Coping with asymmetry: How infants and adults walk with one elongated leg

The stability of a system affects how it will handle a perturbation: The system may compensate for the perturbation or not. This study examined how 14-month-old infants—notoriously unstable walkers—and adults cope with a perturbation to walking. We attached a platform to one of participants’ shoes, forcing them to walk with one elongated leg. At first, the platform shoe caused both age groups to slow down and limp, and caused infants to misstep and fall. But after a few trials, infants altered their gait to compensate for the platform shoe whereas adults did not; infants recovered symmetrical gait whereas adults continued to limp. Apparently, adult walking was stable enough to cope with the perturbation, but infants risked falling if they did not compensate. Compensation depends on the interplay of multiple factors: The availability of a compensatory response, the cost of compensation, and the stability of the system being perturbed.     

Testing Children’s Mentalizing in Middle Childhood: Adopting the Child and Adolescent Reflective Functioning Scale with Clinical and Community Children

Journal of Child and Family Studies - Beginning with Ensink’s seminal study (2015), the field entered a new era in which we were able to measure mentalizing in school-aged children. The goal...     

Gratitude for Categories of Needs Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Journal of Happiness Studies - This naturalistic observation study investigated the influence of broad societal events such as the COVID-19 pandemic on public expressions of gratitude....     

Differential effects of a visual illusion on online visual guidance in a stable environment and online adjustments to perturbations

In the reported, experiment participants hit a ball to aim at the vertex of a Müller–Lyer configuration. This configuration either remained stable, changed its shaft length or the orientation of the tails during movement execution. A significant illusion bias was observed in all perturbation conditions, but not in the stationary condition. The illusion bias emerged for perturbations shortly after movement onset and for perturbations during execution, the latter of which allowed only a minimum of time for making adjustments (i.e., approx.170 ms). These findings indicate that allocentric information is exploited for online control when people make rapid adjustments in response to a sudden change in the environment and not when people guide their limb movements to interact with a stable environment.     

Resilience and successful community reintegration among female forensic psychiatric patients: a preliminary investigation

Research on resiliency and recovery in forensic psychiatric patients is still limited. Information pertaining to factors associated with successful community reintegration would contribute to a more comprehensive assessment of functioning and informed treatment planning that fits within a recovery approach of service provision. Using a retrospective design involving file reviews and a 3-year follow-up period, the authors investigated the rate of successful/unsuccessful community reintegration (defined by the presence or absence of an absolute discharge/readmission to hospital) in female forensic psychiatric patients (N = 48). The study evaluated the extent to which the risk and protective factors captured in the Short-Term Assessment of Risk and Treatability (START) predicted a range of positive and negative outcomes in the study sample. Results showed that 47.9% of the women qualified as having successfully reintegrated into the community, with the remaining 52.1% qualifying as still being in recovery. Successful individuals possessed significantly more protective factors and significantly fewer risk factors than individuals still in recovery. Furthermore, both the vulnerability and the strength scale of the START demonstrated good predictive validity, however we did not find evidence of incremental validity of the strength scale. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Delayed auditory feedback and movement

It is well known that timing of rhythm production is disrupted by delayed auditory feedback (DAF), and that disruption varies with delay length. We tested the hypothesis that disruption depends on the state of the movement trajectory at the onset of DAF. Participants tapped isochronous rhythms at a rate specified by a metronome while hearing DAF (for piano tones) of differing lengths. Motion capture was used to analyze movement trajectories. Mean Inter-Response Intervals (IRIs) varied as an approximately sinusoidal function of feedback condition, with DAF causing slowed production for shorter delays and speeded production for faster delays. Motion capture analyses revealed that finger velocity at the time of DAF predicted the effect of DAF on mean IRI whereas finger position predicted the variability of IRIs. A second experiment in which participants were instructed to vary the timing of peak finger height confirmed that the effect of DAF on timing variability is directly influenced by the finger trajectory.     

Can the onset of type 2 diabetes be delayed by a group-based lifestyle intervention? A randomised control trial

This study was a randomised control trial with a waiting control group. It was designed to evaluate the effectiveness of a 6-month, group-based diabetes prevention programme, The Healthy Living Course and assess whether participation in the programme led to changes in modifiable risk factors for type 2 diabetes among an already at-risk pre-diabetic population. Individuals designated at risk for diabetes by their general practitioners (GPs) were screened using an Oral Glucose Tolerance Test. Volunteers (N = 307) with pre-diabetes were assigned to an intervention or wait-control group in the ratio of approximately 2 : 1. The sample was pre-tested on biochemical, anthropometric and self-report behavioural, cognitive and mood variables and post-tested either at the end of the educational/support-based lifestyle programme or the end of the wait period. The intervention group significantly improved their diabetes knowledge, motivation to change, positive affect, healthy eating and activity levels and showed significantly greater reductions in weight, body mass index, waist circumference, diastolic blood pressure and fasting plasma glucose in comparison with controls. The intervention group also changed their diagnostic status from pre-diabetes to non-diabetes at a greater rate than the wait group (43% vs. 26%) who received standard care from their GPs.     

Representing others' actions: the role of expertise in the aging mind

A large body of evidence suggests that action execution and action observation share a common representational domain. To date, little is known about age-related changes in these action representations that are assumed to support various abilities such as the prediction of observed actions. The purpose of the present study was to investigate (a) how age affects the ability to predict the time course of observed actions; and (b) whether and to what extent sensorimotor expertise attenuates age-related declines in prediction performance. In a first experiment, older adults predicted the time course of familiar everyday actions less precisely than younger adults. In a second experiment, younger and older figure skating experts as well as age-matched novices were asked to predict the time course of figure skating elements and simple movement exercises. Both young age and sensorimotor expertise had a positive influence on prediction performance of figure skating elements. The expertise-related benefit did not show a transfer to movement exercises. Together, the results suggest a specific decline of action representations in the aging mind. However, extensive sensorimotor experience seems to enable experts to represent actions from their domain of expertise more precisely even in older age.