Search Results (4)

Background. A major goal for a significant portion of the osteopathic community is to update osteopathic principles, satisfying three needs: sourcing from the origin, proposing original and unique practical approaches, and describing the entire process in a scientifically updated way. On this line, several interprofessional proposals for healthcare providers have already been made by implementing patient-centered care and touch-based strategies informed by the enactive model. Enactivism principles can provide a foundation for rethinking osteopathic care by integrating environmental, psychological, social, and existential factors to facilitate the patient’s biobehavioral synchronization with the environment and social context, address health needs, and enhance the quality of multiprofessional healthcare services. However, there is a need to develop a conceptual model that offers a framework for organizing and interpreting disciplinary knowledge, guiding clinical observation and practical strategies, and defining both interprofessional collaboration and the unique focus of the profession. This scoping review and integrative hypothesis aim to fulfill the need for a more detailed and comprehensive understanding of the distinctive osteopathic care to biobehavioral synchrony, emphasizing both interprofessional collaboration and the profession’s unique competencies. Methods. The present article was developed in accordance with established guidelines for writing biomedical scoping reviews. Results. A total of 36 papers were considered for thematic and qualitative analyses, which supported the integrative hypothesis. Considering the current tenets for osteopathic rational practice, we propose an integrative hypothesis to focus on a practical framework for osteopathic patient biobehavioral synchronization. Patient–practitioner–environment synchronization could be promoted through a four-step process: (1) a narrative-based sense-making and decision-making process; (2) a touch-based shared sense-making and decision-making process; (3) hands-on, mindfulness-based osteopathic manipulative treatment; (4) patient active participatory osteopathic approaches to enhance person-centered care and rational practice. Conclusions and future directions: The proposed model fosters patient–practitioner synchronization by integrating updated traditional osteopathic narratives and body representations into practice, offering a culturally sensitive approach to promoting health, addressing contemporary health needs, and improving inclusive health services. Future studies are required to assess the transferability and applicability of this framework in modern settings worldwide. Full article

Interspecific contagious yawning (CY), whereby yawns from one species trigger yawning in different species, has now been reported across various taxa. This response to human yawning appears common among animals in captivity and has been interpreted as an empathic response towards human handlers/caregivers. A recent study found that humans also display interspecific CY, though this response was not modulated by proxies of empathic processing (i.e., phylogenetic relatedness or social closeness to the animals). Here, we explored this relationship more explicitly by assessing how interspecific CY to yawns from common household pets relates to self-reported empathic concern. Participants (N = 103) completed a survey measuring empathic concern and then reported on their yawning behavior following exposure to a control condition or yawning images either from domesticated cats or domesticated dogs. The results provide further evidence for interspecific CY in humans, but empathic concern was negatively predictive of this response. There was also no sex difference in interspecific CY, though when comparing the sexes across CY conditions, women reported a higher frequency of yawning in response to dog yawns, and men reported a higher frequency of yawning in response to cat yawns. Overall, these findings do not support a strong connection between interspecific CY and empathy or emotional contagion. Full article

Biobehavioral synchrony, the coordination of physiological and behavioral signals between mother and infant during social contact, tunes the child’s brain to the social world. Probing this mechanism from a two-brain perspective, we examine the associations between patterns of mother–infant inter-brain synchrony and the two well-studied maternal behavioral orientations—sensitivity and intrusiveness—which have repeatedly been shown to predict positive and negative socio-emotional outcomes, respectively. Using dual-electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings, we measure inter-brain connectivity between 60 mothers and their 5- to 12-month-old infants during face-to-face interaction. Thirty inter-brain connections show significantly higher correlations during the real mother–infant face-to-face interaction compared to surrogate data. Brain–behavior correlations indicate that higher maternal sensitivity linked with greater mother–infant neural synchrony, whereas higher maternal intrusiveness is associated with lower inter-brain coordination. Post hoc analysis reveals that the mother-right-frontal–infant-left-temporal connection is particularly sensitive to the mother’s sensitive style, while the mother-left-frontal–infant-right-temporal connection indexes the intrusive style. Our results support the perspective that inter-brain synchrony is a mechanism by which mature brains externally regulate immature brains to social living and suggest that one pathway by which sensitivity and intrusiveness exert their long-term effect may relate to the provision of coordinated inputs to the social brain during its sensitive period of maturation. Full article

Contagious yawning, or the reflexive tendency to yawn following the detection of yawning in others, is well-documented among humans and a growing number of social vertebrates. While the most common form of yawn contagion occurs between conspecifics, some non-human animals in captivity have been reported to yawn in response to yawns from human handlers/caregivers. The current research sought to provide the first formal investigation of whether people yawn contagiously in response to yawns from non-human animals. In addition, this study aimed to test whether this response was modulated by phylogenetic relatedness and domestication/social closeness. A total of 296 participants from Amazon Mechanical Turk self-reported on their yawning behavior following exposure to a (1) control (non-yawning) condition or a compilation of yawning stimuli either from (2) fish, (3) amphibians, (4) reptiles, (5) birds, (6) non-primate mammals, (7) apes, or (8) domesticated cats and dogs. The results provide strong support for interspecific yawn contagion. However, neither the propensity to yawn (binary) nor total yawn frequency varied significantly across interspecific conditions. Overall, these findings suggest that the mechanisms governing yawn contagion can be activated by varied forms of yawning stimuli, including those from distantly related and unfamiliar species. Full article