The ways adolescents develop and use strategies to cope with stress vary according to cultural scripts and values. This cross-sectional study tested the impact of region and gender on adolescents' stress perceptions and coping styles. A total sample of 10,941 adolescents (51.3% female) from 20 countries completed questionnaires on stress and coping behaviors in four domains (school, parents, peers, and romantic relationships). Standardized samples of n = 200 were drawn from each country, resulting in a sample of N = 4,000 adolescents (mean age 15.18, SD = 1.76, balanced gender distribution). Based on the results of discriminant analysis, the adolescents could be grouped into three world regions (Western, Eastern/Asian, and Southern). Results revealed that levels of perceived stressfulness of issues in different domains were universally similar among adolescents from all three regions. Parent- and school-related stress received the highest rankings, and peer- and romance-related stress the lowest. Differences emerged with respect to coping style, depending on region and gender. Coping styles characterized by negotiating, seeking support, and emotional outlet were used more often by adolescents from the Western region than those from the Eastern/Asian or Southern regions. Females in all regions had higher rates in the use of negotiating and seeking support than males did. Adolescents from all countries, despite regional variations, exhibited more emotional outlet in response to conflicts with parents than with peers or romantic partners. Overall, adolescents from all regions of the world demonstrated an impressive level of coping competencies, as only about one fifth of all coping responses involved the use of withdrawal and denial. The findings are discussed with respect to how the effects of globalization and changing societal expectations may have contributed to similar levels of perceived stressfulness and increased coping agency in adolescents in different parts of the world.

Adolescents from all countries were remarkably competent in dealing with relationship stressors. Cultural and regional differences have a stronger effect on stress perception and coping style than gender.

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Background-We explored the safety of intravenous thrombolysis (IVT) or intra-arterial treatment (IAT) in patients withischemic stroke on non-vitamin K antagonist oral anticoagulants (NOACs, last intake <48 hours) in comparison with patients (1) taking vitamin K antagonists (VKAs) or (2) without previous anticoagulation (no-OAC). Methods and Results-This is a multicenter cohort pilot study. Primary outcome measures were (1) in no-OAC patients. sICH ECASS-II and sICH NINDS occurred in 2.6%/3.9% NOAC patients, in comparison with 6.5%/9.3% of VKA patients and 5.0%/7.2% of no-OAC patients, respectively. At 3 months, 23.0% of NOAC patients in comparison with 26.9% of VKA patients and 13.9% of no-OAC patients had died. Propensity score matching revealed no statistically significant differences. Conclusions-IVT/IAT in selected patients with ischemic stroke under NOAC treatment has a safety profile similar to both IVT/IAT in patients on subtherapeutic VKA treatment or in those without previous anticoagulation. However, further prospective studies are needed, including the impact of specific coagulation tests.

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Faces are perceived holistically, even when they are presented briefly (Hole, 1994; Richler, Mack, et al., 2009). Results obtained with a context congruency paradigm support dominance of holistic processing for brief timings, but indicate that larger viewing times enable observers to regulate contextual influences, and to use a feature selective focus (Meinhardt-Injac, Persike, & Meinhardt, 2010). Here we provide further evidence for this claim, and illuminate the role of feedback. With trial by trial feedback observers show poor performance in incongruent facial contexts at brief timings, but become quite effective in suppressing information that interferes with the correct judgements at larger viewing times. Without feedback they are still able to delimit the effects of conflicting contextual information, but are less effective. Adding further target features leads to moderate performance increase in incongruent contexts when there is no feedback, but to strong improvement when feedback is provided. These findings indicate that observers use opportunities of learning to replace holistic face perception by modes of active vision when sufficient temporal resources are available.

According to the two-systems account of theory of mind (ToM), understanding mental states of others involves both fast social-perceptual processes, as well as slower, reflexive cognitive operations (Frith and Frith, 2008; Apperly and Butterfill, 2009). To test the respective roles of specific abilities in either of these processes we administered 15 experimental procedures to a large sample of 343 participants, testing ability in face recognition and holistic perception, language, and reasoning. ToM was measured by a set of tasks requiring ability to track and to infer complex emotional and mental states of others from faces, eyes, spoken language, and prosody. We used structural equation modeling to test the relative strengths of a social-perceptual (face processing related) and reflexive-cognitive (language and reasoning related) path in predicting ToM ability. The two paths accounted for 58% of ToM variance, thus validating a general two-systems framework. Testing specific predictor paths revealed language and face recognition as strong and significant predictors of ToM. For reasoning, there were neither direct nor mediated effects, albeit reasoning was strongly associated with language. Holistic face perception also failed to show a direct link with ToM ability, while there was a mediated effect via face recognition. These results highlight the respective roles of face recognition and language for the social brain, and contribute closer empirical specification of the general two-systems account.

Effects of context and inversion were studied in face matching tasks by measuring proportion correct as a function of exposure duration. Subjects were instructed to attend either internal features (task A) or external features (task B) and matched two consecutive face stimuli, which included either congruent, incongruent, or no facial context features. In congruent contexts matching performance rose fast and took very similar courses for both types of facial features. With no contexts internal and external features were found to be matched at an equal speed, while incongruent contexts seriously delayed matching performance for internal, but not for external features. Analysing the effects of context and inversion showed strong interactions with time scale and the features to be attended. At brief timings effects of inversion and context were strong for both feature types. At longer exposure durations there were pronounced effects of inversion and context for internal features while for external features inversion effects were absent and context effects at just moderate degrees. Moreover, deteriorating effects of incongruent contexts, which were strong at brief timings, were attenuated at longer exposure durations, while facilitative effects of congruent contexts resided at high levels. These findings indicate that global and holistic processing modes dominate the early epoch of the face specific visual response, but can be replaced by modes that allow observers to regulate contextual influences and to access facial features more focused when the first 200 ms have passed.