (1:4 ratio). Non-verbal ability assessed with the Mullen Scales of Early Learning (MSEL) was found to be heritable (0.47; 95% CI: 0.34, 0.57) and the phenotypic association between ANS acuity and non-verbal ability performance was close to zero. Similarly, we found no association between ANS acuity and general attention during the task. An unexpected weak but statistically significant negative association between ANS acuity and scores on the receptive language scale of the MSEL was found. These results suggest that early ANS function may be largely independent from other aspects of non-verbal development. Further, variability in ANS in infancy seems to, to some extent, reflect genotypic differences in the population.

Highlights

• Assessing 514 infant twins with eye tracking, we found that infants' sense of approximate numerosity is heritable and not positively associated with concurrent attentional, cognitive or motor abilities.
• These results have implications for our understanding of development of mathematical ability and the link between cognitive abilities early in postnatal life.

     

Organizing the voice questionnaire for transgender persons

Abstract

Background: The validated Transsexual Voice Questionnaire Male to Female (TVQ^MtF) and the adapted TVQ Female to Male (FtM) (TVQ^FtM) are both 30-item-long questionnaires used to evaluate self-perception of voice in transgender persons. They are part of a series of questionnaires completed by transgender persons during follow-up of cross-sex hormone therapy (CSHT).

Aim: The aim of this study was to examine if these questionnaires can be organized.

Methods: The TVQ^MtF or the TVQ^FtM was filled out at the start of CSHT, by 145 trans women and 83 trans men. Data were analyzed by factor analyses on both the questionnaires.

Results: The factor analyses resulted in a three-factor solution for both the TVQ^MtF and the TVQ^FtM. The three factors were labeled as anxiety and avoidance, vocal identity, and vocal function.

Conclusion: Both the questionnaires can be organized into three factors. This could contribute to making shorter versions of the questionnaires. Shorter versions would be useful to hormone prescribing physicians to track down more quickly voice problems in trans people undergoing virilizing or feminizing hormone treatment.     

Simple devices for restricting the visual fields of birds

The construction and use of several simple occluders designed for long-term use is described. They permit limiting vision either to one eye or to the frontal or lateral visual fields and permit rapid interchange among these conditions.     

Doctors as patients: How psychological therapists experience the opposing ideologies

Research suggests that doctors experience higher levels of stress and mental health problems than the general population. Doctors frequently experience difficulty seeking help, and also challenges during psychological treatment, due to role reversal and competing ideologies.

Focusing specifically on the under-researched area of doctors as patients in a psychological context, this paper explores the processes underlying role transition as well as the therapeutic relationship that follows.

Furthermore, therapeutic reactions and adaptions of practice to this dynamic is also explored. A qualitative approach was employed and seven psychological therapists who had worked extensively with doctors as their patients were interviewed.

Subsequent interview data were thematically analyzed.

Six themes were generated: fear and pressure; status and control; variation of ideologies; change in practice; temporal changes; and help seeking and support.

The main barrier to recovery for doctors is difficulty in accessing services owing to the high-levels of stigma and shame that may be experienced. This research identifies some of the adaptions made by psychological therapists within their practice when working with doctors as patients.