Short-Term Repeatability of Stabilometric Assessments

The authors evaluated the short-term (within-day, between-days) repeatability of center of pressure (COP) displacements. COP sway area and speed were obtained in the morning and afternoon of two separate days, both with open (EO) and closed (EC) eyes, in 10 healthy adults. Agreement and variability among conditions were tested by ANOVA and Bland-Altman plots. Mode (EO/EC, area: p = .032; speed: p < .004), and day (day1/day2, area: p = .006; speed: p = .02) showed significant differences. The EC condition and the second test day showed the largest values, with medium-large effect sizes. Time-of-day did not influence COP displacements. Speed had better agreement than area (Bland-Altman plots). COP displacements were well reproducible within-day, but had significant between-days variations. COP assessments should be performed in the same session.     

Facilitating empathy through virtual reality

This research experimentally investigated whether virtual reality experience can prompt greater empathy and whether greater engagement with a virtual reality connects this virtual reality experience to empathy. Randomly assigned participants viewed a documentary featuring a young girl living in a refugee camp either in a virtual reality format or in a control two-dimensional format. Results indicated that the virtual reality experience resulted in greater engagement and a higher level of empathy for the refugee girl compared to the control condition. Greater engagement was a process connecting the virtual reality experience to empathy. Virtual reality has the potential to influence interpersonal emotions such as empathy.     

A Kid-Friendly Tool to Assess Rumination in Children and Early Adolescents: Relationships with Mother Psychopathology and Family Functioning

The early identification of ruminative processes in children and early adolescents is particularly important to prevent the development of a stable ruminative style in later stages of development. The present study first aimed at validating a child-friendly tool, Kid Rumination Interview (KRI), to be used in a sample aged 7–12 years (n?=?100; 50% females). Second, we hypothesized that maternal depression, family functioning and participants’ emotion regulation skills would be associated with children’ levels of rumination. Factor analysis on KRI scores yielded two main factors: personal life-related rumination and school-related rumination. Older and female participants showed higher tendencies to ruminate about school issues compared to their younger and male counterparts. A low-to-moderate correlation emerged between school-related rumination and child/early adolescent’s emotion regulation capacities. Mothers’ depressive rumination and mothers’ depressive symptoms were positively associated with children/early adolescents’ rumination about personal life and rumination about school issues. Conversely, an adequate and positive family functioning was negatively correlated with both school-related rumination and rumination about personal life. Hierarchical regression analyses pointed to a crucial role of maternal rumination and familiar rigidity in both types of rumination. Personal life-related rumination was also specifically predicted by maternal depression and family enmeshment, whereas school-related rumination was significantly associated with children/early adolescents’ emotional control and gender. Overall, the KRI appears as a promising tool to assess rumination in children/early adolescents. Results suggests partially different pathways to specific forms of ruminative thoughts.     

Investigating the outcome of the initial assessment at a national transgender health service: Time to review the process?

Background: Globally, there is a lack of a standardized assessment process prior to the initiation of gender affirming medical interventions and consequently there is a discrepancy in this process among different transgender health services.

Aim: The main objective of this study is to investigate the outcome of the initial assessment process at a national transgender health service.

Method: The outcome of people over the age of 17 years, assessed at a large national transgender health service in the United Kingdom during a 2-year period was categorized into: (1) recommendation for cross-sex hormone treatment, or (2) no recommendation for cross-sex hormone treatment. In addition, 200 case notes were reviewed in order to investigate the level of agreement between the two clinicians involved in the assessment process.

Results: During the study period, a total number of 617 people completed their assessment at the service. Following assessment 380 (61.6%) patients were recommended for cross-sex hormone treatment, leaving 237 (38.4%) patients who required a longer assessment period or were discharged. The factors associated with being recommended for cross-sex hormone treatment were having socially transitioned, not smoking, having initiated cross-sex hormones prior to assessment, being older, and assigned male at birth. Out of the 200 case notes reviewed, agreement between assessor 1 and 2 (3 months apart) was found in 88% (n = 176) of the cases.

Discussion: Although the results of the study may not be generalizable to other international centers, questioning the assessment process and the role of the assessors is important to ensure treatment is offered in a timely and efficient manner. The findings from this study suggest that the routine inclusion of two assessors needs to be reviewed.     

GreekLex: A lexical database of Modern Greek

To conduct experimental investigations into the orthographic processing of Modern Greek, information is needed about the lexical properties known to influence visual word recognition. In this article we introduce GreekLex, a lexical database for Modern Greek, which presents collectively for the first time a series of orthographic measures that can be used for psycholinguistic research. GreekLex consists of 35,304 Modern Greek words ranging in length from 1 to 22 letters, and for each word includes the following statistical information: word length, word-form frequency, lemma frequency, neighborhood density and frequency, transposition neighbors, and addition and deletion neighbors. Furthermore, type and token frequency measures of single letters and bigrams derived from the database are also available. The complete database can be accessed and downloaded freely from www.psychology.nottingham.ac.uk/GreekLex.     

The influence of context‐specific and dispositional achievement goals on children's paired collaborative interaction

Background . Research has demonstrated that working collaboratively can have positive effects on children's learning. While key factors have been identified which influence the quality of these interactions, little research has addressed the influence of children's achievement goals on collaborative behaviour. Aims . This paper investigates the influence of mastery and performance goals on the nature of children's collaborative participation while playing a problem‐solving computer game with a peer. Sample . Forty‐eight primary schoolchildren aged 8–10 years were divided into two groups: those displaying strong personal goal preferences (dispositional group: N = 14) and those whose goal preferences were context‐dependent, displaying no consistent bias for either mastery or performance goals (context‐dependent: N = 34). Children were paired on the basis of same gender, year group, and goal orientation. Method . Context‐dependent pairs were assigned to either a mastery or a performance condition in which they received goal‐focused instructions. Dispositional pairs received only the instructions to collaborate given to all groups. Collaborative sessions were videotaped and interactions coded. Results . Children who were assigned mastery goals engaged in significantly more elaborated problem‐solving discussion whilst children who were assigned performance goals engaged in more executive help seeking and displayed lower levels of metacognitive control. Dispositional pairs shared some similar patterns, according to goal orientation, as context‐dependent pairs. Conclusions . Goal‐focused instructions can be used to influence the nature and quality of children's paired interactions. Instructing children towards mastery goals appears to promote a more collaborative style of interaction.     

Anaphoric agreement violation: an ERP analysis of its interpretation

In the present study we analyzed the processing of grammatically anomalous sentences like "The famous dancer were nervously preparing herself/themselves to face the crowd.", which contains two anomalies, one early and one late. We investigated how processing of the later anomaly (at the pronoun 'herself' or 'themselves') was affected by the processing of the early anomaly (at 'were'). We considered two processing scenarios involving the first anomaly: (1) The representation of the subject-verb number agreement error at the first verb is coerced to match the verb, rendering 'herself' anomalous; (2) The representation of the subject-verb agreement error is coerced to match the subject noun, rendering 'themselves' anomalous. Our dependent measure was event-related scalp potentials (ERPs). When the pronoun disagreed with the verb (and agreed with the subject), a P600 was recorded, while the opposite condition elicited no reliable effect. Our data suggest that interpretation of reflexive pronouns involves the reactivation of multiple lexical items, verbs included.     

Whistle rates of wild bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus): influences of group size and behavior

In large social groups acoustic communication signals are prone to signal masking by conspecific sounds. Bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) use highly distinctive signature whistles that counter masking effects. However, they can be found in very large groups where masking by conspecific sounds may become unavoidable. In this study we used passive acoustic localization to investigate how whistle rates of wild bottlenose dolphins change in relation to group size and behavioral context. We found that individual whistle rates decreased when group sizes got larger. Dolphins displayed higher whistle rates in contexts when group members were more dispersed as in socializing and in nonpolarized movement than during coordinated surface travel. Using acoustic localization showed that many whistles were produced by groups nearby and not by our focal group. Thus, previous studies based on single hydrophone recordings may have been overestimating whistle rates. Our results show that although bottlenose dolphins whistle more in social situations they also decrease vocal output in large groups where the potential for signal masking by other dolphin whistles increases.