Screening utility of the social anxiety screening scale in Spanish speaking adolescents

The aim of this study was to analyse the screening utility of the Social Anxiety Screening Scale (SASS/EDAS) in a sample of 227 adolescents with social anxiety disorder and 156 Without it (14-17 years). Results showed that the EDAS subscales (Avoidance, Distress and Interference) scores were reliable in terms of internal consistency (alpha > .80). All the subscales discriminated between adolescents with and without the disorder. They also showed a positive and significant correlation with other empirically validated measures of social anxiety. The three subscales indicated relevant sensitivity (69.16-84.14%), specificity (63.46-66.03%) and areas under the curve (.74-.81%). Binary logistic regression analyses indicated the adequate predictive utility of EDAS subscales, with the Distress subscale as the best diagnostic predictor. The data provide empirical evidence of the usefulness of EDAS as a screener for adolescent social anxiety disorder in terms of reliability, convergent and discriminant validity, diagnostic accuracy and clinical usefulness.     

Self-recognition and self-regulation: the relationship with socialization trajectories and children's sex

The initial process of self development involves interaction with others and the establishment of relationships taking different paths depending on the socio-cultural context. Self-recognition and self-regulation are considered manifestations of this development between 18 and 24 months of age. This study aimed at analyzing the relationship between these two aspects, maternal beliefs about autonomy and relatedness, as well as identifying differences between boys and girls in this developmental stage. Participants were 94 mothers of different educational levels and their children of 17-22 months of age in two Brazilian cities. Socialization Goals Inventory and Parental Practices in the First Year Inventory were used to collect data on mothers' beliefs. Children performed tasks related to self-recognition (the mirror test) and self-regulation (compliance to requests). The group of mothers studied valued both autonomy and interdependence. Children's responses are consistent with a perspective of relational autonomy, which value both independence and interdependence. Differences were found in relation to sex in both self-recognition and self-regulation, and baby girls showed superior performance than boys in both tasks.     

The memory failures of everyday questionnaire (MFE): internal consistency and reliability

The Memory Failures of Everyday Questionnaire (MFE) is one of the most widely-used instruments to assess memory failures in daily life. The original scale has nine response options, making it difficult to apply; we created a three-point scale (0-1-2) with response choices that make it easier to administer. We examined the two versions' equivalence in a sample of 193 participants between 19 and 64 years of age. The test-retest reliability and internal consistency of the version we propose were also computed in a sample of 113 people. Several indicators attest to the two forms' equivalence: the correlation between the items' means (r = .94; p < .001) and the order of the items' frequencies (r = .92; p < .001). However, the correlation between global scores on the two forms was not very high (r = .67; p < .001). The results indicate this new version has adequate reliability and internal consistency (r(xx) = .83; p < .001; alpha = .83; p < .001) equivalent to those of the MFE 1-9. The MFE 0-2 provides a brief, simple evaluation, so we recommend it for use in clinical practice as well as research.     

Psychological morbidity, illness representations, and quality of life in female and male patients with obstructive sleep apnea syndrome

Obstructive sleep apnea syndrome (OSAS) is a sleep-related breathing disorder that affects both women and men. The aim of this study was to characterize and investigate the differences in terms of anxiety, depression, illness perception, and quality of life between female and male OSAS patients from a total of 111 patients (33 women and 78 men) who were recently diagnosed with OSAS in an outpatient clinic of a University Hospital in Portugal. They underwent a standardized protocol that included evaluation to assess of psychological morbidity (anxiety and depression - Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale), illness representations (Brief Illness Perception Questionnaire), and quality of life (Sleep Apnea Quality of Life Index). The most significant differences between female and male OSAS patients result of apnea/hypopnea index (AHI), after controlling for body mass index (p?相似文献   

Congruent visual information improves traffic signage

In the last five decades, cognitive scientists and the psychologists of reasoning have dedicated a lot of effort designing usable traffic signs. This study investigated the interference effect produced by the position of the sign elements in traffic signage on response accuracy and reaction time. Sixteen drivers performed a flanker interference reaction time task. Incongruent graphical/space solutions, actually used for the airport stack-type sign, lead to increased reaction time and a reduction in the proportion of correct answers. These results suggest that incongruent visual information should be avoided, as this might impair drivers’ performance. These findings provide important information for the specification of future signage design guidelines and for improving road safety.     

Box for interaction with objects (BIO): A new device to synchronize the presentation of objects with electrophysiological recordings

Brain event-related potentials are a useful tool for investigating visual processing and action planning. This technique requires extremely accurate synchronization of stimulus delivery with recordings. The precision of the onset time of visual stimulus delivery is a major challenge when attempting to use real, three-dimensional objects as stimuli. Here, we present an innovative device, the “box for interaction with objects” (BIO), that is designed to synchronize the presentation of objects with electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings. To reach the required resolution of stimulus-onset timing, the BIO system features an interface with reflective glass and light-emitting diodes (LEDs). When the LEDs inside the BIO are turned on, the object inside becomes visible, and a synchronizing pulse is sent to the recording systems. The BIO was tested in a motivational study that focused on visual and motor event-related potentials. EEG signals were recorded during the presentation of an emotion-laden object that could be grasped and brought close to the participant’s chest. BIO successfully synchronized the appearance of a three-dimensional object with EEG recordings, which would allow for an analysis of visual and motor event-related potentials in the same experiment. The BIO device, through a high-quality psychophysiological approach, offers a new perspective for the study of the motivational factors that drive actions toward relevant stimuli.     

Unified framework for recognition, localization and mapping using wearable cameras

Monocular approaches to simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) have recently addressed with success the challenging problem of the fast computation of dense reconstructions from a single, moving camera. Thus, if these approaches initially relied on the detection of a reduced set of interest points to estimate the camera position and the map, they are currently able to reconstruct dense maps from a handheld camera while the camera coordinates are simultaneously computed. However, these maps of 3-dimensional points usually remain meaningless, that is, with no memorable items and without providing a way of encoding spatial relationships between objects and paths. In humans and mobile robotics, landmarks play a key role in the internalization of a spatial representation of an environment. They are memorable cues that can serve to define a region of the space or the location of other objects. In a topological representation of the space, landmarks can be identified and located according to its structural, perceptive or semantic significance and distinctiveness. But on the other hand, landmarks may be difficult to be located in a metric representation of the space. Restricted to the domain of visual landmarks, this work describes an approach where the map resulting from a point-based, monocular SLAM is annotated with the semantic information provided by a set of distinguished landmarks. Both features are obtained from the image. Hence, they can be linked by associating to each landmark all those point-based features that are superimposed to the landmark in a given image (key-frame). Visual landmarks will be obtained by means of an object-based, bottom-up attention mechanism, which will extract from the image a set of proto-objects. These proto-objects could not be always associated with natural objects, but they will typically constitute significant parts of these scene objects and can be appropriately annotated with semantic information. Moreover, they will be affine covariant regions, that is, they will be invariant to affine transformation, being detected under different viewing conditions (view-point angle, rotation, scale, etc.). Monocular SLAM will be solved using the accurate parallel tracking and mapping (PTAM) framework by Klein and Murray in Proceedings of IEEE/ACM international symposium on mixed and augmented reality, 2007.     

Effects of non-symbolic numerical information suggest the existence of magnitude-space synesthesia

In number-space synesthesia, numbers are visualized in spatially defined arrays. In a recent study (Gertner et al. in Cortex, doi: 10.1016/j.cortex.2012.03.019 , 2012), we found that the size congruency effect (SiCE) for physical judgments (i.e., comparing numbers' physical sizes while ignoring their numerical values, for example, 8) was modulated by the spatial position of the presented numbers. Surprisingly, we found that the neutral condition, which is comprise solely of physical sizes (e.g., 3), was affected as well. This pattern gave rise to the idea that number-space synesthesia might entail not only discrete, ordered, meaningful symbols (i.e., Arabic numbers) but also continuous non-symbolic magnitudes (i.e., sizes, length, luminance, etc.). We tested this idea by assessing the performance of two number-space synesthetes and 12 matched controls in 3 comparative judgment tasks involving symbolic and non-symbolic stimuli: (1) Arabic numbers, (2) dot clusters, and (3) sizes of squares. The spatial position of the presented stimuli was manipulated to be compatible or incompatible with respect to the synesthetic number-space perceptions. Results revealed that for synesthetes, but not for controls, non-symbolic magnitudes (dot clusters) as well as symbolic magnitudes (i.e., Arabic numbers) interacted with space. Our study suggests that number-space synesthetes might have a general magnitude-space association that is not restricted to concrete symbolic stimuli. These findings support recent theories on the perception and evaluation of sizes in numerical cognition.