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Parkinsonism & Related Disorders Aug 2019Verbal fluency deficits are common in patients with Parkinson's disease. The association of these impairments with regional neuropathological changes is unexplored.
BACKGROUND
Verbal fluency deficits are common in patients with Parkinson's disease. The association of these impairments with regional neuropathological changes is unexplored.
OBJECTIVES
Determine if patients with verbal fluency impairments have greater neuropathological burden in frontal, temporal, and limbic regions and if Lewy bodies or neurofibrillary tangles were associated with verbal fluency impairments.
METHODS
Data was derived from the Arizona Study of Aging and Neurodegenerative Disorders. 47 individuals who completed phonemic and semantic verbal fluency tasks and met clinicopathological criteria for Parkinson's disease (with and without comorbid Alzheimer's disease) were included. Impairment on fluency tasks was defined by normative data, and the density of neuropathology in temporal, limbic, and frontal regions was compared between groups.
RESULTS
Individuals with semantic fluency impairments had greater total pathology (Lewy bodies + neurofibrillary tangles) in limbic structures (W = 320.0, p = .033, r = .33), while those who had phonemic fluency impairments had increased total neuropathology in frontal (W = 364.5, p = .011, r = .37), temporal (W = 356.5, p = .022, r = .34), and limbic regions (W = 357.0, p = .024, r = .34). Greater Lewy body density was found in those with verbal fluency impairments, though trends for greater neurofibrillary tangle density were noted as well.
CONCLUSIONS
Impaired phonemic fluency was associated with higher Lewy body and tangle burden in frontal, temporal, and limbic regions, while impaired semantic fluency was associated with greater limbic pathology. Though neurofibrillary tangles trended higher in several regions in those with impaired verbal fluency, higher Lewy body density in general was associated with verbal fluency deficits. Implications for research and clinical practice are discussed.
Topics: Aged; Aged, 80 and over; Brain; Female; Humans; Male; Neuropsychological Tests; Parkinson Disease; Semantics; Speech Disorders; Verbal Behavior
PubMed: 31109728
DOI: 10.1016/j.parkreldis.2019.05.014 -
Psicothema May 2020Aversive control techniques involve aversive stimuli to generate behavioral change. The purpose of this work is to analyze the use of verbal aversive control by... (Observational Study)
Observational Study
BACKGROUND
Aversive control techniques involve aversive stimuli to generate behavioral change. The purpose of this work is to analyze the use of verbal aversive control by psychologists during the clinical interaction, combining respondent and operant explanations.
METHOD
Observational methodology is used to analyze 26 session recordings of three different cases of anxiety disorder, relationship problem and low mood problem (27h 32') carried out by two psychologists of the Therapeutic Institute of Madrid. The variables considered were psychologists' aversive and non-aversive verbalizations and clients' antitherapeutic verbalizations.
RESULTS
There is a strong relationship between clients' antitherapeutic verbalizations and psychologists' aversive verbalizations, both potential punishments (aversive verbalizations contingent on the client's response) and aversive pairings. Additionally, the possible psychologists' aversive verbalizations are accompanied by other verbalizations aimed to induce clients' non-problematic behaviors.
CONCLUSIONS
This work opens a new way to an explanation of therapeutic change using learning processes (both respondent and operant conditioning) that take place through verbal interaction in clinical context.
Topics: Adult; Anxiety Disorders; Aversive Therapy; Behavior Control; Conditioning, Classical; Conditioning, Operant; Female; Humans; Interpersonal Relations; Male; Middle Aged; Mood Disorders; Psychology; Verbal Behavior
PubMed: 32249743
DOI: 10.7334/psicothema2019.171 -
Assessment Oct 2023Category and letter verbal fluency assessment is widely used in basic and clinical research. Yet, the nature of the processes measured by such means remains a matter of...
Category and letter verbal fluency assessment is widely used in basic and clinical research. Yet, the nature of the processes measured by such means remains a matter of debate. To delineate automatic (free-associative) versus controlled (dissociative) retrieval processes involved in verbal fluency tasks, we carried out a psychometric study combining a novel lexical-semantic retrieval paradigm and structural equation modeling. We show that category fluency primarily engages a free-associative retrieval, whereas letter fluency exerts executive suppression of habitual semantic associates. Importantly, the models demonstrated that this dissociation is parametric rather than absolute, exhibiting a degree of unity as well as diversity among the retrieval measures. These findings and further exploratory analyses validate that category and letter fluency tasks reflect partially distinct forms of memory search and retrieval control, warranting different application in basic research and clinical assessment. Finally, we conclude that the novel associative-dissociative paradigm provides straightforward and useful behavioral measures for the assessment and differentiation of automatic versus controlled retrieval ability.
Topics: Humans; Neuropsychological Tests; Semantics; Verbal Behavior
PubMed: 35979927
DOI: 10.1177/10731911221117512 -
Journal of the Experimental Analysis of... Jan 2021Murray Sidman was not himself a clinician nor directly involved in clinical research. Nevertheless, his experimental and conceptual work, especially in the area of...
Murray Sidman was not himself a clinician nor directly involved in clinical research. Nevertheless, his experimental and conceptual work, especially in the area of stimulus equivalence, profoundly influenced the development of clinical behavior analysis. Before his work on stimulus equivalence, clinicians with a behavior analytic world view working with verbally sophisticated humans, were making some progress in understanding clinical phenomena and in developing innovative therapies. However, given the obvious and predominant role of verbal processes in both the development and treatment of clinical problems, that progress was constrained by the existing behavior analytic account of verbal behavior. Most fundamentally, it was hard to understand how, in the apparent absence of direct training, verbal events, even novel verbal events, acquire the functions of the nonverbal events that they stand for or represent. Sidman's work on stimulus equivalence, especially the transfer (transformation) of functions, offered an answer and thereby provided a conceptual framework of symbolic behavior around which clinical behavior analysis could cohere and develop.
Topics: Biomedical Research; Humans; Verbal Behavior
PubMed: 33185279
DOI: 10.1002/jeab.644 -
Psychiatry Research Mar 2022Linguistic abnormalities can emerge early in the course of psychotic illness. Computational tools that quantify similarity of responses in standardized language-based...
Linguistic abnormalities can emerge early in the course of psychotic illness. Computational tools that quantify similarity of responses in standardized language-based tasks such as the verbal fluency test could efficiently characterize the nature and functional correlates of these disturbances. Participants with early-stage psychosis (n=20) and demographically matched controls without a psychiatric diagnosis (n=20) performed category and letter verbal fluency. Semantic similarity was measured via predicted context co-occurrence in a large text corpus using Word2Vec. Phonetic similarity was measured via edit distance using the VFClust tool. Responses were designated as clusters (related items) or switches (transitions to less related items) using similarity-based thresholds. Results revealed that participants with early-stage psychosis compared to controls had lower fluency scores, lower cluster-related semantic similarity, and fewer switches; mean cluster size and phonetic similarity did not differ by group. Lower fluency semantic similarity was correlated with greater speech disorganization (Communication Disturbances Index), although more strongly in controls, and correlated with poorer social functioning (Global Functioning: Social), primarily in the psychosis group. Findings suggest that search for semantically related words may be impaired soon after psychosis onset. Future work is warranted to investigate the impact of language disturbances on social functioning over the course of psychotic illness.
Topics: Humans; Language; Neuropsychological Tests; Phonetics; Psychotic Disorders; Semantics; Speech; Verbal Behavior
PubMed: 35066310
DOI: 10.1016/j.psychres.2022.114404 -
Cerebral Cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) Jan 2021Resting-state fluctuations are ubiquitous and widely studied phenomena of the human brain, yet we are largely in the dark regarding their function in human cognition....
Resting-state fluctuations are ubiquitous and widely studied phenomena of the human brain, yet we are largely in the dark regarding their function in human cognition. Here we examined the hypothesis that resting-state fluctuations underlie the generation of free and creative human behaviors. In our experiment, participants were asked to perform three voluntary verbal tasks: a verbal fluency task, a verbal creativity task, and a divergent thinking task, during functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning. Blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD)-activity during these tasks was contrasted with a control- deterministic verbal task, in which the behavior was fully determined by external stimuli. Our results reveal that all voluntary verbal-generation responses displayed a gradual anticipatory buildup that preceded the deterministic control-related responses. Critically, the time-frequency dynamics of these anticipatory buildups were significantly correlated with resting-state fluctuations' dynamics. These correlations were not a general BOLD-related or verbal-response related result, as they were not found during the externally determined verbal control condition. Furthermore, they were located in brain regions known to be involved in language production, specifically the left inferior frontal gyrus. These results suggest a common function of resting-state fluctuations as the neural mechanism underlying the generation of free and creative behaviors in the human cortex.
Topics: Adult; Brain; Brain Mapping; Creativity; Eye Movements; Female; Humans; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Male; Neuropsychological Tests; Oxygen; Photic Stimulation; Reflex, Pupillary; Rest; Thinking; Verbal Behavior; Young Adult
PubMed: 32935840
DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhaa221 -
Neurology India 2021Verbal fluency test is a short psychometric test, which is sensitive to verbal ability and executive control impairment. We did not find studies that analyze verbal...
INTRODUCTION
Verbal fluency test is a short psychometric test, which is sensitive to verbal ability and executive control impairment. We did not find studies that analyze verbal fluency in relation to the neurodevelopmental disorders in Spanish-speaking children with letters P-M. Our objective was to analyze the verbal fluency of Spanish-speaking children with neurodevelopmental disorders.
METHOD
We carried out a retrospective cross-sectional study to analyze the performance of children who had undergone a neuropsychological assessment.
RESULTS
We included 164 patients. There were 55 (33.54%) patients with low intellectual performance (LIP), 19 (11.59%) patients with dyslexia , and 90 (54.88%) patients had an ADHD. Patients with LIP showed lower phonological fluency than patients with ADHD. As for semantic fluidity, differences were observed between patients with LIP and ADHD and also between LIP and dyslexia. The probability of having LIP was 9.6 times greater when somebody had a scale score lower than 7 in the PF task and it was 16.7 times greater when the scale score was lower than 7 in the SF task.
CONCLUSIONS
There was a direct relationship between FSIQ and the performance in verbal fluency test, which is a brief and effective neuropsychological test in revealing deficits in executive functions, verbal abilities, and LIP.
Topics: Child; Cross-Sectional Studies; Humans; Linguistics; Neurodevelopmental Disorders; Neuropsychological Tests; Retrospective Studies; Verbal Behavior
PubMed: 33642279
DOI: 10.4103/0028-3886.310066 -
Reproductive Health Mar 2020Effective communication by maternity care staff can help a woman during labor and birth have a positive birth experience. Due to limited knowledge regarding this topic...
Role of verbal and non-verbal communication of health care providers in general satisfaction with birth care: a cross-sectional study in government health settings of Erbil City, Iraq.
BACKGROUND
Effective communication by maternity care staff can help a woman during labor and birth have a positive birth experience. Due to limited knowledge regarding this topic in Iraqi Kurdistan, therefore, this study assessed: 1) The level of women's satisfaction regarding verbal and non-verbal communication of midwives and physicians in the delivery room and 2) the association between this satisfaction level and socio-demographic and obstetric characteristics of the women and their general satisfaction with care during labor and delivery.
METHODS
A cross-sectional study was conducted on a convenient sample of 1196 women recruited between January and March 2019 from Erbil city, Iraq, who gave birth in the year before that. Data were collected from women through direct interview. A questionnaire which included sociodemographic, obstetrical information and 28 items related to verbal and non-verbal communication of physicians and midwives in the delivery room was used. Chi-square tests were used to find the association between dependent and independent variables.
RESULTS
Although 58.4% of the women were generally satisfied with communication of midwives and physicians in the delivery room, a large percentage (41.6%) were not satisfied. Only 14.6 and 27.3% of the women were completely satisfied with verbal and non-verbal communication of health care providers, respectively. There was a statistically significant association between women's satisfaction with care during labor and their satisfaction with health care providers' communication; 70.4% of women who were satisfied with care during birth were also satisfied with the communication of delivery room staff. There were statistically significant associations between the satisfaction of women with the communication of midwives and physicians and their level of education, parity, having stillbirth or neonatal death, and the setting of the last delivery.
CONCLUSIONS
Women's satisfaction with verbal and nonverbal communication of health care providers in the delivery room is associated with their satisfaction with birth care. Improving communication skills of health care providers can be a considerable part of improving care in delivery room.
Topics: Adult; Cross-Sectional Studies; Delivery, Obstetric; Female; Hospitals, Public; Humans; Iraq; Nonverbal Communication; Nurse Midwives; Patient Satisfaction; Physician-Patient Relations; Pregnancy; Socioeconomic Factors; Verbal Behavior; Young Adult
PubMed: 32151284
DOI: 10.1186/s12978-020-0894-3 -
Medecine Sciences : M/S Feb 2020Human oro-pharyngeal feeding is old as mammals's (150 millions years). This fonction is performed and coordinated by the central and peripheric nervous system. Thus,...
Human oro-pharyngeal feeding is old as mammals's (150 millions years). This fonction is performed and coordinated by the central and peripheric nervous system. Thus, eating and speaking use the same anatomic ducts and ways. To that purpose, the Broca praxic language area is close to the praxic area of the motor mastication and swallowing control in brain cortex. This area, a new innovation of human evolution, is connected directly with the old motor ways of preexisting oral feeding. The brain connectome and Foxp2 gene have contributed with efficiency to this linking when the language came.
Topics: Adult; Animals; Biological Evolution; Brain Mapping; Child; Child Development; Eating; Feeding Behavior; Humans; Infant, Newborn; Language Development; Nerve Net; Speech; Verbal Behavior
PubMed: 32129753
DOI: 10.1051/medsci/2020015 -
Developmental Psychobiology Jan 2020Mother-infant interactional synchrony has been hypothesized to be crucial for the development of many key neurodevelopmental behaviors in infants, including speech and...
Mother-infant interactional synchrony has been hypothesized to be crucial for the development of many key neurodevelopmental behaviors in infants, including speech and language. Assessing synchrony is challenging because many interactive behaviors may be subtlety, if at all, observable in overt behaviors. Physiological measures, therefore, may provide valuable physiological/biological markers of mother-infant synchrony. We have developed a multilevel measurement platform to assess physiological synchrony, attention, and vocal congruency during dynamic face-to-face mother-infant interactions. The present investigation was designed to provide preliminary data on its application in a group of 10 mother-infant dyads (20 subjects) ranging in age from 7 to 8.5 months at the time of the experimentation. Respiratory kinematics, heart rate, and vocalization were recorded simultaneously from mothers and infants during nonstructured, face-to-face interactions. Novel statistical methods were used to identify reliable moments of synchrony from cross-correlated, mother-infant respiration and to tag infant attention from heart rate deceleration. Results revealed that attention, vocal contingency, and respiratory synchrony are temporally clustered within the dyad interaction. This temporal alignment is consistent with the notion that biological synchrony provides a supportive platform for infant attention and mother-infant contingent vocalization.
Topics: Adult; Attention; Female; Heart Rate; Humans; Infant; Infant Behavior; Male; Mother-Child Relations; Respiration; Time Factors; Verbal Behavior
PubMed: 31493313
DOI: 10.1002/dev.21913