Bullying and Cyberbullying: Their Legal Status and Use in Psychological Assessment.

Bullying and cyberbullying have severe psychological and legal consequences for those involved. However, it is unclear how or even if previous experience of bullying and cyberbullying is considered in mental health assessments. Furthermore, the relevance and effectiveness of current legal solutions has been debated extensively, resulting in a desire for a specific legislation.

Utilising symptom dimensions with diagnostic categories improves prediction of time to first remission in first-episode psychosis.

There has been much recent debate concerning the relative clinical utility of symptom dimensions versus conventional diagnostic categories in patients with psychosis. We investigated whether symptom dimensions rated at presentation for first-episode psychosis (FEP) better predicted time to first remission than categorical diagnosis over a four-year follow-up. The sample comprised 193 FEP patients aged 18-65years who presented to psychiatric services in South London, UK, between 2006 and 2010.

The impact of semantically congruent and incongruent visual information on auditory object recognition across development.

The ability to use different sensory signals in conjunction confers numerous advantages on perception. Multisensory perception in adults is influenced by factors beyond low-level stimulus properties such as semantic congruency. Sensitivity to semantic relations has been shown to emerge early in development; however, less is known about whether implementation of these associations changes with development or whether development in the representations themselves might modulate their influence.

Cognitive Neuroscience: Synchronizing Brains in the Classroom.

Traditional cognitive neuroscience is based on studying single individuals in a lab. A paradigm shift is made by a new study that monitors simultaneously the brains of a dozen students in a classroom setting and demonstrates a link between brain-to-brain synchrony and classroom engagement.

Religion and the public ethics of stem-cell research: Attitudes in Europe, Canada and the United States.

We examine international public opinion towards stem-cell research during the period when the issue was at its most contentious. We draw upon representative sample surveys in Europe and North America, fielded in 2005 and find that the majority of people in Europe, Canada and the United States supported stem-cell research, providing it was tightly regulated, but that there were key differences between the geographical regions in the relative importance of different types of ethical position. In the U.

Longitudinal Associations Between Humor Styles and Psychosocial Adjustment in Adolescence.

This study assessed the concurrent and prospective associations between psychosocial adjustment and four humor styles, two of which are adaptive (affiliative, self-enhancing) and two maladaptive (aggressive, self-defeating). Participants were 1,234 adolescents (52% female) aged 11-13 years, drawn from six secondary schools in England. Self-reports of psychosocial adjustment (loneliness, depressive symptomatology, and self-esteem) and humor styles were collected at two time points (fall and summer).

Who tweets about cancer? An analysis of cancer-related tweets in the USA.

Cancer patients, family members and friends are increasingly using social media. Some oncologists and oncology centres are engaging with social media, and advocacy groups are using it to disseminate information and coordinate fundraising efforts. However, the question of whether such social media activity corresponds to areas with higher incidence of cancer or higher access to cancer centres remains understudied.

Interpreting Quality of Life after Brain Injury Scores: Cross-Walk with the Short Form-36.

The Quality of Life after Brain Injury (QOLIBRI) instruments are traumatic brain injury (TBI)-specific assessments of health-related quality of life (HRQoL), with established validity and reliability. The purpose of the study is to help improve the interpretability of the two QOLIBRI summary scores (the QOLIBRI Total score and the QOLBRI Overall Scale [OS] score). An analysis was conducted of 761 patients with TBI who took part in the QOLIBRI validation studies.

Enhancing duration processing with parietal brain stimulation.

Numerosity and duration are thought to share common magnitude-based mechanisms in brain regions including the right parietal and frontal cortices like the supplementary motor area, SMA. Numerosity and duration are, however, also different in several intrinsic features. For instance, in a quantification context, numerosity is known for being more automatically accessed than temporal events, and durations are by definition sequential whereas numerosity can be both sequential and simultaneous.

Assessment of Health-Related Quality of Life after TBI: Comparison of a Disease-Specific (QOLIBRI) with a Generic (SF-36) Instrument.

Psychosocial, emotional, and physical problems can emerge after traumatic brain injury (TBI), potentially impacting health-related quality of life (HRQoL). Until now, however, neither the discriminatory power of disease-specific (QOLIBRI) and generic (SF-36) HRQoL nor their correlates have been compared in detail. These aspects as well as some psychometric item characteristics were studied in a sample of 795 TBI survivors.

The Responses of Medical General Practitioners to Unreasonable Patient Demand for Antibiotics--A Study of Medical Ethics Using Immersive Virtual Reality.

Background: Dealing with insistent patient demand for antibiotics is an all too common part of a General Practitioner's daily routine. This study explores the extent to which portable Immersive Virtual Reality technology can help us gain an accurate understanding of the factors that influence a doctor's response to the ethical challenge underlying such tenacious requests for antibiotics (given the threat posed by growing anti-bacterial resistance worldwide). It also considers the potential of such technology to train doctors to face such dilemmas.

Investigating the Victim Pseudomaturity Effect: How a Victim's Chronological Age and Dress Style Influences Attributions in a Depicted Case of Child Sexual Assault.

Three-hundred and seven members of the UK public read a hypothetical child sexual abuse case in which the victim's chronological age (12 versus 15 years old) and dress style (sexualized versus nonsexualized) were experimentally manipulated before completing 22 assault severity and blame attribution items. It was predicted that the 15-year-old and the sexually dressed victim would be blamed more for her own abuse. In addition, males were expected to be more blaming generally, but especially of the older and/or sexually dressed victim.

The Remapping of Time by Active Tool-Use.

Multiple, action-based space representations are each based on the extent to which action is possible toward a specific sector of space, such as near/reachable and far/unreachable. Studies on tool-use revealed how the boundaries between these representations are dynamic. Space is not only multidimensional and dynamic, but it is also known for interacting with other dimensions of magnitude, such as time.

'How many' and 'how much' dissociate in the parietal lobe.

We investigated whether two features that are fundamental for quantity processing, namely numerosity and continuous quantity - or 'how many' versus 'how much' - may dissociate in the parietal lobe. Fourteen mathematically-normal participants performed a well-established numerosity discrimination task after receiving continuous theta burst transcranial magnetic stimulation (TBS) over the left or right intraparietal sulcus (IPS) or the Vertex. We performed a detailed analysis of accuracy (based on the Weber Fraction, wf), which distinguished between trials in which numerosity was anti-correlated or 'incongruent' to other continuous measures of quantity, and trials in which numerosity and other continuous features were 'congruent'.

The sensory-motor theory of rhythm and beat induction 20 years on: a new synthesis and future perspectives.

Some 20 years ago Todd and colleagues proposed that rhythm perception is mediated by the conjunction of a sensory representation of the auditory input and a motor representation of the body (Todd, 1994a, 1995), and that a sense of motion from sound is mediated by the vestibular system (Todd, 1992a, 1993b). These ideas were developed into a sensory-motor theory of rhythm and beat induction (Todd et al., 1999).

Source analysis of electrophysiological correlates of beat induction as sensory-guided action.

In this paper we present a reanalysis of electrophysiological data originally collected to test a sensory-motor theory of beat induction (Todd et al., 2002; Todd and Seiss, 2004; Todd and Lee, 2015). The reanalysis is conducted in the light of more recent findings and in particular the demonstration that auditory evoked potentials contain a vestibular dependency.

Enhanced visual detection in trait anxiety.

There is much evidence suggesting that trait anxiety is associated with impairments in the cognitive control of attention. Recent findings, though, have suggested that anxiety may also influence perception, conversely enhancing early information processing. The present study investigated this claim within a visual detection task.

Developmental change and cross-domain links in vocal and musical emotion recognition performance in childhood.

Although the configurations of psychoacoustic cues signalling emotions in human vocalizations and instrumental music are very similar, cross-domain links in recognition performance have yet to be studied developmentally. Two hundred and twenty 5- to 10-year-old children were asked to identify musical excerpts and vocalizations as happy, sad, or fearful. The results revealed age-related increases in overall recognition performance with significant correlations across vocal and musical conditions at all developmental stages.

The media of sociology: tight or loose translations?

Sociologists have increasingly come to recognize that the discipline has unduly privileged textual representations, but efforts to incorporate visual and other media are still only in their beginning. This paper develops an analysis of the ways objects of knowledge are translated into other media, in order to understand the visual practices of sociology and to point out unused possibilities. I argue that the discourse on visual sociology, by assuming that photographs are less objective than text, is based on an asymmetric media-determinism and on a misleading notion of objectivity.

Predicting the rate of language development from early motor skills in at-risk infants who develop autism spectrum disorder.

The aim of the current paper was to use data from a prospective study to assess the impact of early motor skills on the rate of language development in infants with an older sibling with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), who are at increased risk of developing ASD themselves. Infants were tested prospectively at four points (7, 14, 24 and 36 months), and were assessed for ASD at the last visit. Latent growth curve analysis was used to model rate of language development using the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales between 7-36 months in infants at high and low familial risk for ASD.

Learning to integrate versus inhibiting information is modulated by age.

Cognitive training aiming at improving learning is often successful, but what exactly underlies the observed improvements and how these differ across the age spectrum are currently unknown. Here we asked whether learning in young and older people may reflect enhanced ability to integrate information required to perform a cognitive task or whether it may instead reflect the ability to inhibit task-irrelevant information for successful task performance. We trained 30 young and 30 aging human participants on a numerosity discrimination task known to engage the parietal cortex and in which cue-integration and inhibitory abilities can be distinguished.