The purpose of this study was to examine whether stretching training altered the viscoelastic properties of human tendon structures in vivo. Eight men performed the stretching training for 3 wk. Before and after the stretching training, the elongation of the tendon and aponeurosis of medial gastrocnemius muscle was directly measured by ultrasonography while the subjects performed ramp isometric...

The persistence of aggressive criminal behavior is recurrently observed in offenders despite being previously advised on the negative consequences of their actions. One possible explanation for the continuation of aggressive behaviors could be that they are the consequence of either possible deficits in cognitive flexibility (set-shifting) or in altered feedback processing. Event-related brain ...

PURPOSE the Frailty Index (FI) is a popular operationalization of frailty. FI cut-off points have been proposed to define, regardless of age, frailty categories with increasing risk. Here, an alternative method is described that takes age into account. SUBJECTS AND METHODS 29,905 participants aged ≥ 50 from the first wave of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe. The mean foll...

Trust is an important determinant of start-up fi nancing. In a simple agentbased model it is determined what the best trusting strategy is for a collective of investors and whether it is rational for an individual investor to deviate from this collective optimum. Trust depends on a measure of social distance and is the precondition for investment. Trust increases and decreases based on whether ...

Cognitive flexibility is defined as the ability to assimilate previously learned information and concepts to generate novel solutions to new problems. This skill is crucial for success within ill-structured domains such as biology, physiology, and medicine, where many concepts are simultaneously required for understanding a complex problem, yet the problem consists of patterns or combinations o...

Older adults exhibit great variability in their cognitive abilities, with some maintaining high levels of performance on executive control tasks and others showing significant deficits. Previous event-related potential (ERP) work has shown that some of these performance differences are correlated with persistence of the novelty/frontal P3 in older adults elicited by task-relevant events, presum...

Human physiology needs to be well adapted to cope with major discontinuities in both the supply of and demand for energy. This adaptability requires 'a clear capacity to utilize lipid and carbohydrate fuels and to transition between them' (Kelley et al. 2002b). Such capacities characterize the healthy state and can be termed 'metabolic flexibility'. However, increasing evidence points to metabo...

The development of new methods and rep­ resentations for temporal decision-making requires a principled basis for characterizing and measuring the flexibility of decision strategies in the face of uncertainty. Our goal in this paper is to provide a framework not a theory for observing how decision policies behave in the face of informational perturbations, to gain clues as to how they might beh...