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Fotoboek met de fotoreeks van David Losfeld met foto's en quotes van jongeren die vechten tegen kanker. Life is a scene on which actors appear in roles that are not always sufficient to fill in all episodes. Some roles are only written for a few scenes. Others, on the other hand, last for longer. However, no role is secondary. They all create a unified whole, a film full of emotions - a perfect picture. There are no extras here, in the cinema of life we all play leading roles, and each of us is the main star. Even if some of us will not shine throughout the whole screening, we will never go out. We will all remain an important piece of the universe. Warriors vzw helpt mensen met kanker hun zelfbeeld en zelfvertrouwen te herstellen. Het is hun missie om zo veel mogelijk Warriors te ondersteunen, zowel fysiek als mentaal, tijdens en na hun genezingsproces. Ze plaatsten de voorbije jaren al tientallen Warriors voor het oog van onze camera. Allen heel kwetsbaar, met of zonder haar of pruik, maar vooral zeer moedig en veerkrachtig.

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Although it is already acknowledged that generalization of conditioned fear is implicated as a central feature of pathological anxiety, less is known about generalization in a general population with anxiety symptoms, but without formal diagnosis. Previous research has also proved that fear learning gradually improves from childhood to adolescence and from adolescence to adulthood. Moreover, individuals show less fear generalization as they age. Nonetheless, literature regarding the development of fear learning during adolescence (between 12 and 16 years) in a general population is lacking. Last, it is established that girls are more likely to have anxiety symptoms and are more prone to anxiety disorders. On the other side, cerebral volume at the age of fifteen is greater in girls than in boys. Maybe this could be related to greater functionality of the brain. Yet, literature mainly focuses on the difference in fear conditioning between adult men and women, much less has been described about the difference between boys and girls within adolescence. This thesis aims to evaluate if the propensity to generalize fear in a fear conditioning task is associated with the degree of anxiety symptoms in adolescents. Another objective is to examine whether differences with regard to fear acquisition and generalization can be observed between young adolescents and middle adolescents, and between boys and girls. 50 adolescents between 12 and 16 year old out of the general population were recruited and tested. The experimental paradigm consisted of a fear conditioning task with different circles which gradually increased in size, with circle 3 and 8 serving as conditioned safety cues (CS-) or conditioned danger cues (CS+). The circles of intermediary size served as generalization stimuli. Outcome measures included anxiety symptoms using RCADS to examine how risk rating was associated with anxiety symptoms, and risk rating using the rating scale to examine how age and sex were related with risk rating. All analyses were done using linear regression models. After the fear generalization task, participants completed post-hoc ratings of valence, arousal, fear and shock expectancy for every circle. We found that preclinical anxiety symptoms were not associated with fear conditioning, but were associated with post-hoc ratings. Further, the age of the adolescent was associated with fear acquisition, but not with habituation or fear generalization. Last, we found that sex is not associated with fear conditioning and not consistently associated with post-hoc ratings. In response to these results, we can state that older adolescents are better at discriminating between safe and dangerous cues, which might indicate less susceptibility to anxiety than younger adolescents. However, a higher risk rating is not predictive for the number of anxiety symptoms in this general population, which is a reason to suggest that it is not useful to look early on in the general healthy population to predict the number of anxiety symptoms based on the extent of generalization.

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Objectives: Facial emotion recognition (FER) is a domain of social cognition which is well-known to be affected in schizophrenia (SZ). Parallel to other social and nonsocial cognitive impairments, FER may already be affected before onset of SZ. This prodromal stage is known as the ultra-high risk of psychosis (UHR). Since the emergence of the UHR concept, FER has been researched by individual studies to further clarify its role as a predictor of transition to psychosis. To date, no systematic review has synthesized these findings. Method: We conducted a systematic review on the topic of FER in UHR on PubMed. Studies that did not use well-defined UHR criteria or a healthy control group (HC) were excluded. Results: UHR generally show worse FER performance than HC, but findings are inconsistent. Older studies, with younger participants, using SIPS as diagnostic instrument more often report significantly worse FER performance for UHR. This worse FER performance in general may be driven by worse recognition of specific, mainly negative, emotions. Furthermore, UHR also show a bias towards negative emotions and have difficulties differentiating neutral from negative emotions. Nonetheless, worse FER performance does not appear to be a clear predictor of transition to psychosis. Conclusion: FER is inconsistently affected in UHR. Worse recognition of negative emotions may underly a worse FER performance in general. FER does not appear to be a clear predictor of transition to psychosis.

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Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a neurocognitive disorder that affects over 40 million people worldwide and has become one of the main causes of death in developed countries. Its major neurobiological hallmarks are the extracellular Aβ plaques and the aggregation of hyperphosphorylated tau protein into intracellular neurofibrillary tangles (NFTs). The disease is characterized by a gradual onset and progressive decline of cognitive functions such as episodic memory, executive functions and language. Moreover, AD patients present behavioural and psychological signs and symptoms of dementia (BPSD), such as social withdrawal, apathy, depressive mood, aggression and diurnal rhythm disturbances. Currently, no cure exists for the disease. However, many authors have proposed that earlier intervention could improve AD prognosis and might even halt AD progression. Therefore, it is crucial to improve preclinical detection and diagnosis of AD based on biomarkers and behavioural markers. In order to identify robust preclinical cognitive and non-cognitive changes in AD, we assessed cognitive functions and social behaviour in 3-month-old wild-type and transgenic mice over a period of three months. All mice had a C57BL/6J background. Two transgenic mouse models were used: 1) the biAT mouse model (APP.V717I x Tau.P301L) expressing both Aβ plaques and NFTs and 2) the TPLH mouse model (Tau.P301L) which only expresses tau pathology. All mice performed a variety of behavioural tasks to evaluate cognitive and non-cognitive impairments. More specifically, the test battery included 12 tasks (Morris water maze (MWM), context- and cue-dependent fear conditioning (CFR), spontaneous activity, rotarod, marble burying, elevated plus maze, open field, SPSN, tail suspension, tail withdrawal, nesting, and nesting 2.0), designed to assess hippocampus-dependent memory, exploratory, anxiety-related, social, depressive and nociceptive behaviour, and activities of daily living (ADLs). We hypothesized that compared to age-matched controls, transgenic mice would show specific impairments in both cognitive and non-cognitive tasks. We expected significant differences in hippocampus-dependent memory function and anxiety-related, social and depressive behaviour, which are affected first in human patients. Furthermore, we expected little to no differences in exploratory behaviour, nociception and ADLs, since these functions are generally affected in later stages of the disease. Furthermore, we expected more severe impairments in the biAT than in the TPLH mouse model. In line with our expectations, transgenic mice showed decreased cognitive flexibility in the MWM. Moreover, transgenic mice displayed increased anxiety-related behaviour. However, transgenic mice also displayed decreased exploratory behaviour and reduced functioning in ADLs. Finally, there were no major differences in performance between the biAT and TPLH mouse models.