No abstract

Freezing of gait (FoG) is a disabling symptom associated with falls, with little or no responsiveness to pharmacological treatment. Current protocols used for rehabilitation are based on the use of external sensory cues. However, cued strategies might generate an important dependence on the environment. Teaching motor strategies without cues [i.e., action observation (AO) plus Sonification] could represent an alternative/innovative approach to rehabilitation that matters most on appropriate allocation of attention and lightening cognitive load. We aimed to test the effects of a novel experimental protocol to treat patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) and FoG, using functional, and clinical scales. The experimental protocol was based on AO plus Sonification. 12 patients were treated with 8 motor gestures. They watched eight videos showing an actor performing the same eight gestures, and then tried to repeat each gesture. Each video was composed by images and sounds of the gestures. By means of the Sonification technique, the sounds of gestures were obtained by transforming kinematic data (velocity) recorded during gesture execution, into pitch variations. The same 8 motor gestures were also used in a second group of 10 patients; which were treated with a standard protocol based on a common sensory stimulation method. All patients were tested with functional and clinical scales before, after, at 1 month, and 3 months after the treatment. Data showed that the experimental protocol have positive effects on functional and clinical tests. In comparison with the baseline evaluations, significant performance improvements were seen in the NFOG questionnaire, and the UPDRS (parts II and III). Importantly, all these improvements were consistently observed at the end, 1 month, and 3 months after treatment. No improvement effects were found in the group of patients treated with the standard protocol. These data suggest that a multisensory approach based on AO plus Sonification, with the two stimuli semantically related, could help PD patients with FoG to relearn gait movements, to reduce freezing episodes, and that these effects could be prolonged over time.

Home advantage and referee bias are two well-documented phenomena in professional sports, especially in association football. Among the various factors determining them, the crowd noise is considered as one of the most relevant; yet, the majority of previous studies could not isolate its contribution. The possibility to study the effects of crowd noise-or, better, of its absence-in an ecological context was given by the matches played behind closed doors due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether home advantage and referee bias still occur (and to what extent) during matches played in absence of spectators. In particular, the focus was on the first and second divisions of the top four countries in the UEFA ranking, for a total of 841 matches behind closed doors. The hypothesis was that, if these phenomena are largely due to the effect of crowd noise, the absence of spectators should reduce their occurrence. Various parameters for each of the two phenomena were considered, and the analyses revealed a reduction of home advantage and the absence of referee bias. The results bring further support to the claim that, among all the factors contributing to home advantage and referee bias, crowd noise has a relevant role. Thus, spectators can significantly contribute to determine the dynamics and the outcomes of professional football matches.

The term circumplex was introduced by Guttman (1954) to describe specific patterns in correlation matrices in which, as one moves diagonally away from the main diagonal, intercorrelations at first decrease, then increase. A visual-form hypothesis concerning the magnitude and direction of associations among the variables postulates that, as association strength decreases, the distance between variables on the circumference of a circle increases. Thereby, a circumplex representation implies that both the strength and direction of associations among variables should depend on the distances between the variables on the circumference of a circle.Fabrigar, Visser, and Browne (1997) conducted a review of empirical investigations of circumplex data representations in personality and social psychology. They found two dominant methods of analysis: One was based on exploratory principal components/factor analyses, the other on multidimensional scaling. Because circumplex theories are essentially pictorial representations of the relationships among variables, both of these approaches offer the advantage of yielding graphical representations of the variables' circular ordering. However, neither of these approaches directly examines the extent to which the observed data conform to a circumplex structure. In fact, the two methods can only assess the goodness of fit of two-(or multi-) dimensional scaling/common factor solutions.To overcome this limit, Browne (1992) proposed a covariance structure modeling (CSM) approach for directly testing circumplex structure. (Unless noted otherwise, all discussion of Browne herein relates to Browne, 1992). This approach allows a researcher to examine the extent to which the underlying structure of a sample correlation matrix conforms to a circumplex pattern and to obtain estimates of the locations of the variables on a circle. Browne's CSM approach is based on earlier work by Anderson (1960). Unlike Anderson's approach, however, Browne's can be applied to data in which all variables are positively correlated, as well as to data in which some variables have negative correlations. Thus, Browne's model-unlike Anderson's-may be seen as particularly applicable to personality psychology, where certain personality traits or emotions are expected to be negatively related to each other.A practical advantage of approaches utilizing principal components/factor analysis and multidimensional scaling is their availability in most major statistical programs. In this connection, Browne's CSM approach can be tested using CIRCUM, a DOS program that includes special subroutines specifically designed for analyzing circumplex data, which are appended to a general algorithm for fitting nonstandard models called AUFIT (Browne & Du Toit, 1992). The CIRCUM program allows unconstrained as well as equally spaced estimations of variables' spatial positions around 360º. Constraints can also be applied to the amount of unique 1 variance relative to each variable and to the minimum common score correlation (MCSC) at 180º...

Whole-body movements represent an ecologically valid model for assessing the effect of emotional stimuli valence on approach/avoidance reactions as they entail a change of the physical distance between such stimuli and the self. However, research in this field has provided inconsistent results as the task relevance of the emotional content of the stimuli was not properly controlled, and very often, it is impossible to dissociate the effect of arousal from that of valence. To overcome these limitations, we studied the effect of facial emotional expressions (anger and happiness) on forward gait initiation using an experimental paradigm that allows us to compare the impact of the stimuli emotional content when they are task relevant and when they are not. We found that angry and happy expressions altered forward gait initiation parameters differently only when relevant for ongoing goals. In particular, both the reaction times and the percentages of omission errors increased when the go signal was an angry face compared to when the go signal was a happy face. These results indicate that forward step movements share the same features as reaching arm movements regarding emotional stimuli, that is, facial emotions do not automatically influence behavioral responses. Instead, their effects depend critically on their conscious appraisal.