No abstract

Patients with PD show a characteristic pattern of declining speech rate. These results suggest that in PD, disfluencies are the result of the movement disorder affecting the physiology of speech production systems.

We conducted a review to analyze the 100 most-cited studies on binge drinking (BD) in the Web of Science (WoS) database to determine their current status and the aspects that require further attention. We carried out a retrospective bibliometric analysis in January 2021. The year of publication, authors, design, subject, journal, institution and lead author’s country, as well as the definition of BD, were extracted from the articles. The data on the country, year, thematic category of the journals and their rank were obtained from the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) Journal Citation Reports 2020. The number of citations was collected from the WoS, and the h index was collected from the Scopus database. The citation density and Bradford’s law were calculated. The majority of the articles were empirical quantitative studies with a cross-sectional design published between 1992 and 2013 in 49 journals. There were 306 authors, mostly English-speaking and from the USA. The definitions used to describe BD are not homogeneous. The most-cited topics were the analysis of consequences, determinants and epidemiology. There is a need to unify the definitions of BD and base them on scientific evidence. The multidisciplinary nature of BD is not well reflected in each of the thematic areas discussed in this work.

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Exam is an academic stressor that frequently triggers the affective reaction of anxiety, as well as psychophysiological changes in the autonomic nervous system. Anxiety is a negative affective variable associated with a low level of performance. This study examined the impact of an academic exam on state anxiety (SA) levels and the effects on cardiovascular activity during its performance, as well as its possible influence on the score. The study group was composed of 122 female university students. Cardiovascular responses (heart rate [HR], diastolic blood pressure, and systolic blood pressure) were recorded continuously in three phases (before, during, and after the exam) for each participant. The SA was obtained with the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) before the exam. Then, those with extremely low and high SA scores were assigned to the low and high anxiety groups, respectively. The exam score reflected the performance level. The results partially confirmed our hypotheses. The high SA group showed significant fluctuations in cardiovascular activity; in particular, the HRs were higher than in the low SA group during the exam (not in diastolic and systolic pressures, respectively).On the other hand, the high SA group showed lower performance expectations scores than the low SA group, and the level of performance was similar in the two groups. Therefore, the exam confirmed changes in the HR with respect to the SA level, with no significant impact on performance.