Fear of hypoglycemia: relationship to physical and psychological symptoms in patients with insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus.

Among diabetic patients, experience with hypoglycemia ranges from the unpleasant to the life threatening. The aversiveness of these episodes often results in fear. To examine the impact of hypoglycemia on fear, 69 patients with insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus completed the Behavior and Worry subscales of the Hypoglycemia Fear Survey along with measures of psychological symptoms, perceived stress, risk of future hypoglycemic episodes, and glycosylated hemoglobin. Behavior and Worry scores were positively related to psychological symptoms, perceived stress, and previous experiences with hypoglycemia. Fear was unrelated to glycosylated hemoglobin but was significantly higher for patients who had greater variability and lower mean daily blood glucose.     

The contribution of private and public information in foraging by Australasian gannets

Predators that forage on foods with temporally and spatially patchy distributions may rely on private or public sources of information to enhance their chances of foraging success. Using GPS tracking, field observations, and videography, we examined potential sites and mechanisms of information acquisition in departures for foraging trips by colonially breeding Australasian gannets (Morus serrator). Analyses of the bill-fencing ceremony between mated pairs of breeding gannets did not detect correlations between parameters of this reciprocal behavior and foraging trips, as would have been predicted if gannets used this behavior as a source of private information. Instead, 60 % of the departing birds flew directly to join water rafts of other conspecific en route to the feeding grounds. The departure of solitary birds from the water rafts was synchronized (within 60 s) with the arrival of incoming foragers and also among departing birds. Furthermore, solitary departing birds from the rafts left in the same directional quadrant (90º slices) as the prior arriving (67 %) and also prior departing forager (79 %). When associated plunge dives of conspecific were visible from the colony, providing a public source of information, gannets more often departed from the water rafts in groups. Our study thus provides evidence for the use of water rafts, but not the nest site, as locations of information transfer, and also confirms the use of local enhancement as a strategy for foraging flights by Australasian gannets.     

The Leuven Perceptual Organization Screening Test (L-POST), an online test to assess mid-level visual perception

Neuropsychological diagnostic tests of visual perception mostly assess high-level processes like object recognition. Object recognition, however, relies on distinct mid-level processes of perceptual organization that are only implicitly tested in classical tests. The Leuven Perceptual Organization Screening Test (L-POST) fills a gap with respect to clinically oriented tests of mid-level visual function. In 15 online subtests, a range of mid-level processes are covered, such as figure–ground segmentation, local and global processing, and shape perception. We also test the sensitivity to a wide variety of perceptual grouping cues, like common fate, collinearity, proximity, and closure. To reduce cognitive load, a matching-to-sample task is used for all subtests. Our online test can be administered in 20–45 min and is freely available at www.gestaltrevision.be/tests. The online implementation enables us to offer a separate interface for researchers and clinicians to have immediate access to the raw and summary results for each patient and to keep a record of their patient’s entire data. Also, each patient’s results can be flexibly compared with a range of age-matched norm samples. In conclusion, the L-POST is a valuable screening test for perceptual organization. The test allows clinicians to screen for deficits in visual perception and enables researchers to get a broader overview of mid-level visual processes that are preserved or disrupted in a given patient.     

Points to Consider in the Clinical Use of NGS Panels for Mitochondrial Disease: An Analysis of Gene Inclusion and Consent Forms

Mitochondrial next generation sequencing (NGS) panels offer single-step analysis of the numerous nuclear genes involved in the structure, function, and maintenance of mitochondria. However, the complexities of mitochondrial biology and genetics raise points for consideration in clinical use of these tests. To understand the current status of mitochondrial genetic testing, we assessed the gene offerings and consent forms of mitochondrial NGS panels available from seven US-based clinical laboratories. The NGS panels varied markedly in number of genes (101–1204 genes), and the proportion of genes causing “classic” mitochondrial diseases and their phenocopies ranged widely between labs (18 %–94 % of panel contents). All panels included genes not associated with classic mitochondrial diseases (6 %–28 % of panel contents), including genes causing adult-onset neurodegenerative disorders, cancer predisposition, and other genetic syndromes or inborn errors of metabolism. Five of the panels included genes that are not listed in OMIM to be associated with a disease phenotype (5 %–49 % of panel contents). None of the consent documents reviewed had options for patient preference regarding receipt of incidental findings. These findings raise points of discussion applicable to mitochondrial diagnostics, but also to the larger arenas of exome and genome sequencing, including the need to consider the boundaries between clinical and research testing, the necessity of appropriate informed consent, and the responsibilities of clinical laboratories and clinicians. Based on these findings, we recommend careful evaluation by laboratories of the genes offered on NGS panels, clear communication of the predicted phenotypes, and revised consent forms to allow patients to make choices about receiving incidental findings. We hope that our analysis and recommendations will help to maximize the considerable clinical utility of NGS panels for the diagnosis of mitochondrial disease.     

When past meets present: the relationship between website‐induced nostalgia and well‐being

The present research examined whether social media websites increase feelings of nostalgia, and whether this nostalgic reverie promotes psychological and social health. Specifically, in comparison to control conditions, participants exposed to the websites Dear Old Love and Dear Photograph reported greater feelings of nostalgia (Studies 1–3), positive affect (Studies 1 and 3), life satisfaction (Study 1), and relationship need satisfaction (Study 2). Further, mediational analyses revealed that increased thoughts of nostalgia heightened subjective well‐being and social connectedness. Study 3 showed that the relationship between nostalgia and positive affect was specific to the Dear Photograph website and did not generalize to any website focused on close relationships. The implications of this research for nostalgia, internet use, and well‐being are further discussed.     

An enhanced experimental procedure to rationalize on the impairment of perception of action capabilities

It is well documented that changes in the physiological states of the perceiver–actor influence the perception of action capabilities. However, because experimental procedures of most studies involved a limitless availability for stimuli visual encoding and perceptual strategies, it remains difficult to adopt a single position among the large range of alternative interpretations for impaired perception. A reaching-to-grasp paradigm under breathing restriction was adapted from Graydon et al. (Cogn Emot 26:1301–1305, 2012) to standardize the time for encoding of stimuli information and narrowed the involvement of perceptual strategies. In the present study, we propose a highly controlled environment where the discrete information is presented during 300 ms, congruently with neurophysiological studies focused on visuomotor transformation. An underestimation of the perception of action capabilities is found under breath restriction, suggesting that 300 ms for stimuli encoding is sufficient to induce altered visuomotor brain transformations when limiting the involvement of perceptual strategies. This result suggests that such behavior could refer to an impaired brain potentiation of the perceptual occurrence, providing strong hypotheses on the brain dynamics of sensorimotor integration that underlie impaired perception of action capabilities in stressful situations.     

Preschoolers use phrasal prosody online to constrain syntactic analysis

Two experiments were conducted to investigate whether young children are able to take into account phrasal prosody when computing the syntactic structure of a sentence. Pairs of French noun/verb homophones were selected to create locally ambiguous sentences ([la petite ferme ] [est très jolie] ‘the small farm is very nice’ vs. [la petite] [ ferme la fenêtre] ‘the little girl closes the window’ – brackets indicate prosodic boundaries). Although these sentences start with the same three words, ferme is a noun (farm) in the former but a verb (to close) in the latter case. The only difference between these sentence beginnings is the prosodic structure, that reflects the syntactic structure (with a prosodic boundary just before the critical word when it is a verb, and just after it when it is a noun). Crucially, all words following the homophone were masked, such that prosodic cues were the only disambiguating information. Children successfully exploited prosodic information to assign the appropriate syntactic category to the target word, in both an oral completion task (4.5‐year‐olds, Experiment 1) and in a preferential looking paradigm with an eye‐tracker (3.5‐year‐olds and 4.5‐year‐olds, Experiment 2). These results show that both groups of children exploit the position of a word within the prosodic structure when computing its syntactic category. In other words, even younger children of 3.5 years old exploit phrasal prosody online to constrain their syntactic analysis. This ability to exploit phrasal prosody to compute syntactic structure may help children parse sentences containing unknown words, and facilitate the acquisition of word meanings.     

Advance Car-Crash Planning: Shared Decision Making between Humans and Autonomous Vehicles

Science and Engineering Ethics - Over the past few years, there has been a proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) strategies, released by governments around the world, that seek to maximise...     

Easier Said Than Done? Task Difficulty's Influence on Temporal Alignment,Semantic Similarity,and Complexity Matching Between Gestures and Speech

Gestures and speech are clearly synchronized in many ways. However, previous studies have shown that the semantic similarity between gestures and speech breaks down as people approach transitions in understanding. Explanations for these gesture–speech mismatches, which focus on gestures and speech expressing different cognitive strategies, have been criticized for disregarding gestures’ and speech's integration and synchronization. In the current study, we applied three different perspectives to investigate gesture–speech synchronization in an easy and a difficult task: temporal alignment, semantic similarity, and complexity matching. Participants engaged in a simple cognitive task and were assigned to either an easy or a difficult condition. We automatically measured pointing gestures, and we coded participant's speech, to determine the temporal alignment and semantic similarity between gestures and speech. Multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis was used to determine the extent of complexity matching between gestures and speech. We found that task difficulty indeed influenced gesture–speech synchronization in all three domains. We thereby extended the phenomenon of gesture–speech mismatches to difficult tasks in general. Furthermore, we investigated how temporal alignment, semantic similarity, and complexity matching were related in each condition, and how they predicted participants’ task performance. Our study illustrates how combining multiple perspectives, originating from different research areas (i.e., coordination dynamics, complexity science, cognitive psychology), provides novel understanding about cognitive concepts in general and about gesture–speech synchronization and task difficulty in particular.     

Eveningness Predicts Negative Affect Following Sleep Restriction

Although considerable research has shown that sleep loss results in decreased positive affect, findings regarding change in negative affect are inconsistent. Such inconsistency may be due in part to variability in individual difference factors, such as chronotype, which is associated with both sleep and affective outcomes. Chronotype represents the tendency to be a morning- or evening-type person and is underpinned by the timing of circadian processes linked to sleep and mental health. The present study examined the predictive effect of chronotype above and beyond that of depression on affective response to sleep restriction in a sample of healthy sleeping adults (n = 73). Participants completed measures of chronotype and depression at baseline and measures of positive and negative affect before and after one night of sleep restriction (4 hours between 4 a.m. and 8 a.m.). Results indicate a large, significant decrease in positive affect following sleep restriction, but no statistically significant change in negative affect. Subsequent analyses showed that chronotype predicted affective response to sleep restriction, such that eveningness predicted a medium, significant increase in negative affect following sleep restriction, controlling for depression—however, there was no association between chronotype and change in positive affect in response to sleep restriction. These findings highlight a differential effect of sleep loss on positive and negative affect and suggest that evening chronotype may confer a distinct vulnerability for increased negative affect following sleep loss.