Accuracy and Speed of Emotion Recognition With Face Masks.

Wearing face masks is one of the important actions to prevent the spread of COVID-19 among people around the world. Nevertheless, social interaction is limited via masks, and this impacts the accuracy and speed of emotional perception. In the present study, we assess the impact of mask-wearing on the accuracy and speed of emotion recognition. Fifty people (female n = 39, male n = 11) aged 19-28 participated in the study (M = 21.1 years). We used frontal photos of a Kosova woman who belonged to the same participants' age group, with a grey background. Twelve different pictures were used that showed the emotional states of fear, joy, sadness, anger, neutrality, and disgust, in masked and unmasked conditions. The experiment was conducted in a controlled laboratory setting. Participants were faster for identifying emotions like joy (1.507 ms) and neutral (1.971 ms). The participants were more accurate (emotions identification) in unmasked faces (M = 85.7%) than in masked faces (M = 73.8%), F(1,98) = 20.73, MSE = 1027.66, p ≤ .001, partial η² = 0.17. Masks make confusion and reduce the accuracy and speediness of emotional detection. This may have a notable impact on social interactions among peoples.

Professional competences to promote healthy ageing across the lifespan: a scoping review.

As societies age, the development of resources and strategies that foster healthy ageing from the beginning of life become increasingly important. Social and healthcare professionals are key agents in this process; therefore, their training needs to be in agreement with societal needs. We performed a scoping review on professional competences for social and health workers to adequately promote healthy ageing throughout life, using the framework described by Arksey and O'Malley and the Joanna Briggs Institute Guidelines. A stakeholder consultation was held in each of the participating countries, in which 79 experts took part. Results show that current literature has been excessively focused on the older age and that more attention on how to work with younger population groups is needed. Likewise, not all disciplines have equally reflected on their role before this challenge and interprofessional approaches, despite showing promise, have not been sufficiently described. Based on our results, health and social professionals working to promote healthy ageing across the lifespan will need sound competences regarding person-centred communication, professional communication, technology applications, physiological and pathophysiological aspects of ageing, social and environmental aspects, cultural diversity, programs and policies, ethics, general and basic skills, context and self-management-related skills, health promotion and disease prevention skills, educational and research skills, leadership skills, technological skills and clinical reasoning. Further research should contribute to establishing which competences are more relevant to each discipline and at what level they should be taught, as well as how they can be best implemented to effectively transform health and social care systems.

The Impact of Information About COVID-19 on the Endocrine Stress System and Cognitive Distortions.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is one of the major health concerns worldwide affecting not only human physical health but also contributing to the development of many mental disorders including impairment of the cognitive function. It is highly conceivable that elevation of the stress hormones, i.e., glucocorticoids and catecholamines, due to the infection, as well as the presence of psychosocial stressors, such as COVID-19 information, play a critical role in the development of these disorders. In the present study, the potential impact of exposure to COVID-19 information on the cognitive distortion and stress levels was analyzed in a population of 32 first-year medical sciences students using the stress assessment questionnaire (SAQ) and the posttraumatic cognitions inventory (PTCI) surveys. Both surveys demonstrated no acute change in the stress and post-traumatic cognition levels between medical sciences students who were either exposed or not to information about COVID-19. Interestingly, analysis of the stress and cognition points across the first and second measurements of the SAQ categories revealed a significant change in the control group but not in the experimental group. In addition, there was no significant difference among groups when considering the time*group factor. To conclude, we found that exposure to information about COVID-19 did not contribute acutely to cognitive distortion and stress levels among participating students. The previous exposure to COVID-19-related information from media and living during the COVID-19 pandemic era might have enhanced the awareness of the students to the situation.

Strategy selection in Alzheimer patients: a study in arithmetic.

OBJECTIVE: We compared Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients' and elderly controls' abilities to select the best strategy on each item and determined whether AD patients tended to repeat the same strategy across consecutive items more often than controls. METHOD: A total of 60 participants (30 healthy older adults, HOA; 30 AD patients) were asked to select the best rounding strategy to estimate products of multiplication problems (e.g., estimating 42 × 76 by rounding operands down or up, like doing 40 × 70 = 2800 or 50 × 80 = 3200). We identified strategies used on each problem and measured solution latencies and percentage errors with each strategy as a function of problem characteristics. RESULTS: Older adults and AD patients were able to use both available strategies. However, AD patients were less able to select the best strategy than HOA, especially on problems for which selecting the best strategy was most difficult. Moreover, AD patients significantly repeated the preceding strategies across successive problems more often than HOA. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings have important implications for further our understanding of dementia-related differences in strategic aspects of cognitive performance.

Strategy repetition in young and older adults: a study in arithmetic.

We investigated a new phenomenon that sheds light on age-related differences in strategy selection: the strategy repetition phenomenon (i.e., tendency to repeat the same strategy over consecutive items). Young and older adults had to provide the best estimates of multiplication problems like 47 × 86. They had to select the best of 2 rounding strategies on each problem, the rounding-down strategy (i.e., doing 40 × 80 = 3,200) or the rounding-up strategy (i.e., doing 50 × 90 = 4,500). Data showed that both young and older adults repeated the same strategy over consecutive problems more often than chance and repeated strategies more often in the 2-prime condition (i.e., after executing one strategy to solve the 2 immediately preceding problems) than in the 1-prime condition (i.e., after executing a strategy on one immediately preceding problem). Moreover, this strategy repetition phenomenon increased with age, especially in the most difficult condition (e.g., when participants solved rounding-up problems in the 2-prime condition). Our findings have important theoretical and empirical implications for computational models of strategy selection and for furthering our understanding of strategic development during adulthood.