1,721,489 research outputs found
Paralysis, Scoliosis, and Learning: A Tribute to My Friend Neal Miller
No full textAbstract
Niels Birbaumer provides personal reflections on the life and work of Neal Miller, including his pioneering laboratory investigations of visceral learning. He also describes Miller's study of psychoanalysis in Vienna, and Miller's efforts to translate the concepts of psychoanalysis into the language of learning theory.</jats:p
Involvement of the prefrontal cortex in visuo-spatial planning
No full textNiels Birbaumer, Giulio Lancioni, Antonino Raffon
Supplementary_Material – Supplemental material for Brain-Machine Interface in Chronic Stroke: Randomized Trial Long-Term Follow-up
No full textSupplemental material, Supplementary_Material for Brain-Machine Interface in Chronic Stroke: Randomized Trial Long-Term Follow-up by Ander Ramos-Murguialday, Marco R. Curado, Doris Broetz, Özge Yilmaz, Fabricio L. Brasil, Giulia Liberati, Eliana Garcia-Cossio, Woosang Cho, Andrea Caria, Leonardo G. Cohen and Niels Birbaumer in Neurorehabilitation and Neural Repair</p
Datenfälschung: DFG bestraft renommierten Hirnforscher
No full texthttps://www.spiegel.de/lebenundlernen/uni/niels-birbaumer-strafe-gegen-renommierten-hirnforscher-a-1287667.htm
Könyvszemle
No full textNiels Birbaumer - Robert F. Schmidt: Biologische Psychologie; David G. Myers: Psychologie; Freddie Strasser - Paul Randolph: Mediáció. A konfliktusmegoldás lélektani aspektusai; Borsos Szabolcs: A perszonalizmus mint az önismeret filozófiáj
Attitudes Towards End-of-Life Decisions and the Subjective Concepts of Consciousness: An Empirical Analysis
Full text linkBackground: People have fought for their civil rights, primarily the right to live in dignity. At present, the development of technology in medicine and healthcare led to an apparent paradox: many people are fighting for the right to die. This study was aimed at testing whether different moral principles are associated with different attitudes towards end-of-life decisions for patients with a severe brain damage.
Methodology: We focused on the ethical decisions about withdrawing life-sustaining treatments in patients with severe brain damage. 202 undergraduate students at the University of Padova were given one description drawn from four profiles describing different pathological states: the permanent vegetative state, the minimally conscious state, the locked-in syndrome, and the terminal illness. Participants were asked to evaluate how dead or how alive the patient was, and how appropriate it was to satisfy the patient's desire.
Principal Findings: We found that the moral principles in which people believe affect not only people's judgments concerning the appropriateness of the withdrawal of life support, but also the perception of the death status of patients with severe brain injury. In particular, we found that the supporters of the Free Choice (FC) principle perceived the death status of the patients with different pathologies differently: the more people believe in the FC, the more they perceived patients as dead in pathologies where conscious awareness is severely impaired. By contrast, participants who agree with the Sanctity of Life (SL) principle did not show differences across pathologies.
Conclusions: These results may shed light on the complex aspects of moral consensus for supporting or rejecting end-of-life decisions
Emotional processing, cognition and well-being in ALS: evidence from behavioral and physiological level and professional medical encounter
No full textIn addition to physical impairment, patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) may present with some extra-motor symptoms such as changes in emotional processing, behavior and cognition. So far it has not been fully understood how these symptoms interfere with patients’ well-being and how they influence medical encounter with professionals. Therefore, the aim was to study extra-motor manifestations including emotional processing, signs of pathological laughing and crying and cognition. Additionally, impact of these on patients’ decision status for or against therapeutic interventions and professionals’ perspective on the influence of these interventions on patients’ well-being were studied.
Emotional processing in ALS was studied by asking patients (N=30) and healthy controls (N=29) to rate basic facial emotions on a computer screen and view the facial expressions in a functional magnetic resonance image scanner (subset of N=15 patients and N=14 healthy controls) while their cortical activity was recorded. Furthermore, patients (N=10) and healthy controls (N=10) were asked to rate emotionally laden and neutral pictures while listening to happy or sad music extracts. This was correlated with their emotional lability score. Influence of patients’ cognition on their therapy preferences was studied by including N=169 patients who filled out a questionnaire on their decision making regarding life prolonging measures. This was correlated with patients’ cognitive status. Finally, physicians perspectives were studied by asking N=105 neurologists to estimate depressiveness and quality of life of ALS patients with life prolonging measures and by comparing these with patients’ subjective ratings.
Emotional processing, especially of negative material, was impaired: ALS patients recognized disgust and fear less than healthy controls and showed decreased activity in cortical areas related to these emotions. Especially when viewing sad faces patients presented with decreased activity in hippocampus bilaterally together with increased activity in the right inferior frontal gyrus, which was positively correlated with the patient’s social activity. This suggests a compensatory cortical function that might be enhanced by positive influence of social activity in life.
ALS patients with pathological laughing and/or crying tended to rate neutral pictures accompanied by sad music more negatively. Patients with a high positive emotional lability score rated happy pictures more positively and sad pictures more negatively, while patients with a high negative lability score rated happy pictures more negatively. Therefore, our results suggest that ALS patients with pathological laughing and/or crying might exhibit reduced inhibitory mechanisms and are in general more sensitive to the negative component of emotion regulation.
Patients’ decisions regarding life prolonging measures, hypothetical ideation to turn off these measures or patients’ wish for hastened death were not associated with their cognitive status or behavioral changes. Therefore, decision making by proxies should not necessarily be rushed. Furthermore, with regards to patients’ psychological well-being with life prolonging measures, highly experienced neurologists estimated quality of life and depressiveness closer to patients’ subjective estimation than neurologists with low experience on ALS. Thus, neurologists with significant experience are able to correctly recognize patients’ affective state and sympathize with their life with certain therapeutic measures. Similarly, in contrast to those without palliative care training, neurologists with palliative care training estimated depressiveness and quality of life of patients similarly with patients’ subjective ratings.
Some in ALS occurring extra-motor symptoms might be counteracted by positive social contacts and they are not necessarily associated with patients’ psychosocial adaptation and decision making regarding life prolonging measures. Patients’ well-being might often be underestimated by social environment with insufficient knowledge on the disease. On the other hand, patients’ good psychosocial adaptation is probably well understood among highly experienced neurologists. Therefore, patients with a rare disease such as ALS would be ideally treated by experienced neurologists, when they might receive both more advanced medical expertise and better understanding for their condition with regard to psychological well-being
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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