Search Results (58)

Thailand has become a prominent destination for contemporary Chinese mobility through international education, employment, entrepreneurship, family relocation, retirement, and lifestyle-oriented movement. However, these pathways are usually studied separately, obscuring how education, work, legal status, digital infrastructures, everyday adaptation, and belonging interact over time. This article reports a structured integrative review of 53 empirical, theoretical, methodological, and policy sources identified through targeted searches of publisher platforms, scholarly discovery services, Thai journal repositories, and institutional sources, supplemented by citation chaining. The synthesis develops a framework of layered belonging under negotiated mobility. Mobility begins with aspirations and capabilities situated within a regional opportunity structure; educational and other entry pathways provide uneven access to linguistic, social, and professional resources; and the conversion of these resources is mediated by language, digital and interpersonal networks, institutional support, and everyday competence while being filtered through visa rules, work authorization, employer dependence, occupational access, and public narratives. Belonging is therefore differentiated across six interdependent dimensions: affective-place, relational-social, functional-everyday, professional-economic, legal-institutional, and future-temporal. This framework explains why migrants may feel emotionally at home and socially connected in Thailand while remaining legally temporary, professionally dependent, or uncertain about long-term residence. The review clarifies the added value of the framework relative to place-belongingness, integration domains, social anchoring, and differentiated embedding; proposes six empirically testable propositions; and identifies implications for universities, employers, public agencies, and migrant-serving organizations. Full article

Drawing on 13 women’s struggles in Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan, this paper conceptualises care as social love underpinning the everyday work of organising and movement-building. The paper explores who provides social love, for whom, and under what conditions, revealing infrastructures that sustain collective action. Moving beyond care as a unidirectional or dyadic relationship between giver and receiver, the paper shows how care as social love reveals fluid, nested dynamics, with actors continuously shifting roles and often occupying both positions. Engaging with Tronto’s phases of care, the paper highlights that these phases rarely unfold sequentially; instead, they overlap, collapse into one another, or reappear in response to changing needs. The paper also demonstrates how care is spatially dispersed within movements, across digital platforms, informal gatherings and interpersonal relationships. These three dimensions (fluidity of care roles; non-linearity of care; spatially dispersed care) constitute the ‘webs of care’, which function as ongoing, overlapping networks that build and sustain movements in times of backlash, fragmentation, or fatigue. In so doing, the paper argues that care as social love brings out messy, fluid and collectively situated processes. It contributes to feminist social movement theory by positioning social love as central to organising and sustainability and to care ethics by expanding the temporal, spatial and relational dimensions through which it is practised. Full article

The Michelangelo phenomenon describes an interpersonal model of personal growth in which romantic partners affirm each other’s ideal selves, thereby enhancing their relational and personal well-being. The present study examined how attachment security relates to this process. Based on cross-sectional data from N = 452 individuals in 258 couples, the results replicated prior work and provided new insights. Greater partner affirmation was associated with higher relationship quality, higher life satisfaction, and lower depression, but was not associated with general anxiety. Movement toward the ideal self mediated the links between partner affirmation and well-being outcomes. Importantly, attachment security (lower attachment anxiety and avoidance) was directly associated with greater partner affirmation and indirectly associated with greater well-being outcomes through partner affirmation and movement toward the ideal self. The effects were particularly robust for lower attachment anxiety, relative to lower attachment avoidance. The findings suggest that attachment security may allow individuals to better rely on close relationships to experience personal growth. Full article

Interpersonal synchrony is a time-dependent coordination pattern in which interacting partners’ body movements become temporally aligned. This study frames interpersonal synchrony as a human motion analysis problem and presents Synchrony Vision, an RGB-D sensor-based system for real-time monitoring and event-level analysis of interpersonal motion synchrony in free dialog. The system transforms Kinect-derived skeletal positions into joint acceleration signals, applies sensor-specific conditioning, detects movement peaks, and estimates event-level phase differences between two participants within a ±1.0 s window. The operator-facing interface supports live RGB-D monitoring, acceleration visualization, joint selection, millisecond-scale phase-difference histograms, four synchrony metrics (Frequency, Lead–lag, Width, and Strength), and exportable acceleration, timestamp, peak-pairing, and summary artifacts. We evaluated the deployed pipeline on 25 Kinect-tracked dyads engaged in unconstrained conversation. Across 200.6 min comprising 245,835 frames, the system detected 2681 synchrony events. The observed event rate exceeded circular-surrogate baselines, and dyad rankings remained stable across reasonable parameter settings. Motion Energy Analysis-style cross-correlation on the same acceleration signals also confirmed above-chance synchrony but produced different dyad rankings. These findings show that RGB-D skeletal sensing can extend human motion analysis from individual movement capture to transparent, event-level quantification of interpersonal coordination. Full article

This article examines the utilization of WhatsApp as an alternative communication tool for disseminating visual content among social activists during protests. While WhatsApp is typically conceptualized as an interpersonal or group messaging platform, research on its role as an infrastructure for alternative media and citizen journalism remains limited. The study focuses on the “Tikva” group, established at the onset of the public struggle against the 2023 judicial reform in Israel, which evolved into a nine-month mass protest movement described as one of the largest in the country’s history. Through qualitative thematic content analysis of videos distributed within the group, the article explores how WhatsApp functions simultaneously as a channel for digital activism and as a site of bottom-up, democratic, non-institutional news production. The findings indicate two primary trends: functionally, WhatsApp operates as a mechanism for resource mobilization, calls to action in physical and digital spaces, and the cultivation of belonging and solidarity among activists facing institutional power; in terms of content and production, the videos articulate an anti-hegemonic discourse and challenge mainstream media conventions. The analysis shows how these videos dismantle delegitimizing frames and construct a counter-narrative depicting protesters as citizens defending democracy, thereby sustaining the protest movement’s momentum. Full article

Background/Objectives: Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD, here on termed autistic children) exhibit motor difficulties in social and non-social contexts. Although previous studies have reported behavioral and neural characteristics, their relationship remains largely unexplored. The current study aimed to investigate the behavioral and neural mechanisms underlying interpersonal synchrony in autistic children using simultaneous kinematic and Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) recordings. Methods: Fifty-eight autistic or non-autistic children participated (mean age = 10.1, standard error = 0.3). fNIRS and an inertial measurement unit were used simultaneously to record the neural activity over frontotemporal and parietal regions and arm movement kinematics during a reach-to-clean-up task across three conditions: Watch—the child observed the tester clean up the blocks; Do—the child cleaned up the blocks independently; and Together—the child and tester cleaned up the blocks synchronously. Results: Behaviorally, autistic children demonstrated longer movement displacement, higher average velocity and acceleration, and a greater number of movement units. In terms of cortical activation, autistic children showed hypoactivation in the bilateral precentral gyrus and right inferior parietal lobe, along with hyperactivation in the right middle frontal gyrus, left inferior frontal gyrus, and left inferior parietal lobule. Correlations between kinematic and neural measures suggest that autistic children rely more on online/feedback control to compensate for reduced feedforward control. Conclusions: This study reveals unique compensatory strategies in autistic children, highlighting the connections between neural and behavioral characteristics. These findings have strong potential to inform the development of ASD screening tools and to guide targeted intervention strategies. Full article

Background: In-person conferences (IPCs) in family medicine remain central for cross-border collaboration and early-career development. With the rise of digital formats, the motivations of young general practitioners (GPs) to attend or organise IPCs require closer investigation. Methods: Using a modified two-round Delphi design, we surveyed 107 participants and 23 organisers of the 2024 and 2025 EYFDM (European Young Family Doctors’ Movement) Forums. Round one included open and closed questions; round two involved prioritisation tasks. Quantitative data were analysed with non-parametric statistics; qualitative responses were thematically coded. Results: Participants primarily attended in-person conferences for networking (56.1%), workshops, and inspiration, while formal content played a secondary role. Organisers emphasised personal development, citing project management and teamwork as key benefits, though 34.8% reported workload and lack of recognition as major barriers. A strong preference for in-person formats (94.4%) reflected the perceived importance of interpersonal interaction, which online formats could not replicate. Conclusions: The findings highlight IPC as key environments for identity formation, motivation, and sustainable European collaboration in family medicine. Organising offers learning opportunities but demands better structural support. Future conference planning must prioritise in-person interaction, while using hybrid formats as complementary tools. IPCs remain essential for fostering authentic networks and collaboration among young GPs. Full article

Sextortion has rapidly expanded into a global cyber-enabled crime that leverages anonymous digital communication and decentralized payment systems. This study examines the financial infrastructures underlying contemporary sextortion by conducting a two-phase analysis of 87 confirmed cases involving cryptocurrency payments. Using blockchain forensic tools and open-source intelligence, the research traces fund movements across perpetrator-controlled wallets, identifies laundering techniques such as mixers, peel-chain transfers, and exchange-based cash-outs, and links these behaviors to narrative patterns within victim reports. The results reveal a dual-tier ecosystem in which mass-produced, multilingual extortion scripts coexist with divergent laundering typologies that differentiate lower-value, high-volume scams from more organized and higher-yield operations. By integrating qualitative and quantitative evidence, this study provides a forensic framework for detecting illicit cryptocurrency activity, improving threat classification, and strengthening investigative and regulatory responses to sextortion and related crypto-enabled interpersonal crimes. Full article

Traumatic experiences can disrupt one’s sense of safety, self-efficacy, and relationships. Prolonged stress may lead to anxiety, depression, and diminished agency. The embodied, subjective manifestations of trauma call for personalized therapeutic approaches that address symptoms and foster resilience. Group Creative Arts Therapies (CATs) offer relational aesthetic interventions that promote resilience and trauma recovery. Incorporating body-based methods, movement, materials and visual expression, CATs support interoceptive awareness, multisensory integration, embodiment, and emotional–cognitive processing. This article presents a review and conceptual framework of group CAT interventions during wartime, focusing on challenges related to body awareness, self-efficacy, and autobiographical memory. It examines how creative aesthetic approaches help process trauma and strengthen resilience. Drawing on predictive processing accounts of brain function, the article explores the neuropsychological impact of trauma and how creative group work may modulate related brain mechanisms. Creative techniques can foster bodily anchored self-awareness, self-efficacy and processes of traumatic memory reconsolidation. Aesthetic experiences are associated with changes in brain activation and connectivity through processes of embodiment, externalization, and meaning making. On an intrapersonal level, converging evidence highlights the role of sensory and sensorimotor processing, along with the dynamic interplay between Default Mode, Executive Control, and Salience networks, as conceptualized in the Triple Network Model. On an interpersonal level, the literature points to the dynamics of brain and body synchronization, as emerging phenomena during shared creative engagement. These neurodynamics provide a coherent framework for understanding how creative arts-based psychotherapeutic group work can support trauma processing and the cultivation of resilience. Full article

Background/Objectives: Empathy is essential for successful social functioning, mediating different aspects of social cognition in everyday life. An intriguing aspect is the involvement of empathy even in basic neural mechanisms of action perception, thanks to its association with the Mirror Neuron System (MNS). The present retrospective study explores whether individual differences in cognitive and affective empathy, measured by the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) questionnaire, can predict motor resonance—the enhancement of motor cortex reactivity during the observation of biological movements—during transitive and intransitive action observation. Methods: Data from 160 healthy subjects who participated in transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) experiments assessing corticospinal excitability during action observation were retrospectively analyzed using multiple linear regression models. Participants filled the IRI and observed intransitive single-digit finger movements (n = 80) or grasping actions directed at different targets (intransitive, object-directed, social-directed; n = 80) synchronized with TMS over the primary motor cortex, allowing the investigation of how action features modulate the relationship between participants’ empathic traits and motor resonance magnitude. Results: Results show that empathic traits do not affect motor resonance during intransitive movements, whereas they do when motor resonance is measured during the observation of transitive actions. Cognitive empathy, particularly the perspective-taking scale, significantly predicts motor resonance magnitude when observing goal-directed actions. Meanwhile, affective empathy, specifically the empathic concern scale, predicts motor resonance while observing social action. Conclusions: These findings highlight that different facets of empathy are significantly related to humans’ ability to understand others’ actions through inner simulation mechanisms, particularly concerning action goals and social relevance. Full article

Orbital floor fractures are primarily caused by blunt trauma to the area around the eyes. These injuries most commonly affect the orbital floor and medial wall due to the fragility of these structures. The mechanism typically involves transmission of force through the orbital rim or an acute increase in intraorbital pressure caused by globe displacement. Blowout fractures often occur alongside additional maxillofacial fractures and periorbital soft tissue injuries. The reported causes mirror those of general maxillofacial trauma and include motor vehicle collisions, interpersonal violence, falls, sports-related injuries, incidents involving firearms, and occupational accidents. Here, we present the case of a 56-year-old male patient who sustained an exceptionally rare injury pattern characterized by a complete orbital floor fracture with globe dislocation into the maxillary sinus. Such extensive fractures are associated with significant functional impairments, including diplopia, enophthalmos, and restricted extraocular muscle movement, as well as marked aesthetic deformity. Comprehensive diagnostic imaging, comprising coronal, sagittal, and three-dimensional CT reconstructions, was crucial for accurately assessing the extent of bony disruption and soft tissue involvement. Particular emphasis should be placed on imaging that clearly delineates the extraocular muscles and the optic nerve, as precise evaluation of these structures is essential for surgical planning and prognosis. Surgical management involved repositioning of the globe and the orbital contents, followed by reconstruction of the orbital floor using a titanium mesh anchored to the infraorbital rim. This case highlights the technical challenges of total orbital floor reconstruction, emphasizing the importance of meticulous anatomical restoration for achieving optimal functional and aesthetic outcomes. Full article

Background. Living with a stoma entails profound changes in a person’s life, affecting physical, psychological, and social well-being. Patients often face challenges related to body image, interpersonal relationships, and self-esteem. A stoma can impair quality of life, trigger feelings of shame and limit freedom of movement. Objectives. To assess the subjective perception of quality of life and related psychophysical consequences in individuals with an intestinal stoma. To evaluate the level of perceived support from healthcare professionals involved in the care pathway. Methods. This is a descriptive observational study conducted through the administration of an online questionnaire. The sample includes 189 adult patients with an intestinal stoma. Results. Data analysis revealed that participants aged ≥65 years and those with a permanent stoma reported higher quality of life scores compared to younger individuals or those with a temporary stoma. An inverse correlation emerged between quality of life and perceived stress (p < 0.001); in particular, pain and social embarrassment were strongly associated with higher levels of stress. The enterostomal therapy nurse was identified as a key figure in the care pathway (70.4%). Conclusions. The findings highlight the need for person-centered care that addresses not only clinical aspects but also emotional and relational dimensions. Enhancing the role of trained professionals, such as enterostomal therapy nurses, and promoting targeted educational interventions may contribute to improving the quality of life in patients living with a stoma. Full article

Cerebellar ataxias are a group of disorders characterized by clumsy movements because of defective muscle control. In affected individuals, muscular impairment might have an impact on activities like walking, balance, hand coordination, speech, and feeding, as well as eye movements. The development of symptoms typically takes place during the span of adolescence, and it has the potential to cause distress for individuals in many areas of their lives, including professional and interpersonal relationships. Although skeletal muscle is understudied in ataxias, its examination may provide hitherto unexplored details in this family of disorders. Observing muscle involvement can assist in diagnosing conditions where genetic tests alone are inconclusive. Furthermore, it helps determine the stage of progression of a pathology that might otherwise be challenging to assess. In this study, we reviewed the main scientific literature reporting on skeletal muscle examination in autosomal recessive cerebellar ataxias (ARCAs), with a focus on the rare Marinesco–Sjögren syndrome. (MSS). Our aim was to highlight the similarities in muscle alterations observed in ARCA patients while also considering data gathered from preclinical models. Analyzing the similarities among these disorders could enhance our understanding of the unidentified mechanisms underlying the phenotypic evolution of some less common conditions. Full article

Background/Objectives: Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) experience difficulties with interpersonal synchrony (IPS). While creative movement (CM) interventions have shown benefits for social, cognitive, and motor skills in children with ASD, the neural mechanisms underlying these improvements remain unclear. This pilot randomized control trial examined the behavioral and neural effects of CM, general movement (GM), and sedentary play (SP) interventions. Methods: Twenty-two children with ASD (Mean Age ± SE = 8.7 ± 1.9) participated. Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) was used to measure cortical activation during a drumming synchrony task before and after 8 weeks of intervention. Results: The CM group demonstrated significant improvements in IPS and the most widespread increases in socially enhanced activation across the left middle frontal gyrus (MFG), inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), and superior temporal sulcus (STS). The GM group showed increased activation in the left IFG, while the SP group showed enhanced activation in the left STS. Children with lower baseline adaptive functioning and social responsiveness showed greater IPS improvement. Conclusions: These findings provide preliminary evidence for the efficacy of CM in improving IPS in children with ASD and support the use of fNIRS to capture neural effects following interventions. Full article

The full-body illusion (FBI) is a phenomenon where individuals experience body perception not in their physical body but in an external virtual body. Previous studies have shown that the relationship between the self and the virtual body influences the occurrence and intensity of the FBI. However, the influence of interpersonal factors on the FBI has not been explored. This study investigated the effect of interpersonal synchrony on body perception through an evaluation experiment involving the FBI. Specifically, the participant and an experimenter clapped together while their movements were recorded by a video camera placed behind the participant and displayed to them via a head-mounted display (HMD). This setup presented synchronous visuotactile stimuli, aligning the visual feedback with the tactile sensations in the participant’s hands, to induce the FBI. The experimenter’s clapping rhythm was manipulated to either be synchronous or asynchronous with the participant’s rhythm, thus controlling the state of movement synchronization between the participant and the experimenter. The impact on the participant’s body perception was then assessed through subjective reports. The results indicated that when the clapping rhythm was synchronized with the other person, there was a significant reduction in touch referral to the participant’s virtual body. Additionally, there was a trend toward a reduction in ownership. This study demonstrated for the first time that interpersonal synchrony affects body perception. Full article