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Further observations on the unique efficacy of picoTesla range magnetic fields in Parkinson's disease.

External application of picoTesla range magnetic fields (MF) has been reported recently to be efficacious in the treatment of patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) including those who manifest levodopa-related dyskinesias. In the present communication, we present four additional Parkinsonian patients who showed, within a brief period of time, marked improvement in motor symptoms after therapy with MF. Three of the patients had been maintained on antiParkinsonian medication during treatment with MF while the fourth patient had never received pharmacotherapy. Improvement with magnetic therapy was noted not only in the motor sphere (resting tremor, gait apraxia, postural instability), but also in nonmotor aspects of the disease including mood, sleep, pain, anorexia, autonomic, and cognitive functions attesting to the unique efficacy of external picoTesla range MF in the treatment of Parkinsonism. Poverty of facial expression (hypomimia, "masked facies"), which correlates with the degree of striatal dopaminergic deficiency, is one of the clinical hallmarks of PD reflecting the severity of hypokinesia and rigidity in the orofacial musculature. In this report, we emphasize the effects of MF on the hypomimia of PD and provide visual documentation illustrating the changes in the patients' facial expression which follow treatment with MF.

Aged↗

Emotion recognition patterns in patients with panic disorder.

Recognition of facially expressed emotions is essential in social interaction. For patients with social phobia, general anxiety disorders, and comorbid anxiety, deficits in their emotion recognition and specific biases have already been reported. This is the first study to investigate facial emotion recognition patterns in patients with panic disorder [PD]. We assumed a general performance deficit in patients with PD. Exploratory analyses should have revealed recognition patterns and specific types of errors. Additionally, we checked the influence of depression and anxiety symptoms, per se, on recognition. A carefully selected group of 37 patients with PD without agoraphobia [DSM-IV 300.01] and no psychiatric comorbidity was compared to 43 controls matched for age and sex. We assessed emotion recognition with the FEEL Test [Facially Expressed Emotion Labeling], using faces displaying fear, anger, sadness, happiness, disgust, and anger. Recognition of emotions in patients with PD was significantly worse than that of controls, specifically, sadness and anger. They also showed a tendency to interpret nonanger emotions as anger. Interestingly, in patients with PD, depressive symptoms were more strongly related to emotion recognition than were anxiety symptoms, and recognition differences between patients and controls disappeared when we controlled for depression. This effect is discussed in the context of previous studies reporting emotion recognition deficits of depressed patients.

Adult↗

[The languages of pains].

The plural words "languages" and "pains" emphasize the variety of the conditions and the locations from which pain emerges of the conduction and processing of pain stimuli in the central nervous system, and of the subjective gestalt of pain feeling. The personal expression in speaking, facial expression, gestures, and posture is, like words, a mixture of measurable and understandable elements. The verb "to hurt" should therefore be understood and used transitively and intransitively, passively and actively by suffering and by acting-forming. The concept--called isopathy--of the analysis of the conditions of possible understanding of the affective expressions of a person by an empathic-participating observer and listener should be applied to the understanding of pains in one individual person.

English Abstract↗

Sleeping and waking state development in preterm infants.

BACKGROUND: Most studies of sleep-wake states of preterm infants have been cross-sectional. Thus, the extent to which sleep-wake development occurs within individuals and how environmental factors affect the development of sleeping and waking is unclear. AIMS: This study examined the development of sleeping and waking during the preterm and early post-term periods and the effects of infant health and environmental characteristics. DESIGN: Longitudinal, descriptive design. PARTICIPANTS: 134 preterm infants at high risk for developmental problems because of birthweights under 1500 g or mechanical ventilation. OUTCOME MEASURES: Weekly 2-h behavioral observations were conducted from the time infants were no longer critically ill until 43 weeks post-conceptional age or discharge. A single follow-up observation was conducted 1-3 months later. RESULTS: Active sleep, large body movements and the percent of no REM during active sleep decreased with age, and quiet waking, active waking, quiet sleep and regularity of respiration in active sleep and quiet sleep increased. The state of sleep-wake transition increased until 40 weeks and then decreased after 43 weeks CA. Negative facial expressions showed a quadratic decrease over age. Active waking, active sleep, negative facial expressions and quiet sleep regularity showed a change of development after term. Infant characteristics, illness severity and medical treatments, the handling due to performing an EEG and hospital had only minor effects. CONCLUSIONS: Significant development of sleeping and waking occurs over the preterm period. Additional research is needed to determine how the change from the hospital to the home environment affects on these developmental trajectories.

Female↗

Aesthetic oculoplastic surgery.

Important concepts and advances continue to evolve in the field of aesthetic oculoplastic surgery. A keen interest in aesthetics exists, both on the part of the youth-oriented, aging baby-boomer population and on the part of many physicians and surgeons in a variety of different specialities. This review article highlights recent, important developments regarding cosmetic Botox injections for lines of facial expression, laser facial-resurfacing techniques, endoscopic and updated browlift techniques, lower-lid blepharoplasty with suborbicularis oculi fat lift, and subcutaneous Gore-Tex implants for treatment of deep facial rhytids. Because of the space limitations of this review, it is not possible to include a thorough step-by-step description of all surgical techniques. Rather, important concepts, references, and updates are emphasized. The information presented should be of interest to readers of varying levels of expertise.

Esthetics↗

[EMG reactions of mimetic muscles after repeated presentation of pictures with positive, negative and neutral content].

Twenty male subjects (Ss) were repeatedly confronted for five seconds to pictures with positive, negative and neutral valence. During the picture presentation facial EMG-reactions of five mimic muscles (m. frontalis lateralis, m. corrugator supercilii, m. orbicularis oculi, m. zygomaticus major on the right and left side of the face) were recorded. In addition, heart rate was measured. It could be shown that during repeated presentation of pictures with positive valence the m. orbicularis oculi and the m. zygomaticus major on both sides of the face yielded enhanced average EMG-reactions as compared to the repeated presentation of pictures with negative and neutral valence. During presentation of pictures with negative valence the m. frontalis lateralis and the m. corrugator supercilii revealed enhanced EMG-reactions as compared to the repeated presentation of pictures with positive valence. Furthermore, it could be shown that during the repeated presentation of pictures with positive valence those facial muscles which mainly react during confrontation with pictures of positive valence showed a continuous decrease of EMG-activity. Facial muscles which mainly react during the presentation of pictures with negative valence do not show a continuous decrease in EMG-activity during the course of the repeated presentation of pictures with negative valence. Additionally, the EMG-activity of the m. zygomaticus major on the right and lift side of the face do not differ with respect to the mean activity and the time course during confrontation of pictures with positive valence. The m. orbicularis oculi yielded enhanced EMG-reactions during the presentation of pictures with positive valence as compared to both m. zygomaticus major muscles. The present results are discussed with respect to psychobiological theories concerning facial expression.

Adult↗

[Botulinum toxin in the treatment of frontoglabellar and periorbital wrinkles. An initial study].

Glabellar frown lines and crow's feet are wrinkles of facial expression related to an underlying muscular activity, which is particularly strong during facial expression. Classic treatments of these wrinkles only give partially satisfactory are associated with results, and secondary effects, whether they involve skin and muscle lifting, surgical section of muscles, dermal stimulation by thread or injectable fillers, chemical or mechanical abrasion, transient or permanent soft tissue augmentation with various materials. The authors studied the efficacy and safety of intramuscular injections botulinum A Exotoxin in glabellar and crow's feet areas in 19 well-informed and consenting patients. Botulinum toxin injections have been used since 1980 in the treatment of focal dystonia (blepharospasm, oromandibular dystonia, spasmodic torticollis, spasmodic dysphonia and writer's cramp) and safety hemifacial spasm. Their wide use in these indications has highlighted their excellent and efficacy, and the need to repeat injections every 3 to 4 months. The dose required was progressively adjusted around glabellar and orbital areas, while injections of the peri-buccal and forehead areas are still being evaluated. The 19 patients were examined clinically, filmed and photographed every month over a period of 12 to 24 months, and skin prints were performed. Evaluation criteria included the percentage improvement as assessed by the patients themselves, and also evaluation by the investigators of the data of clinical examination, and blind comparison of photographic, videoscopic, and prints. The authors obtained a significant decrease of wrinkles of the areas studied, with a "smoothing" effect during the period of activity of the toxin, which lased an average of 3 to 4 months at the beginning, and 6 to 9 months after several injections. No secondary effects, either general or local, were observed. The product's specificity means that the operator must have a complete mastery of the injection technique and a thorough knowledge of its pharmacology.

Adult↗

Smiling in photographs: childhood similarities between sexes become differences constant in adulthood.

Contemporary published photographs of 1639 children, 200 older teenagers, and 304 adults in North America were analyzed for the smiling pattern (full, partial, or none) exhibited by individuals by sex. For each of the three age groups and for both sexes, most individuals posed with a full smile. No statistically significant differences in smiling pattern were present between the sexes for photographs of children at preschool and grade-school age. By teenage years, and even more for the adults, there were statistically significant differences between the sexes with regard to a smiling facial expression. In those cases, more female than male subjects smiled fully, whereas more male than female subjects did not smile. Examination of photographs of well-known persons longitudinally through adulthood showed that individuals tended to be consistent in smiling pattern. There was no significant sex difference for this relative constancy of facial expression in posed photographs.

Adult↗

Facial-affect recognition and visual scanning behaviour in the course of schizophrenia.

The performance of schizophrenic in-patients in facial expression identification was assessed in an acute phase and in a partly remitted phase of the illness. During visual exploration of the face stimuli, the patient's eye movements were recorded using an infrared-corneal-reflection technique. Compared to healthy controls, patients demonstrated a significant deficit in facial-affect recognition. In addition, schizophrenics differed from controls in several eye movement parameters such as length of mean scan path and mean duration of fixation. Both the facial-affect recognition deficit and the eye movement abnormalities remained stable over time. However, performance in facial-affect recognition and eye movement abnormalities were not correlated. Patients with flattened affect showed relatively selective scan pattern characteristics. In contrast, affective flattening was not correlated with performance in facial-affect recognition. Dosage of neuroleptic medication did not affect the results. The main findings of the study suggest that schizophrenia is associated with disturbances in primarily unrelated neurocognitive operations mediating visuomotor processing and facial expression analysis. Given their time stability, the disturbances might have a trait-like character.

Adult↗

Diminished response to pleasant stimuli by depressed women.

This study examined the self-report and facial expressions of emotional response to pictorial stimuli and the incidental learning of pleasant and unpleasant words by depressed (n = 20) and nondepressed (n = 20) women. Depression was associated with reports of diminished emotional response and reduced frequency and intensity of facial expressions only to pleasant stimuli. The 2 groups did not differ in response to hedonically unpleasant stimuli, even those specifically relevant to the emotion of sadness. In a similar vein, depressed and nondepressed participants showed differences in incidental recall for only pleasant self-referential terms. There was no difference in recall of unpleasant words. These findings suggest the importance of hedonic deficits on psychological processes in clinical depression.

Adult↗

The temporal coordination of early infant communication.

The ability to coordinate expressive behaviors is crucial to the development of social and emotional communication. Coordination involves systematic sequencing of behaviors from two different modalities that have some temporal overlap. A bootstrapping procedure was used to determine whether preverbal 3- and 6-month-old infants sequence vocalizations, gazes at their mothers' faces, and facial expressions into pairs of coordinated patterns nonrandomly. Smiles and frowns were highly coordinated with vocalizations. Smiles were also coordinated with gazes at mothers' faces, which became stronger with age. Vocalizations were not coordinated with gazes at mothers' faces. These findings illustrate the manner in which infants temporally coordinate communicative actions and provide new evidence that facial expressions (particularly smiles) are central to early infant communications.

Age Factors↗

Social context effects on facial activity in a negative emotional setting.

Evidence for A. J. Fridlund's (e.g.. 1994) "behavioral ecology view" of human facial expression comes primarily from studies of smiling in response to positive emotional stimuli. Smiling may be a special case because it clearly can, and often does serve merely communicative functions. The present experiment was designated (a) to assess the generalizability of social context effects to facial expressions in response to negative emotional stimuli and (b) to examine whether these effects are mediated by social motives, as suggested by the behavioral ecology view. Pairs of friends or strangers viewed film clips that elicited different degrees of sad affect, in either the same or a different room; a control group participated alone. Dependent variables included facial activity, subjective emotion, and social motives. Displays of sadness were influenced by stimulus intensity and were lower in all social conditions than in the alone condition. Unexpectedly, social context effects were also found for smiling.

Affect↗

Emotional bias and waking salivary cortisol in relatives of patients with major depression.

BACKGROUND: Biases in the processing of emotional information have been shown to be abnormal in subjects with major depression, both during an episode and after full recovery. However, it is unclear whether these biases are a cause or an effect of the depression. This study set out to explore whether such biases represent a vulnerability factor for depression by looking at unaffected first-degree relatives of those with major depressive disorder. We also measured waking salivary cortisol, as the regulation of the hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis is thought to be impaired in depressive disorder. METHOD: Twenty-five female relatives and 21 age-matched controls completed a facial expression recognition task, an emotional categorization task with positive and negative personality characteristics, and had their waking salivary cortisol measured on a work day and a non-work day. RESULTS: The depressed relative group was significantly faster to recognize facial expressions of fear than controls. The depressed relative group also showed significantly increased reaction time to recognize positive versus negative personality characteristics in the categorization task. There was no difference in waking salivary cortisol between groups, although there was an effect of work day versus non-work day. CONCLUSIONS: Subtle biases in the processing of emotional information may exist in the unaffected first-degree relatives of those with depression. As such, this may represent a familial vulnerability factor to developing a depressive illness.

Adult↗

Emotion processing in borderline personality disorders.

The aim of this study was to examine the ways in which adults with borderline personality disorder (BPD) experience and manage their feelings. Responses of 30 subjects who met the criteria for BPD on the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-III-R were compared with 40 non-BPD controls on the following measures of emotion processing and affect regulation: 1) level of emotional awareness, 2) capacity to coordinate mixed valence feelings, 3) accuracy at identifying facial expressions of emotion, and 4) intensity of response to negative emotions. The results showed significant differences between the two groups on all measures. The borderlines showed significantly lower levels of emotional awareness, less capacity to coordinate mixed valence feelings, lower accuracy at recognizing facial expressions of emotion, and more intense responses to negative emotions than the nonborderline controls. The findings corroborate clinical observations of borderline patients' difficulties in regulating emotions. The implications of the results for the therapeutic management of BPD patients are discussed.

Adaptation, Psychological↗

Acute administration of nutritionally sourced tryptophan increases fear recognition.

RATIONALE: The serotonin precursor tryptophan (TRP) has been widely used as a nutritional supplement and antidepressant. Recently, however, the use of TRP has been severely restricted due to its association with the eosinophilic myalgic syndrome, an autoimmune disorder probably caused by ingestion of a contaminant produced in certain TRP manufacturing processes. OBJECTIVES: To determine the bioavailability of a nutritional source of TRP obtained from milk protein and to assess whether administration of this material produced neuroendocrine and neuropsychological effects consistent with increased brain serotonin activity. METHODS: We studied 24 healthy subjects who ingested approximately 1.8 g of nutritionally-sourced TRP or placebo in a double-blind, parallel group, design. We carried out venous sampling for amino acid and hormone estimation and performed a test of emotional processing using a facial expression recognition task. RESULTS: The nutritionally-sourced TRP caused a substantial increase in the availability of TRP in plasma. Relative to placebo the TRP material produced some evidence of an increase in plasma cortisol, and enhanced the perception of fearful and happy facial expressions. CONCLUSIONS: A nutritional source of TRP increased the availability of TRP for brain serotonin synthesis and produced endocrine and neuropsychological changes consistent with increased brain serotonin function. The effect of TRP on emotional processing may be relevant to its reported activity in primate studies of social behaviour.

Adult↗

Amygdala reactivity predicts automatic negative evaluations for facial emotions.

The amygdala is a key structure in a limbic circuit involved in the rapid and unconscious processing of facial emotions. In the present study, the role of the amygdala in automatic, involuntary appraisal processes, which are believed to be a crucial component of emotion processing, was investigated in 23 healthy subjects. Amygdala activity was recorded in response to masked displays of angry, sad, and happy facial expressions using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). In a subsequent experiment, the subjects performed a masked affective priming task that characterizes automatic emotion processing by investigating the biasing effect of subliminally presented emotional faces on evaluative ratings to subsequently presented neutral stimuli. In the affective priming task, significant valence-congruent evaluation manipulation was observed. Subjects rated neutral targets more positively if they were primed by happy faces. Significant correlations were found between amygdala responses to masked negative facial expressions and negative evaluation shifts elicited by the corresponding emotion quality in the affective priming task. Spontaneous amygdala reactivity to facial emotions appears to be a determinant of automatic negative evaluative response tendencies. This finding might shed some light on how amygdala hyperresponsivity contributes to negative cognitive biases commonly observed in affective disorders.

Adult↗

Are you always on my mind? A review of how face perception and attention interact.

In this review we examine how attention is involved in detecting faces, recognizing facial identity and registering and discriminating between facial expressions of emotion. The first section examines whether these aspects of face perception are "automatic", in that they are especially rapid, non-conscious, mandatory and capacity-free. The second section discusses whether limited-capacity selective attention mechanisms are preferentially recruited by faces and facial expressions. Evidence from behavioral, neuropsychological, neuroimaging and psychophysiological studies from humans and single-unit recordings from primates is examined and the neural systems involved in processing faces, emotion and attention are highlighted. Avenues for further research are identified.

Animals↗

Can a congenital dysfunctional bladder be diagnosed from a smile? The Ochoa syndrome updated.

During the last 40 years over 100 patients have been reported with a dysfunctional lower urinary tract associated with a peculiar distortion of the facial expression. This most unusual disorder was initially considered a local observation. Time, however, has proven otherwise, since patients with this syndrome have now been reported from various countries throughout the world. This association of lower urinary tract and bowel dysfunction with an abnormal facial expression was named the urofacial (Ochoa) syndrome. Genetic studies have demonstrated that this condition is inherited as an autosomal recessive trait, and a potential gene has been mapped to chromosome 10q23-q24. There is also enough evidence to suggest that patients with this syndrome as well as those with subclinical neurological bladder, occult neuropathic bladder, non-neurogenic neurogenic bladder or Hinman syndrome, dysfunctional voiding, or dysfunctional elimination may be affected by the same congenital disorder of neurological origin.

Abnormalities, Multiple↗