The World Report on Disability recommends more involvement of people with disabilities in research. However, the lead article by Wylie, McAllister, Davidson, and Marshall (2013) has not addressed issues relating specifically to the involvement of people with communication disabilities in research. This deserves careful consideration. Involving people with communication difficulties in research forefronts discussion and collaboration, and requires researchers to focus on the priorities and needs of people with communication disabilities in their locality. Taking a participatory approach to research can develop a rich, context-specific understanding of communication disabilities. This paper uses the first author's experience preparing for a participatory research project in Uganda, to outline, particularly with reference to the Majority World, the benefits and challenges of engaging people with communication disabilities in research.
Photojournalistic images shape our understanding of sociopolitical events. How humans are depicted in images may have far-reaching consequences for our attitudes towards them. Social psychology has shown how the visualization of an ‘identifiable victim effect’ can elicit empathic responses. However, images of identifiable victims in the media are the exception rather than the norm. In the context of the Syrian refugee crisis, the majority of images in Western media depicted refugees as large unidentifiable groups. While the effects of the visual depiction of single individuals are well-known, the ways in which the visual framing of large groups operates, and its social and political consequences, remain unknown. We here focus on the visual depiction of refugees to understand how exposure to the dominant visual framing used in the media, depicting them in large groups of faceless individuals, affects their dehumanization and sets off political consequences. To that end we brought together insights from social psychology, social sciences and the humanities to test a range of hypotheses using methods from social and political psychology in 10 studies with the participation of 3951 European citizens. Seeing images of large groups resulted in greater implicit dehumanization compared with images depicting refugees in small groups. Images of large groups are also explicitly rated as more dehumanizing, and when coupled with meta-data such as newspaper headlines, images continue to play a significant and independent role on how (de)humanizing we perceive such news coverage to be. Moreover, after viewing images of large groups, participants showed increased preference for more dominant and less trustworthy-looking political leaders and supported fewer pro-refugee policies and more anti-refugee policies. In terms of a mechanistic understanding of these effects, the extent to which participants felt pity for refugees depicted in large groups as opposed to small groups mediated the effect of visual framing on the choice of a more authoritarian-looking leader. What we see in the media and how it is shown not only has consequences for the ways in which we relate to other human beings and our behaviour towards them but, ultimately, for the functioning of our political systems.
Photography and photojournalism frame our experience of the world, especially in a culture powered by images at an unprecedented level. Images in the digital age and the era of alternative facts mediate our relations to other human beings and make our negotiation between what is real or fake challenging. We investigated how our visceral responses, as the basis of subjective feelings, influence our relation and responses to the authenticity of photojournalistic images. Higher neurophysiological and affective arousal at the first perception of an image predicted the probability with which participants would judge that image as ‘real’ in a subsequent session. These findings highlight the crucial role that physiology plays in engaging us with imagery, beyond cognitive processing. ‘Feeling in seeing’ seems to be a salient signal that at least partly determines our beliefs in a culture powered by images. By considering at the same time the underlying neural, physiological and cognitive mechanisms that guide our responses to images as well as the contextual cultural effects on how these mechanisms are recruited, these findings contribute to long-standing but still timely and multidisciplinary debates in visual culture.
Physical exertion is sometimes associated with changes in cognitive function. However, there is a dearth of literature on the physiological basis of these associations. PURPOSE: To determine the acute effects of intense physical exercise on executive function and prefrontal cortex brain activity, and the impact of baseline fitness on these associations. METHODS: 103 participants (F = 29, M= 74; Age = 40 ± 8) completed tests of executive function before and after undergoing a VO2max test with a Bruce Treadmill Protocol. A comparison control group of 32 participants matched for age, birth sex and fitness completed the same tests before and after active rest. Body fat % was determined via bioelectrical impedance and VO2max via gas analysis. The cognitive tests measured reaction time, control inhibition, stimulus-oriented & stimulus-independent thought, and source memory. Brain activity of the prefrontal cortex was measured during the pre-and post-exercise cognitive tests using functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS). RESULTS: The cohort's mean body fat was 25 ± 7 %, Anaerobic Threshold (AT) was 28 ± 5 ml/kg/min and VO2max was 38 ± 7 ml/kg/min.At baseline, there was no association between body fat % or VO2max and cognitive test performance. However, after exercise, participants showed significantly improved cognitive speed with no decrease in accuracy (F = 28.1; p<.001). The degree to which individual participants showed this exercise-related cognitive enhancement was reflected in changes in oxygen utilisation in the prefrontal cortex, in the regions associated with performances on the individual tasks, beyond those occurring in the no-exercise control group (n = 92, α < .05, FDR corrected). In addition, the exercise-related cognitive speed improvements were significantly negatively associated with body fat % (R 2 = 11.4%; p = .001) and with age (R 2 = 11.0%; p = .001) and were positively correlated with VO2/kg at AT (R 2 = 6.9%, p = .008) and VO2max (p = .003). CONCLUSION: Exercise improved prefrontal cortex brain activity and cognitive processing speed with no detriment to accuracy in executive function in healthy adults. Although all participants improved after exercise, those with a higher body fat percentage, lower cardiovascular fitness and older age showed proportionally less improvement.
Photojournalistic images shape our understanding of sociopolitical events. The ways in which humans are depicted in images may have far-reaching consequences for our attitudes towards them, their well-being and our sociopolitical systems. Here, across ten studies (N-total of EU citizens = 3,936), we focus on the refugee crisis to understand how exposure to the dominant visual framing, depicting refugees in large groups, affects their dehumanization and sets off political consequences. Exposure to images of large groups of refugees resulted in greater implicit dehumanization compared with exposure to images depicting small groups. This visual framing was also explicitly evaluated as being more dehumanizing independently from textual information. Moreover, after viewing images of large groups of refugees, participants showed increased preference for a more dominant and less trustworthy political leader and expressed reduced support for pro-refugee policies, highlighting the political consequences of such visual exposure. Notably, the extent to which participants felt pity for refugees depicted in large as opposed to small groups mediated the effect of visual framing on the choice of a more authoritarian leader. Taken together our findings show that what we see in the media and how it is shown not only has consequences for the ways in which we relate to other human beings and our behaviour towards them but, ultimately, for our political systems.
People with a depressed mood tend to perform poorly on executive function tasks, which require much of the prefrontal cortex (PFC), an area of the brain which has also been shown to be hypo-active in this population. Recent research has suggested that these aspects of cognition might be improved through physical activity and cognitive training. However, whether the acute effects of exercise on PFC activation during executive function tasks vary with depressive symptoms remains unclear. To investigate these effects, 106 participants were given a cardiopulmonary exercise test (CPET) and were administered a set of executive function tests directly before and after the CPET assessment. The composite effects of exercise on the PFC (all experimental blocks) showed bilateral activation changes in dorsolateral (BA46/9) and ventrolateral (BA44/45) PFC, with the greatest changes occurring in rostral PFC (BA10). The effects observed in right ventrolateral PFC varied depending on level of depressive symptoms (13% variance explained); the changes in activation were less for higher levels. There was also a positive relationship between CPET scores (VO2peak) and right rostral PFC, in that greater activation changes in right BA10 were predictive of higher levels of aerobic fitness (9% variance explained). Since acute exercise ipsilaterally affected this PFC subregion and the inferior frontal gyrus during executive function tasks, this suggests physical activity might benefit the executive functions these subregions support. And because physical fitness and depressive symptoms explained some degree of cerebral upregulation to these subregions, physical activity might more specifically facilitate the engagement of executive functions that are typically associated with hypoactivation in depressed populations. Future research might investigate this possibility in clinical populations, particularly the neural effects of physical activity used in combination with mental health interventions.
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