Sedentary Lifestyle Matters as Past Sedentariness, Not Current Sedentariness, Predicts Cognitive Inhibition Performance among College Students: An Exploratory Study.

Background: Currently, sedentariness is assessed over a short period of time, thus it is difficult to study its cognitive implications. To investigate the cognitive consequences of a sedentary lifestyle, the past level (i.e., the sedentary time accumulated over the years) and current level of sedentariness should be considered. This pilot study aimed to investigate the negative association between a sedentary lifestyle and cognition by considering both the current and past sedentariness. It was expected that the physical activity level moderates the potential negative association between sedentariness and cognition. Methods: 52 college students (Mage = 20.19, SDage = 2; 36 women) participated in the study. Current sedentariness (ratio of sedentary time in the last year), past sedentariness (ratio of sedentary time accumulated in previous years), and physical activity (ratio of time spent in physical activity in years) were assessed using a questionnaire. Cognitive inhibition, cognitive flexibility, and working memory updating were measured through three specific tests. Results: Past sedentariness significantly explained the inhibition performance when controlled for physical activity, whereas current sedentariness did not. More precisely, past sedentariness only negatively predicted cognitive inhibition when the physical activity level was low (ß = -3.15, z(48) = -2.62, p = 0.01). Conclusions: The impact of sedentariness on cognitive functioning might only be revealed when past sedentariness and physical activity are controlled.

Sedentary Behavior at Work and Cognitive Functioning: A Systematic Review.

Background: It is now well-established that sedentarity has a negative impact on the physiological functioning and health of humans, whereas very little is known about the psychological repercussions, especially in cognitive functioning. Yet, studying the cognitive effects of the sedentary lifestyle is particularly relevant in the short term for productivity and in the long term for cognitive health (accelerated aging). This systematic review therefore aims to make an inventory of the potential cognitive effects of sedentarity at the workplace. Methods: Pubmed, PsycINFO, Cochrane, Web of Science, and Scopus were searched for English-language peer-reviewed articles published between January 1, 2000 and December 31, 2017 to identify studies including sedentary behavior and objective measures from cognitive domains (cognitive inhibition, cognitive flexibility, working memory, etc.). To carry out this systematic review, the 3 keywords "Sedentary" and "Cognition" and "Work" (and their derivatives) had to appear in the title or in the summary of the paper. Results: Of the 13 papers that met the inclusion criteria, 9 were short-term interventions, 3 medium-term interventions, and 1 long-term intervention. Nine of them reported non-significant results. Two studies study reported deterioration in cognitive performance. Two reported an improvement in performance in cognitive tasks with one study with overweight adults and the only one study with a long-term intervention. However, these studies intend to reduce sedentary behavior, but do not allow answering the question of the potential cognitive effects of the sedentary lifestyle. Conclusion: These data suggest that sedentary behavior is not associated with changes in cognitive performance in interventions that intend to reduce sedentary behavior. Then, and given the trend toward increased time in sedentary behavior, long-term prospective studies of high methodological quality are recommended to clarify the relationships between sedentary behavior and the cognitive functioning. Our systematic review identifies also the need for retrospective, longitudinal, or epidemiologic studies. It also recognizes the need to standardize methodology for collecting, defining, and reporting sedentary behavior and the need to standardize the cognitive tests used. The relationship between sedentary behavior and cognitive functioning remaining uncertain, further studies are warranted for which 8 recommendations are proposed.

'Do Well B.': Design Of WELL Being monitoring systems. A study protocol for the application in autism.

INTRODUCTION: Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have difficulties in communication and social interaction resulting from atypical perceptual and cognitive information processing, leading to an accumulation of anxiety. Extreme overloading experienced internally may not be externally visible. Identifying stressful situations at an early stage may avoid socially problematic behaviour from occurring, such as self-injurious behaviour. Activation of the autonomous nervous system (ANS) is involved in the response to anxiety, which can be measured through heart rate variability and skin conductance with the use of portable devices, non-intrusively and pain-free. Thus, developing innovative analysis of signal perception and reaction is necessary, mainly for non-communicative individuals with autism. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: The protocol will take place in real life (home and social environments). We aim to associate modifications of the ANS with external events that will be recorded in a synchronous manner through a specific design (spy glasses with video/audio recording). Four phases will be carried out on ASD participants and aged-matched controls: (1) 24-hour baseline pre-experiment (physical activity, sleep), (2) 2 h in a real life situation, (3) 30 min in a quiet environment, interrupted by a few seconds of stressful sound, (4) an interview to record feelings about events triggering anxiety. ASD and control participants will be together for phases 2 and 3, revealing different physiological responses to the same situations, and thus identifying potentially problematic events. The novelty will be to apply time-series analyses (which led to several Nobel Prizes in quantitative finance) on ANS series (heart rate, heart rate variability, skin conductance) and wrist motion. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: Ethical approval has been obtained from Ethics Committee of Clermont-Ferrand (South-East I), France (2014-A00611-46). Trial findings will be disseminated via open-access peer-reviewed publications, conferences, clinical networks, public lectures and our websites. TRIAL REGISTRATION NUMBER: ClinicalTrials identifier NCT02275455.

Dopamine replacement therapy and deep brain stimulation of the subthalamic nuclei induce modulation of emotional processes at different spatial frequencies in Parkinson's disease.

BACKGROUND: Deep brain stimulation of the subthalamic nuclei (STN-DBS) is an effective treatment for the most severe forms of Parkinson's disease (PD) and is intended to suppress these patients' motor symptoms. However, be it in association with Dopamine Replacement Therapy (DRT) or not, STN-DBS may in some cases induce addictive or emotional disorders. OBJECTIVE: In the current study, we suggest that PD patients suffer from emotional deficits that have not been revealed in previous studies because in those experiments the stimuli were displayed for a time long enough to allow patients to have recourse to perceptual strategies in order to recognize the emotional facial expressions (EFE). METHODS: The aim of the current article is to demonstrate the existence of emotional disorders in PD by using a rapid presentation of the visual stimuli (200-ms display time) which curtails their perceptual analysis, and to determine whether STN-DBS, either associated or not associated with DRT, has an impact on the recognition of emotions. RESULTS: The results show that EFE recognition performance depends on both STN-DBS ('on' vs. 'off') and medication ('on' vs. 'off'), but also that these variables have an interactive influence on EFE recognition performance. Moreover, we also reveal how these EFE impairments depend on different spatial frequencies perceptual channels (related to different cortical vs. subcortical neural structures). CONCLUSIONS: The effect of PD without therapy seems to be particularly acute for LSF emotional faces, possibly due to a subcortical dysfunction. However, our results indicate that the joint action of STN-DBS and DRT could also disrupt recognition of emotional expressions at the level of occipito-temporal cortical areas (processing HSF visual information) inducing broad global impairment of EFE at the level of HSF visual channels.

Rapid Presentation of Emotional Expressions Reveals New Emotional Impairments in Tourette's Syndrome.

OBJECTIVE: Based on a variety of empirical evidence obtained within the theoretical framework of embodiment theory, we considered it likely that motor disorders in Tourette's syndrome (TS) would have emotional consequences for TS patients. However, previous research using emotional facial categorization tasks suggests that these consequences are limited to TS patients with obsessive-compulsive behaviors (OCB). METHOD: These studies used long stimulus presentations which allowed the participants to categorize the different emotional facial expressions (EFEs) on the basis of a perceptual analysis that might potentially hide a lack of emotional feeling for certain emotions. In order to reduce this perceptual bias, we used a rapid visual presentation procedure. RESULTS: Using this new experimental method, we revealed different and surprising impairments on several EFEs in TS patients compared to matched healthy control participants. Moreover, a spatial frequency analysis of the visual signal processed by the patients suggests that these impairments may be located at a cortical level. CONCLUSION: The current study indicates that the rapid visual presentation paradigm makes it possible to identify various potential emotional disorders that were not revealed by the standard visual presentation procedures previously reported in the literature. Moreover, the spatial frequency analysis performed in our study suggests that emotional deficit in TS might lie at the level of temporal cortical areas dedicated to the processing of HSF visual information.

The combined effect of subthalamic nuclei deep brain stimulation and L-dopa increases emotion recognition in Parkinson's disease.

Deep brain stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus (DBS) is a widely used surgical technique to suppress motor symptoms in Parkinson's disease (PD), and as such improves patients' quality of life. However, DBS may produce emotional disorders such as a reduced ability to recognize emotional facial expressions (EFE). Previous studies have not considered the fact that DBS and l-dopa medication can have differential, common, or complementary consequences on EFE processing. A thorough way of investigating the effect of DBS and l-dopa medication in greater detail is to compare patients' performances after surgery, with the two therapies either being administered ('on') or not administered ('off'). We therefore used a four-condition (l-dopa 'on'/DBS 'on', l-dopa 'on'/DBS 'off', l-dopa 'off'/DBS 'on', and l-dopa 'off'/DBS 'off') EFE recognition paradigm and compared implanted PD patients to healthy controls. The results confirmed those of previous studies, yielding a significant impairment in the detection of some facial expressions relative to controls. Disgust recognition was impaired when patients were 'off' l-dopa and 'on' DBS, and fear recognition impaired when 'off' of both therapies. More interestingly, the combined effect of both DBS and l-dopa administration seems much more beneficial for EFE recognition than the separate administration of each individual therapy. We discuss the implications of these findings in the light of the inverted U curve function that describes the differential effects of dopamine level on the right orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). We propose that, while l-dopa could "overdose" in dopamine the ventral stream of the OFC, DBS would compensate for this over-activation by decreasing OFC activity, thereby restoring the necessary OFC-amygdala interaction. Another finding is that, when collapsing over all treatment conditions, PD patients recognized more neutral faces than the matched controls, a result that concurs with embodiment theories.

Adult attitudes toward behaviors of a six-year-old boy with autism.

Parents report that their children with autism are often judged as undisciplined and rude (e.g., Peeters, Autism: From theoretical understanding to educational intervention, 1997). The phenomenon of a negative view of individuals with autism was studied here. Four behaviors (two problematic and two non-problematic) produced by a six-year-old child with autism were assessed on social, emotional, and cognitive dimensions by 88 adults in an "informed" or "uninformed" condition. The child was perceived more positively when identified as having autism. However, this effect was dependent on the type of behavior and the evaluative dimension used. The results indicate that the mere fact of being informed of a child's disability triggers the use of a different standard of comparison than that employed to evaluate typical children (Mussweiler and Strack, J Pers Soc Psychol 78:1038-1052, 2000).

Fictitious Academic Expertise and Processing Resources.

A previous study showed that pairs of students interacting in a second language produced more words when they were assigned a fictitious expert position in a specific competence dimension than when they were assigned a nonexpert position. It has also been shown that the usual level of expertise has an impact on the assigned fictitious expertise effect. The present study was designed to determine whether the processing capacity allotted to the current task could partly determine performance. A given position of expertise may demand a large or small attentional capacity. Two experiments were conducted using a dual-task paradigm. As expected, the different expertise positions led to different reaction times on the secondary task. The second experiment showed that the impact of assigning a position of expertise to students depends on their usual academic standing. This study supports the idea that in interactive situations, performance variations as a function of the expertise position can be partially explained by differences in the processing resources allocated to the task. Implications for teaching are discussed. Copyright 2001 Academic Press.