Mental health, coping and family-functioning in parents of young people with obsessive-compulsive disorder and with anxiety disorders

Objective. To compare mental health, coping and family-functioning in parents of young people with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), anxiety disorders, and no known mental health problems. Method. Parents of young people with OCD (N=28), other anxiety disorders (N=28), and no known mental health problems (N=62) completed the Brief Symptom Inventory (Derogatis, 1993), the Coping Responses Inventory (Moos, 1990), and the McMaster family assessment device (Epstein, Baldwin, & Bishop, 1983). Results. Parents of children with OCD and anxiety disorders had poorer mental health and used more avoidant coping than parents of non-clinical children. There were no group differences in family-functioning. Conclusion. The similarities across the parents of clinically referred children suggest that there is a case for encouraging active parental involvement in the treatment of OCD in young people.

The cooler side of mycorrhizas: their occurrence and functioning at low temperatures

Mycorrhizal associations occur in a range of habitats in which soils are subject to low temperature (≤15 °C) for a significant part of the year. Despite this, most of our understanding of mycorrhizal fungi and their interactions with their plant hosts is based on physiological investigations conducted in the range 20–37 °C using fungi of temperate origin. Comparatively little consideration has been given to the cold edaphic conditions in which many mycorrhizas survive and prosper, and the physiological and ecological consequences of their low temperature environments. In this review, we consider the distribution and persistence of arbuscular and ectomycorrhizal mycorrhizal associations in cold environments and highlight progress in understanding adaptations to freezing resistance and nutrient acquisition at low temperature in mycorrhizal fungi.

Synergy of extreme drought and shrub invasion reduce ecosystem functioning and resilience in water-limited climates

Extreme drought events and plant invasions are major drivers of global change that can critically affect ecosystem functioning and alter ecosystem-atmosphere exchange. Invaders are expanding worldwide and extreme drought events are projected to increase in frequency and intensity. However, very little is known on how these drivers may interact to affect the functioning and resilience of ecosystems to extreme events. Using a manipulative shrub removal experiment and the co-occurrence of an extreme drought event (2011/2012) in a Mediterranean woodland, we show that native shrub invasion and extreme drought synergistically reduced ecosystem transpiration and the resilience of key-stone oak tree species. Ecosystem transpiration was dominated by the water use of the invasive shrub Cistus ladanifer, which further increased after the extreme drought event. Meanwhile, the transpiration of key-stone tree species decreased, indicating a competitive advantage in favour of the invader. Our results suggest that in Mediterranean-type climates the invasion of water spending species and projected recurrent extreme drought events may synergistically cause critical drought tolerance thresholds of key-stone tree species to be surpassed, corroborating observed higher tree mortality in the invaded ecosystems. Ultimately, this may shift seasonally water limited ecosystems into less desirable alternative states dominated by water spending invasive shrubs.

Pragmatic abilities of high-functioning Greek-speaking children with autism

This paper reports on the findings of the pragmatic abilities of Greek-speaking children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Twenty high functioning children with ASD and their typically developing age and vocabulary controls were administered a pragmatics task. The task was based on the Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation (DELV) in the context of a larger study targeting the grammar of Greek-speaking children with autism, and assessed the children’s abilities in communicative role taking, narrative, and question asking. The children with ASD showed an uneven profile in their pragmatic abilities. The two groups did not differ in communicative role taking and question asking. However, the children with ASD had difficulties on the narrative task, and more specifically, on the items assessing reference contrast and temporal links. Yet, they performed similarly on the mental state representations and the false beliefs items. Despite their good performance on mental states and false beliefs, the ASD children’s lower performance on reference contrast can be interpreted via Theory of Mind deficits if we assume that the former involve an additional level of complexity; namely, quantifying the amount of information available to the listener. Lower performance on temporal links is in line with the ASD children’s attested difficulties in organizing events into a coherent gist. Their overall profile, and, in particular, the dissociation between the different sections of the task, does not support single deficit accounts. It rather indicates that the deficits of individuals with ASD stem from distinct deficits in core cognitive processes (Happé & Frith, 2006).

Functional identity and diversity of animals predict ecosystem functioning better than species-based indices

Drastic biodiversity declines have raised concerns about the deterioration of ecosystem functions and have motivated much recent research on the relationship between species diversity and ecosystem functioning. A functional trait framework has been proposed to improve the mechanistic understanding of this relationship, but this has rarely been tested for organisms other than plants. We analysed eight datasets, including five animal groups, to examine how well a trait-based approach, compared with a more traditional taxonomic approach, predicts seven ecosystem functions below- and above-ground. Trait-based indices consistently provided greater explanatory power than species richness or abundance. The frequency distributions of single or multiple traits in the community were the best predictors of ecosystem functioning. This implies that the ecosystem functions we investigated were underpinned by the combination of trait identities (i.e. single-trait indices) and trait complementarity (i.e. multi-trait indices) in the communities. Our study provides new insights into the general mechanisms that link biodiversity to ecosystem functioning in natural animal communities and suggests that the observed responses were due to the identity and dominance patterns of the trait composition rather than the number or abundance of species per se.