The influence of emotion clarity on emotional prosody identification in paranoid schizophrenia

Background Identification of emotional facial expression and emotional prosody (i.e. speech melody) is often impaired in schizophrenia. For facial emotion identification, a recent study suggested that the relative deficit in schizophrenia is enhanced when the presented emotion is easier to recognize. It is unclear whether this effect is specific to face processing or part of a more general emotion recognition deficit. Method We used clarity-graded emotional prosodic stimuli without semantic content, and tested 25 in-patients with paranoid schizophrenia, 25 healthy control participants and 25 depressive in-patients on emotional prosody identification. Facial expression identification was used as a control task. Results Patients with paranoid schizophrenia performed worse than both control groups in identifying emotional prosody, with no specific deficit in any individual emotion category. This deficit was present in high-clarity but not in low-clarity stimuli. Performance in facial control tasks was also impaired, with identification of emotional facial expression being a better predictor of emotional prosody identification than illness-related factors. Of those, negative symptoms emerged as the best predictor for emotional prosody identification. Conclusions This study suggests a general deficit in identifying high-clarity emotional cues. This finding is in line with the hypothesis that schizophrenia is characterized by high noise in internal representations and by increased fluctuations in cerebral network

Morbus Darier und Depression - besteht eine genetische Verbindung?: Übersicht und klinischer Fall

Zusammenfassung: Der Morbus Darier ist eine seltene Hauterkrankung, die autosomal-dominant vererbt wird und durch eine Mutation im SERCA (sarco/endoplasmatic reticulum calcium transporter)-2-Gen verursacht wird. In einigen Stammbäumen ist das Auftreten des Morbus Darier eng mit dem Vorkommen affektiver Erkrankungen verknüpft. Die wahrscheinlichste Ursache ist ein Suszeptibilitätsgen für affektive Erkrankungen in der Nähe des SERCA-2-Gens. Als Suszeptibilitätslokus konnte eine 6,5-Mb-Region identifiziert werden. Auch Studien mit affektiv erkrankten Stichproben, die nicht an Morbus Darier leiden, weisen ein Signal in der gleichen Region auf. Das zugrunde liegende Gen ist jedoch noch nicht identifizier

A Novel Diagnostic Aid for Detection of Intra-Abdominal Adhesions to the Anterior Abdominal Wall Using Dynamic Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Introduction. Abdominal adhesions can cause serious morbidity and complicate subsequent operations. Their diagnosis is often one of exclusion due to a lack of a reliable, non-invasive diagnostic technique. Development and testing of a candidate technique are described below. Method. During respiration, smooth visceral sliding motion occurs between the abdominal contents and the walls of the abdominal cavity. We describe a technique involving image segmentation and registration to calculate shear as an analogue for visceral slide based on the tracking of structures throughout the respiratory cycle. The presence of an adhesion is attributed to a resistance to visceral slide resulting in a discernible reduction in shear. The abdominal movement due to respiration is captured in sagittal dynamic MR images. Results. Clinical images were selected for analysis, including a patient with a surgically confirmed adhesion. Discernible reduction in shear was observed at the location of the adhesion while a consistent, gradually changing shear was observed in the healthy volunteers. Conclusion. The technique and its validation show encouraging results for adhesion detection but a larger study is now required to confirm its potential

Storytelling as 'unorthodox' agency:negotiating the 2012 family immigration rules (United Kingdom)

This article attends to the lived experience of binational families subject to the 2012 family immigration rules (FIR). It seeks to enrich the pre-existing discussions of family migration within the European Union (EU) and the United Kingdom, focusing on the ‘micro-political’ experiences of those whose lives have been adversely affected by their introduction. It draws on the life writings of binational families, suggesting that a micro-political focus reveals an ongoing neuropolitical experience that traditional accounts of moral agency are ill-equipped to negotiate. The article suggests an unorthodox interpretation of agency premised on storytelling, while probing the tensions that emerge when this lived experience is framed in such a manner. It concludes by positing a series of questions relating to the value of a neuropolitical labelling of the subject and suggests a need to further engage with traumatic interpretations of harm at the intersection of citizenship rights and mobility rights

An Australian longitudinal pilot study examining health determinants of cardiac outcomes 12 months post percutaneous coronary intervention

Background Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) is a very common revascularisation procedure for coronary artery disease (CAD). The purpose of this study was to evaluate cardiac outcomes, health related quality of life (HRQoL), resilience and adherence behaviours in patients who have undergone a PCI at two time points (6 and 12 months) following their procedure. Methods A longitudinal pilot study was conducted to observe the cardiac outcomes across a cohort of patients who had undergone a percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI). Participants who had undergone PCI 6 months prior were invited. Those participants who met the inclusion criteria and provided consent then completed a telephone survey (time point 1). These participants were then contacted 6 months later (i.e. 12 months post-intervention, time point 2) and the measures were repeated. Results All patients (n = 51) were recorded as being alive at time point 1. The multiple model indicated that controlling for other factors, gender was significantly associated with a linear combination of outcome measures (p = 0.004). The effect was moderate in magnitude (partial-η2 = 0.303), where males performed significantly better than females 6 months after the PCI procedure physically and with mood. Follow-up univariate ANOVAs indicated that gender differences were grounded in the scale measuring depression (PHQ9) (p = 0.005) and the physical component score of the short form measuring HRQoL (SF12-PCS) (p = 0.003). Thirteen patients were lost to follow-up between time points 1 and 2. One patient was confirmed to have passed away. The pattern of correlations between outcome measures at time point 2 revealed statistically significant negative correlation between the PHQ instrument and the resilience scale (CD-RISC) (r = -0.611; p < 0.001); and the physical component score of the SF-12 instrument (r = -0.437; p = 0.054). Conclusions Men were performing better than women in the 6 months post-PCI, particularly in the areas of mood (depression) and physical health. This pilot results indicate gender-sensitive practices are recommended particularly up to 6 months post-PCI. Any gender differences observed at 6 month appear to disappear at 12 months post-PCI. Further research into the management of mood particularly for women post-PCI is warranted. A more detailed inquiry related to access/attendance to secondary prevention is also warranted

Automatic Assessment of Speech Capability Loss in Disordered Speech

International audienceIn this article, we report on the use of an automatic technique to assess pronunciation in the context of several types of speech disorders. Even if such tools already exist, they are more widely used in a different context, namely, Computer-Assisted Language Learning, in which the objective is to assess nonnative pronunciation by detecting learners' mispronunciations at segmental and/or suprasegmental levels. In our work, we sought to determine if the Goodness of Pronunciation (GOP) algorithm, which aims to detect phone-level mispronunciations by means of automatic speech recognition, could also detect segmental deviances in disordered speech. Our main experiment is an analysis of speech from people with unilateral facial palsy. This pathology may impact the realization of certain phonemes such as bilabial plosives and sibilants. Speech read by 32 speakers at four different clinical severity grades was automatically aligned and GOP scores were computed for each phone realization. The highest scores, which indicate large dissimilarities with standard phone realizations, were obtained for the most severely impaired speakers. The corresponding speech subset was manually transcribed at phone level; 8.3% of the phones differed from standard pronunciations extracted from our lexicon. The GOP technique allowed the detection of 70.2% of mispronunciations with an equal rate of about 30% of false rejections and false acceptances. Finally, to broaden the scope of the study, we explored the correlation between GOP values and speech comprehensibility scores on a second corpus, composed of sentences recorded by six people with speech impairments due to cancer surgery or neurological disorders. Strong correlations were achieved between GOP scores and subjective comprehensibility scores (about 0.7 absolute). Results from both experiments tend to validate the use of GOP to measure speech capability loss, a dimension that could be used as a complement to physiological measures in pathologies causing speech disorders

EEG Microstate Analysis in Drug-Naive Patients with Panic Disorder

Patients with panic disorder (PD) have a bias to respond to normal stimuli in a fearful way. This may be due to the preactivation of fear-associated networks prior to stimulus perception. Based on EEG, we investigated the difference between patients with PD and normal controls in resting state activity using features of transiently stable brain states (microstates). EEGs from 18 drug-naive patients and 18 healthy controls were analyzed. Microstate analysis showed that one class of microstates (with a right-anterior to left-posterior orientation of the mapped field) displayed longer durations and covered more of the total time in the patients than controls. Another microstate class (with a symmetric, anterior-posterior orientation) was observed less frequently in the patients compared to controls. The observation that selected microstate classes differ between patients with PD and controls suggests that specific brain functions are altered already during resting condition. The altered resting state may be the starting point of the observed dysfunctional processing of phobic stimuli

A novel diagnostic aid for intra-abdominal adhesion detection in cine-MR imaging: Pilot study and initial diagnostic impressions

OBJECTIVES: A non-invasive diagnostic technique for abdominal adhesions is not currently available. Capture of abdominal motion due to respiration in cine-MRI has shown promise, but is difficult to interpret. This article explores the value of a complimentary diagnostic aid to facilitate the non-invasive detection of abdominal adhesions using cine-MRI. METHOD: An image processing technique was developed to quantify the amount of sliding that occurs between the organs of the abdomen and the abdominal wall in sagittal cine-MRI slices. The technique produces a 'sheargram' which depicts the amount of sliding which has occurred over 1-3 respiratory cycles. A retrospective cohort of 52 patients, scanned for suspected adhesions, made 281 cine-MRI sagittal slices available for processing. The resulting sheargrams were reported by two operators and compared to expert clinical judgement of the cine-MRI scans. RESULTS: The sheargram matched clinical judgement in 84% of all sagittal slices and 93-96% of positive adhesions were identified on the sheargram. The sheargram displayed a slight skew towards sensitivity over specificity, with a high positive adhesion detection rate but at the expense of false positives. CONCLUSIONS: Good correlation between sheargram and absence/presence of inferred adhesions indicates quantification of sliding motion has potential to aid adhesion detection in cine-MRI. Advances in Knowledge: This is the first attempt to clinically evaluate a novel image processing technique quantifying the sliding motion of the abdominal contents against the abdominal wall. The results of this pilot study reveal its potential as a diagnostic aid for detection of abdominal adhesions