Evidence that patients with chronic pain selectively attend to pain-related stimuli presented in modified Stroop and dot-probe paradigms is mixed. The pain-related stimuli used in these studies have been primarily verbal in nature (i.e., words depicting themes of pain). The purpose of the present study was to determine whether patients with chronic pain, relative to healthy controls, show selective attention for pictures depicting painful faces. To do so, 170 patients with chronic pain and 40 age- and education-matched healthy control participants were tested using a dot-probe task in which painful, happy, and neutral facial expressions were presented. Selective attention was denoted using the mean reaction time and the bias index. Results indicated that, while both groups shifted attention away from happy faces (and towards neutral faces), only the control group shifted attention away from painful faces. Additional analyses were conducted on chronic pain participants after dividing them into groups on the basis of fear of pain/(re)injury. The results of these analyses revealed that while chronic pain patients with high and low levels of fear both shifted attention away from happy faces, those with low fear shifted attention away from painful faces, whereas those with high fear shifted attention towards painful faces. These results suggest that patients with chronic pain selectively attend to facial expressions of pain and, importantly, that the tendency to shift attention towards such stimuli is positively influenced by high fear of pain/(re)injury. Implications of the findings and future research directions are discussed.

Abstract-Utilizing a humanoid social robot to systematically teach music to children with autism has not received wide attention to date. In this study, a novel robot-assisted music-based scenario has been designed in order to: 1) teach fundamentals of music via a xylophone-/drum-player robot as a teacher assistant, and 2) improve social/cognitive skills through active music games in children with autism. The educational-therapeutic interventions were conducted in an elevensession case study program on three high-functioning and one low-functioning children with autism taking into consideration the children's, parents', and therapists' experience during the program. The results indicated that as a tool and facilitator, the NAO robot does have the ability to teach musical notes/rhythms to the participants with high-functioning autism. It was also observed that the severity of the participants' autism as well as the stress of the parents decreased somewhat during these sessions. Furthermore, noticeable improvements were seen in social/cognitive skills of all four participants; as well as the positive effect of this program on fine motor imitation skills of two subjects after the interventions. The progress reported from this preliminary exploratory study confirmed the potential benefits of using social robots and intelligent technologies as a facilitator in music-teaching and cognitive-rehabilitation. 1-IntroductionMusic has the power to influence humans and in particular children's emotions, moods, and feelings. Teaching music can help develop new or improve existing social, verbal/non-verbal communication skills in children [1][2][3]. Children who receive regular music education may have better movement, math and reading skills in comparison to their peers [4].Children with autism may have stereotyped behaviors and limited communication skills [5]. Music could be an effective way to involve them in rhythmic/non-verbal communication [1]. Nowadays, at least 12% of all treatment of ASD 1 s consist of music-based therapies [6].Music has often been used in therapeutic sessions with children with mental and behavioral disabilities [7]. There is ample evidence that shows either playing music during therapy sessions or teaching music to children with autism can significantly increase the impact of therapy sessions [8,9]. These studies have inspired researchers to use embodied music-based approaches to facilitate multisystem development of children [6]. In such studies or therapy sessions, an instrument is either played by a human or recorded music is played back in individual/group interventions [6,10]. Kalas [11], and Kim, Wigram, & Gold [2] showed improvement in joint attention, turn taking and eye contact of children with autism in (active) musicmaking interventions. Some studies have reported an acceptable decrease in stereotyped behaviors and self-injuries in ASDs after running music-based interventions [12,13]. Music therapy interventions have also been used to increase social [14,15] and emotional [16] skills...

During the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the COVIDiSTRESS Consortium launched an open-access global survey to understand and improve individuals’ experiences related to the crisis. A year later, we extended this line of research by launching a new survey to address the dynamic landscape of the pandemic. This survey was released with the goal of addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion by working with over 150 researchers across the globe who collected data in 48 languages and dialects across 137 countries. The resulting cleaned dataset described here includes 15,740 of over 20,000 responses. The dataset allows cross-cultural study of psychological wellbeing and behaviours a year into the pandemic. It includes measures of stress, resilience, vaccine attitudes, trust in government and scientists, compliance, and information acquisition and misperceptions regarding COVID-19. Open-access raw and cleaned datasets with computed scores are available. Just as our initial COVIDiSTRESS dataset has facilitated government policy decisions regarding health crises, this dataset can be used by researchers and policy makers to inform research, decisions, and policy.

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