Exercise recommendations for patients with myositis: a narrative review of safety and efficacy.

Idiopathic inflammatory myopathies (IIM) are marked by progressive muscle weakness and lasting disability. Therapies targeting patient well-being include the use of prescription drugs as well as exercise. Maintaining or increasing muscular strength and endurance as well as cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) improves quality of life (QoL) as well as functional status in IIM patients. This narrative review highlights exercise interventions in patients of different IIM subtypes with the intent to provide a summary table with exercise recommendations that will safely and effectively improve QoL in myositis patients.

Multimodal Approach for the Treatment of Complex Hypothalamic Hamartomas.

Hypothalamic hamartomas (HHs) are rare congenital lesions formed by heterotopic neuronal and glial cells attached to the mammillary bodies, tuber cinereum, and hypothalamus.They often present with an intractable epilepsy typically characterized by gelastic seizures but commonly associated with other types of refractory seizures. The clinical course is progressive in most of the cases, starting with gelastic seizures in infancy and deteriorating into complex seizure disorders that result in catastrophic epilepsy associated with cognitive decline and behavioral disturbances.Hamartomas are known to be intrinsically epileptogenic and the site of origin for the gelastic seizures. As antiepileptic drugs are typically ineffective in controlling HH-related epilepsy, different surgical options have been proposed as a treatment to achieve seizure control. Resection or complete disconnection of the hamartoma from the mammillothalamic tract has proved to achieve a long-lasting control of the epileptic syndrome.Usually, symptoms and their severity are typically related to the size, localization, and type of attachment. Precocious puberty appears mostly in the pedunculated type, while epileptic syndrome and behavioral decline are frequently related to the sessile type. For this reason, different classifications of HHs have been developed based on their size, extension, and type of attachment to the hypothalamus.The bigger and more complex hypothalamic hamartomas typically present with severe refractory epilepsy, behavioral disturbances, and progressive cognitive decline posing a formidable challenge for the control of these symptoms.We present here our experience with the multimodal treatment for complex hypothalamic hamartomas. After an in-depth review of the literature, we systematize our approach for the different types of hypothalamic hamartomas.

Sound symbolic associations in Spanish emotional words: affective dimensions and discrete emotions.

Sound symbolism refers to non-arbitrary associations between word forms and meaning, such as those observed for some properties of sounds and size or shape. Recent evidence suggests that these connections extend to emotional concepts. Here we investigated two types of non-arbitrary relationships. Study 1 examined whether iconicity scores (i.e. resemblance-based mapping between aspects of a word's form and its meaning) for words can be predicted from ratings in the affective dimensions of valence and arousal and/or the discrete emotions of happiness, anger, fear, disgust and sadness. Words denoting negative concepts were more likely to have more iconic word forms. Study 2 explored whether statistical regularities in single phonemes (i.e. systematicity) predicted ratings in affective dimensions and/or discrete emotions. Voiceless (/p/, /t/) and voiced plosives (/b/, /d/, /g/) were related to high arousing words, whereas high arousing negative words tended to include fricatives (/s/, /z/). Hissing consonants were also more likely to occur in words denoting all negative discrete emotions. Additionally, words conveying certain discrete emotions included specific phonemes. Overall, our data suggest that emotional features might explain variations in iconicity and provide new insight about phonemic patterns showing sound symbolic associations with the affective properties of words.

Masked priming under the Bayesian microscope: Exploring the integration of local elements into global shape through Bayesian model comparison.

To investigate whether local elements are grouped into global shapes in the absence of awareness, we introduced two different masked priming designs (e.g., the classic dissociation paradigm and a trial-wise probe and prime discrimination task) and collected both objective (i.e., performance based) and subjective (using the perceptual awareness scale [PAS]) awareness measures. Prime visibility was manipulated using three different prime-mask stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) and an unmasked condition. Our results showed that assessing prime visibility trial-wise heavily interfered with masked priming preventing any prime facilitation effect. The implementation of Bayesian regression models, which predict priming effects for participants whose awareness levels are at chance level, provided strong evidence in favor of the hypothesis that local elements group into global shape in the absence of awareness for SOAs longer than 50 ms, suggesting that prime-mask SOA is a crucial factor in the processing of the global shape without awareness.

Your words went straight to my heart: the role of emotional prototypicality in the recognition of emotion-label words.

Emotional words differ in how they acquire their emotional charge. There is a relevant distinction between emotion-label words (those that directly name an emotion, e.g., "joy" or "sadness") and emotion-laden words (those that do not name an emotion, but can provoke it, e.g., "party" or "death"). In this work, we focused on emotion-label words. These words vary in their emotional prototypicality, which indicates the extent to which the word refers to an emotion. We conducted two lexical decision experiments to examine the role played by emotional prototypicality in the recognition of emotion-label words. The results showed that emotional prototypicality has a facilitative effect in word recognition. Emotional prototypicality would ease conceptual access, thus facilitating the retrieval of emotional content during word recognition. In addition to the theoretical implications, the evidence gathered in this study also highlights the need to consider emotional prototypicality in the selection of emotion-label words in future studies.

Emoji-SP, the Spanish emoji database: Visual complexity, familiarity, frequency of use, clarity, and emotional valence and arousal norms for 1031 emojis.

This article presents subjective norms for 1031 emojis in six dimensions: visual complexity, familiarity, frequency of use, clarity, emotional valence, and emotional arousal. This is the largest normative study conducted so far that relies on subjective ratings. Unlike the few existing normative studies, which mainly comprise face emojis, here we present a wide range of emoji categories. We also examine the correlations between the dimensions assessed. Our results show that, in terms of their affective properties, emojis are analogous to other stimuli, such as words, showing the expected U-shaped relationship between valence and arousal. The relationship between affective properties and other dimensions (e.g., between valence and familiarity) is also similar to the relationship observed in words, in the sense that positively valenced emojis are more familiar than negative ones. These findings suggest that emojis are suitable stimuli for studying affective processing. Emoji-SP will be highly valuable for researchers of various fields interested in emojis, including computer science, communication, linguistics, and psychology. The full set of norms is available at: https://osf.io/dtfjv/ .

CROWD-5e: A Croatian psycholinguistic database of affective norms for five discrete emotions.

The present study introduces affective norms for a set of 3022 Croatian words on five discrete emotions: happiness, anger, sadness, fear, and disgust. The words were rated by 1239 Croatian native speakers. Each participant rated 251 or 252 words for one discrete emotion on a five-point Likert scale. The analyses revealed a significant relationship between discrete emotions, emotional dimensions (valence and arousal), and other psycholinguistic properties of words. In addition, small sex differences in discrete emotion ratings were found. Finally, the analysis of the distribution of words among discrete emotions allowed a distinction between "pure" words (i.e., those mostly related to a single emotion) and "mixed" words (i.e., those related to more than one emotion). The new database extends the existing Croatian affective norms collected from a dimensional conception of emotions, providing the necessary resource for future experimental investigation in Croatian within the theoretical framework of discrete emotions.

The bright side of words: Norms for 9000 Spanish words in seven discrete positive emotions.

In recent years, assumptions about the existence of a single construct of happiness that accounts for all positive emotions have been questioned. Instead, several discrete positive emotions with their own neurobiological and psychological mechanisms have been proposed. Of note, the effects of positive emotions on language processing are not yet properly understood. Here we provide a database for a large set of 9000 Spanish words scored by 3437 participants in the positive emotions of awe, contentment, amusement, excitement, serenity, relief, and pleasure. We also report significant correlations between discrete positive emotions and several affective (e.g., valence, arousal, happiness, negative discrete emotions) and lexico-semantic (e.g., frequency of use, familiarity, concreteness, age of acquisition) characteristics of words. Finally, we analyze differences between words conveying a single emotion ("pure" emotion words) and those denoting more than one emotion ("mixed" emotion words). This study will provide researchers a rich source of information to do research that contributes to expanding the current knowledge on the role of positive emotions in language. The norms are available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.21533571.v2.

Subjective age of acquisition norms for 1604 English words by Spanish L2 speakers of English and their relationship with lexico-semantic, affective, sociolinguistic and proficiency variables.

Psycholinguistic studies have shown that there are many variables implicated in language comprehension and production. At the lexical level, subjective age of acquisition (AoA), the estimate of the age at which a word is acquired, is key for stimuli selection in psycholinguistic studies. AoA databases in English are often used when testing a variety of phenomena in second language (L2) speakers of English. However, these have limitations, as the norms are not provided by the target population (L2 speakers of English) but by native English speakers. In this study, we asked native Spanish L2 speakers of English to provide subjective AoA ratings for 1604 English words, and investigated whether factors related to 14 lexico-semantic and affective variables, both in Spanish and English, and to the speakers' profile (i.e., sociolinguistic variables and L2 proficiency), were related to the L2 AoA ratings. We used boosted regression trees, an advanced form of regression analysis based on machine learning and boosting algorithms, to analyse the data. Our results showed that the model accounted for a relevant proportion of deviance (58.56%), with the English AoA provided by native English speakers being the strongest predictor for L2 AoA. Additionally, L2 AoA correlated with L2 reaction times. Our database is a useful tool for the research community running psycholinguistic studies in L2 speakers of English. It adds knowledge about which factors-linked to the characteristics of both the linguistic stimuli and the speakers-affect L2 subjective AoA. The database and the data can be downloaded from: https://osf.io/gr8xd/?view_only=73b01dccbedb4d7897c8d104d3d68c46 .

Pain E-motion Faces Database (PEMF): Pain-related micro-clips for emotion research.

A large number of publications have focused on the study of pain expressions. Despite the growing knowledge, the availability of pain-related face databases is still very scarce compared with other emotional facial expressions. The Pain E-Motion Faces Database (PEMF) is a new open-access database currently consisting of 272 micro-clips of 68 different identities. Each model displays one neutral expression and three pain-related facial expressions: posed, spontaneous-algometer and spontaneous-CO2 laser. Normative ratings of pain intensity, valence and arousal were provided by students of three different European universities. Six independent coders carried out a coding process on the facial stimuli based on the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), in which ratings of intensity of pain, valence and arousal were computed for each type of facial expression. Gender and age effects of models across each type of micro-clip were also analysed. Additionally, participants' ability to discriminate the veracity of pain-related facial expressions (i.e., spontaneous vs posed) was explored. Finally, a series of ANOVAs were carried out to test the presence of other basic emotions and common facial action unit (AU) patterns. The main results revealed that posed facial expressions received higher ratings of pain intensity, more negative valence and higher arousal compared with spontaneous pain-related and neutral faces. No differential effects of model gender were found. Participants were unable to accurately discriminate whether a given pain-related face represented spontaneous or posed pain. PEMF thus constitutes a large open-source and reliable set of dynamic pain expressions useful for designing experimental studies focused on pain processes.

Image-guided radiation therapy (IGRT) in prostate cancer in México, survey of SOMERA (Sociedad Mexicana de Radioterapeutas/Mexican Society of Radiation Oncologists) with recommendations on its implementation and process.

Background: Prostate cancer is one of the main tumors worldwide, its treatment is multidisciplinary, includes radiotherapy in all stages: curative, radical, adjuvant, salvage and palliative. Technological advances in planning systems, image acquisition and treatment equipment have allowed the delivery of higher doses limiting toxicity in healthy tissues, distributing radiation optimally and ensuring reproducibility of conditions. Image-guided radiotherapy (IGRT) is not standard in guidelines, only recommended with heterogeneity in its own process. Materials and methods: A survey was conducted to members of the Mexican Society of Radiation Oncologists (SOMERA), to know the current status and make recommendations about its implementation and use, taking into account existing resources. Results: Responses of 541 patients were evaluated, 85% belonged to the intermediate-high risk group, 65% received adjuvant or salvage radiotherapy (RT), 80% received intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) using doses up to 80 Gy/2 Gy. Cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) was performed on 506 (93.5%), (100% IMRT) and 90% at a periodicity of 3-5/week. 3D treatment with 42% portal images 1/week. Online correction strategies (36% changes before treatment), following a diet and bladder and rectal control. Evidence and recommendations are reviewed. Conclusions: IGRT should be performed in patients with prostate cancer. In Mexico, despite limitations in the distribution of human and technological resources, it is routinely applied. More information is still needed on clinical evidence of its benefits and the process should be implemented according to infrastructure, following institutional guidelines, recommending to report the initial experience that helps to standardize national conduct.

The development of selective stopping: Qualitative and quantitative changes from childhood to early adulthood.

Although progress has been made in elucidating the behavioral and neural development of global stopping across the lifespan, little is known about the development of selective stopping. This more complex form of inhibitory control is required in real-world situations where ongoing responses must be inhibited to certain stimuli but not others, and can be assessed in laboratory settings using a stimulus selective stopping task. Here we used this task to investigate the qualitative and quantitative developmental changes in selective stopping in a large-scale cross-sectional study with three different age groups (children, preadolescents, and young adults). We found that the ability to stop a response selectively to some stimuli (i.e., use a selective strategy) rather than non-selectively to all presented stimuli (i.e., use a global, non-selective strategy) is fully mature by early preadolescence, and remains stable afterwards at least until young adulthood. By contrast, the efficiency or speed of stopping (indexed by a shorter stop-signal reaction time or SSRT) continues to mature throughout adolescence until young adulthood, both for global and selective implementations of stopping. We also provide some preliminary findings regarding which other task variables beyond the strategy and SSRT predicted age group status. Premature responding (an index of "waiting impulsivity") and post-ignore slowing (an index of cognitive control) were among the most relevant predictors in discriminating between developmental age groups. Although present results need to be confirmed and extended in longitudinal studies, they provide new insights into the development of a relevant form of inhibitory control.

I want it small or, rather, give me a bunch: the role of evaluative morphology on the assessment of the emotional properties of words.

ABSTRACTEvaluative markers of diminution and augmentation typically express quantity or intensity. Prior evidence suggests that they also convey emotions, although it remains unexplored as to whether this function is mediated by their role in expressing quantification/intensification. Here we investigated the effects of evaluative suffixes on the assessment of word affective properties by asking participants (N = 300) to score valence and arousal features for augmentatives, diminutives and base words with negative, positive or neutral valence. Diminutives and, to a lesser extent, augmentatives were assessed more positively than base forms in negative words and more negatively than bases in positive words. The capacity of diminution to express attenuated emotions is in line with its function in conveying quantity. By contrast, valence effects for augmentatives suggests a role in expressing pejoration and amelioration that is not mediated by quantification. With regard to arousal, negative, neutral and positive augmentatives showed higher scores than base words, which, in addition, were also rated higher than diminutives. These incremental effects suggest that suffixes which convey larger quantity are also associated with increased arousal. Thus, with the exception of valence effects in augmentatives, it seems that evaluative suffixes encode both valence and arousal through quantification.

The predictors of general knowledge: Data from a Spanish megastudy.

Studies on sociodemographic data and crystallized intelligence have often struggled to recruit enough participants to achieve sufficient validity. However, the advent of the internet now allows this problem to be solved through the creation of megastudies. Yet, this methodology so far has only been used in studies on vocabulary size, while general knowledge, another key component of crystallized intelligence, remains unexamined. In the present study, regression models were used to examine the impact of sociodemographic variables-gender, age, years of study and socioeconomic status-on general knowledge scores. The sample comprised 48,234 participants, each of whom answered 60 general knowledge questions, their data being fully available online. Men were found to score higher than women in general knowledge. Years of study and socioeconomic status acted as strong and weak positive predictors, respectively. Age acted as a strong positive predictor until the age of 50, where it became progressively detrimental. These results are discussed relative to other studies on crystallized intelligence, highlighting the need to study each of its components individually.

The Level of Processing Modulates Visual Awareness: Evidence from Behavioral and Electrophysiological Measures.

The level of processing hypothesis (LoP) proposes that the transition from unaware to aware visual perception is graded for low-level (i.e., energy, features) stimulus whereas dichotomous for high-level (i.e., letters, words, meaning) stimulus. In this study, we explore the behavioral patterns and neural correlates associated with different depths (i.e., low vs. high) of stimulus processing. The low-level stimulus condition consisted of identifying the color (i.e., blue/blueish vs. red/reddish) of the target, and the high-level stimulus condition consisted of identifying stimulus category (animal vs. object). Behavioral results showed that the levels of processing manipulation produced significant differences in both the awareness rating distributions and accuracy performances between tasks, the low-level task producing more intermediate subjective ratings and linearly increasing accuracy performances and the high-level task producing less intermediate ratings and a more nonlinear pattern for accuracies. The electrophysiological recordings revealed two correlates of visual awareness, an enhanced posterior negativity in the N200 time window (visual awareness negativity [VAN]), and an enhanced positivity in the P3 time window (late positivity [LP]). The analyses showed a double dissociation between awareness and the level of processing hypothesis manipulation: Awareness modulated VAN amplitudes only in the low-level color task, whereas LP amplitude modulations were observed only in the higher level category task. These findings are compatible with a two-stage microgenesis model of conscious perception, where an early elementary phenomenal sensation of the stimulus (i.e., the subjective perception of color) would be indexed by VAN, whereas stimulus' higher level properties (i.e., the category of the target) would be reflected in the LP in a later latency range.

EmoPro - Emotional prototypicality for 1286 Spanish words: Relationships with affective and psycholinguistic variables.

We present EmoPro, a normative study of the emotion lexicon of the Spanish language. We provide emotional prototypicality ratings for 1286 emotion words (i.e., those that refer to human emotions such as "fear" or "happy"), belonging to different grammatical categories. This is the largest data set for this variable so far. Each word was rated by at least 20 participants, and adequate reliability and validity rates for prototypicality scores were found. We also provide new affective (valence, arousal, emotionality, happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, and anger) and psycholinguistic (Age-of-Acquisition, frequency and concreteness) ratings for those words without prior data in the extant literature, and analyze which of the given variables contribute the most to prototypicality. A factor analysis on the affective and psycholinguistic variables has shown that prototypicality loads in a factor associated to the emotional salience of words. Furthermore, a regression analysis reveals a significant role of both dimensional and discrete- emotion-related variables, as well as a modest effect of AoA and frequency on the prediction of prototypicality. Cross-linguistic comparisons show that the pattern obtained here is similar to that observed in other languages. EmoPro norms will be highly valuable for researchers in the field, providing them with a tool to select the most representative emotion words in Spanish for their experimental (e.g., for a comparison with emotion-laden words, such as "murder" or "party") or applied studies (e.g., to examine the acquisition of emotion words/concepts in children). The full set of norms is available as supplementary material.

Visual awareness and the levels of processing hypothesis: A critical review.

Does a visual percept emerge to consciousness in a graded manner (i.e. evolving through increasing degrees of clarity), or according to a dichotomous, "all-or-none" pattern (i.e. abruptly transitioning from unawareness to awareness)? The level of processing hypothesis (LoP; B. Windey and A. Cleeremans, 2015) recently proposed a theoretical framework where the transition from unaware to aware visual experience is graded for low-level stimulus representations (i.e. stimulus "energy" or "feature" levels) whereas it is dichotomous for high-level (i.e. the perception of "letters", "words" or "meaning") stimulus perception. Here, we will critically review current behavioral and brain-based evidence on the LoP hypothesis and discuss potential challenges (such as differences in LoP conceptualizations, awareness scale related issues, attentional confounds and divergences on experimental factors or statistical analyses) which might be of use for future research within the field. Overall, the LoP hypothesis is a recent and promising proposal that attempts to integrate divergent evidence on the graded vs. dichotomous emergence of awareness debate. Whereas current evidence validates some of the assumptions proposed by the LoP account, there is still much work to do on both methodological and experimental levels. Future neuroimaging studies might help to disentangle the current complex pattern of results found in LoP studies and, importantly, shed some light on the ongoing debate about the search for the Neural Correlates of Consciousness (NCC).

Life-threatening secondary hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis following vagal nerve stimulator infection in a child with CHD2 myoclonic encephalopathy: a case report.

Vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) is a surgical treatment available for patients affected by generalized refractory epilepsy. The authors report the case of a 15-year-old girl affected by CHD2-related myoclonic encephalopathy and BLM haploinsufficiency due to a deletion of 15q25.3q26.2 region, who suffered from secondary hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis (SHLH) after a VNS wound infection. SHLH has sporadically been described in epileptic patients. Based on indirect evidence that shows immune dysregulation in patients with CHD2 mutations and BLM mutations, we hypothesize that the genetic background of this patient may have played a critical role in the development of the syndrome.

Highly realistic simulation for robot-assisted hypothalamic hamartoma real-time MRI-guided laser interstitial thermal therapy (LITT).

PURPOSE: Real-time MRI-guided laser interstitial thermal therapy (LITT) is a challenging procedure due to its technical complexity, as well as the need for efficient multidisciplinary teamwork and transfer of an anesthetized patient between operating room (OR) and magnetic resonance (MR). A highly realistic simulation was developed to design the safest process before being applied to real patients. In this report, authors address the description of the methodology used for this simulation and its purposefulness. METHODS: The entire image planning, anesthetic, and surgical process were performed on a modified pediatric simulation mannequin with a brain made of medical grade silicone including a hypothalamic hamartoma. Preoperative CT and MR were acquired. Stereotactic insertion of the optical fiber was assisted by the Neuromate® stereotactic robot. Laser ablation was performed with the Medtronic Visualase® MRI-guided system in a 3T Phillips Ingenia® MR scanner. All the stages of the process, participants, and equipment were the same as planned for a real surgery. RESULTS: No critical errors were found in the process design that prevented the procedure from being performed with adequate safety. Specific proposals for team positioning and interaction in patient transfers and in MR room were validated. Some specific elements that could improve safety were identified. CONCLUSION: Highly realistic simulation has been an extremely useful tool for safely planning LITT, because professionals were able to take actions in the workflow based not on ideas but on lived experiences. It contributed definitively to build a well-coordinated surgical team that worked safely and more efficiently.

Spanish affective normative data for 1,406 words rated by children and adolescents (SANDchild).

Most research on the relationship between emotion and language in children relies on the use of words whose affective properties have been assessed by adults. To overcome this limitation, in the current study we introduce SANDchild, the Spanish affective database for children. This dataset reports ratings in the valence and the arousal dimensions for a large corpus of 1406 Spanish words rated by a large sample of 1276 children and adolescents from four different age groups (7, 9, 11 and 13 years old). We observed high inter-rater reliabilities for both valence and arousal in the four age groups. However, some age differences were found. In this sense, ratings for both valence and arousal decreased with age. Furthermore, the youngest children consider more words to be positive than adolescents. We also found sex differences in valence scores since boys gave higher valence ratings than girls, while girls considered more words to be negative than boys. The norms provided in this database will allow us to further extend our knowledge on the acquisition, development and processing of emotional language from childhood to adolescence. The complete database can be downloaded from https://psico.fcep.urv.cat/exp/files/SANDchild.xlsx .