Applications of VR technologies for childhood disability

This chapter explores how changing patterns of childhood participation and engagement provide opportunities for using VR technologies for children with disabilities. The International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health—Children and Youth version is used as a framework to consider the role of VR technologies in evaluation and intervention across body structures and body function, activity performance and participation within different contexts. Benefits of VR are viewed through the lens of current theory and research to consider broader aspects of the potential impact on brain–behaviour relationships

Gender Differences of Brain Activity in the Conflicts Based on Implicit Self-Esteem

There are gender differences in global and domain-specific self-esteem and the incidence of some psychiatric disorders related to self-esteem, suggesting that there are gender differences in the neural basis underlying one's own self-esteem. We investigated gender differences in the brain activity while subjects (14 males and 12 females) performed an implicit self-esteem task, using fMRI. While ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) was significantly activated in females, medial and dorsomedial PFC (dmPFC) were activated in males in the incongruent condition (self = negative) compared with the congruent condition (self = positive). Additionally, scores on the explicit self-esteem test were negatively correlated with vmPFC activity in females and positively correlated with dmPFC activity in males. Furthermore, the functional relationships among the regions found by direct gender comparisons were discussed based on the somatic-marker model. These showed that, compared to males, females more firmly store even the incongruent associations as part of their schematic self-knowledge, and such associations automatically activate the neural networks for emotional response and control, in which vmPFC plays a central role. This may explain female cognitive/behavioral traits; females have more tendency to ruminate more often than males, which sometimes results in a prolonged negative affect

Easier to accelerate than to slow down: Contributions of developmental neurobiology for the understanding of adolescent social anxiety

Early adolescence poses many challenges for young people, and it is during this phase that social anxiety disorder (SAD) tends to develop. Research indicates that adolescents have a relatively immature neurobiological brake-system (based in the prefrontal cortex) in relation to a more matured alarm- or gas-system (based in the subcortical regions) compared to adults. For this reason, adolescents are more sensitive for developing vicious circles of dysfunctional emotion regulation strategies like avoidance of frightening situations, worry, and rumination as well as sleep disturbances compared to adults—all of which are factors that may contribute to the development of SAD. In this chapter, we explore the genetic, neurobiological, cognitive, behavioral, and social explanations as to why some adolescents are more vulnerable for developing SAD than others. We propose a theoretical model, based on a neurobiological model proposed by Sommerville and colleagues (Brain Cogn 72(1):124–133, 2010), where early development of the subcortical regions in combination with late development of the prefrontal cortical regions is expected to predict an increase in emotionally driven behavior as well as difficulties to control them during adolescence. According to our model, we hypothesize that adolescents with poor peer and parent relationships will have a larger developmental gap between these regions compared to adolescents with supportive peer and parent relationships. Finally, we discuss how including mothers, fathers, and peers in the study of social anxiety, and taking into account both emotion regulation and sleep patterns, may be an important next step in the understanding of who may be at risk for developing social anxiety and why