Search

Face perception in humans and nonhuman primates is accomplished by a patchwork of specialized cortical regions. How these regions develop has remained controversial. In sighted individuals, facial information is primarily conveyed via the visual modality. Early blind individuals, on the other hand, can recognize shapes using auditory and tactile cues. Here we demonstrate that such individuals can learn to distinguish faces from houses and other shapes by using a sensory substitution device (SSD) presenting schematic faces as sound-encoded stimuli in the auditory modality. Using functional MRI, we then asked whether a face-selective brain region like the fusiform face area (FFA) shows selectivity for faces in the same subjects, and indeed, we found evidence for preferential activation of the left FFA by sound-encoded faces. These results imply that FFA development does not depend on experience with visual faces per se but may instead depend on exposure to the geometry of facial configurations., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist., (Copyright: © 2023 Plaza et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)

The present data article provides a dataset of psychological scores, additional description of used measures, and descriptive data of participants related to the research article entitled "Impact of physical exercise on depression and anxiety in adolescent inpatients: a randomized controlled trial" (Philippot et al., 2022). This randomized controlled trial aimed at assessing the effect of add-on treatment with structured physical exercise compared to social relaxation activities in a clinical population of adolescents hospitalized for depression and anxiety in a psychiatric hospital. A group of 40 adolescents was randomly assigned to either a physical exercise or a control program three to four times per week over six weeks. The primary outcome was the Hospital Anxiety Depression Scale (HADS) for evaluation of depression and anxiety symptoms. Secondary outcomes were psychological self-assessments (The Zung Self-Assessment Depression Scale (SDS), Beck's abbreviated Depression Inventory (BDI-13), The Child Depression Inventory (CDI), The State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI)), diagnostic interview (Hamilton Depression Rating Scale), and physical examinations (an adapted version of the Astrand-Rhyming Sub-Maximal Effort Test and BMI measures). These questionnaires and tests were filled at baseline and after intervention., Competing Interests: AG De Volder is Senior Research Associate at the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research. This study was supported by sponsorship of the Baillet-Latour asbl Funds (Belgium) to Prof. V. Dubois in the AREA+ hospital. The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships which have or could be perceived to have influenced the work reported in this article., (© 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc.)

Background: Physical exercise therapy is of proven efficacy in the treatment of adults with depression, but corresponding evidence is lacking in depressed adolescent inpatients. The aim of this study was to document the effect of add-on treatment with structured physical exercise in a clinical population of adolescents hospitalized for depression and anxiety in a psychiatric hospital., Methods: A group of 52 adolescent inpatients was randomly assigned to a physical exercise or control program three to four times per week over a six-week period (20 hours in total). The primary outcome was the Hospital Anxiety Depression Scale (HADS) for evaluation of depression and anxiety symptoms. Secondary outcomes were psychological self-assessments, diagnostic interviews, and physical examinations., Results: Six participants were lost in each group, leaving 20 inpatients each in the intervention and control groups. A linear mixed model with F-test revealed a significant interaction in favor of physical exercise in reducing the mean depression score (HADS-D) by 3.8 points [95% (CI), range 1.8 to 5.7], compared to a mean reduction score of 0.7 [95% (CI), range -0,7 to 2.0] in the control group. No significant interaction was found for anxiety symptoms (HADS-A)., Limitations: The investigation was limited to the six-week hospital window and the small sample size prevented exploring differences in social characteristics., Conclusion: Structured physical exercise add-on therapy integrated into the psychiatric hospitalization of adolescents has led to a reduction in their depressive symptoms, demonstrating its effectiveness in the care of adolescent inpatients with depression., (Copyright © 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)