Aktuelle Publikationen

Exposure to traumatic experiences across lifespan shapes the functioning of the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal (HPA) axis and sets individuals at risk to develop symptoms of depression and anxiety. Particularly, HPA axis regulation and the psychological health of the expectant mother have been of interest, as the health of the unborn child may be affected through changes in gestational biology. The present study investigated the potential associations between lifetime trauma, current symptoms (depression and anxiety) and hair cortisol concentrations (HCC) in pregnant women. A total of 149 pregnant women were interviewed in public outpatient clinics with varying gestational age in Greece, Spain and Perú. Lifetime trauma exposure and current symptoms of depression and anxiety were assessed. HCC was measured in scalp-near hair segments (2 cm length) reflecting cumulative cortisol secretion of the past two months. Results showed that trauma load is negatively associated with HCC and higher symptoms of depression and anxiety. There was a negative association between HCC and symptoms. The present findings support the notion that cumulative trauma exposure exerts long-lasting effects on the expectant mother’s HPA axis activity functioning and mental health and may thereby potentially create risk trajectories for the unborn child via changes in gestational biology.

The COVID-19 pandemic changed higher education radically and challenged faculties to adapt their teaching to the new circumstances. The aim of this study is to highlight changes, in particular, the advantages and disadvantages associated with them, and to find out what conclusions were drawn for the future in the three experimental natural sciences of biology, chemistry, and physics at the University of Konstanz (Germany). In a guided interview, the majority of the university teachers in the bachelor’s programs were interviewed, and their statements were subsequently categorized. While lectures and tutorials in distance learning were held asynchronously or synchronously online, laboratory courses used a variety of formats. The number of disadvantages cited, as well as the number of university faculty citing the same disadvantage, is greater than for advantages. The most commonly cited drawbacks fall into the areas of workload, communication, feedback, and active student participation. Physical presence and a return to the original learning objectives in the lab courses is wanted by the majority. The results point to commonalities between the science subjects and should encourage science departments to work together on similar problems in similar formats in the future. Furthermore, there is an urgent and ongoing need for the training of natural science teachers in competence-oriented digital teaching.

Theoretischer Hintergrund: Das Verständnis der Antipsychotika-Adhärenz ist lückenhaft, obwohl sie ein Grundpfeiler der Schizophrenie-Behandlung darstellt. Die spezifische Erfassung der Wahrnehmung von Risiken bei Einnahme sowie Absetzen von Antipsychotika könnte zur Erklärung der Adhärenz beitragen. Fragestellung: Explorative Studie zur Entwicklung und ersten Evaluierung des Fragebogens zur Risikowahrnehmung von Antipsychotika (FRA). Methode: Basierend auf theoretischen Überlegungen wurde ein Itempool für die Risikowahrnehmung des Absetzens und Einnehmens von Antipsychotika generiert. Eingeschlossen wurden ambulante und stationäre F2-Patient_innen. Stichprobe 1 ( N = 120) diente zur Itemselektion und explorativen Faktorenanalyse (faktorielle Validität). Anhand Online-Stichprobe 2 ( N = 39) wurde die diskriminante und konvergente Validität analysiert. Ergebnisse: Die explorative Faktorenanalyse ergab die theoretisch erwartete zweifaktorielle Struktur. Die Korrelationen des FRA zu Adhärenzmaßen und spezifischen Medikamentenfragebögen unterstützten die konvergente und diskriminante Validität.

Schlussfolgerungen: Der FRA als Erhebungsinstrument der Wahrnehmung von Antipsychotika-Risiken könnte das Verständnis von Antipsychotika-Adhärenz und von Behandlungsansätzen verbessern. Prospektive konfirmatorische Studien müssen durchgeführt werden.

This article reviews the current knowledge state on pragmatic and structural language abilities in autism and their potential relation to extralinguistic abilities and autistic traits. The focus is on questions regarding autism language profiles with varying degrees of (selective) impairment and with respect to potential comorbidity of autism and language impairment: Is language impairment in autism the co-occurrence of two distinct conditions (comorbidity), a consequence of autism itself (no comorbidity), or one possible combination from a series of neurodevelopmental properties (dimensional approach)? As for language profiles in autism, three main groups are identified, namely, (i) verbal autistic individuals without structural language impairment, (ii) verbal autistic individuals with structural language impairment, and (iii) minimally verbal autistic individuals. However, this tripartite distinction hides enormous linguistic heterogeneity. Regarding the nature of language impairment in autism, there is currently no model of how language difficulties may interact with autism characteristics and with various extralinguistic cognitive abilities. Building such a model requires carefully designed explorations that address specific aspects of language and extralinguistic cognition. This should lead to a fundamental increase in our understanding of language impairment in autism, thereby paving the way for a substantial contribution to the question of how to best characterize neurodevelopmental disorders.

In cycling, propulsion is generated by the muscles of the lower limbs and hips. After the first reports of pedal/crank force measurements in the late 1960s, it has been assumed that highly trained athletes have better power transfer to the pedals than recreational cyclists. However, motor patterns indicating higher levels of performance are unknown. To compare leg muscle activation between trained (3.5–4.2 W/kgbw) and highly trained (4.3–5.1 W/kgbw) athletes we applied electromyography, lactate, and bi-pedal/crank force measurements during a maximal power test, an individual lactate threshold test and a constant power test. We show that specific activation patterns of the rectus femoris (RF) and vastus lateralis (VL) impact on individual performance during high-intensity cycling. In highly trained cyclists, we found a strong activation of the RF during hip flexion. This results in reduced negative force in the fourth quadrant of the pedal cycle. Furthermore, we discovered that pre-activation of the RF during hip flexion reduces force loss at the top dead center (TDC) and can improve force development during subsequent leg extension. Finally, we found that a higher performance level is associated with earlier and more intense coactivation of the RF and VL. This quadriceps femoris recruitment pattern improves force transmission and maintains propulsion at the TDC of the pedal cycle. Our results demonstrate neuromuscular adaptations in cycling that can be utilized to optimize training interventions in sports and rehabilitation.

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dc.contributor.author: Angelini, Patrizio; Chaplick, Steven; Cornelsen, Sabine; Da Lozzo, Giordano; Roselli, Vincenzo

This article examines the approach of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) to claims of discriminatory practices linked to armed conflict, as well as the more recent development of overlapping or parallel interstate claims before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the interstate procedure of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), based on the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD). It examines the potential implications of the latter trend for the application and interpretation of non-discrimination norms, and concludes that this should encourage the ECtHR once again towards application and explicit interpretation of Article 14 in armed conflict contexts. Such an approach would recognise the gravity of any discriminatory dimensions of conflict practices; ensure consistency with the ECtHR’s own evolving case law on discriminatory violence; and facilitate harmonious interpretation of non-discrimination norms, as well as the ECtHR’s autonomous interpretation of the ECHR and participation in judicial dialogue on concepts common to the ECHR and ICERD.

1. Disgust is an adaptive system hypothesized to have evolved to reduce the risk of becoming sick. It is associated with behavioural, cognitive and physiological responses tuned to allow animals to avoid and/or get rid of parasites, pathogens and toxins.

2. Little is known about the mechanisms and outcomes of disease avoidance in wild animals. Furthermore, given the escalation of negative human-wildlife interactions, the translation of such knowledge into the design of evolutionarily relevant conservation and wildlife management strategies is becoming urgent.

3. Contemporary methods in animal ecology and related fields, using direct (sensory cues) or indirect (remote sensing technologies and machine learning) means, provide a flexible toolbox for testing and applying disgust at individual and collective levels.

4. In this review/perspective paper, we provide an empirical framework for testing the adaptive function of disgust and its associated disease avoidance behaviours across species, from the least to the most social, in different habitats. We predict various trade-offs to be at play depending on the social system and ecology of the species.

5. We propose five contexts in which disgust-related avoidance behaviours could be applied, including endangered species rehabilitation, invasive species, crop-raiding, urban pests and animal tourism.

6. We highlight some of the perspectives and current challenges of testing disgust in the wild. In particular, we recommend future studies to consider together disease, predation and competition risks. We discuss the ethics associated with disgust experiments in the above contexts. Finally, we promote the creation of a database gathering disease avoidance evidence in animals and its applications.

While many studies investigated basic facets of empathy, less is known about the association with early life adversity (ELA). To investigate a possible association of empathy with ELA, we assessed self-reported ELA, using the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ), the Parental Bonding Instrument (PBI) for mother and father, and empathy, using the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI), in a sample of N  = 228 (83% female, age mean  = 30.51 ± 9.88 years, age range  = 18–60). Further, we measured willingness to donate a certain percentage of study compensation to a charity as an index of prosocial behavior. In line with our hypotheses that stated a positive association of empathy with ELA, increased levels of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse, and emotional and physical neglect were positively correlated with personal distress in response to others’ suffering. Likewise, higher parental overprotection and lower parental care were related to higher personal distress. Furthermore, while participants with higher levels of ELA tended to donate more money on a merely descriptive level, only higher levels of sexual abuse were significantly related to larger donations after correction for multiple statistical tests. Other facets of the IRI (empathic concern, perspective taking and fantasy) were not related to any other ELA measure. This suggests ELA only affects levels of personal distress.

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dc.contributor.author: Degroote, Cathy; von Känel, Roland; Thomas, Livia; Zuccarella-Hackl, Claudia; Messerli-Bürgy, Nadine; Saner, Hugo; Wiest, Roland; Wirtz, Petra H.

How collectives remain coordinated as they grow in size is a fundamental challenge affecting systems ranging from biofilms to governments. This challenge is particularly apparent in multicellular organisms, where coordination among a vast number of cells is vital for coherent animal behavior. However, the earliest multicellular organisms were decentralized, with indeterminate sizes and morphologies, as exemplified by Trichoplax adhaerens , arguably the earliest-diverged and simplest motile animal. We investigated coordination among cells in T. adhaerens by observing the degree of collective order in locomotion across animals of differing sizes and found that larger individuals exhibit increasingly disordered locomotion. We reproduced this effect of size on order through a simulation model of active elastic cellular sheets and demonstrate that this relationship is best recapitulated across all body sizes when the simulation parameters are tuned to a critical point in the parameter space. We quantify the trade-off between increasing size and coordination in a multicellular animal with a decentralized anatomy that shows evidence of criticality and hypothesize as to the implications of this on the evolution hierarchical structures such as nervous systems in larger organisms.

Offering a comparative case study of two different postcolonial responses to Sophocles’s tragedy Antigone from European and African perspectives, this article brings together Magnet Theatre’s Cape Town production of Antigone (not quite/quiet) with Thomas Köck’s play antigone. a requiem that premiered almost simultaneously in September 2019 in Hannover, Germany. Both re-examine Sophocles’s tragedy to come to terms with their respective colonial histories and postcolonial challenges: while Magnet Theatre engages with the ancient material to reflect on the difficulties of fully overcoming the legacies of colonialism in post-apartheid South Africa, Köck explores the afterlives of ‘thebaneuropean’ colonialism as manifested in current European migration policies. Comparing the adaptation principle of Magnet Theatre’s ‘ruinous’, fragmenting approach to the literary and theatrical archive of European colonialism to Köck’s postdramatic recomposition of Antigone as a requiem for migrant deaths and for European tragedy itself, the article discusses the productions in their respective contexts of political protest movements. Drawing on cultural theory of ungrievability, domopolitics, and postcolonial shame, it explores the central functions of the chorus – indecisive Europeans on the verge of anagnorisis in Köck’s play, the post-apartheid South African generation caught between rage and disillusionment in Magnet Theatre’s production – and as well as the prominence of Ismene as a problematic survivor figure in both adaptations.