Left out and vilified: Do the effects of political metaphors on spatial orientation judgments indicate a taboo effect?

Can aversion from a political ideology lead to rapid, automatic rejection of said ideology? We tested this question in the Israeli political context using a spatial Stroop task to examine whether politically charged left-wing terms would elicit slower verbal latencies. In Study 1 (  85), participants were presented with left- and right-wing political terms presented either in a congruent or incongruent spatial location and were asked to verbally indicate only the location of the word. Study 2 ( = 128), replicated this procedure with the Hebrew words for "left" and "right" and examined whether political awareness primes would amplify the effect.

Taking the Extra Listening Mile: Processing Spoken Semantic Context Is More Effortful for Older Than Young Adults.

Objectives: Older adults use semantic context to generate predictions in speech processing, compensating for aging-related sensory and cognitive changes. This study aimed to gauge aging-related changes in effort exertion related to context use.

Design: The study revisited data from Harel-Arbeli et al.

PTSD symptoms and subjective traumatic outlook in the Israel-Hamas war: Capturing a broader picture of posttraumatic reactions.

This study examined the unique associations of both probable posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and subjective traumatic outlook (STO) with psychiatric and psychological concomitants among Israelis during the Israel-Hamas War. While PTSD reflects phenomenological psychiatric reactions to traumatic events, STO reflects subjective evaluations that one is traumatized. A convenience sample of 375 Israelis aged 20-87 from around Israel completed an online survey in the first two months of the war.

The Role of Early Intact Auditory Experience on the Perception of Spoken Emotions, Comparing Prelingual to Postlingual Cochlear Implant Users.

Objectives: Cochlear implants (CI) are remarkably effective, but have limitations regarding the transformation of the spectro-temporal fine structures of speech. This may impair processing of spoken emotions, which involves the identification and integration of semantic and prosodic cues. Our previous study found spoken-emotions-processing differences between CI users with postlingual deafness (postlingual CI) and normal hearing (NH) matched controls (age range, 19 to 65 years).

Seven Days of Voice Rest Post-phonosurgery Is Not Better than 3 days: A Prospective Randomized Short-term Outcome Study.

Objective: The aim of the study is to compare the short-term effect of 7 versus 3 days of voice rest (VR) on objective vocal (acoustic) parameters following phonosurgery.

Methods: A prospective randomized study conducted at a tertiary referral medical center. Patients with vocal fold nodules, polyps, or cysts and scheduled for phonosurgery were recruited from the Voice Clinic.

"Love looks not with the eyes": supranormal processing of emotional speech in individuals with late-blindness versus preserved processing in individuals with congenital-blindness.

Processing of emotional speech in the absence of visual information relies on two auditory channels: semantics and prosody. No study to date has investigated how blindness impacts this process. Two theories, Perceptual Deficit, and Sensory Compensation, yiled different expectations about the role of visual experience (or its lack thereof) in processing emotional speech.

Age-related differences in processing of emotions in speech disappear with babble noise in the background.

Older adults process emotional speech differently than young adults, relying less on prosody (tone) relative to semantics (words). This study aimed to elucidate the mechanisms underlying these age-related differences via an emotional speech-in-noise test. A sample of 51 young and 47 older adults rated spoken sentences with emotional content on both prosody and semantics, presented on the background of wideband speech-spectrum noise (sensory interference) or on the background of multi-talker babble (sensory/cognitive interference).

New horizon in improving ageing with improvisational theatre.

Cognitive decline, mental health and mindset factors can all affect the autonomy and well-being of older adults. As the number of older adults across the globe increases, interventions to improve well-being are urgently needed. Improvisational theatre (improv) and improv-based interventions are well-suited to address this need.

Associations among loneliness, internal locus of control and subjective accelerated ageing in older adults who received the booster vaccination.

Background: A rise in loneliness among older adults since the COVID-19 outbreak, even after vaccination, has been highlighted. Loneliness has deleterious consequences, with specific effects on perceptions of the ageing process during the COVID-19 pandemic. Coping with stressful life events and the challenges of ageing may result in a perception of acceleration of this process.

Sow in tears and reap in joy: Eye tracking reveals age-related differences in the cognitive cost of spoken context processing.

Older adults have been found to use context to facilitate word recognition at least as efficiently as young adults. This may pose a conundrum, as context use is based on cognitive resources that are considered to decrease with aging. The goal of this study was to shed light on this question by testing age-related differences in context use and the cognitive demands associated with it.

COVID-19 Booster Vaccination Bellwethers: Factors Predictive of Older Adults' Adoption of the Second Booster COVID-19 Vaccine in Israel: A Longitudinal Study.

Israel became the first country to offer the second COVID-19 booster vaccination. The study tested for the first time, the predictive role of booster-related sense of control (SOC_B), trust and vaccination hesitancy (VH) on adoption of the second-booster among older adults, 7 months later. Four hundred Israelis (≥60 years-old), eligible for the first booster, responded online, two weeks into the first booster campaign.

High-throughput analysis of the transcriptional patterns of sexual genes in malaria.

Background: Plasmodium falciparum (Pf) is the leading protozoan causing malaria, the most devastating parasitic disease. To ensure transmission, a small subset of Pf parasites differentiate into the sexual forms (gametocytes). Since the abundance of these essential parasitic forms is extremely low within the human host, little is currently known about the molecular regulation of their sexual differentiation, highlighting the need to develop tools to investigate Pf gene expression during this fundamental mechanism.

Listen up! ADHD slows spoken-word processing in adverse listening conditions: Evidence from eye movements.

Background: Cognitive skills such as sustained attention, inhibition and working memory are essential for speech processing, yet are often impaired in people with ADHD. Offline measures have indicated difficulties in speech recognition on multi-talker babble (MTB) background for young adults with ADHD (yaADHD). However, to-date no study has directly tested online speech processing in adverse conditions for yaADHD.

Processing emotional prosody in a foreign language: the case of German and Hebrew.

Unlabelled: This study investigated the universality of emotional prosody in perception of discrete emotions when semantics is not available. In two experiments the perception of emotional prosody in Hebrew and German by listeners who speak one of the languages but not the other was investigated. Having a parallel tool in both languages allowed to conduct controlled comparisons.

Speech Processing as a Far-Transfer Gauge of Serious Games for Cognitive Training in Aging: Randomized Controlled Trial of Web-Based Effectivate Training.

Background: The number of serious games for cognitive training in aging (SGCTAs) is proliferating in the market and attempting to combat one of the most feared aspects of aging-cognitive decline. However, the efficacy of many SGCTAs is still questionable. Even the measures used to validate SGCTAs are up for debate, with most studies using cognitive measures that gauge improvement in trained tasks, also known as near transfer.

Sense of Relationship Entitlement of Aging Parents Toward Their Offspring (SRE-ao)-A New Concept and Measurement Tool.

Our sense of entitlement influences our interactions and attitudes in a range of specific relational contexts, one of them being aging parents' relationships with their adult children. This study aimed to examine the factor structure of the Sense of Relational Entitlement-aging parents toward their offspring (SRE-ao), an 11-item questionnaire that assesses aging people's sense of relational entitlement toward their children, and examine the associations of its subscales with related personality and mental health constructs. One thousand and six participants (24.

Validation and cross-linguistic adaptation of the Frenchay Dysarthria Assessment (FDA-2) speech intelligibility tests: Hebrew version.

'Dysarthria' is a group of motor speech disorders resulting from a disturbance in neuromuscular control. Most individuals with dysarthria cope with communicative restrictions due to speech impairments and reduced intelligibility. Thus, language-sensitive measurements of intelligibility are important in dysarthria neurological assessment.

Age-Related Changes in the Perception of Emotions in Speech: Assessing Thresholds of Prosody and Semantics Recognition in Noise for Young and Older Adults.

Older adults process emotions in speech differently than do young adults. However, it is unclear whether these age-related changes impact all speech channels to the same extent, and whether they originate from a sensory or a cognitive source. The current study adopted a psychophysical approach to directly compare young and older adults' sensory thresholds for emotion recognition in two channels of spoken-emotions: prosody (tone) and semantics (words).

Response to McKenzie et al. 2021: Keep It Simple; Young Adults With Autism Spectrum Disorder Without Intellectual Disability Can Process Basic Emotions.

We recently read the interesting and informative paper entitled "Empathic accuracy and cognitive and affective empathy in young adults with and without autism spectrum disorder" (McKenzie et al. in Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 52: 1-15, 2021). This paper expands recent findings from our lab (Ben-David in Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 50: 741-756, 2020a; International Journal of Audiology 60: 319-321, 2020b) and a recent theoretical framework (Icht et al.

One Size Does Not Fit All: Examining the Effects of Working Memory Capacity on Spoken Word Recognition in Older Adults Using Eye Tracking.

Difficulties understanding speech form one of the most prevalent complaints among older adults. Successful speech perception depends on top-down linguistic and cognitive processes that interact with the bottom-up sensory processing of the incoming acoustic information. The relative roles of these processes in age-related difficulties in speech perception, especially when listening conditions are not ideal, are still unclear.

Vaccine and Psychological Booster: Factors Associated With Older Adults' Compliance to the Booster COVID-19 Vaccine in Israel.

Israel became the first country to offer the booster COVID-19 vaccination. The study tested for the first time the role of sense of control (SOC) due to vaccinations, trust and vaccination hesitancy (VH), and their association with compliance to the booster COVID-19 vaccine among older adults, during the first 2 weeks of the campaign. 400 Israeli citizens (≥ 6 years old), eligible for the booster vaccine, responded online.

"Post-lockdown Depression": Adaptation Difficulties, Depressive Symptoms, and the Role of Positive Solitude When Returning to Routine After the Lifting of Nation-Wide COVID-19 Social Restrictions.

Objectives: The aim of the current study was to identify difficulties in adapting to normal life once COVID-19 lockdown has been lifted. Israel was used as a case study, as COVID-19 social restrictions, including a nation-wide lockdown, were lifted almost completely by mid-April 2021, following a large-scale vaccination operation.

Methods: A sample of 293 mid-age and older Israeli adults ( age = 61.