Vicarious touch: Overlapping neural patterns between seeing and feeling touch.

Simulation theories propose that vicarious touch arises when seeing someone else being touched triggers corresponding representations of being touched. Prior electroencephalography (EEG) findings show that seeing touch modulates both early and late somatosensory responses (measured with or without direct tactile stimulation). Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) studies have shown that seeing touch increases somatosensory cortical activation. These findings have been taken to suggest that when we see someone being touched, we simulate that touch in our sensory systems. The somatosensory overlap when seeing and feeling touch differs between individuals, potentially underpinning variation in vicarious touch experiences. Increases in amplitude (EEG) or cerebral blood flow response (fMRI), however, are limited in that they cannot test for the information contained in the neural signal: seeing touch may not activate the same information as feeling touch. Here, we use time-resolved multivariate pattern analysis on whole-brain EEG data from people with and without vicarious touch experiences to test whether seen touch evokes overlapping neural representations with the first-hand experience of touch. Participants felt touch to the fingers (tactile trials) or watched carefully matched videos of touch to another person's fingers (visual trials). In both groups, EEG was sufficiently sensitive to allow decoding of touch location (little finger vs. thumb) on tactile trials. However, only in individuals who reported feeling touch when watching videos of touch could a classifier trained on tactile trials distinguish touch location on visual trials. This demonstrates that, for people who experience vicarious touch, there is overlap in the information about touch location held in the neural patterns when seeing and feeling touch. The timecourse of this overlap implies that seeing touch evokes similar representations to later stages of tactile processing. Therefore, while simulation may underlie vicarious tactile sensations, our findings suggest this involves an abstracted representation of directly felt touch.

Effects of the Parental Friendship Coaching Intervention on Parental Emotion Socialization of Children with ADHD.

Parental emotion-related socialization behaviors shape children's socioemotional functioning and appear important for children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The Parental Friendship Coaching (PFC) intervention teaches parents to coach their children with ADHD in friendship skills, which includes managing emotions. We examined whether PFC, relative to psychoeducation and social support (Coping with ADHD through Relationships and Education; CARE), improved parental emotion-related socialization behaviors, child affect with a friend, and child social behaviors related to emotional difficulties. Participants were 172 families of children with ADHD (ages 6-11, 30% female), randomized to PFC or CARE. At baseline, children and their real-life friends interacted and their affect was coded. Parents coached their child in friendship skills before and after the child-friend interaction, and parents' praise, warmth, criticism, and discussion of emotion-related friendship strategies were coded. Parents and teachers reported children's withdrawn/depressed and aggressive behaviors. Results suggested that PFC (relative to CARE) led to parents providing more emotion strategies and praise at post-treatment and follow-up, and more warmth at follow-up, and to children showing less withdrawn/depressed behavior at follow-up. For bidirectional relationships from baseline to post-treatment, more parental warmth was associated with less child withdrawn/depressed behavior, and more parental criticism with more child aggression. More child withdrawn/depressed behavior and positive affect at post-treatment were associated with more parental criticism at follow-up. After corrections for multiple comparisons, only PFC effects on praise and emotion strategies at post-treatment, and praise and withdrawn/depressed behavior at follow-up, maintained. Implications are discussed for supporting socioemotional functioning in children with ADHD.

Promoting Classroom Social and Academic Functioning among Children at Risk for ADHD: The MOSAIC Program.

OBJECTIVE: Social and academic functioning are linked in elementary school, and both are frequently impaired in children with elevated symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). This study evaluated the Making Socially Accepting Inclusive Classrooms (MOSAIC) program, a classroom intervention to support children's social and academic functioning, especially for children at risk for ADHD. Teachers delivered MOSAIC practices to the whole class and applied some strategies more frequently to target children selected for elevated ADHD symptoms and peer impairment. METHOD: Participants were 34 general education teachers (grades K-5) and 558 children in their classrooms, randomized to MOSAIC or to a typical practice control group for one academic year. In the fall and spring, we assessed (a) peers' sociometric judgments of children, (b) children's self-report of supportive relationships with teachers and peers, and (c) teachers' report of children's social and academic competencies and impairments. RESULTS: Regarding whole class effects, relative to control group children, children in MOSAIC classrooms (target and non-target children) were rated by teachers in spring as having better competencies and lower impairment, after controlling for fall functioning. There were no main effects of MOSAIC on peer sociometrics or child perceptions of supportive relationships. Target status moderated some effects such that, in spring, target children in MOSAIC perceived greater support from their teachers but received poorer sociometrics than did target children in control classrooms. CONCLUSIONS: We discuss the difficulty in changing peers' perceptions of children with ADHD symptoms, even in the presence of improvements in other aspects of social and academic functioning.

Integrating Research-Supported Coaching Practices Into Secondary Teachers' Team Meetings: Early Indications of Potential to Impact Collaborations, Classroom Interactions, and Student Engagement.

The My Teaching Partner-Secondary (MTPS) program demonstrated improvements in classroom interactions and student outcomes in secondary schools using one-on-one coaching between study staff and teachers. Despite promising results, the time, cost, and oversight from a university research team may pose barriers to adoption of coaching programs like MTPS at scale. The My Teaching Team (MTT) project sought to translate key ingredients from MTPS into existing professional development contexts that are already built into many middle and high school educators' weekly schedules: co-planning or professional learning community meetings. Six teams of secondary teachers (N = 30 teachers) participated in a pilot test of the usability of MTT materials across 5 months in one school year. Three teams elected to use MTT materials, and three elected to be a comparison group who continued their typical practices. Teams adopting MTT materials were observed to do so with good implementation integrity, and reported satisfaction with the intervention. Compared to typical practice teams, those using MTT were observed to spend more meeting time discussing teaching practice and less time discussing logistics/mechanics, and engaged in more video sharing and feedback to team members in the MTT sessions that explicitly encouraged this. The number of MTT meetings completed by a team, as well as spending more time discussing teaching practices and video sharing (but not feedback provided) during team meetings, predicted students' self-reports of greater engagement and observations of higher levels of emotional support provided in the classroom. Implications for translating empirically supported interventions from the lab to real-world school settings are discussed.

Reducing the Number of Mismatches between Hairs and Buccal References When Analysing mtDNA Heteroplasmic Variation by Massively Parallel Sequencing.

In forensics, mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) analysis is foremost applied to rootless hairs often lacking detectable nuclear DNA. Sanger sequencing is the routine mtDNA method in most forensic laboratories, even though interpretation of mixed samples and heteroplasmic sites can be challenging. Individuals may hold cells with low-level heteroplasmy variants below the detection threshold and other cells where this minor variant is the major one. This difference may be interpreted as a mismatch between reference and evidentiary trace samples, such as buccal specimens and rootless hairs. Such mismatches may be solved by Massively Parallel Sequencing (MPS), allowing more sensitive quantitative analysis for mixed positions than Sanger. The mtDNA control region was analysed in buccal reference samples from 26 individuals and 475 corresponding hairs by MPS and compared to Sanger sequencing data generated on the same samples. With MPS, mixed contributions down to 3% were regarded, leading to a substantial increase in the frequency of heteroplasmy. Our results demonstrate that previously reported mismatches between buccal reference and hair shaft samples by Sanger are detected as low-level heteroplasmy by MPS. A detailed overview of buccal and hair heteroplasmy is provided and implications for MPS-based mtDNA analysis in the context of forensic cases are discussed.

Treatment of friendship problems in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: Initial results from a randomized clinical trial.

OBJECTIVE: This study evaluated a novel intervention for friendship problems in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Parental Friendship Coaching (PFC) teaches parents to coach their children in targeted friendship behaviors that are lacking in children with ADHD and that help children develop good quality friendships. METHOD: Participants were 172 families of children with ADHD and social impairment (ages 6-11; 29.7% female) at two Canadian sites, randomized to PFC or to an active comparison intervention (Coping with ADHD through Relationships and Education; CARE) to control for common therapy factors. Questionnaire and observational measures assessing primary outcomes of children's friendship quality and secondary outcomes of children's friendship behaviors were collected at baseline, posttreatment, and 8-month follow-up. RESULTS: Across both treatment conditions, children showed improvements in positive friendship quality and in friendship behaviors. Relative to CARE, PFC was associated with somewhat more positive and less negative friendship behaviors at posttreatment and follow-up, but no difference between conditions was found in friendship quality. However, moderation analyses suggested that PFC may contribute to better friendship quality among families who had previous psychosocial treatment, as well as children with comorbid externalizing disorders. CONCLUSIONS: Although PFC showed some efficacy for affecting children's friendship behaviors, these changes may not translate into friendship quality. Nevertheless, PFC may improve friendship quality for at-risk subgroups of children with ADHD. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Correlates of Loneliness in Children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: Comorbidities and Peer Problems.

Children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are well-documented to experience social-emotional difficulties; however, little is known about their loneliness-an aspect of social-emotional functioning. Using a cross-sectional design, we examined how loneliness relates to comorbid internalizing disorders, externalizing disorders, and peer problems in a sample of 213 children with ADHD. Children (66 girls, Mage = 8.58, SDage = 1.55) reported their loneliness. Comorbid internalizing and externalizing disorders were assessed via a multi-informant procedure. Proportion of classmates who accepted, rejected, and ignored the child, friendship quantity, and friendship quality were peer problem indicators. Results suggested that children with comorbid internalizing disorders, fewer friendships, or potentially more negative friendship quality, reported more loneliness. Gender appeared to moderate the association between peer rejection and loneliness, such that boys with peer rejection reported more loneliness than girls. Clinical implications include targeting loneliness as a social-emotional problem to assess and treat in children with ADHD.

Visual body form and orientation cues do not modulate visuo-tactile temporal integration.

Body ownership relies on spatiotemporal correlations between multisensory signals and visual cues specifying oneself such as body form and orientation. The mechanism for the integration of bodily signals remains unclear. One approach to model multisensory integration that has been influential in the multisensory literature is Bayesian causal inference. This specifies that the brain integrates spatial and temporal signals coming from different modalities when it infers a common cause for inputs. As an example, the rubber hand illusion shows that visual form and orientation cues can promote the inference of a common cause (one's body) leading to spatial integration shown by a proprioceptive drift of the perceived location of the real hand towards the rubber hand. Recent studies investigating the effect of visual cues on temporal integration, however, have led to conflicting findings. These could be due to task differences, variation in ecological validity of stimuli and/or small samples. In this pre-registered study, we investigated the influence of visual information on temporal integration using a visuo-tactile temporal order judgement task with realistic stimuli and a sufficiently large sample determined by Bayesian analysis. Participants viewed videos of a touch being applied to plausible or implausible visual stimuli for one's hand (hand oriented plausibly, hand rotated 180 degrees, or a sponge) while also being touched at varying stimulus onset asynchronies. Participants judged which stimulus came first: viewed or felt touch. Results show that visual cues do not modulate visuo-tactile temporal order judgements. This is not in line with the idea that bodily signals indicating oneself influence the integration of multisensory signals in the temporal domain. The current study emphasises the importance of rigour in our methodologies and analyses to advance the understanding of how properties of multisensory events affect the encoding of temporal information in the brain.

Social Skills Training and ADHD-What Works?

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: Many children and adolescents with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have difficulties in their social skills and peer relationships. Because social problems exacerbate later maladjustment in ADHD populations, it is important to address this serious impairment. Although social skills training (SST) is a common intervention approach, evidence to date suggests that SST has limited efficacy, at least when provided in traditional, clinic-based settings. The current review summarizes recent advances to traditional SST approaches that may potentially enhance their efficacy. RECENT FINDINGS: We identify two promising directions in which SST may be modified to make it more efficacious for ADHD populations. The first direction involves providing increased reinforcement and reminders of appropriate social behavior at the point of performance to youth with ADHD (e.g., in vivo, in real life peer situations as opposed to in the clinic). We note the importance of ensuring that youth with ADHD are receptive to such reminders. The second direction involves encouraging peers to be more socially accepting and inclusive of youth with ADHD. This avenue has been understudied in the literature to date. SST for children and adolescents with ADHD may be enhanced by providing more in vivo reminders and feedback at the point of performance and by making efforts to alter peers' impressions about youth with ADHD.