Longitudinal associations between justice sensitivity, nonsuicidal self-injury, substance use, and victimization by peers

Justice sensitivity (JS), the tendency to perceive and negatively respond to alleged injustice, has been associated with a range of internalizing and externalizing problems and peer victimization; however, it remains unclear if it has an association with self-victimization. Participants (N = 769) reported on their JS longitudinally at 9–19 (T1), 11–21 (T2), and 14–22 years of age (T3). They further reported on nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) and illegal substance use as indicators of self-victimization as well as victimization by peers at T2 and T3. A cross-lagged latent model revealed that victim JS at T1 was positively associated with NSSI, substance use, and peer victimization at T2, and victim JS at T2 was positively associated with substance use at T3. Higher observer JS at T2 predicted higher illegal substance use at T3 and higher illegal substance use at T2 predicted higher observer JS at T3. Finally, higher peer victimization at T2 predicted less perpetrator JS at T3 in the total group. Multigroup models further revealed sex-specific effects. Our findings highlight that being sensitive to injustice, particularly the tendency to feel unfairly treated or being taken advantage of, contributes to individuals’ vulnerability to both engaging in behaviors reflecting self-victimization and being a target of peer victimization, which in turn have influences on JS

Prevalence of Candida species in Psoriasis

Background: Psoriasis patients are more frequently colonised with Candida species. The correlation between fungal colonisation and clinical severity is unclear, but may exacerbate psoriasis and the impact of antipsoriatic therapies on the prevalence of Candida is unknown. Objectives: To examine the prevalence of C species in psoriasis patients compared to an age- and sex-matched control population, we investigated the influence of Candida colonisation on disease severity, immune cell activation and the interplay on psoriatic treatments. Methods: The prevalence of C species was examined in 265 psoriasis patients and 200 control subjects by swabs and stool samples for fungal cultures. Peripheral mononuclear blood cells (PBMCs) were collected from 20 fungal colonised and 24 uncolonised patients and stimulated. The expression of interferon (IFN)-γ, IL-17A, IL-22 and tumour necrosis factor (TNF)-α from stimulated PBMCs was measured by quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qPCR). Results: A significantly higher prevalence for Candida was detected in psoriatic patients (p ≤ .001) compared to the control subjects; most abundant in stool samples, showing Candida albicans. Older participants (≥51 years) were more frequent colonised, and no correlation with gender, disease severity or systemic treatments like IL-17 inhibitors was found. Conclusions: Although Candida colonisation is significantly more common in patients with psoriasis, it does not influence the psoriatic disease or cytokine response. Our study showed that Candida colonisation is particularly more frequent in patients with psoriasis ≥51 years of age. Therefore, especially this group should be screened for symptoms of candidiasis during treatment with IL-17 inhibitors

Tool mastering today – an interdisciplinary perspective

Tools have coined human life, living conditions, and culture. Recognizing the cognitive architecture underlying tool use would allow us to comprehend its evolution, development, and physiological basis. However, the cognitive underpinnings of tool mastering remain little understood in spite of long-time research in neuroscientific, psychological, behavioral and technological fields. Moreover, the recent transition of tool use to the digital domain poses new challenges for explaining the underlying processes. In this interdisciplinary review, we propose three building blocks of tool mastering: (A) perceptual and motor abilities integrate to tool manipulation knowledge, (B) perceptual and cognitive abilities to functional tool knowledge, and (C) motor and cognitive abilities to means-end knowledge about tool use. This framework allows for integrating and structuring research findings and theoretical assumptions regarding the functional architecture of tool mastering via behavior in humans and non-human primates, brain networks, as well as computational and robotic models. An interdisciplinary perspective also helps to identify open questions and to inspire innovative research approaches. The framework can be applied to studies on the transition from classical to modern, non-mechanical tools and from analogue to digital user-tool interactions in virtual reality, which come with increased functional opacity and sensorimotor decoupling between tool user, tool, and target. By working towards an integrative theory on the cognitive architecture of the use of tools and technological assistants, this review aims at stimulating future interdisciplinary research avenues

Effect anticipation and action control

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Executive function and food approach behavior in middle childhood

Executive function (EF) has long been considered to be a unitary, domain-general cognitive ability. However, recent research suggests differentiating ‘hot’ affective and ‘cool’ cognitive aspects of EF. Yet, findings regarding this two-factor construct are still inconsistent. In particular, the development of this factor structure remains unclear and data on school-aged children is lacking. Furthermore, studies linking EF and overweight or obesity suggest that EF contributes to the regulation of eating behavior. So far, however, the links between EF and eating behavior have rarely been investigated in children and non-clinical populations.First, we examined whether EF can be divided into hot and cool factors or whether they actually correspond to a unitary construct in middle childhood. Second, we examined how hot and cool EF are associated with different eating styles that put children at risk of becoming overweight during development. Hot and cool EF were assessed experimentally in a non-clinical population of 1,657 elementary-school children (aged 6-11 years). The ‘food approach’ behavior was rated mainly via parent questionnaires.Findings indicate that hot EF is distinguishable from cool EF. However, only cool EF seems to represent a coherent functional entity, whereas hot EF does not seem to be a homogenous construct. This was true for a younger and an older subgroup of children. Furthermore, different EF components were correlated with eating styles, such as responsiveness to food, desire to drink, and restrained eating in girls but not in boys. This shows that lower levels of EF are not only seen in clinical populations of obese patients but are already associated with food approach styles in a normal population of elementary school-aged girls. Although the direction of effect still has to be clarified, results point to the possibility that EF constitutes a risk factor for eating styles contributing to the development of overweight in the long

The impact of salient action effects on 6-, 7-, and 11-month-olds' goal-predictive gaze shifts for a human grasping action.

When infants observe a human grasping action, experience-based accounts predict that all infants familiar with grasping actions should be able to predict the goal regardless of additional agency cues such as an action effect. Cue-based accounts, however, suggest that infants use agency cues to identify and predict action goals when the action or the agent is not familiar. From these accounts, we hypothesized that younger infants would need additional agency cues such as a salient action effect to predict the goal of a human grasping action, whereas older infants should be able to predict the goal regardless of agency cues. In three experiments, we presented 6-, 7-, and 11-month-olds with videos of a manual grasping action presented either with or without an additional salient action effect (Exp. 1 and 2), or we presented 7-month-olds with videos of a mechanical claw performing a grasping action presented with a salient action effect (Exp. 3). The 6-month-olds showed tracking gaze behavior, and the 11-month-olds showed predictive gaze behavior, regardless of the action effect. However, the 7-month-olds showed predictive gaze behavior in the action-effect condition, but tracking gaze behavior in the no-action-effect condition and in the action-effect condition with a mechanical claw. The results therefore support the idea that salient action effects are especially important for infants' goal predictions from 7 months on, and that this facilitating influence of action effects is selective for the observation of human hands

Contiguity and Contingency in Action-Effected Learning

According to the two-stage model of voluntary action, the ability to perform voluntary action is acquired in two sequential steps. Firstly, associations are acquired between representations of movements and of the e#ects that frequently follow them. Secondly, the anticipation or perception of an acquired action effect primes the movement that has been learnt to produce this effect; the acquired action-e#ect associations thus mediate the selection of actions that are most appropriate to achieve an intended action goal. If action-effect learning has an associative basis, it should be influenced by factors that are known to a#ect instrumental learning, such as the temporal contiguity and the probabilistic contingency of movement and effect. In two experiments, the contiguity or the contingency between key presses and subsequent tones was manipulated in various ways. As expected, both factors affected the acquisition of action-effect relations as assessed by the potency of action effects to prime the corresponding action in a later behavioral test. In particular, evidence of action-effect associations was obtained only if the effect of the action was delayed for no more than 1 s, if the effect appeared more often in the presence than in the absence of the action, or if action and effect were entirely uncorrelated but the effect appeared very often. These findings support the assumption that the control of voluntary actions is based on action-effect representations that are acquired by associative learning mechanisms

The effect of the number of processors on the convergence of the parallel block Jacobi method

Elsner L, Neumann M, Vemmer B. The effect of the number of processors on the convergence of the parallel block Jacobi method. Linear Algebra and its Applications. 1991;154-156:311-330.We investigate the effect, on the rate of convergence of a model of the asynchronized parallel iteration method, of allowing the number of processors to differ from the number of splittings. Under certain regularization assumptions we prove that decreasing the number of processors increases the convergence rate. Our interpretation of this result for the model is as follows: increasing the number of processors means that each processor updates the global approximation in the host node with a local iteration which is computed from older global data. Hence the convergence rate is reduced. To prove our results we develop theorems for comparison of the spectral radii for certain nonnegative matrices which are of interest in their own right. We provide numerical examples to illustrate our results