Self- and observer ratings of capacity limitations in patients with neurological conditions.

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study was to compare the self- and observer ratings of capacity limitations in patients with neurological conditions. Research on this topic is relevant for assessing the patients' ability to participate in work and social life and improving collaborative patient-clinician relationships. METHOD: The self- and observer ratings of capacity limitations in a sample of N = 245 patients with neurological conditions from a rehabilitation facility were compared and assessed using the short rating of activity limitations and participation restrictions in mental disorders according to the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (Mini-ICF-APP) and the equivalent self-rating questionnaire (Mini-ICF-APP-S). RESULTS: Paired-samples t-tests revealed significant differences between the self- and observer ratings for six out of 13 capacity dimensions. On average, the patients rated the capacity dimensions adherence to regulations, planning and structuring of tasks, professional competency and endurance as significantly less limited, in comparison to the observers (small to medium effect sizes). The self-ratings for limitation of contact with others and self-care were only marginally higher than the observer ratings. CONCLUSIONS: The findings show that psychological capacity limitations occur in patients with neurological conditions. In clinical practice, limitations in each capacity dimension and discrepancies in patient- and clinician-ratings should be thoroughly assessed. This is especially relevant in patients with neurological conditions who have a potential tendency to underestimate or deny their disability.

Optic pathway glioma and the sex association in neurofibromatosis type 1: a single-center study.

BACKGROUND: Low-grade optic pathway glioma (OPG) develops in 15-20% of children with neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1). OPGs are symptomatic in 30-50% and one-third of these require treatment. A few studies have suggested female sex as a risk factor for visual impairment associated with NF1-OPG. This descriptive study investigated the correlation between NF1-OPG growth, sex and visual impairment. METHOD: We based our cross-sectional study on a systematic, retrospective data collection in a NF1 cohort of children and adolescents below 21 years of age followed at Center for Rare Diseases, Aarhus University Hospital, Denmark. For each patient with OPG a medical chart review was performed including demographics, ophthalmological examinations and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of OPG. RESULTS: Of 176 patients with NF1 (85 females, 91 males), we identified 21 patients with OPG (11.9%) with a preponderance of females, p = 0.184. Eight females (62%) and one male (13%) had visual impairment at the last ophthalmological evaluation. Five out of 21 children with OPG (24%) underwent diagnostic MRI because of clinical findings at the ophthalmological screening. Nine children (43%) had symptoms suggestive of OPG and seven (33%) experienced no OPG-related symptoms before the diagnostic MRI. Of eight children diagnosed with OPG ≤ two years of age, one had visual impairment. Of 13 children diagnosed > two years of age, eight had visual impairment; in each group, four of the children were treated with chemotherapy. The study suggested no correlation between NF1-OPG growth and sex. CONCLUSION: Our data suggest sex as a risk factor for visual impairment, while an OPG diagnose ≤ two years of age was a protective factor for visual impairment. Females with NF1-OPG had a higher prevalence of visual impairment outcome compared to males. Interestingly, our data also suggest a better response to treatment in children with OPG diagnosed ≤ two years of age compared to older children. The findings in our study suggest sex as a potential prognostic factor for visual impairment.

Mental health problem or workplace problem or something else: what contributes to work perception?

Purpose: Work perception is an important predictor for work ability and, therefore, of interest for rehabilitation. Until now it is unclear to which extent different psychological aspects explain work perception. This study investigates in which way workplace problems on the one hand, and mental health and coping on the other hand, contribute to work perception.Methods: A heterogeneous sample of 384 persons in working age with and without mental health problems was recruited. Participants gave self-reports on workplace problems, mental health problems, work-coping, work-anxiety, and work perception.Results: Persons with mental health problems and workplace problems (M + W) perceive the highest degree of work demands, followed by persons with workplace problems but without mental health problems (NM + W). Work-anxiety appeared as the strongest factor explaining perception of high work demands, whereas general mental health problems did not contribute significantly to variance explanation.Conclusions: Persons with specific mental health problems in terms of work-anxiety may be expected to perceive higher work demands. They may be detected when asking for work perception, e.g., within the frame of return-to-work interventions in rehabilitation, or in occupational health settings by mental hazard analysis.Implications for rehabilitationWork perception is an important predictor for work ability. Work-anxiety plays a key role for work perception. Thus, work perception and work anxiety should be explored in the diagnostic phase of rehabilitation treatments.Work-anxiety should be considered not only in rehabilitation diagnostics and interventions in clinical settings, but considered in preventive activities at work: Self-ratings on work-anxiety and work perception (instead of general wellbeing) may be included in assessments for workplace exploration, or mental hazard analysis. They give hints concerning concrete work-related health problems.

The Relationship between Emotion Comprehension and Internalizing and Externalizing Behavior in 7- to 10-Year-Old Children.

The influence of internalizing and externalizing problems on children's understanding of others' emotions has mainly been investigated on basic levels of emotion comprehension. So far, studies assessing more sophisticated levels of emotion comprehension reported deficits in the ability to understand others' emotions in children with severe internalizing or externalizing symptoms. The aim of this study was to investigate the relation between emotion comprehension and interindividual differences, with a focus on internalizing and externalizing behavior in children aged 7-10 years from the general population. A sample of 135 children was tested for emotion understanding using the Test of Emotion Comprehension. Information on internalizing and externalizing behavior was assessed with the Child Behavior Checklist 4/18. Age, bilingual upbringing, and amount of paternal working hours were significant control variables for emotion comprehension. In contrast to prior research, overall level of emotion understanding was not related to externalizing symptoms and correlated positively with elevated levels of somatic complaints and anxious/depressed symptoms. In addition, and in line with previous work, higher levels of social withdrawal were associated with worse performance in understanding emotions elicited by reminders. The present results implicate not only an altered understanding of emotions among more specific internalizing symptoms, but also that these alterations occur already on a low symptom level in a community based sample.

No Interrelation of Motor Planning and Executive Functions across Young Ages.

The present study examined the developmental trajectories of motor planning and executive functioning in children. To this end, we tested 217 participants with three motor tasks, measuring anticipatory planning abilities (i.e., the bar-transport-task, the sword-rotation-task and the grasp-height-task), and three cognitive tasks, measuring executive functions (i.e., the Tower-of-Hanoi-task, the Mosaic-task, and the D2-attention-endurance-task). Children were aged between 3 and 10 years and were separated into age groups by 1-year bins, resulting in a total of eight groups of children and an additional group of adults. Results suggested (1) a positive developmental trajectory for each of the sub-tests, with better task performance as children get older; (2) that the performance in the separate tasks was not correlated across participants in the different age groups; and (3) that there was no relationship between performance in the motor tasks and in the cognitive tasks used in the present study when controlling for age. These results suggest that both, motor planning and executive functions are rather heterogeneous domains of cognitive functioning with fewer interdependencies than often suggested.

COMADRE: a global data base of animal demography.

UNLABELLED: The open-data scientific philosophy is being widely adopted and proving to promote considerable progress in ecology and evolution. Open-data global data bases now exist on animal migration, species distribution, conservation status, etc. However, a gap exists for data on population dynamics spanning the rich diversity of the animal kingdom world-wide. This information is fundamental to our understanding of the conditions that have shaped variation in animal life histories and their relationships with the environment, as well as the determinants of invasion and extinction. Matrix population models (MPMs) are among the most widely used demographic tools by animal ecologists. MPMs project population dynamics based on the reproduction, survival and development of individuals in a population over their life cycle. The outputs from MPMs have direct biological interpretations, facilitating comparisons among animal species as different as Caenorhabditis elegans, Loxodonta africana and Homo sapiens. Thousands of animal demographic records exist in the form of MPMs, but they are dispersed throughout the literature, rendering comparative analyses difficult. Here, we introduce the COMADRE Animal Matrix Database, an open-data online repository, which in its version 1.0.0 contains data on 345 species world-wide, from 402 studies with a total of 1625 population projection matrices. COMADRE also contains ancillary information (e.g. ecoregion, taxonomy, biogeography, etc.) that facilitates interpretation of the numerous demographic metrics that can be derived from its MPMs. We provide R code to some of these examples. SYNTHESIS: We introduce the COMADRE Animal Matrix Database, a resource for animal demography. Its open-data nature, together with its ancillary information, will facilitate comparative analysis, as will the growing availability of databases focusing on other aspects of the rich animal diversity, and tools to query and combine them. Through future frequent updates of COMADRE, and its integration with other online resources, we encourage animal ecologists to tackle global ecological and evolutionary questions with unprecedented sample size.

Infant shy temperament predicts preschoolers Theory of Mind.

The aim of this longitudinal study was to investigate the relation between infant temperament at 18 months and early Theory of Mind (ToM) abilities at 3 years of age. Temperament was assessed with the Early Childhood Behavior Questionnaire (ECBQ) and ToM by assessing children's understanding of divergent desires and beliefs, and of knowledge access. Our results are in line with a social-emotional reactivity perspective postulating more sophisticated ToM abilities for children with less reactive more observant temperament. Children with shy temperament at 18 months and at 3 years were better in reasoning about others' mental states at age 3. Language, siblings and parental education had no effect on ToM. Findings indicate that temperament is related to ToM earlier in development than previously found, and that this relation is thus not unique to false-belief understanding.

Visual habituation tasks: the role of infant temperament.

This longitudinal study investigated the relation between infant temperament and dropout rate in two visual habituation tasks when infants (N=80) were 6 and 12 months of age. At both age points, infant temperament was assessed with the Infant Behavior Questionnaire Revised (IBQ-R) and infants were presented with the same two habituation tasks that were similar in set-up and procedure but different in content. Consistent with previous German work, a two-factor solution was found at each age point indicating Surgency/Extraversion and Negative Affectivity as underlying temperament dimensions. Dropout rates in the habituation tasks ranged from 21% to 68%. Overall, only few IBQ-R subscales, especially Duration of Orienting, had an impact on dropout rate. This suggests that the relatively high dropout rates reported in infant looking time studies are not systematically related to infant temperament. However, findings also suggest that temperament might have an impact on the likelihood of dropout when a habituation task is conducted at the end of a longer test session.

The end-state comfort effect in 3- to 8-year-old children in two object manipulation tasks.

The aim of the study was to compare 3- to 8-year-old children's propensity to anticipate a comfortable hand posture at the end of a grasping movement (end-state comfort effect) between two different object manipulation tasks, the bar-transport task, and the overturned-glass task. In the bar-transport task, participants were asked to insert a vertically positioned bar into a small opening of a box. In the overturned-glass task, participants were asked to put an overturned-glass right-side-up on a coaster. Half of the participants experienced action effects (lights) as a consequence of their movements (AE groups), while the other half of the participants did not (No-AE groups). While there was no difference between the AE and No-AE groups, end-state comfort performance differed across age as well as between tasks. Results revealed a significant increase in end-state comfort performance in the bar-transport task from 13% in the 3-year-olds to 94% in the 8-year-olds. Interestingly, the number of children grasping the bar according to end-state comfort doubled from 3 to 4 years and from 4 to 5 years of age. In the overturned-glass task an increase in end-state comfort performance from already 63% in the 3-year-olds to 100% in the 8-year-olds was significant as well. When comparing end-state comfort performance across tasks, results showed that 3- and 4-year-old children were better at manipulating the glass as compared to manipulating the bar, most probably, because children are more familiar with manipulating glasses. Together, these results suggest that preschool years are an important period for the development of motor planning in which the familiarity with the object involved in the task plays a significant role in children's ability to plan their movements according to end-state comfort.

Infant and maternal sensitivity to interpersonal timing.

A perturbation paradigm was employed to assess 3- and 6-month-old infants' and their mothers' sensitivity to a 3-s temporal delay implemented in an ongoing televised interaction. At both ages, the temporal delay affected infant but not maternal behavior and only when implementing the temporal delay in maternal (Experiment 1, N=64) but not infant (Experiment 2, N=60) behavior. In addition, the experimental manipulation influenced promptness of maternal smiling responses reliably more than promptness of infant smiling responses. The findings suggest that the timing of maternal behavior plays an important role in infants' perception of maternal responsiveness, whereas mothers seem to monitor general aspects of infant behavior such as overall level of engagement.

The link between preschoolers' executive function and theory of mind and the role of epistemic states.

The aim of this study was to assess the specific relation between 3- to 6-year-olds' performance on a task measuring executive function (EF), the Dimensional Change Card Sort task (DCCS), and different developmental attainments in their theory of mind (ToM) by employing a battery of scaled ToM tasks that were comparable in task format and task demands. In addition, individual differences on the temperamental dimensions emotionality, activity, sociability, and shyness were assessed by parental rating. The main findings show that children's (N=195) performance on the DCCS related to their overall performance on the ToM scale but that this relation was specific to those ToM tasks that tap children's understanding of epistemic states such as knowledge access, diverse beliefs, and false beliefs regarding content and location. The relation between children's EF and overall ToM performance remained significant after controlling for age, sentence comprehension, child temperament, and parental education. Individual differences in child activity showed consistent negative relation to EF and ToM abilities. The findings point to a differential involvement of the various EF components in reasoning about different mental concepts.

Sensitivity to social contingencies between 1 and 3 months of age.

Infants' sensitivity to social contingencies was assessed. In Study 1, 1-month-old infants and their mothers interacted face-to-face in three types of imperfect contingent interactions: Normal, Non-Contingent and Imitation. One-month-old infants did not discriminate these conditions. In Study 2, 3-month-old infants were tested as in Study 1. At 3 months of age, infants gazed reliably longer in the Imitation condition and smiled reliably more in the Normal than in the Non-Contingent and Imitation interactions. These findings suggest a developmental transition in the sensitivity to social contingencies between 1 and 3 months of age. The relationship between the developing sensitivity to social contingencies and social cognition is discussed.

Twelve-month-olds point to share attention and interest.

Infants point for various motives. Classically, one such motive is declarative, to share attention and interest with adults to events. Recently, some researchers have questioned whether infants have this motivation. In the current study, an adult reacted to 12-month-olds' pointing in different ways, and infants' responses were observed. Results showed that when the adult shared attention and interest (i.e alternated gaze and emoted), infants pointed more frequently across trials and tended to prolong each point--presumably to prolong the satisfying interaction. However, when the adult emoted to the infant alone or looked only to the event, infants pointed less across trials and repeated points more within trials--presumably in an attempt to establish joint attention. Results suggest that 12-month-olds point declaratively and understand that others have psychological states that can be directed and shared.