Lower extremity strength and hopping and jumping ground reaction forces in children with neurofibromatosis type 1

The purpose of this study was to (1) extend the research findings of decreased muscular force production in grip strength to the lower extremity strength of children with NF1 and (2) to determine if there was a relationship between isometric strength and functional activities in children with NF1. Force production was assessed using a hand held dynamometer (HHD) and a functional task (hopping and jumping) on a force plate. Data from twenty-six children with NF1 were compared to data from 48 typically developing children of similar sex, weight and height. Children with NF1 demonstrated statistically significant lower force production with HHD (p<0.01) during hip extension, but similar force production for knee extension and ankle plantar flexion compared to the control group. A relationship existed between the ground reaction forces at take-off from both hopping and jumping and the force generated from knee extensor strength in the NF1 group. The addition of a functional task to hand held dynamometry is useful for determining a relationship between common clinical measures and functional activities.     

Identity construction and career development interventions with emerging adults

Today's wealthy societies are more fluid, varied and complex than they were just a few decades ago. As a consequence, what were “vocational choices” at the beginning of the 20th century now appear as “life designing issues”. In this context, contemporary research stresses the plurality and relative malleability of human subjects as well as their ability to take reflexive stances on their current and past experiences. Fitting in such an epistemology, a self-constructing model is proposed as a basis for a life designing counseling interview. This model describes self-identity as a dynamic system of (past, present and expected) subjective identity forms (SIF), the synthesis and dynamism of which originate in a tension between two kinds of reflexivity. Counseling interviews with emerging adults show that the elicitation of some expected SIF allows them to re-read their current and past experiences from such a perspective and constitutes a compelling incentive to act.     

Changes in natural language use as an indicator of psychotherapeutic change in personality disorders

Word use has been shown to reflect various psychological processes and psychological change. This study examines the self-view in personality disorders (PDs) and its change over the course of therapy using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count analysis procedure. A sample of 299 participants with PDs and 108 community control participants wrote short essays about their lives. Patients repeated the assignment three times over two years and completed assessments of PD-pathology, general psychopathology, PD-beliefs, and quality of life. Results show that as hypothesized the use of words in the 1st Person Singular Pronouns, Negative Emotion, Causation, Past and Future Tense Verbs categories significantly declines over the course of treatment, while the use of Present Tense Verbs and Positive Emotion increases. These categories tend to distinguish patients from non-patients prior to treatment. We also found 12 additional word categories changing over time, including Word Count and Negations. Change in word use statistically predicts better treatment outcome on all outcome measures (p < .001). Reductions in the use of Negative Emotion Words and Negations are the strongest predictors of outcome. The non-hypothesized role of Negations was explored and seemed to reflect that PD-patients miss a lot in their lives. Reduction of what they miss seems central to recovery. This issue seems relatively neglected in theoretical and treatment models of PDs. An increased focus on what patients miss in their lives might improve our understanding and treatment of PDs. In sum, Negative Emotion and Negation word categories appear to reflect key treatment targets.     

Integration of pragmatic and phonetic cues in spoken word recognition

Although previous research has established that multiple top-down factors guide the identification of words during speech processing, the ultimate range of information sources that listeners integrate from different levels of linguistic structure is still unknown. In a set of experiments, we investigate whether comprehenders can integrate information from the 2 most disparate domains: pragmatic inference and phonetic perception. Using contexts that trigger pragmatic expectations regarding upcoming coreference (expectations for either he or she), we test listeners' identification of phonetic category boundaries (using acoustically ambiguous words on the /hi/～/∫i/ continuum). The results indicate that, in addition to phonetic cues, word recognition also reflects pragmatic inference. These findings are consistent with evidence for top-down contextual effects from lexical, syntactic, and semantic cues, but they extend this previous work by testing cues at the pragmatic level and by eliminating a statistical-frequency confound that might otherwise explain the previously reported results. We conclude by exploring the time course of this interaction and discussing how different models of cue integration could be adapted to account for our results.     

The role of the executive functions in school achievement at the end of Grade 1

The aim of this study was to determine the role of executive functions (EFs) in early school achievement when a variety of potential confounding factors were controlled. Measures of EF (inhibition, flexibility, and working memory) and school readiness were administered to a sample of 85 kindergartners (39 boys and 46 girls, 5-6 years old). School achievement was then assessed at the end of Grade 1. Results show math and reading/writing skills at the end of Grade 1 to be associated with kindergarten EFs. Only working memory contributed uniquely to the variance in school achievement after all covariates (preacademic abilities, affective variables, and family variables) were controlled and, even then, only with respect to math skills. On the other hand, working memory and inhibition had an indirect effect on reading/writing skills via anger-aggression. EF implication in school achievement is discussed in terms of task demands and child age.     

Young infants' eye movements over "natural" scenes and "experimental" scenes

Eye movements of 30 4-month-olds were tracked as infants viewed animals and vehicles in “natural” scenes and, for comparison, in homogeneous “experimental” scenes. Infants showed equivalent looking time preferences for natural and experimental scenes overall, but fixated natural scenes and objects in natural scenes more than experimental scenes and objects in experimental scenes and shifted fixations between objects and contexts more in natural than in experimental scenes. The findings show how infants treat objects and contexts in natural scenes and suggest that they treat more commonly used experimental scenes differently.     

Emotional speech processing: disentangling the effects of prosody and semantic cues

To inform how emotions in speech are implicitly processed and registered in memory, we compared how emotional prosody, emotional semantics, and both cues in tandem prime decisions about conjoined emotional faces. Fifty-two participants rendered facial affect decisions (Pell, 2005a), indicating whether a target face represented an emotion (happiness or sadness) or not (a facial grimace), after passively listening to happy, sad, or neutral prime utterances. Emotional information from primes was conveyed by: (1) prosody only; (2) semantic cues only; or (3) combined prosody and semantic cues. Results indicated that prosody, semantics, and combined prosody-semantic cues facilitate emotional decisions about target faces in an emotion-congruent manner. However, the magnitude of priming did not vary across tasks. Our findings highlight that emotional meanings of prosody and semantic cues are systematically registered during speech processing, but with similar effects on associative knowledge about emotions, which is presumably shared by prosody, semantics, and faces.     

An Assessment of Time Involved in Pre-test Case Review and Counseling for a Whole Genome Sequencing Clinical Research Program

Whole genome sequencing (WGS) is being used for evaluation of individuals with undiagnosed disease of suspected genetic origin. Implementing WGS into clinical practice will place an increased burden upon care teams with regard to pre-test patient education and counseling about results. To quantitate the time needed for appropriate pre-test evaluation of participants in WGS testing, we documented the time spent by our clinical research group on various activities related to program preparation, participant screening, and consent prior to WGS. Participants were children or young adults with autism, intellectual or developmental disability, and/or congenital anomalies, who have remained undiagnosed despite previous evaluation, and their biologic parents. Results showed that significant time was spent in securing allocation of clinical research space to counsel participants and families, and in acquisition and review of participant’s medical records. Pre-enrollment chart review identified two individuals with existing diagnoses resulting in savings of $30,000 for the genome sequencing alone, as well as saving hours of personnel time for genome interpretation and communication of WGS results. New WGS programs should plan for costs associated with additional pre-test administrative planning and patient evaluation time that will be required to provide high quality care.