Prevalence of pain flashbacks in post-traumatic stress disorder arising from exposure to multiple traumas or childhood traumatization

Background: Flashbacks are a form of multisensory memory that are experienced with a ‘happening in the present’ quality. Pain flashbacks are a re-experiencing of pain felt at the time of a traumatic event. It is unclear how common pain flashbacks are. Aims: The current study was designed primarily to assess the prevalence of pain flashbacks in a sample of patients with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Methods: We assessed the prevalence of pain flashbacks over a period of two years in patients (n = 166) referred to a psychological trauma service in the UK. Patients underwent a clinical screen for PTSD, and completed a self-report measure of pain flashbacks. Results: Pain flashbacks were classified as present in 49% of a sample of complex trauma patients meeting criteria for PTSD. Pain flashbacks were positively associated with the extent of pain at the time of trauma. Conclusions: Pain re-experiencing in PTSD, and its relative absence in non-clinical populations, supports an account of memory in which perceptual details can be re- experienced when memories have been encoded under conditions of extreme stress. It may be possible to conceptualize some cases of unexplained pain as pain flashbacks, or of having a trauma origin

Grasp It Loudly! Supporting Actions with Semantically Congruent Spoken Action Words

Evidence for cross-talk between motor and language brain structures has accumulated over the past several years. However, while a significant amount of research has focused on the interaction between language perception and action, little attention has been paid to the potential impact of language production on overt motor behaviour

The short-term cost of falls, poisonings and scalds occurring at home in children under 5 years old in England: multicentre longitudinal study

Background Childhood falls, poisonings and scalds, occurring predominantly in the home, are an important public health problem, yet there is limited evidence on the costs of these injuries to individuals and society. Objectives To estimate National Health Service (NHS) and child and family costs of falls, poisonings and scalds. Methods We undertook a multicentre longitudinal study of falls, poisonings and scalds in children under 5 years old, set in acute NHS Trusts across four UK study centres. Data from parental self-reported questionnaires on health service resource use, family costs and expenditure were combined with unit cost data from published sources to calculate average cost for participants and injury mechanism. Results 344 parents completed resource use questionnaires until their child recovered from their injury or until 12 months, whichever came soonest. Most injuries were minor, with >95% recovering within 2 weeks, and 99% within 1 month of the injury. 61% emergency department (ED) attendees were not admitted, 35% admitted for ≤1 day and 4% admitted for ≥2 days. The typical healthcare cost of an admission for ≥2 days was estimated at £2000–3000, for an admission for ≤1 day was £700–1000 and for an ED attendance without admission was £100–180. Family costs were considerable and varied across injury mechanisms. Of all injuries, scalds accrued highest healthcare and family costs. Conclusions Falls, poisonings and scalds incur considerable short-term healthcare and family costs. These data can inform injury prevention policy and commissioning of preventive services

Museum Topology and the Will to Connect

This paper is concerned with the relationship between material culture and spatiality. Through the example of the ceramics collection in the City Museum and Art Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent, England, an analysis is made of the topological character of space that is folded around certain objects on display. Ozzy the Owl, a 17th Century slipware owl jug, who was discovered on BBC TV's Antiques Roadshow in 1990 and subsequently bought by the museum, is seen as an agent that is constituted by the folding together of preface and afterword in the museum display, unsettling its (Euclidean) geometry, (Kantian) aesthetic and discourse of improvement (Organised around Wedgwood). Ozzy brings complexity and connection; his contingent location within the museum's heterogeneous material netwek reveals the functional blankness of objects and the effects that this can have in performing new topological arrangements in a space, revealing the friability and partial connectedness of its narrativity

Verbs in space: axis and direction of motion norms for 299 English verbs

A strong body of work has explored the interaction between visual perception and language comprehension; for example, recent studies exploring predictions from embodied cognition have focused particularly on the common representation of sensory—motor and semantic information. Motivated by this background, we provide a set of norms for the axis and direction of motion implied in 299 English verbs, collected from approximately 100 native speakers of British English. Until now, there have been no freely available norms of this kind for a large set of verbs that can be used in any area of language research investigating the semantic representation of motion. We have used these norms to investigate the interaction between language comprehension and low-level visual processes involved in motion perception, validating the norming procedure’s ability to capture the motion content of individual verbs. Supplemental materials for this study may be downloaded from brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental