Self-Rated Confidence in Vocal Emotion Recognition Ability: The Role of Gender

PURPOSE

We studied the role of gender in metacognition of voice emotion recognition ability (ERA), reflected by self-rated confidence (SRC). To this end, we guided our study in two approaches: first, by examining the role of gender in voice ERA and SRC independently and second, by looking for gender effects on the ERA association with SRC.

METHOD

We asked 100 participants (50 men, 50 women) to interpret a set of vocal expressions portrayed by 30 actors (16 men, 14 women) as defined by their emotional meaning. Targets were 180 repetitive lexical sentences articulated in congruent emotional voices (anger, sadness, surprise, happiness, fear) and neutral expressions. Trial by trial, the participants were assigned retrospective SRC based on their emotional recognition performance.

RESULTS

A binomial generalized linear mixed model (GLMM) estimating ERA accuracy revealed a significant gender effect, with women encoders (speakers) yielding higher accuracy levels than men. There was no significant effect of the decoder's (listener's) gender. A second GLMM estimating SRC found a significant effect of encoder and decoder genders, with women outperforming men. Gamma correlations were significantly greater than zero for women and men decoders.

CONCLUSIONS

In spite of varying interpretations of gender in each independent rating (ERA and SRC), our results suggest that both men and women decoders were accurate in their metacognition regarding voice emotion recognition. Further research is needed to study how individuals of both genders use metacognitive knowledge in their emotional recognition and whether and how such knowledge contributes to effective social communication.

Home Videos for Remote Assessment in Children with Disabilities: A Scoping Review

Background: Analysis of parent-provided home videos is a mode of technology that can facilitate a telehealth assessment, allowing observation of function in the child's natural home environment. This scoping review investigated areas of use of home videos for functional assessment by health professionals with a pediatric population with disabilities. Methods: Four databases were searched for articles in which parent-provided home videos were employed by health professionals for functional assessment in children with disabilities. Articles published from 2013 to 2023 were included in the review if they met the inclusion criteria, and the data were extracted into an Excel file. Results: After screening 3,019 articles, 30 articles were included in the data extraction. The majority of studies utilized home videos for diagnosis of autism, followed by assessment of motor development in infants. Studies found that using home videos for assessment is feasible and empowers parents. The validity and reliability of various home video platforms were demonstrated. Conclusions: Analysis of home videos can aid in making a timely diagnosis for prompt intervention, and can be used to assess various body functions, interchangeable with a live clinic assessment. It is important to provide parents with clear instructions when using this method. Future studies are necessary to determine whether parent-provided home videos can be utilized by a multidisciplinary team to assess diverse factors, including activity, participation, and the environment, in a variety of populations of children with disabilities, thus extending services beyond the physical borders of the clinic.

Inhibitory control and mood in relation to psychological resilience: an ecological momentary assessment study

Psychological resilience, the ability to adapt to adversity, is theorized to rely on intact inhibitory control (IC) mechanisms, which underlie one's ability to maintain goal-directed behavior by inhibiting prepotent responses. However, no study to date has explored daily fluctuations of IC performance in relation to resilience. Here, we examined the association between IC and mood measured daily in relation to psychological resilience in young adults in a stressful situation. Baseline resilience was obtained from 144 female and male soldiers during their basic combat training. Then, participants completed an ecological momentary assessment protocol, in which they reported their momentary mood and completed a short IC assessment twice/day for 2 weeks. A hierarchical linear modeling analysis revealed that psychological resilience moderated the relationship between momentary IC and momentary mood, such that better IC was associated with better mood only for those with higher, but not lower, self-reported psychological resilience at baseline. These results show that psychological resilience is manifested in the everyday association between IC and mood. Furthermore, they lend important support to cognitive models of resilience and may have significant contribution to our understanding of resilient behavior in real life.Trial Registration: MOH_2018-0-13_002451.

Video-Conference-Based Graphomotor Examination for Children: A Validation Study

BACKGROUND

Telehealth can assist with providing accessible pediatric occupational therapy services.

OBJECTIVES

This study aimed to investigate the acceptability, inter-rater reliability, and concurrent validity of the Gilboa Functional Test (GIFT) as a video-conference-based graphomotor examination for children (GIFT-Online).

METHODOLOGY

A community-based sample of 157 children aged 3 to 7 years was screened using the GIFT-Online.

FINDINGS

Inter-rater reliability was excellent (r = 0.97; p < .001; n = 40). In addition, significant correlations were found between the total GIFT-Online scores and the Developmental Coordination Disorder Questionnaire 2007 (DCDQ'07), the Little DCDQ (LDCDQ) (r = 0.29, p < .001; n = 157), and the Drawing Proficiency Screening Questionnaire (DPSQ) (r = -0.35, p < .001; n = 157); demonstrating construct and concurrent validity. The online assessment was well received by parents and children.

CONCLUSIONS

The GIFT-Online was found to be an acceptable method of assessing graphomotor performance. Our results support the validity and reliability of the GIFT-Online as a screening tool administered remotely, thereby overcoming physical distancing and travel restrictions.

The Relationship between Young Children's Graphomotor Skills and Their Environment: A Cross-Sectional Study

The current study aimed to examine the unique contribution of personal and environmental factors to explain graphomotor skills in typically developing preschoolers and first-year elementary school students. A convenience sample of 136 Israeli children aged three−seven years was recruited. Graphomotor skills were assessed using the Gilboa Functional Test (GIFT); personal and environmental factors were assessed using a demographic questionnaire and the Home Literacy Experiences Questionnaire (HLEQ). A hierarchical multiple linear regression analysis revealed that home literacy and educational approach accounted for 43.1% of the variance of graphomotor skills (R2 = 40.4, p < 0.000), each providing a unique contribution to the explained variance after controlling for age, gender, and spoken language. Generally, our results supported the bioecological model, with proximal factors (home literacy and educational approach) having a greater influence on child graphomotor skills than distal factors (parental socioeconomic and immigration status). By highlighting the role of environmental factors in graphomotor development, these results can be used as a conceptual framework for developing early intervention programs.

The relationship between executive functions and naturalistic use of screen-based activities in children

Engagement in interactive game-playing and passive TV watching has become an integral part of young children's routines. While there is a consensus regarding the harmful effect of long passive TV viewing on child development, the influence of interactive game playing is much less clear. This study seeks to specifically explore the association between passive TV watching and interactive-game playing, to executive functions (EF) in typically developing children in their natural environment. A convenience sample of 194 Israeli children (aged 5-7 years) was recruited for our cross-sectional study. Parents provided information on the average daily time their children spent watching TV and playing interactive games. In addition, parents fulfilled the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function (BRIEF) to assess everyday executive skills in natural settings. Our findings revealed significant correlations between TV viewing and poor EF in five out of eight subscales of BRIEF, in addition to the indexes and the global executive composite (p < 0.05). However, the time spent on playing interactive games was not correlated with any of the BRIEF's subscales except one. Moreover, longer time spent watching TV was found to be a significant predictor of low EF among children (F(1,189) = 8.37; p = .004, R² = 3.7%). The current study results show that passive viewing led to worse EF performance than active digital gaming. As a consequence, our study supports previous professional recommendations to limit passive TV viewing.

Sentence vs. Word Perception by Young Healthy Females: Toward a Better Understanding of Emotion in Spoken Language

Expression and perception of emotions by voice are fundamental for basic mental health stability. Since different languages interpret results differently, studies should be guided by the relationship between speech complexity and the emotional perception. The aim of our study was therefore to analyze the efficiency of speech stimuli, word vs. sentence, as it relates to the accuracy of four different categories of emotions: anger, sadness, happiness, and neutrality. To this end, a total of 2,235 audio clips were presented to 49 females, native Hebrew speakers, aged 20–30 years (M = 23.7; SD = 2.13). Participants were asked to judge audio utterances according to one of four emotional categories: anger, sadness, happiness, and neutrality. Simulated voice samples were consisting of words and meaningful sentences, provided by 15 healthy young females Hebrew native speakers. Generally, word vs. sentence was not originally accepted as a means of emotional recognition of voice; However, introducing a variety of speech utterances revealed a different perception. Thus, the emotional conveyance provided new, even higher precision to our findings: Anger emotions produced a higher impact to the single word (χ2 = 10.21, p &lt; 0.01) as opposed to the sentence, while sadness was identified more accurately with a sentence (χ2 = 3.83, p = 0.05). Our findings resulted in a better understanding of how speech types can interpret perception, as a part of mental health.

Ecological Momentary Mood, Resilience, and Mental Health Status as Predictors of Quality of Life Among Young Adults Under Stress: A Structural Equation Modeling Analysis

Multiple internal factors, such as psychological resilience and mental health status, have been shown to contribute to overall quality of life (QoL). However, very few studies to date have examined how these factors contribute to QoL of youth and young adults in a stressful situation. Here, we studied the contribution of these factors, as well as of ecological momentary mood assessment, to QoL of young army recruits during their Basic Training Combat (BCT). To this end, we collected data from 156 male and female soldiers in a mixed-gender unit in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Using a mobile app installed on participants' phones, participants provided self-reports regarding their mental health status and psychological resilience at baseline, and QoL 2 weeks later. Momentary mood reporting was further collected during the 2-week interval period using a daily self-report mood scale (IMS-12). Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to examine the interrelationships among the study variables based on a hypothesized model. We found that a model with all factors (gender, resilience, mental health status and momentary mood) provided a good fit for the data based on its fit indices [χ2(38) = 47.506, p = 0.139, CFI = 0.979, NFI = 0.910, RMSEA = 0.040, TLI = 0.964]. However, the only direct contributors to QoL were gender and momentary mood, accounting together for 61.5% of the variance of QoL. Psychological resilience and mental health status contributed to QoL only indirectly, through their associations with momentary mood. Collectively, these results highlight the importance of ecological momentary assessment of mental-health related factors such as mood to the prediction of QoL in young adults under stress. These findings may have broader implications for monitoring and improvement of well-being in young healthy populations as well as in clinical ones.