Cultural adaptation and transitions within international higher education: University students' experiences of studying abroad during the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic.

This qualitative study explored students' lived experiences of higher education study abroad programs during the Covid-19 pandemic. Studying individual experiences in extraordinary circumstances like a pandemic can reveal personal, organisational and process-related resilience relevant to understanding and planning future events. Online semi-structured interviews with thirteen international students from four continents (North America, South America, Europe and Asia) were conducted amidst the pandemic in the Spring of 2021.

Benefits of dance for Parkinson's: The music, the moves, and the company.

Dance classes designed for people with Parkinson's are very popular and associated not only with increasing individuals' motor control abilities but also their mood; not least by providing a social network and the enjoyment of the music. However, quantitative evidence of the benefits is inconsistent and often lacks in power. For a better understanding of the contradictory findings between participants' felt experiences and existing quantitative findings in response to dance classes, we employed a mixed method approach that focussed on the effects of music.

"I'm Never Going to Be in Phantom of the Opera": Relational and Emotional Wellbeing of Parkinson's Carers and Their Partners in and Beyond Dancing.

The caregiving of people who suffer from Parkinson's predominantly falls on their life partners. Living with and caring for somebody with Parkinson's can cause a range of emotional, psychological, and financial pressures. Whilst an increasing number of alternative treatments for Parkinson's is available, such as dancing, the focus is predominantly on the motor and emotional improvements of the person suffering from Parkinson's.

Feeling for the Other With Ease: Prospective Actors Show High Levels of Emotion Recognition and Report Above Average Empathic Concern, but Do Not Experience Strong Distress.

Differences in empathic abilities between acting, dance, and psychology students were explored, in addition to the appropriateness of existing empathy measures in the context of these cohorts. Students ( = 176) across Higher Education Institutions in the United Kingdom and Europe were included in the online survey analysis, consisting of the Reading the Mind in the Eyes (RME) test, the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI), the Empathy Quotient (EQ), and the E-drawing test (EDT), each measuring particular facets of empathy. Based on existing evidence and our understanding of the discipline practices, we predicted that acting students would perform the best at identifying people's emotional expressions but might lack other cognitive or affective empathy skills, particularly those related to emotional reactions.

The pack size effect: Influence on consumer perceptions of portion sizes.

Larger portions as well as larger packs can lead to larger prospective consumption estimates, larger servings and increased consumption, described as 'portion-size effects' and 'pack size effects'. Although related, the effects of pack sizes on portion estimates have received less attention. While it is not possible to generalize consumer behaviour across cultures, external cues taken from pack size may affect us all.

Neuronal bases of structural coherence in contemporary dance observation.

The neuronal processes underlying dance observation have been the focus of an increasing number of brain imaging studies over the past decade. However, the existing literature mainly dealt with effects of motor and visual expertise, whereas the neural and cognitive mechanisms that underlie the interpretation of dance choreographies remained unexplored. Hence, much attention has been given to the action observation network (AON) whereas the role of other potentially relevant neuro-cognitive mechanisms such as mentalizing (theory of mind) or language (narrative comprehension) in dance understanding is yet to be elucidated.

Differences in fMRI intersubject correlation while viewing unedited and edited videos of dance performance.

Intersubject correlation (ISC) analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data provides insight into how continuous streams of sensory stimulation are processed by groups of observers. Although edited movies are frequently used as stimuli in ISC studies, there has been little direct examination of the effect of edits on the resulting ISC maps. In this study we showed 16 observers two audiovisual movie versions of the same dance.

Motor imagery training improves precision of an upper limb movement in patients with hemiparesis.

Background: In healthy participants, beneficial effects of motor imagery training on movement execution have been shown for precision, strength, and speed. In the clinical context, it is still debated whether motor imagery provides an effective rehabilitation technique in patients with motor deficits.

Objective: To compare the effectiveness of two different types of movement training: motor imagery vs.

"Some like it hot": spectators who score high on the personality trait openness enjoy the excitement of hearing dancers breathing without music.

Music is an integral part of dance. Over the last 10 years, however, dance stimuli (without music) have been repeatedly used to study action observation processes, increasing our understanding of the influence of observer's physical abilities on action perception. Moreover, beyond trained skills and empathy traits, very little has been investigated on how other observer or spectators' properties modulate action observation and action preference.

Uni- and multisensory brain areas are synchronised across spectators when watching unedited dance recordings.

The superior temporal sulcus (STS) and gyrus (STG) are commonly identified to be functionally relevant for multisensory integration of audiovisual (AV) stimuli. However, most neuroimaging studies on AV integration used stimuli of short duration in explicit evaluative tasks. Importantly though, many of our AV experiences are of a long duration and ambiguous.

In the here and now: enhanced motor corticospinal excitability in novices when watching live compared to video recorded dance.

Enhanced motor corticospinal excitability (MCE) in passive action observation is thought to signify covert motor resonance with the actions seen. Actions performed by others are an important social stimulus and thus, motor resonance is prevalent during social interaction. However, most studies employ simple/short snippets of recorded movements devoid of any real-life social context, which has recently been criticized for lacking ecological validity.

Motor simulation without motor expertise: enhanced corticospinal excitability in visually experienced dance spectators.

The human "mirror-system" is suggested to play a crucial role in action observation and execution, and is characterized by activity in the premotor and parietal cortices during the passive observation of movements. The previous motor experience of the observer has been shown to enhance the activity in this network. Yet visual experience could also have a determinant influence when watching more complex actions, as in dance performances.

Neurocognitive control in dance perception and performance.

Dance is a rich source of material for researchers interested in the integration of movement and cognition. The multiple aspects of embodied cognition involved in performing and perceiving dance have inspired scientists to use dance as a means for studying motor control, expertise, and action-perception links. The aim of this review is to present basic research on cognitive and neural processes implicated in the execution, expression, and observation of dance, and to bring into relief contemporary issues and open research questions.

Injury, imagery, and self-esteem in dance healthy minds in injured bodies?

The purpose of this study was to investigate a selection of psychological variables (help-seeking behaviors, mental imagery, self-esteem) in relation to injury among UK dancers. We recruited 216 participants from eight dance styles and six levels of involvement. It was found that 83.

Proprioceptive integration and body representation: insights into dancers' expertise.

The experience of the body as a single coherent whole is based on multiple local sensory signals, integrated across different sensory modalities. We investigated how local information is integrated to form a single body representation and also compared the contribution of proprioceptive and visual information both in expert dancers and non-dancer controls. A number of previous studies have focused on individual differences in proprioceptive acuity at single joints and reported inconsistent findings.

Segmenting the body into parts: evidence from biases in tactile perception.

How do we individuate body parts? Here, we investigated the effect of body segmentation between hand and arm in tactile and visual perception. In a first experiment, we showed that two tactile stimuli felt farther away when they were applied across the wrist than when they were applied within a single body part (palm or forearm), indicating a "category boundary effect". In the following experiments, we excluded two hypotheses, which attributed tactile segmentation to other, nontactile factors.