Unilateral Stability and Visual Feedback Body Control Improves After Three-Month Resistance Training in Overweight Individuals

The authors evaluated the effect of 3 months of resistance and aerobic training (3 sessions/week) on body balance in a group of 25 overweight and obese individuals. Prior to and after the training, they performed static and task-oriented balance tests under various conditions. Mean center of pressure (CoP) velocity and mean trace length of the CoP in the y-axis registered during a one-legged stance significantly decreased after the resistance training (19.1%, p = .024; 29.3%, p = .009). Mean trace length of the CoP in the y-axis decreased significantly also during a bipedal stance on a foam surface with eyes open and closed (10.9%, p = .040; 18.2%, p = .027). In addition, mean CoP distance and mean squared CoP distance in the anteroposterior direction during a visually guided center of mass (CoM) tracking task significantly improved (14.7%, p = .033; 28.2%, p = .016). However, only mean trace length of the CoP in the y-axis during a bipedal stance on a foam surface with eyes open and closed significantly decreased after the aerobic training (10.3%, p = .047; 16.5%, p = .029). It may be concluded that resistance training is more efficient for the improvement of the anteroposterior unilateral stability and the accuracy of the regulation of the CoM anteroposterior position than aerobic training in overweight and obese individuals.     

Influence of Different Sitting Positions on Healthy Infants' Reaching Movements

The authors analyze the influence of different sitting positions (ring and flexion) on the reaching performance (spatiotemporal variables) of full-term infants 6 and 7 months old. In addition, they correlated level of trunk control, measured by the Segmental Assessment of Trunk Control, with performance during reaching. The different sitting positions only influenced the reaching movements of 6-month-old infants, who showed the best performance in the ring position. However, this influence was observed only for the trunk displacement, deceleration time, movement units, straightness index and mean velocity. In contrast, there was no influence of positions on 7-month-old infants’ reaching performance. Regarding the correlations, it was observed that infants with more level of trunk control showed a better performance when reaching, regardless of position and the age assessed.     

Connections between Family Centered Care and Medical Homes of Children with Neurodevelopmental Disabilities: Experiences of Diverse Families

Cultural issues tied to race/ethnicity are important aspects in delivering medical home services to children with neurodevelopmental disabilities and their families. To better understand family satisfaction with family centered care (FCC) in medical homes of children with disabilities, this study investigated whether family race/ethnicity, in addition to parent and child characteristics, significantly influenced family perceptions of FCC in three areas: family-provider partnership, care setting practices and policies, and community coordination and follow-up. Based on the life course theory for optimizing children's developmental trajectories, examining connections between family race/ethnicity and satisfaction with health care allows for identification of strengths and weaknesses in medical home services delivery, and offers opportunities for family support and improvement in outcomes for children with disabilities. This study developed an original empirical survey using a structured questionnaire developed by Family Voices, a national advocacy organization dedicated to promoting the well-being of children with disabilities and their families. The study collected data for 122 families in a large urban area in the northeastern United States. Multivariate analyses revealed that family race/ethnicity significantly contributed to the prediction of parental satisfaction with medical homes of children with disabilities, and to families' perceptions of FCC in care setting practices and policies, and community coordination and followup, but not to family provider partnership. Non-White families reported significantly lower satisfaction. Discussion emphasizes that health care providers need to become more vigilant in providing culturally sensitive care. To enhance FCC practices and policies, the study advances a checklist of ten essential areas that promote culturally sensitive interactions between families of children with disabilities and their medical and non-medical health care providers.     

What is competent communication behaviour of patients in physician consultations? – Chronically-ill patients answer in focus groups

Many desirable outcomes depend on good patient-physician communication. Patient-based perspectives of what constitutes competent communication behavior with physicians are needed for patient-oriented health care. Therefore it was our main aim to identify competent patient communication skills from the patient’s perspective. We also wanted to reveal any differences in opinion among various groups (chronic ischemic heart disease, chronic low back pain, breast cancer). This study examined nine guideline-supported focus groups in rehabilitation centers. The criterion for study inclusion was any one of the three diagnoses. Enrolled in the study were N = 49 patients (32 women) aged M = 60.1 (SD = 12.8). The interview recordings were transcribed and subjected to content analysis. We documented 396 commentaries in these interviews that were allocated to 82 different codes; these in turn resulted in the formation of 12 main topics. Examples are: posing questions, being an active and participatory patient, being aware of emotions and communicating them. This study represents stage two (‘documentation of patient and clinician views’) in the seven-stage model of communication research. Findings reveal that chronically-ill patients name behaviours that contribute to successful discussion with a physician. These enable us to develop communication trainings and design-measuring tools used for patient-based communication skills.     

Emotional prosody effects on verbal memory in older and younger adults

Prosody, or the way things are said, can modify the meaning of utterances making qualitatively different affective prosodies useful for understanding how auditory affective information is processed and remembered. In this study, we collected behavioral data from 225 younger (M age = 20.8 years, SD = 2.5 years; 119 males) and 225 older adults (M age = 71.6 years, SD = 6.5 years; 119 males) in order to examine age differences in emotional prosody effects on verbal memory. Participants were randomly divided into three subgroups according to different prosody listening conditions (positive, negative, and neutral) and prosody effects on a yes–no recognition memory task were investigated. The results showed how older adults who listened to the story read with a neutral prosody remembered more words than those who listened to the same story with a positive or negative prosody. Younger adults showed no valence effects. Our findings highlighted an age and affective prosody interaction that affects remembering in older adults alone.     

Conceptions of Plagiarism and Problems in Academic Writing in a Changing Landscape of External Regulation

The aim of this study was to investigate the consequences of the use of text-matching software on teachers’ and students’ conceptions of plagiarism and problems in academic writing. An electronic questionnaire included scale items, structured questions, and open-ended questions. The respondents were 85 teachers and 506 students in a large Finnish university. Methods of analysis included exploratory factor analysis, t-test, and inductive content analysis. Both teachers and students reported increased awareness of plagiarism and improvements in writing habits, as well as concerns and limitations related to the system. The results suggest that teachers are inclined to think of plagiarism as part of a learning process rather an issue of morality, which may have consequences for how they understand the role of text matching. The introduction of text-matching software has supported teachers’ work, but at the same time teachers emphasized their own responsibility in detecting problems in student writing. The survey provides a limited sample of “Case Finland,” where implementation of text-matching software nationwide has been remarkably rapid; it offers a glimpse into one institution’s implementation of a newly introduced policy for mandatory plagiarism detection.     

Social Support and Neighborhood Stressors Among African American Youth: Networks and Relations to Self-Worth

Although neighborhood stressors have a negative impact on youth, and social support can play a protective role, it is unclear what types and sources of social support may contribute to positive outcomes among at-risk youth. We examined the influences of neighborhood disadvantage and social support on global self-worth among low-income, urban African American youth, both concurrently and longitudinally. We examined social support from both a structural and functional perspective, and tested the main-effects and the stress-buffering models of social support. Participants included 82–130 youth, in 6th–8th grade, who completed self-report measures. Network support results suggest participants received emotional, tangible, and informational support most often from mothers and other female relatives, with friends, fathers, and teachers also playing important roles. Model testing accounted for neighborhood stressors and support from various sources, revealing support from close friends was associated with concurrent self-worth; whereas, parent support predicted self-worth longitudinally, above and beyond initial levels of self-worth. The findings provide evidence for the main-effects model of social support and not the stress-buffering model. Our findings illustrate the importance of extended family networks and the types of support that youth rely upon in African American impoverished communities, as well as how support contributes to global self-worth. Implications and suggestions for future research and intervention are discussed.     

A tale of two negatives: differential memory modulation by threat-related facial expressions

Facial expressions serve as cues that encourage viewers to learn about their immediate environment. In studies assessing the influence of emotional cues on behavior, fearful and angry faces are often combined into one category, such as "threat-related," because they share similar emotional valence and arousal properties. However, these expressions convey different information to the viewer. Fearful faces indicate the increased probability of a threat, whereas angry expressions embody a certain and direct threat. This conceptualization predicts that a fearful face should facilitate processing of the environment to gather information to disambiguate the threat. Here, we tested whether fearful faces facilitated processing of neutral information presented in close temporal proximity to the faces. In Experiment 1, we demonstrated that, compared with neutral faces, fearful faces enhanced memory for neutral words presented in the experimental context, whereas angry faces did not. In Experiment 2, we directly compared the effects of fearful and angry faces on subsequent memory for emotional faces versus neutral words. We replicated the findings of Experiment 1 and extended them by showing that participants remembered more faces from the angry face condition relative to the fear condition, consistent with the notion that anger differs from fear in that it directs attention toward the angry individual. Because these effects cannot be attributed to differences in arousal or valence processing, we suggest they are best understood in terms of differences in the predictive information conveyed by fearful and angry facial expressions.     

Enhanced response inhibition during intensive meditation training predicts improvements in self-reported adaptive socioemotional functioning

We examined the impact of training-induced improvements in self-regulation, operationalized in terms of response inhibition, on longitudinal changes in self-reported adaptive socioemotional functioning. Data were collected from participants undergoing 3 months of intensive meditation training in an isolated retreat setting (Retreat 1) and a wait-list control group that later underwent identical training (Retreat 2). A 32-min response inhibition task (RIT) was designed to assess sustained self-regulatory control. Adaptive functioning (AF) was operationalized as a single latent factor underlying self-report measures of anxious and avoidant attachment, mindfulness, ego resilience, empathy, the five major personality traits (extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience), difficulties in emotion regulation, depression, anxiety, and psychological well-being. Participants in Retreat 1 improved in RIT performance and AF over time whereas the controls did not. The control participants later also improved on both dimensions during their own retreat (Retreat 2). These improved levels of RIT performance and AF were sustained in follow-up assessments conducted approximately 5 months after the training. Longitudinal dynamic models with combined data from both retreats showed that improvement in RIT performance during training influenced the change in AF over time, which is consistent with a key claim in the Buddhist literature that enhanced capacity for self-regulation is an important precursor of changes in emotional well-being.