Erin Cvejic

Prosody off the top of the head: Prosodic contrasts can be discriminated by head motion

The current study investigated peoples ability to discriminate prosody related head and face motion from videos showing only the upper face of the speaker saying the same sentence with different prosody. The first two experiments used a visual-visual matching task. These videos were either fully textured (Experiment 1) or showed only the outline of the speakers head (Experiment 2). Participants were presented with two stimulus pairs of silent videos, with their task to select the pair that had the same prosody. The overall results of the visual-visual matching experiments showed that people could discriminate same- from different-prosody sentences with a high degree of accuracy. Similar levels of discrimination performance were obtained for the fully textured (containing rigid and non-rigid motions) and the outline only (rigid motion only) videos. Good visual-visual matching performance shows that people are sensitive to the underlying factor that determined whether the movements were the same or not, i.e., the production of prosody. However, testing auditory-visual matching provides a more direct test concerning peoples sensitivity to how head motion/face motion relates to spoken prosody. Experiments 3 (with fully textured videos) and 4 (with outline only videos) employed a cross-modal matching task that required participants to match auditory with visual tokens that had the same prosody. As with the previous experiments, participants performed this discrimination very well. Similarly, no decline in performance was observed for the outline only videos. This result supports the proposal that rigid head motion provides an important visual cue to prosody.

Recognizing prosody across modalities, face areas and speakers : examining perceivers' sensitivity to variable realizations of visual prosody

Prosody can be expressed not only by modification to the timing, stress and intonation of auditory speech but also by modifying visual speech. Studies have shown that the production of visual cues to prosody is highly variable (both within and across speakers), however behavioural studies have shown that perceivers can effectively use such visual cues. The latter result suggests that people are sensitive to the type of prosody expressed despite cue variability. The current study investigated the extent to which perceivers can match visual cues to prosody from different speakers and from different face regions. Participants were presented two pairs of sentences (consisting of the same segmental content) and were required to decide which pair had the same prosody. Experiment 1 tested visual and auditory cues from the same speaker and Experiment 2 from different speakers. Experiment 3 used visual cues from the upper and the lower face of the same talker and Experiment 4 from different speakers. The results showed that perceivers could accurately match prosody even when signals were produced by different speakers. Furthermore, perceivers were able to match the prosodic cues both within and across modalities regardless of the face area presented. This ability to match prosody from very different visual cues suggests that perceivers cope with variation in the production of visual prosody by flexibly mapping specific tokens to abstract prosodic types.

Tracking eyebrows and head gestures associated with spoken prosody

Although it is clear that eyebrow and head movements are in some way associated with spoken prosody, the precise form of this association is unclear. To examine this, eyebrow and head movements were recorded from six talkers producing 30 sentences (with two repetitions) in three prosodic conditions (Broad focus, Narrow focus and Echoic question) in a face to face dialogue exchange task. Movement displacement and peak velocity were measured for the prosodically marked constituents (critical region) as well as for the preceding and following regions. The amount of eyebrow movement in the Narrow focus and Echoic question conditions tended to be larger at the beginning of an utterance (in the pre-critical and critical regions) than at the end (in the post-critical region). Head rotation (nodding) tended to occur later, being maximal in the critical region and still occurring often in the post-critical one. For eyebrow movements, peak velocity tended to distinguish the regions better than the displacement measure. The extent to which eyebrow and head movements co-occurred was also examined. Compared to broad focussed condition, both movement types occurred more often in the narrow focussed and echoic question ones. When these double movements occurred in narrow focused utterances, brow raises tended to begin before the onset of the critical constituent and reach a peak displacement at the time of the critical constituent, whereas rigid pitch movements tended to begin at the time of critical constituent and reach peak displacement after this region. The pattern for echoic questions was similar for eyebrow motion however head rotations tended to begin earlier compared to the narrow focus condition. These results are discussed in terms of the differences these types of visual cues may have in production and perception.

Neurocognitive disturbances associated with acute infectious mononucleosis, Ross River fever and Q fever: A preliminary investigation of inflammatory and genetic correlates

Disturbances in neurocognitive performance are a core feature of the acute sickness response to infection; however the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. The current study used a computerised battery to assess neurocognitive functioning in subjects enrolled in the Dubbo Infection Outcomes Study (n=107) - a prospective cohort of subjects followed from documented acute infection with Epstein Barr virus, Ross River virus, or Coxiella burnetii until recovery. Subjects were assessed when ill, and a subset again after complete recovery. Associations between sickness-related cognitive disturbances and single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in cytokine (interleukin [IL]-6, IL-10, tumor necrosis factor-α and interferon-γ) and neurobehavioral genes (serotonin transporter and catechol-O-methyltransferase) were explored. During acute infection, subjects exhibited slower matching-to-sample responses (p=0.03), poorer working memory capacity (p=0.014), mental planning (p=0.045), and dual attention task performance (p=0.02), and required longer to complete discordant Stroop trials (p=0.01) compared to recovery. Objective impairments correlated significantly with self-reported symptoms (p<0.05) as well as levels of the inflammation marker, C-reactive protein (p=0.001). Linear regression analysis identified an association between neurocognitive disturbance during acute illness and functional polymorphisms in inflammatory cytokine genes. Specifically, the high cytokine producing G allele of the IL-6-174G/C SNP was associated with poorer neurocognitive performance when subjects were ill (p=0.027). These findings confirm that acute infection impacts on neurocognitive performance, manifesting as slowed responses and impaired performance on complex tasks requiring higher-order functioning which has important real-world implications. The data provide the first preliminary evidence for a role of a genetic predisposition to more intense inflammatory responses in objective neurocognitive disturbances during acute infections. These associations require replication in a larger sample size.

Reliability revisited: Autonomic responses in the context of everyday well-being

Vishal Patel , Sabine Giesebrecht , Alexander R. Burton , Erin Cvejic , Jim Lemon , Dusan Hadzi-Pavlovic , Stephen Dain , Andrew Lloyd , Ute Vollmer-Conna a,⁎ a School of Psychiatry, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia b Optics and Radiometry Laboratory, School of Optometry and Vision Science, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia c Inflammation and Infection Research Centre, School of Medical Sciences, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia

Visual Functioning and Health-related Quality-of-Life are Compromised in Patients with Uveitis

ABSTRACT Purpose: To assess the vision-related (VR) and health-related (HR) quality-of-life (QoL) of patients with uveitis. Methods: In total, 60 patients with uveitis, 81 patients with diabetic retinopathy (DR), and 70 healthy subjects completed the National Eye Institute Visual Functioning Questionnaire and the Medical Outcome Study 36-Item Short Form. Results: Patients with uveitis reported lower HR- and VR-QoL than healthy subjects (p<0.05) and lower VR-QoL (p<0.001) than patients with DR. For patients with uveitis, multiple linear regression analyses indicated that lower HR-QoL scores were predicted by younger age (p<0.01), while lower VR-QoL scores were predicted by poorer visual acuity (p<0.001), ocular comorbidities (p<0.05), and female sex (p<0.05). Conclusions: Patients with uveitis have significantly poorer VR- and HR-QoL than healthy control subjects. Uveitis has a more debilitating impact on VR-QoL than DR.

Acute coronary syndrome-associated depression: the salience of a sickness response analogy?

Depression emerging in conjunction with acute coronary syndrome (ACS) is thought to constitute a distinct high-risk phenotype with inflammatory determinants. This review critically examines the notion put forward in the literature that ACS-associated depression constitutes a meaningful subtype that is qualitatively different from depressive syndromes observed in psychiatric patients; and evaluates the salience of an analogy to the acute sickness response to infection or injury as an explanatory model. Specific features differentiating ACS-associated depression from other phenotypes are discussed, including differences in depression symptom profiles, timing of the depressive episode in relation to ACS, severity of the cardiac event, and associated immune activation. While an acute sickness response analogy offers a plausible conceptual framework, concrete evidence is lacking for inflammatory activity as the triggering mechanism. It is likely that ACS-associated depression encompasses several causative scenarios.

Effects of seeing the interlocutor on the production of prosodic contrasts (L)

This study investigated whether the production of prosodic focus and phrasing contrasts was modified when interlocutors could only hear each other [auditory only (AO)], compared to when they could hear and see each other [face to face (FTF)]. The prosodic characteristics of utterances produced by six talkers were examined using both acoustic and perceptual measures (ratings of the degree of focus or clarity of the statement-question contrast). The acoustic measures showed a range of differences between narrow focus and between phrasing contrasts and some of these differences were greater in the AO setting than the FTF one. The listeners ratings of focus and phrasing showed a clear difference between the AO and FTF conditions, with perceptual attributes of both narrow focus and echoic question phrasing being rated as clearer in the AO condition. To explain these results it is proposed that talkers compensate for the lack of visual prosodic cues in the AO condition by taking extra care (relative to FTF conditions) to ensure the effective transmission of prosodic cues.

Characterising acute coronary syndrome-associated depression: Let the data speak.

Depression in the context of acute coronary syndrome (ACS) is understood to confer increased morbidity and mortality risk. The pathophysiological mechanisms underlying this association remain poorly understood, although several candidates including inflammation, cardiac autonomic dysregulation, and behavioural factors are viewed as of key importance. No single bio-behavioural explanatory model of ACS-associated depression has emerged, likely due the substantial heterogeneity across both conditions. We studied 344 patients with ACS; 45 fulfilled diagnostic (DSM-IV) criteria for a major depressive episode occurring within 1-month of ACS, and 13 had ongoing major depression that pre-dated ACS and continued through to 1 month post-ACS. We employed two statistical methods (multinomial logistic regression; and latent class analysis) and a range of immunological, autonomic and nutritional markers in an attempt to characterise a biological basis for ACS-associated depression. Regression modelling failed to accurately predict categorical group membership of ACS-associated depression. An alternative data-driven approach produced a three-class solution, with the derived classes differing on measure of C-reactive protein, vitamin D, omega-6:omega-3 ratio, heart rate variability, and age (all p⩽0.004). The majority of participants with ACS-associated and ongoing depression were members of the class characterised by the greatest biological disturbance. Patients with depression differed from those without depression on a range of psychological trait and state variables; additionally reporting poorer sleep quality, higher levels of social isolation, and functional impairment, but had similar biological profiles. Patients with ongoing depression generally had higher scores on these psychological/behavioural measures. Our novel analytic approach identified a combination of biomarkers suggestive of a role for immune, autonomic, and nutritional pathways in the manifestation of depression during ACS, in the context of additional psychosocial and behavioural vulnerabilities. Further studies are required to confirm the causal role of these factors in perpetuating depression and increasing risk of poor-health outcomes.

Acute coronary syndrome and depression: A review of shared pathophysiological pathways

Objective: To examine the evidence for shared pathophysiological pathways in acute coronary syndrome and major depression and to conceptualise the dynamic interplay of biological systems and signalling pathways that link acute coronary syndrome and depression within a framework of neuro-visceral integration. Methods: Relevant articles were sourced via a search of published literature from MEDLINE, EMBASE and PubMed using a variety of search terms relating to biological connections between acute coronary syndrome and depression. Additional articles from bibliographies of retrieved papers were assessed and included where relevant. Results: Despite considerable research efforts, a clear understanding of the biological processes connecting acute coronary syndrome and depression has not been achieved. Shared abnormalities are evident across the immune, platelet/endothelial and autonomic/stress-response systems. From the available evidence, it seems unlikely that a single explanatory model could account for the complex interactions of biological pathways driving the pathophysiology of these disorders and their comorbidity. Conclusion: A broader conceptual framework of mind–body or neuro-visceral integration that can incorporate the existence of several causative scenarios may be more useful in directing future research and treatment approaches for acute coronary syndrome–associated depression.