Body Motion Cues Drive First Impressions: Consensus, Truth and the Origins of Personality Trait Judgements based on Targets' Whole-Body Motion.

Personality trait attribution is automatic, and first impressions can be lasting and lead to important social decisions. Research on how facial cues impact on person perception is plentiful, but less is known about how whole-body motion contributes to first impressions. This thesis presents results from experiments in which participants rated the traits of target individuals based solely on short, silent movie clips of those individuals performing actions or expressing emotions with their bodies, or simply walking. To isolate the contribution to trait attribution of body motion cues, the static form information of the body stimuli was degraded. Consensus at zero acquaintance is replicated throughout the thesis, as manifested by strong inter-rater agreement for all rating experiments and within all displayed behaviours, thus indicating that body motion may contain visual cues that drive trait impressions. Further experiments identified motion parameters that predict personality trait impressions, and an experimental paradigm showed that computational manipulation of motion data can indeed change observer judgements of computerised models based on human motion data. No accuracy was found in the trait judgements, in that there was no link between how a target was judged and this target individual's scores on a five-factor personality questionnaire. Underlying judgements driving personality trait impressions were found: impressions of emotions, attractiveness and masculinity appear to be intertwined with personality trait judgements. Finally, patterns in personality trait judgements based on body motion were consistent with findings from studies on face perception, reflecting a two-step judgement of a target person's intention and ability to cause harm. Differences were found depending on the display format of the stimuli, and interpretations for these discrepancies are offered. The thesis shows that people go beyond the information available to them when forming personality trait impressions of strangers, and offers evidence that changes in body motion may indeed have an impact on such trait impressions

Reducing unwarranted variation: can a ‘clinical dashboard’ be helpful for hospital executive boards and top-level leaders?

Background/aim: In the past decades, there has been an increasing focus on defining, identifying and reducing unwarranted variation in clinical practice. There have been several attempts to monitor and reduce unwarranted variation, but the experience so far is that these initiatives have failed to reach their goals. In this article, we present the initial process of developing a safety, quality and utilisation rate dashboard (‘clinical dashboard’) based on a selection of data routinely reported to executive boards and top-level leaders in Norwegian specialist healthcare. Methods: We used a modified version of Wennberg’s categorisation of healthcare delivery to develop the dashboard, focusing on variation in (1) effective care and patient safety and (2) preference-sensitive and supply-sensitive care. Results: Effective care and patient safety are monitored with outcome measures such as 30-day mortality after hospital admission and 5-year cancer survival, whereas utilisation rates for procedures selected on cost and volume are used to follow variations in preference-sensitive and supply-sensitive care. Conclusion: We argue that selecting quality indicators of patient safety, quality and utilisation rates and presenting them in a dashboard may help executive hospital boards and top-level leaders to focus on unwarranted variation

Geographic variation in the utilisation of specialist healthcare for patients with severe mental illness in Norway: a population‑based registry study

Purpose - The aim of this study is to measure geographic variations in mental healthcare service utilisation among patients with severe mental illness in Norway. Method - We analysed data from the Norwegian patient registry for 2014–2018 for patients with severe mental illness. The outcomes measured in this study were: outpatient contact, admission, bed days and total contact rates. Total contacts were calculated as the sum of observed outpatient contacts plus four times the hospital bed days for each hospital catchment area based on the Norwegian health director’s report on clinical activity and patient treatment cost. Geographic variations were measured using extreme quotient (EQ), coefficient of variation (CV) and systematic component of variation (SCV). Maps, figures, and tables were used to visualise geographic variation. Results - The geographic variations saw a six-fold increase in the outpatient contact rate and a three-fold increase in the admission rate between the areas with lowest rate and areas with the highest rate. However, there was low geographic variation in calculated total contact rates (Eqs. 5 − 95 =1.77). The low-level geographic variation in the total calculated contact rate was also confirmed with an SCV of less than three. Conclusion - The levels of geographic variations in the utilisation of outpatient and inpatient mental healthcare services among patients with severe mental illness are high. However, the geographic variation in total services provided by hospital catchment areas calculating the two service modalities together using their treatment cost ratio, is low. This may reflect the relatively equal performance of hospital catchment areas in terms of resource utilisation regardless which service modality they prioritise. Factors contributing to high geographic variation in individual service modalities need further investigation

Remodelling of oxidative energy metabolism by galactose improves glucose handling and metabolic switching in human skeletal muscle cells

Cultured human myotubes have a low mitochondrial oxidative potential. This study aims to remodel energy metabolism in myotubes by replacing glucose with galactose during growth and differentiation to ultimately examine the consequences for fatty acid and glucose metabolism. Exposure to galactose showed an increased [14C]oleic acid oxidation, whereas cellular uptake of oleic acid uptake was unchanged. On the other hand, both cellular uptake and oxidation of [14C]glucose increased in myotubes exposed to galactose. In the presence of the mitochondrial uncoupler carbonylcyanide p-trifluormethoxy-phenylhydrazone (FCCP) the reserve capacity for glucose oxidation was increased in cells grown with galactose. Staining and live imaging of the cells showed that myotubes exposed to galactose had a significant increase in mitochondrial and neutral lipid content. Suppressibility of fatty acid oxidation by acute addition of glucose was increased compared to cells grown in presence of glucose. In summary, we show that cells grown in galactose were more oxidative, had increased oxidative capacity and higher mitochondrial content, and showed an increased glucose handling. Interestingly, cells exposed to galactose showed an increased suppressibility of fatty acid metabolism. Thus, galactose improved glucose metabolism and metabolic switching of myotubes, representing a cell model that may be valuable for metabolic studies related to insulin resistance and disorders involving mitochondrial impairments