Istra Inspirit, one of the best tourism projects in the history of Croatian tourism, invites all interested to participate in a creative competition and tell their own and new authentic story from Istria, which will be the guiding thread for the new Istra Inspirit experience, and the most creative proposals will be awarded prizes .In the five years of its existence, Istra Inspirit can boast of several hundred performances in authentic locations throughout Istria (Pula, Medulin, Poreč, Rovinj, Labin / Raša, Buzet, Svetvinčenat, Pazin, Savudrija, Bale, Vodnjan, Brijuni), cooperation with municipalities and cities, local tourist boards and family farms, organizations and institutions, and the commercial sector – agencies and hotels.As there are many stories that are not yet known, Istra Inspirit invites all interested to share those related to the rich Istrian history and to participate in a creative competition designed to publish a new project website.The authors of the most creative proposals will be awarded the following prizes:Trip to Venice for 2 people (Atlas dd);Medieval evening for 4 people in Svetvinčenat (Historical Association Kaštel);Private tour of Zagreb for 4 people: ‘Sleeping dragon and other legends’ (Secret).The competition runs from 17.03. to 31.03.2017., and each participant can send only one proposal and present it in 5 to 10 sentences by e-mail info@istrainspirit.hr, and other competition rules can be found at the link: http://istrainspirit.hr/novosti/Istra Inspirit After five years of its existence, it has decided to redesign its website in order to make its users travel through time or the world of stories, legends and myths of Istria simpler and more interesting. By the way, the project is recognized as a significant product of cultural tourism and has so far been awarded numerous prestigious awards for the most creative tourism product. All of the above testifies to the fact that this is a prominent product of cultural and experiential tourism on the Istrian peninsula, which has been encouraged since 2012 by the Administrative Department for Tourism of the Istrian County.Also, recently the Istra Inpirit project was presented as an example of good practice of experience tourism at the business forum ‘Economy of experience as a stimulus for growth and development’ organized by the British Embassy, ​​the Croatian Ministry of Tourism and the Croatian Chamber of Commerce.RELATED NEWS:STORYTELLING IN THE TRUE SENSE – ISTRIA INSPIRITUNWO LISTED ISTRIA INSPIRIT AMONG THE BEST WORLD TOURIST STORIES read more

Email At age 12, 24.9% of children reported having nightmares in the previous 6 months and 7.9% of the sample were found to be experiencing psychotic symptoms. There was around twice the odds of later experiencing psychotic symptoms in those earlier reporting nightmares.Lead author Dr Andrew Thompson, from Warwick Medical School, said: “The presence of anxiety and depressive symptoms as confounding factors in those with sleep disturbance could potentially explain the findings. Experience of stressful events has also been related to both the development of both nightmares and psychotic symptoms in late childhood and may be important.”Dr Thompson said the research could have implications for the way early nightmares and night terrors are viewed and potentially addressed by professionals or carers.He said: “It is likely that in some individuals, nightmares and night terrors have little significance to later psychopathology. However, in individuals with additional risks such as a family psychiatric history or a past exposure to trauma by adults or peers, such sleep problems may have greater significance and may also highlight other unnoticed psychopathology or trauma.”Dr Thompson added that more work was needed, but these initial results did suggest that specific parasomnias such as persistent nightmares in children could be a potential risk indicator for the development of psychotic experiences and possibly psychotic disorder. Share Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Researchers at the University of Warwick have found a significant link between the presence of persistent nightmares in childhood and psychotic experiences in later adolescence.In a new paper published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, a team based at the Division of Mental Health and Wellbeing at Warwick Medical School at the University of Warwick found that persistent childhood nightmares both at an early age (between 2 and 9) and at age 12 were significantly associated with new incidences of suspected or definite psychotic experiences at age 18.The University of Warwick led team, which also included colleagues from University College London, Cardiff University, University of Bristol and Kings College London, used a sample of 4,060 individuals from a UK birth cohort. They used parental reports on the child’s experience of regular nightmares between the ages of 2 and 9. They then used interviews to assess experiences of nightmares, night terrors and sleepwalking at age 12 and psychotic experiences at age 18. LinkedIn Pinterest read more

Share on Twitter In a study that included nearly 24,000 participants, those who experienced a stroke had an acute decline in cognitive function and also accelerated and persistent cognitive decline over 6 years, according to an article in the July 7 issue of JAMA.Each year, approximately 795,000 U.S. residents experience a stroke. In 2010, almost 7 million adults were stroke survivors. Cognitive decline is a major cause of disability in stroke survivors. The magnitude of survivors’ cognitive changes after stroke has been uncertain, according to background information in the article.Deborah A. Levine, M.D., M.P.H., of the University of Michigan Medical School and Ann Arbor VA Health System, and colleagues examined the changes in cognitive function among survivors of incident stroke, controlling for their pre-stroke cognitive trajectories. The study included 23,572 U.S. participants 45 years or older without cognitive impairment at study entry (2003-2007), and followed up through March 2013. Over a median follow-up of 6.1 years, 515 participants (306 white, 209 black) survived incident stroke and 23,057 remained stroke free. Participants are in the Reasons for Geographic and Racial Differences in Stroke (REGARDS) study. Share Pinterest LinkedIn Share on Facebook Email The researchers found that stroke survivors had a significantly faster rate of incident cognitive impairment after stroke compared with the pre-stroke rate, controlling for the odds of developing cognitive impairment before or acutely after the event. Incident stroke was associated with accelerated and persistent declines in global cognition and executive function (cognitive process that regulates an individual’s ability to organize thoughts and activities, prioritize tasks, manage time and make decisions), after accounting for individuals’ cognitive changes before and acutely after the event. In addition, there were significant, acute declines in new learning and verbal memory after stroke but no acceleration of pre-stroke rates of change in these functions.“Our study has potential implications for clinical practice, research, and health care policy. Although clinical practice guidelines and quality improvement programs recommend cognitive assessments be performed for patients with stroke before hospital discharge and also in the postacute settings, our results suggest that stroke survivors also warrant monitoring for mounting cognitive impairment over the years after the event,” the authors write.“Moreover, our results suggest that long-term cognitive dysfunction is a potential domain for evaluating acute stroke therapies. As adults increasingly survive stroke, cases of post-stroke cognitive impairment will multiply. Given that post-stroke cognitive impairment increases mortality, morbidity, and health care costs, health systems and payers will need to develop cost-effective systems of care that will best manage the long-term needs and cognitive problems of this increasing and vulnerable stroke survivor population.” read more

Share on Twitter Share on Facebook Writing in the journal Cognition and Emotion, the researchers conclude that both working memory and levels of worry can change over a short period of time – even a day – with any change to either worry levels or working memory affecting the ability to solve problems. Significantly, just how much effect worry has on working memory (and problem solving) depends on how much working-memory capacity one has in the first place. Moreover, levels of worry and working memory also seem to have an effect on each other – but not in the linear way we might have expected.The researchers conclude: “On the basis of the final model, a student with initial higher WM and lower Worry will likely maintain WM and Worry levels and algebraic problem solving accuracy would remain high. Conversely, for a student with low WM and high Worry, WM is likely to decrease, Worry increase and problem solving would be impaired.”“Thus the model suggests that what begins as relatively small differences between individuals in WM and Worry, though their mutual iterative differences, would lead to much larger differences.”More research needs to be done on the influence other factors like feedback, pressure and location have on the complex relationship between WM and worry, but Trezise and Reeve’s findings already have important implications. Understanding just how stable (or temporary) worry, like the all-too-common Math Anxiety, is may help to prevent or treat it in future. Email That our emotional state can affect our cognitive functions can be all too clear to anyone struggling to complete a mental task under pressure. What has been less clear, until now, is whether that relationship between our emotions and our abilities can change over a period of time.To explore that connection, Kelly Trezise and Robert A. Reeve from the University of Melbourne decided to investigate how an emotional state (in this case, worry, in the form of Math Anxiety) affected the working memory (WM) of students preparing for an algebra test.To do this, the pair subjected 133 high-school students to a series of tests designed to test their working memory and levels of worry over the course of a day. Share LinkedIn Pinterest read more

Pinterest A study of risk communication as it relates to altruistic behavior has found that portraying an event as a distant risk, despite highlighting its importance and potential progression, fails to prompt altruistic behavior intention among the U.S. public.Results of the study by Janet Yang, a University at Buffalo expert on the communication of risk information related to science, health and environmental issues, suggest that holding a collective, communitarian belief system contributed to altruistic behavior, while those who hold more individualistic values are less likely to be altruistic regardless of how much risk is triggered.Yang’s study, recently published in the journal Risk Analysis, manipulated risk perception to determine what factors might influence altruistic behavior, which she measured as support for family and friends if they were to go to West Africa as Ebola responders. Share on Twitter LinkedIn Share The Ebola outbreak in West Africa gained substantial media momentum during the final three months of 2014. In October, a Liberian man visiting family in Texas became the first diagnosed Ebola patient in the U.S. to die from the disease. Public health officials announced three other confirmed cases later that month. Around the same time, President Barack Obama spoke of the unlikelihood of an Ebola epidemic in the U.S., a powerful reassurance echoed by the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.The messages calmed domestic fears, but they also translated into minimal assistance from the U.S. public to the affected region, at least compared to American responses to other recent crises or disasters, such as the Haitian earthquake, according to Yang, associate professor of communication in the UB College of Arts and Sciences.“It was a great opportunity to study a risk communication issue,” she says.Yang says statistics at the time confirmed the issue’s importance to the American public, but she wanted to examine the variance between what’s important to a news consumer and what’s personally relevant in terms of that same person being affected, or the country being affected.The National Science Foundation, recognizing the opportunity to gain groundbreaking insight on risk communication in a public health crisis, funded the study with a special grant for Rapid Response Research, a mechanism for quickly studying urgent issues.In a nationally representative sample involving more than 1,000 adults, Yang assigned two experimental conditions to the subjects: a high-risk article about Ebola modeled after one that appeared in a major newspaper that mentioned two confirmed cases in the U.S., and a low-risk version with the detail about the domestic cases omitted.The content in both conditions was equally dire, mentioning Ebola cases possibly climbing into the millions.“Even that subtle change triggered different levels of risk perception,” Yang says.“When we manipulate risk perception, we see that two factors influence altruistic behaviors across the two conditions,” she says. “One is issue salience or the perceived importance of the Ebola outbreak. The other is how deeply the message is processed.”In the high-risk condition, the perceived importance of the issue was much more effective in getting people to feel more altruistic, but there is no such correlation in the low-risk condition.  Meantime, those who reflected deeply on the message reported much more altruistic behavior intention, something not present in the low-risk condition, says Yang.Emotions also played a significant role. Yang measured anger, empathy, fear, panic and sadness. Participants reported sadness and anger most often, but the two had significant yet opposite effects.“Those who reported sadness were much more like to support family and friends responding to the crisis,” says Yang.  “Sadness might make participants feel more sympathetic toward the victims.”Anger, however, she says, was often antagonistic, directed at international health organizations. Participants also reported significant levels of fear, but that didn’t engender altruistic intention since the emotion is often managed by avoiding the issue, according to Yang. Share on Facebook Email read more

Share on Facebook LinkedIn Share A flurry of newspaper headlines have called into question the existence of SAD, or Seasonal Affective Disorder. Scientists, they reported, appear to have debunked a widespread conviction, that feeling low in winter time is a genuine illness caused by disturbed levels of brain chemicals and that demands treatment.A visit to any number of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) websites leads to online questionnaires offering “diagnosis”, treatment recommendations, and advertisements for light boxes – gadgets that simulate daylight and compensate for poor exposure to the real thing. SAD is identified as a form of depression caused by disturbances of hormonal rhythms sensitive to daylight, primarily melatonin. Unusually, intense exposure to artificial light often is advocated as a treatment. There is even a device that can be worn on the head, allowing the patient to use a light box on the move.Where’s the evidence?The publication prompting the news story is a large US survey associating the experience of depression with season, latitude and sunlight exposure. Although various models confirm associations between the experience of depression and variables such as age, gender, education, employment and marital status, it found there were no associations between depression and season, latitude, a combination of the two, or sunlight exposure – as derived from knowledge of the respondent’s location and US Naval Observatory records. Email These are high-quality data that have been analysed appropriately. They also confirm similar findings that are equally unable to associate reported mental distress and fluctuations in daylight length, even those of the extreme type found in polar regionsThe sad truthSo how might we reconcile the fact that seemingly conclusive research is unable to demonstrate an association between symptoms of depression and sunlight exposure, with the sheer number of people who believe they suffer from SAD?According to one source, SAD prevalence ranges from 9.7% in New Hampshire to 1.4% in Florida. In the UK, the estimate is that it affects 2.4% of the adult population. These estimates represent a large number of people – and their conviction that they are suffering from a real illness is often a strong one.Indeed, SAD can even carry the juridical significance of a formal disability. According to the Los Angeles Times: “The US 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago ruled in October [2009] that a teacher could pursue a lawsuit against her former employer alleging that the school district had failed to accommodate her SAD, causing her mental health to deteriorate.”The teacher in question had been obliged to work in a basement room without windows – and yet research is telling us that there is no measurable association between exposure to daylight and psychological well-being. Once again, in the field of “mental illness”, science and society are not singing in tune. Indeed, perhaps this is where the real conversation lies.It’s good to talkThis story highlights several features of contemporary psychiatry that point to a need for changes in how the conditions it responds to are framed, understood and described. Distressing difficulties concerning emotions are nothing new, but construing them as a family of illnesses to be treated by healthcare practitioners is. Reflections on the past half century’s exploration of this approach has to conclude that it is often deeply flawed.SAD and its treatment with lightboxes is not the only “mental illness” where hard evidence and conventional practice are no longer in tune. Critical review of data accumulated in the course of antidepressant drug trials is beginning to suggest that even these, very widely-prescribed medicines might be associated with more harm than good.Suggesting this challenges numerous interests and positions, but the resulting debate is a healthy and invigorating one. There may well be no evidence for such a thing as SAD, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk about it – especially when the days are short and the skies grey.By Hugh Middleton, Clinical Associate Professor, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of NottinghamThis article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Share on Twitter Pinterest read more

Share How the human brain processes the words we hear and constructs complex concepts is still somewhat of a mystery to the neuroscience community. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) can alter our language processing, allowing for faster comprehension of meaningful word combinations, according to new research from the department of Neurology the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. The work is published in the Journal of Neuroscience.“Integrating conceptual knowledge is one of the neural functions fundamental to human intelligence,” said the study’s first author Amy Price, a neuroscience graduate student at Penn. “For example, when we read or listen to a sentence, we need to combine, or integrate, the meaning of the words to understand the full idea of the sentence. We perform this process effortlessly on a daily basis but it is quite a complex process and little is known about the brain regions that support this ability.”Semantic memory is our stored knowledge about the world, such as the meaning of words and objects. “We sought to understand how and in what part of the brain semantic representations are integrated into more complex ideas” said senior author Roy Hamilton, MD, MS, an assistant professor in the departments of Neurology and Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation, and director of the Laboratory for Cognition and Neural Stimulation at Penn. Recent findings from functional MRI scans (fMRI) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) have suggested the angular gyrus, a region of the brain known to be involved in language, number processing and spatial cognition, memory retrieval and attention, as a potential hub for semantic memory integration, specifically the left angular gyrus. Share on Twitter Email LinkedIn Pinterest Share on Facebook Hamilton and team, which also included Jonathan Peelle PhD, an assistant professor in the Department of Otolaryngology at the Washington University School of Medicine, Michael Bonner, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychology at Penn, and Murray Grossman, MD, EdD, professor of Neurology and director of the Penn Frontotemporal Dementia Center, looked at the role of the left angular gyrus in semantic memory by applying high definition tDCS in healthy adults to modulate neural activity and determine its effect on semantic integration. This was done using three separate brain stimulation sessions in 18 healthy adults. Subjects donned the tDCS stimulation cap equipped with electrodes that stimulated the left angular gyrus or the right angular gyrus, as well as applied a fake form of stimulation known as sham stimulation as a control. After each stimulation session, subjects were presented with word pairs that could to be semantically integrated into coherent, or meaningful, combinations — such as “plaid jacket” and another set of word pairs that formed non-coherent, or non-meaningful combinations- such as “fast blueberry.”This was followed by a letter task that served as a control for brain stimulation affects on vision and attention, in which subjects looked at non-pronounceable strings of letters – such as vsbsl vsbql – and were asked to indicate whether or not the letter strings matched.Results showed that stimulation to the left angular gyrus resulted in a faster comprehension of meaningful relative to non-meaningful word pairs when compared with both sham and right angular gyrus stimulation. This same effect was not produced in the letter-string task, showing that these findings cannot be easily attributed to non-specific effects on attention, motor control or low-level visual processing.“Our findings extend our knowledge about the angular gyrus as a center wherein the brain constructs higher-level meaning from individual words during semantic comprehension and plays an important role in the fluent composition of meaning in language,” Hamilton said. “They are also consistent with the broader claim that the angular gyrus is a cortical semantic hub.” read more

Share on Facebook Share LinkedIn While many studies have been conducted on infants’ and preschoolers’ math competencies, few have evaluated how toddlers’ basic mathematics knowledge relates to early elementary school success. Now, in a study funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), researchers at the University of Missouri discovered that preschoolers who better process words associated with numbers, such as “three” or “four,” and understand the quantities associated with these words are more likely to have success with math when they enter kindergarten.Findings also reveal that children who have a basic understanding that addition increases quantity and subtraction decreases it are much better prepared for math in school. Scientists contend that emphasis on these two skillsets could lead to greater success in school.“Our previous 10-year longitudinal study followed first graders and how their basic understanding of numbers and the relations among them puts them on a track for future success in high school and work,” said David Geary, Curators’ Distinguished Professor of Psychological Sciences in the MU College of Arts and Science. “However, there have been few studies that bridge the gap between preschool curricula and later success in early elementary school. Our current study follows kids from preschool to first grade, and we found that future success in mathematics lies in the basic understanding of number words and the quantities they represent.” Pinterest Email Share on Twitter Geary and his team including Alex Moore, a postdoctoral fellow, and Kristy vanMarle, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences, followed 112 preschool children ranging in ages from 3 to 5 years old and identified as at risk for school failure. Controls were established to account for general knowledge, parental background and other factors. The children selected were administered several tasks to evaluate non-symbolic skills (such as quantities of collections of objects) and symbolic quantitative and calculation skills, including their understanding of number words and the ability to add and subtract from collections of objects.“We measured participants’ math skills at the beginning of preschool and again at the end of preschool,” Geary said. “Kids who better understand the value of number words have an implicit understanding of addition and subtraction and are more fluent at processing numbers going into kindergarten. Preschoolers need to have a good understanding of quantities associated with number words and need to have experiences manipulating set sizes. Preschool curricula sometimes covers a lot of things, so what seems important may not be–we want to help narrow the most fundamental concepts down so that kids can continue to be successful throughout their school careers.”Geary and his team will continue to follow their participants through first grade in this four-year longitudinal study where they will use the same preschool measures to evaluate success.The study, “Kindergarteners’ fluent processing of symbolic numerical magnitude is predicted by their cardinal knowledge and implicit understanding of arithmetic 2 years earlier,” recently was published in theJournal of Experimental Child Psychology. read more

Email Share LinkedIn Share on Facebook For each study, participants were grouped into teams of three. Each team member was given multiple opportunities to either contribute to the team’s value using tokens or keep the tokens for personal use.When happy, upbeat music was played – researchers chose the “Happy Days” theme song, “Brown Eyed Girl” by Van Morrison, “Yellow Submarine” by the Beatles and “Walking on Sunshine” by Katrina and the Waves – team members were more likely to contribute to the group’s value. When music deemed unpleasant was played – in this case, heavy metal songs by less than well-known bands – participants were more likely to keep tokens for themselves. The researchers found contribution levels to the public good when happy, upbeat songs were played were approximately one-third higher compared to the less pleasant music.When researchers conducted a second experiment testing how people react when no music is played, the results were the same. The researchers conclude that happy music provokes people to more often make decisions that contribute to the good of the team.“Music is a pervasive part of much of our daily lives, whether we consciously notice it or not,” said Kniffin, a behavioral scientist at Cornell and lead author on the paper. “Music might melt into the background in places like supermarkets or gyms and other times it’s very prominent like places of worship or presidential nominating conventions. Our results show that people seem more likely to get into sync with each other if they’re listening to music that has a steady beat to it.”Wansink, director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab, added: “What’s great about these findings, other than having a scientific reason to blast tunes at work, is that happy music has the power to make the workplace more cooperative and supportive overall.”The researchers suggest managers consider not only the customer experience but also workers’ when picking the day’s music. Starting the day with this simple consideration in mind could result in happier employees and more teamwork.“Lots of employers spend significant sums of time and money on off-site teambuilding exercises to build cooperation among employees. Our research points to the office sound system as a channel that has been underappreciated as a way to inspire cooperation among co-workers,” said Kniffin. Share on Twitter From casual acoustic melodies at the coffee shop to throbbing electronic beats at teen clothing outlets, music is used to mold customer experience and behavior. But what impact does it have on employees?Cornell University researchers explored this question in a pair of lab experiments and found that music can have important effects on the cooperative spirits of those exposed to music.In the paper newly published by the Journal of Organizational Behavior, Cornell researchers Kevin Kniffin, Jubo Yan, Brian Wansink and William Schulze describe two studies they conducted to test the effect of different types of music on the cooperative behavior of individuals working as a team. Pinterest read more

LinkedIn Share on Facebook Pinterest Parents should continue to avoid spanking and to use positive parenting techniques such as warmth in order to foster positive behaviors in their children, according to a recent study published online this April in the Journal of Marriage and Family.Decades of research have found links between parents’ use of spanking and an increased likelihood of negative outcomes for children, such as antisocial behavior. Spanking is thought to increase antisocial behavior because it models aggression and does not teach children why their behavior was wrong or what alternative behaviors are appropriate.Despite the negative child outcomes associated with spanking, some academics have defended spanking as an effective means of discipline, and a significant proportion of U.S. parents regularly use spanking to discipline children. Furthermore, little attention has been paid to whether spanking promotes desirable child behaviors. Share on Twitter Email Share In contrast to spanking, maternal warmth includes behaviors such as affection, positive reinforcement, and verbal responsiveness to the child. These behaviors have been shown to promote the creation of trust and reciprocity between parents and children and the development of children’s social competence. In addition, maternal warmth has been associated with fewer oppositional child behaviors, better child self-regulation, and fewer child behavior problems.The study, by Inna Altschul (University of Denver), Shawna Lee (University of Michigan) and Elizabeth Gershoff (University of Texas at Austin), investigated whether spanking or warmth predicted change in young children’s aggressive and socially competent behaviors over time.The study used information from 3,279 families with young children who participated in a longitudinal study of urban families. It assessed mothers’ use of spanking and maternal warmth, and subsequently their child’s aggressive behavior and social competence. Psychosocial risk factors, socioeconomic and demographic characteristics and child characteristics were also controlled for.The results revealed that spanking predicted child aggression but was not being associated with children’s social competence. In contrast, maternal warmth predicted children’s greater social competence but was not associated with aggression. Warmth was a significantly stronger predictor of children’s social competence than spanking.The researchers concluded, “These findings indicate parents should continue to avoid spanking and to use positive parenting techniques such as warmth in order to foster positive behaviors in their children.” They also suggested, “Even if parents use both warmth and spanking, the benefits of warmth with regard to children’s social competence may be undermined by the increased child aggression associated with spanking.” read more