Representation Of Body Research Articles

Attachment and body representations in adolescents with personality disorder.

Attachment theory has served as an influential framework for understanding psychopathology, partly due to reliable assessment methodology. The influence of insecure attachment on attitudes towardthe body and the impact this might have for the development of psychopathology is however less well elucidated. A total of 123 adolescents (35 with borderline personality disorder or BPD, 25 with other personality disorders [OPD]and 63 comprising a normative control group) were interviewed with the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) and the Mirror Interview (MI). The MI questions respondents about how they feel about their bodies, as they look in the mirror. The AAIs from the Borderline group were predominantly insecure-preoccupied and unresolved. These adolescents had significantly lower levels of a positive and integrated sense of self and body than the other groups. Regression results revealed a high loving relationship with fathers, low involving anger with father, high coherence of mind, slight derogation of mother &low levels of unresolved loss uniquely and additively predicted 55% of variance in the summary score assigned to MIresponses, that is,the summary score for a Positive and Integrated Body Representation (PIBR). Unfavorable attachment experiences and current states of mind regarding attachment may give rise to problems with establishing PIBRs, and thus play a role in the development of psychopathology, especially BPD.

The representation of sexuality and ageing in cinema: a reflection of a persistent capacitist ideology

One might think that the representation of the ageing body in film has evolved over the years, reflecting certain cultural and societal changes, as well as advances in the understanding of ageing. However, regardless of gender, older people are more likely than any other group to appear in film as comic antidotes to ageing, cultivating stereotypes of physical, cognitive and even sexual inefficiency.

Accurate prediction of three-dimensional humanoid avatars for anthropometric modeling.

To evaluate the hypothesis that anthropometric dimensions derived from a person's manifold-regression predicted three-dimensional (3D) humanoid avatar are accurate when compared to their actual circumference, volume, and surface area measurements acquired with a ground-truth 3D optical imaging method. Avatars predicted using this approach, if accurate with respect to anthropometric dimensions, can serve multiple purposes including patient body composition analysis and metabolic disease risk stratification in clinical settings. Manifold regression 3D avatar prediction equations were developed on a sample of 570 adults who completed 3D optical scans, dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA), and bioimpedance analysis (BIA) evaluations. A new prospective sample of 84 adults had ground-truth measurements of 6 body circumferences, 7 volumes, and 7 surface areas with a 20-camera 3D reference scanner. 3D humanoid avatars were generated on these participants with manifold regression including age, weight, height, DXA %fat, and BIA impedances as potential predictor variables. Ground-truth and predicted avatar anthropometric dimensions were quantified with the same software. Following exploratory studies, one manifold prediction model was moved forward for presentation that included age, weight, height, and %fat as covariates. Predicted and ground-truth avatars had similar visual appearances; correlations between predicted and ground-truth anthropometric estimates were all high (R2s, 0.75-0.99; all p < 0.001) with non-significant mean differences except for arm circumferences (%Δ ~ 5%; p < 0.05). Concordance correlation coefficients ranged from 0.80-0.99 and small but significant bias (p < 0.05-0.01) was present with Bland-Altman plots in 13 of 20 total anthropometric measurements. The mean waist to hip circumference ratio predicted by manifold regression was non-significantly different from ground-truth scanner measurements. 3D avatars predicted from demographic, physical, and other accessible characteristics can produce body representations with accurate anthropometric dimensions without a 3D scanner. Combining manifold regression algorithms into established body composition methods such as DXA, BIA, and other accessible methods provides new research and clinical opportunities.

Multimodal Massage Localization Algorithm for Human Acupoints

As the aging population issue worsens, people are experiencing increasing life pressures, and the elderly are unable to receive sufficient care, intensifying the demand for home-based intelligent massage healthcare robots. Addressing the challenges faced by users in expressing preferences for specific areas like the back through gestures or voice during the use of massage robots, and the issue of elderly individuals expressing imprecisely, which hinders effective communication of the desired massage target location to the robot, this paper proposes a new human-machine interaction mode for massage robots. The main innovations include: achieving precise control of the massage area through the representation of a virtual human body on the screen; proposing a virtual-to-real mapping algorithm based on human acupoints to address the consistency issue in human virtual-to-real mapping; introducing a multimodal intent understanding algorithm based on dynamic information entropy to address the current limitations of a single interaction mode and low intent comprehension rates in massage robot interactions. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed multimodal massage localization algorithm achieves good massage intent recognition effects. By combining natural human-machine interaction with intent understanding, it not only accurately captures user massage intentions and assists in completing massage tasks but also reduces user psychological and cognitive loads, leading to more desirable interaction outcomes.

EM-Gait: Gait recognition using motion excitation and feature embedding self-attention

Gait recognition, which can realize long-distance and contactless identification, is an important biometric technology. Recent gait recognition methods focus on learning the pattern of human movement or appearance during walking, and construct the corresponding spatio-temporal representations. However, different individuals have their own laws of movement patterns, simple spatial–temporal features are difficult to describe changes in motion of human parts, especially when confounding variables such as clothing and carrying are included, thus distinguishability of features is reduced. To this end, we propose the Embedding and Motion (EM) block and Fine Feature Extractor (FFE) to capture the motion mode of walking and enhance the difference of local motion rules. The EM block consists of a Motion Excitation (ME) module to capture the changes of temporal motion and an Embedding Self-attention (ES) module to enhance the expression of motion rules. Specifically, without introducing additional parameters, ME module learns the difference information between frames and intervals to obtain the dynamic change representation of walking for frame sequences with uncertain length. By contrast, ES module divides the feature map hierarchically based on element values, blurring the difference of elements to highlight the motion track. Furthermore, we present the FFE, which independently learns the spatio-temporal representations of human body according to different horizontal parts of individuals. Benefiting from EM block and our proposed motion branch, our method innovatively combines motion change information, significantly improving the performance of the model under cross appearance conditions. On the popular dataset CASIA-B, our proposed EM-Gait is better than the existing single-modal gait recognition methods.

Neural Basis of Categorical Representations of Animal Body Silhouettes.

Neural activities differentiating bodies versus non-body stimuli have been identified in the occipitotemporal cortex of both humans and nonhuman primates. However, the neural mechanisms of coding the similarity of different individuals' bodies of the same species to support their categorical representations remain unclear. Using electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG), we investigated the temporal and spatial characteristics of neural processes shared by different individual body silhouettes of the same species by quantifying the repetition suppression of neural responses to human and animal (chimpanzee, dog, and bird) body silhouettes showing different postures. Our EEG results revealed significant repetition suppression of the amplitudes of early frontal/central activity at 180-220 ms (P2) and late occipitoparietal activity at 220-320 ms (P270) in response to animal (but not human) body silhouettes of the same species. Our MEG results further localized the repetition suppression effect related to animal body silhouettes in the left supramarginal gyrus and left frontal cortex at 200-440 ms after stimulus onset. Our findings suggest two neural processes that are involved in spontaneous categorical representations of animal body silhouettes as a cognitive basis of human-animal interactions.

A model to predict indoor concentrations and internal radiation doses of radioactive aerosols from nuclear accidents

Spread of radiation contaminations can be affected by several factors. Some of these factors were considered in previous articles. Those studies were based on some Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) schemes and gave good results for describing deposition and penetration of aerosol particles. In this paper, those CFD schemes are applied to set a model that can be used to calculate the indoor concentrations of the radioactive aerosols that release from nuclear accidents. The one of the Fukushima nuclear power plant (NPP) that took place in 2011 is taken as an example. Furthermore, the internal radiation doses caused by the intake of the radioactive aerosols are estimated. Considering in particular the radionuclide C137s, due to its very long half-life, the internal doses are calculated for the lungs and some of the surrounding vital organs. The radiation transport throughout the body is simulated by codes of the Monte-Carlo N-Particle simulation software, version 5 (MCNP5), with exploiting the human body representation by the phantom of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory-Medical Internal Radiation Dose (ORNL-MIRD). The results show a large spread of the radiation contaminations from outdoors to indoors, and that the whole-body annual dose from C137s is more than tenfold higher than the annual dose limit set by the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP).

Reading Gender Stereotypes in Printed Advertisements

Semiotics describes how advertising messages manipulate the connection between ‘meaning’ and ‘reality’ by investigating how already determined meanings are attributed to given products, thus establishing methods of decoding their true meaning. Therefore, the central theme of the semiotic approach to advertising is establishing a connection between meaning and reality. To that extent, semiotics as the science of signs is not an abstract study but rather reflects the essence of social life emphasizing the multi-layered and dynamic character of meaning creation. Advertising messages, therefore, have as much meaning as they have ‘readers’. This research aimed to establish a connection between gender stereotypes and advertising messages, i.e. to point out the main gender stereotypes shown in advertising messages, and to determine whether, in the new century, there have been changes in the way and contexts of the portrayal of women and men in advertisements compared to of the same in the past. A total of 31 advertising messages displayed in a women’s magazine were examined. A detailed analysis of the visual representation of female and male bodies, symbols, body positioning, and products was conducted. Messages are direct and open. Human bodies are glorified by emphasizing a healthy, well-shaped, well-groomed female and male body as a symbol of the extension of the species. It has also been noted that advertising messages reflect changes in society and social expectations among members of both sexes.

The Politics of Transgression in De Humani Corporis Fabrica

The film De Humani Corporis Fabrica has repeatedly been dubbed in the English-speaking film criticism media as a “non-fiction shocker” (Chang, 2023), a sample of “tactile cinema” (Mullen, 2023) with “ample gore on display” (Mintzer, 2022). This paper, firstly, aims to contradict these claims, as the film’s goal is not to elicit an immersive representation of the human body but a reflection on how it is instead objectified, abstracted, and interpreted by means of deconstructing the medical gaze and via a complex interplay between the viewer’s quasi-identification and alienation. To this end, it closely analyses the patterns in the camerawork, the various degrees of remediation of the medical imagery, and the relationships between denotation and connotation, highlighting the prevalence of de-dramatization strategies, which run counter to societal taboos and conventional representations of the hospital in popular culture as a sensationalized site of emergencies. As such, we argue that De Humani Corporis Fabrica is an essay film that seeks neither to “shock” viewers nor to mount a narrow institutional critique of the French sanitary system. By delving into the film’s intricate biopolitics, we outline how the various levels of transgression, the emphasis on “malfunction,” and the pervasiveness of technology are framed as symptoms of broader tensions between paternalistic modes of interaction and patient-centred approaches within the Western sanitary system at large. Finally, by interpreting the ending as a counterpoint to the objectifying gaze that the film lures us into adopting throughout, we consequently stress the film’s defiant sense of “anarchy,” as it urges us to reclaim “our” bodies, be them individual or collective.

Accurate Prediction of Three-Dimensional Humanoid Avatars for Anthropometric Modeling.

To evaluate the hypothesis that anthropometric dimensions derived from a person's manifold-regression predicted three-dimensional (3D) humanoid avatar are accurate when compared to their actual circumference, volume, and surface area measurements acquired with a ground-truth 3D optical imaging method. Avatars predicted using this approach, if accurate with respect to anthropometric dimensions, can serve multiple purposes including patient metabolic disease risk stratification in clinical settings. Manifold regression 3D avatar prediction equations were developed on a sample of 570 adults who completed 3D optical scans, dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA), and bioimpedance analysis (BIA) evaluations. A new prospective sample of 84 adults had ground-truth measurements of 6 body circumferences, 7 volumes, and 7 surface areas with a 20-camera 3D reference scanner. 3D humanoid avatars were generated on these participants with manifold regression including age, weight, height, DXA %fat, and BIA impedances as potential predictor variables. Ground-truth and predicted avatar anthropometric dimensions were quantified with the same software. Following exploratory studies, one manifold prediction model was moved forward for presentation that included age, weight, height, and %fat as covariates. Predicted and ground-truth avatars had similar visual appearances; correlations between predicted and ground-truth anthropometric estimates were all high (R2s, 0.75-0.99; all p < 0.001) with non-significant mean differences except for arm circumferences (%D ~ 5%; p < 0.05). Concordance correlation coefficients ranged from 0.80-0.99 and small but significant bias (p < 0.05 - 0.01) was present with Bland-Altman plots in 13 of 20 total anthropometric measurements. The mean waist to hip circumference ratio predicted by manifold regression was non-significantly different from ground-truth scanner measurements. 3D avatars predicted from demographic, physical, and other accessible characteristics can produce body representations with accurate anthropometric dimensions without a 3D scanner. Combining manifold regression algorithms into established body composition methods such as DXA, BIA, and other accessible methods provides new research and clinical opportunities.

Conversations on Meaningful Memes 2024

Internet microformats (short stories, gifs, pics, memes, demotivators, etc.) have a short life compared to “monumental” content, but are characterized by a high speed of circulation and reproduction. Metaphorically, this allows us to designate their life cycle and the specifics of penetration into the information environment, and from there to the consumer, as “virulent”. Memes are short messages, usually combining visual and verbal levels. Their social functions (not to mention cognitive ones), the nature of the impact on the values ​​of generations, the formation and catalysis of worldviews, are usually underestimated. In a dialogic format, representatives of different generations discuss current memes of 2024. The participants in the conversation (authors) talk about what memes broadcast new memes and how they do it. The focus is on corporeality and body representation in memes. The conversations also touch on “peripheral” topics – soviet and post-soviet culture, scandalous events in the media, etc. The dialogues perform at least two functions: first, they are the result of understanding significant microformats and transmitted meanings; second, the texts of the conversations can serve as material for understanding the values ​​of representatives of different generations, understanding patterns and stereotypes of thought. The authors hope that the texts offered to the reader will play at least one of these roles.

A Together Apart Corporeality: The Representation of the Female Body in Hanane El-Sheikh’s the Occasional Virgin and Sylvia Plath’s the Bell Jar

This paper is concerned with the conceptualization of the female body in samples from Arab and American literatures, by virtue of the analysis of Hanane El Sheikh’s The Occasional Virgin(2015), and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar(1963) respectively. The present investigation relies on feminist criticism traced by Simone De Beauvoirand Julia Kristeva, in addition to Michel Foucault’s theory of docility.

Psychomotric Perspectives of Rehabilitation in Chronic Brachial Plexus Palsies

Background. The perspective of ongoing electric signals within the motor cortex, conditioned by continuous rehabilitation strategies (doubled by adherence to the treatment protocol), is of interest related to understanding how cerebral plasticity is being modulated in adult traumatic brachial plexus (BP) lesions. Very often, patients with chronic BP lesions tend to be less compliant to rehabilitation therapy over time, since multiple reconstructive microsurgery interventions may not always offer a proper upper limb functionality, especially in severe, complex BP cases. Material and methods. In order to asses the ongoing psychomotric projection of the limb’s representation among the motor cortex, in relation with long term rehabilitation protocol we followed up a group of 11 chronic patients, by transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) during a time-lapse of two years. Results. Although modest in relation with amelioration of the deficit on the MRC scale, the patients had mild improvements of the parameter latency, but more important, by assessing the amplitude of the motor evoked potential (MEP), we observed a dynamism of the motor area. This we consider suggestive for ongoing psychomotor components stimulated by rehabilitation: ideomotricity, perceptual-motor coordination, laterality and body representation, as a foundation in maintaining a proven measurable potential of continuous neuroplasticity. Conclusion. From clinical perspective, since psychomotricity actually means interdisciplinarity, this is the common denominator found in the collaboration between medical specialties: plastic surgery and reconstructive microsurgery, clinical neurology, electrodiagnostic and neuromotor rehabilitation.

Lesions Causing Alice in Wonderland Syndrome Map to a Common Brain Network Linking Body and Size Perception.

Alice in Wonderland syndrome (AIWS) profoundly affects human perception of size and scale, particularly regarding one's own body and the environment. Its neuroanatomical basis has remained elusive, partly because brain lesions causing AIWS can occur in different brain regions. Here, we aimed to determine if brain lesions causing AIWS map to a distributed brain network. A retrospective case-control study analyzing 37 cases of lesion-induced AIWS identified through systematic literature review was conducted. Using resting-state functional connectome data from 1,000 healthy individuals, the whole-brain connections of each lesion were estimated and contrasted with those from a control dataset comprising 1,073 lesions associated with 25 other neuropsychiatric syndromes. Additionally, connectivity findings from lesion-induced AIWS cases were compared with functional neuroimaging results from 5 non-lesional AIWS cases. AIWS-associated lesions were located in various brain regions with minimal overlap (≤33%). However, the majority of lesions (≥85%) demonstrated shared connectivity to the right extrastriate body area, known to be selectively activated by viewing body part images, and the inferior parietal cortex, involved in size and scale judgements. This pattern was uniquely characteristic of AIWS when compared with other neuropsychiatric disorders (family-wise error-corrected p < 0.05) and consistent with functional neuroimaging observations in AIWS due to nonlesional causes (median correlation r = 0.56, interquartile range 0.24). AIWS-related perceptual distortions map to one common brain network, encompassing regions critical for body representation and size-scale processing. These findings lend insight into the neuroanatomical localization of higher-order perceptual functions, and may inform future therapeutic strategies for perceptual disorders. ANN NEUROL 2024;96:662-674.

Disintegration Bodies

Digital materiality has been mainly discussed in two main domains. On the one hand, to critically capture the physical infrastructure that undergirds digital systems, and on the other, to explore digital materiality as such. I approach digital materiality from a phenomenological standpoint, as a sensuous manifestation of the digital. I associate digital materiality with terms such as “plasticity”, “haptic looking” and the “vitality”. I am interested in how digital materiality becomes tangible and alive in the process of artistic creation, specifically using certain image manipulation techniques such as glitching or datamoshing or morphing.I argue that these destructive digital effects create a “digital abject” a specific state of digital materiality. I apply Kristeva’s notion of the abject as “the jettisoned object, [that] is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses.” The digital abject comes into being when destructive digital practices intersect with representation of bodies. In these cases, bodies are disordered and digitally disfigured so that they become abstract and affective matter. Moreover, in specific context these effects become self-reflective, relating to digital materiality and media representation.

Form and Matter of Regular Geometrical Bodies in Luca Pacioli’s Summa (1494) and Compendium de divina proportione (1498)

Abstract Luca Pacioli (ca. 1447–1517) is widely considered a central figure in the Italian Renaissance, particularly in the history of practical mathematics. The perspectival representations of geometrical bodies that Leonardo da Vinci drew for Pacioli’s Compendium de divina proportione are, in turn, often singled out to illustrate the relationships between the visual arts and mathematics in the late fifteenth century. Yet despite increasing scholarly attention, the philosophical framework of Pacioli’s works deserves to be further explored. This paper discusses how Pacioli ably developed his arguments on regular geometrical bodies by relying on a predominantly Aristotelian philosophical framework. In this way, Pacioli established correlations among the quantitative, material, and formal properties of regular geometrical bodies, concluding with the visualisation of their (geometrically defined) form at the level of the intellect.

Assessment of body Schema distortions in early-onset schizophrenia

Distorted body representations play a major role in the onset and maintenance of Schizophrenia. However, these distortions are difficult to assess because explicit assessments can provoke intense fears about the body and require a good insight. We proposed an implicit motor imagery task to a 14-year-old girl with Early-Onset Schizophrenia. The test consisted of presenting different openings varying in width. For each aperture, the young girl has to say if she could pass through without turning her shoulders. A critical aperture is determined as the first aperture for which she considered she could no longer pass, compared to her shoulders' width. The girl perceived herself as 51 % wider than she was, indicating a significant oversized body schema. The implicit assessments of body schema generate less anxiety and does not require a great level of insight; moreover, those are promising tools for early detection of disease in prodromal phases of Schizophrenia and assistance with differential diagnosis.

Have I Been Touched? Subjective and Objective Aspects of Tactile Awareness.

Somatosensory tactile experience is a key aspect of our interaction with the environment. It is involved in object manipulation, in the planning and control of actions and, in its affective components, in the relationships with other individuals. It is also a foundational component of body awareness. An intriguing aspect of sensory perception in general and tactile perception in particular is the way in which stimulation comes to consciousness. Indeed, although being aware of something seems a rather self-evident and monolithic aspect of our mental states, sensory awareness may be in fact modulated by many different processes that impact on the mere stimulation of the skin, including the way in which we perceive our bodies as belonging to us. In this review, we first took into consideration the pathological conditions of absence of phenomenal experience of touch, in the presence of implicit processing, as initial models for understanding the neural bases of conscious tactile experience. Subsequently, we discussed cases of tactile illusions both in normal subjects and in brain-damaged patients which help to understand which high-order processes impact tactile awareness. Finally, we discussed the observations reported in the review in light of some influential models of touch and body representation.

The body interior in anorexia nervosa: from interoception to conceptual representation of body interior.

Body image disorders are well documented in anorexia nervosa (AN); however, knowledge of interoceptive awareness (IA) in this population remains poor. This descriptive study investigated whether and how the representation of the interior of the body may have an impact on IA. The representations and knowledge of the body interior were evaluated with a drawing task in 34 women with AN and 34 healthy controls (HCs). A lexicometric analysis was performed on the vocabulary used to describe the drawn body parts in a structured interview. It was assumed that the conceptual representation of the body interior could be affected by or influence IA. Thus, the relationship between IA, measured with the heartbeat task and the ischemia-induction test, and the drawings was explored. Other scales, such as those of body shape, awareness or satisfaction, were used to assess affective representations of the body. The drawing, lexicometric and IA results were similar in the two groups. No correlations were found among IA, body representation scores and representation level of body interior. Only the representation of bones by the AN group was significantly different. Increased visual attention to the skeleton or greater awareness of bone health could explain the stronger representation of bones in the AN group. The psychophysical therapy received by some AN participants (73%) did not seem to have influenced IA. Our results do not support a relationship between IA and the representation of the body interior.Clinical trial registration:https://clinicaltrials.gov/, identifier NCT03988218.

Bound by Experience: Updating the Body Representation When Using Virtual Objects.

Four web-based experiments investigated flexibility of disembodiment of a virtual object that is no longer actively controlled. Emphasis was on possibilities to modify the timescale of this process. Interactions with virtual objects are commonplace in settings like teleoperation, rehabilitation, and computer-aided design. These objects are quickly integrated into the operator's body schema (embodiment). Less is known about how long such embodiment lasts. Understanding the dynamics of this process is crucial because different applied settings either profit from fast or slow disembodiment. To induce embodiment, participants moved a 2D virtual hand through operating a computer mouse or touchpad. After initial embodiment, participants either stopped or continued moving for a fixed period of time. Embodiment ratings were collected continuously during each trial. Results across all experiments indicated that embodiment for the virtual hand gradually increased during active use and gradually decreased after stopping to use it. Disembodiment unfolded nearly twice as fast as embodiment and showed a curved decay pattern. These dynamics remained unaffected by anticipation of active control that would be required in an upcoming task. The results highlight the importance of continuously experiencing active control in virtual interactions if aiming at inducing stable embodiment of a virtual object. Our findings suggest that applications of virtual disembodiment such as virtual tools or interventions to affect a person's body representation critically depend on continuous updating of sensorimotor experience. However, if switching between virtual objects, for example, during teleoperation or video gaming, after-effects are unlikely to affect performance.