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Emotion dynamics is a framework for measuring how an individual's emotions change over time. It is a powerful tool for understanding how we behave and interact with the world. In this paper, we introduce a framework to track emotion dynamics through one's utterances. Specifically we introduce a number of utterance emotion dynamics (UED) metrics inspired by work in Psychology. We use this approach to trace emotional arcs of movie characters. We analyze thousands of such character arcs to test hypotheses that inform our broader understanding of stories. Notably, we show that there is a tendency for characters to use increasingly more negative words and become increasingly emotionally discordant with each other until about 90% of the narrative length. UED also has applications in behavior studies, social sciences, and public health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dementia is an ever-increasing health and social problem, with a growing number of people being affected worldwide. As dementia progresses, dependency on others increases, requiring the presence of caregivers. Caregivers tend to focus on the diagnosis itself - dementia - which makes it difficult to see the person in their uniqueness. The person is there, and can be seen by listening, which requires time and communication skills. The voices of older adults living with several types of dementia, collected while working as a psychologist in a nursing home, are presented in the first person to bring forward the person they are. These excerpts of interactions illustrate the basic psychological need of relatedness, which is built through interaction, stories, and touch, and the needs of competence and autonomy. The framework of this paper encompasses validation therapy, person-centered care, and self-determination theory. Two conclusions emerge: Seeing the person through the dementia enables an adequate psychological assessment and a helpful supportive psychotherapy, and it also makes us acknowledge and help satisfy the three basic psychological needs of relatedness, competence, and autonomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper argues that it is a mistake to define habit as behaviour or action; as a regular conjunction of actions; as a stock; as a form of automaticity (although habit is acquired and activated automatically); as a tendency, propensity or disposition (even though habit acts tendentially); as a mechanism; and as a process (even though habit is acquired and activated via several processes). A taxonomic definition is provided wherein habit is a cognitive representation of a cue-action response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Research on personality in sport is popular because it allows you to forecast the greediness of actions in sports competition situations. The purpose of this paper is to determine which personality traits characterize individual sports champions. Materials and Methods: The subjects of the research were Polish athletes (N = 600) between 20 and 29 years of age from 20 individual sports disciplines (each n = 30). Then, a sample of champions (n = 56) and other individual disciplines athletes (n = 544) was selected from the study population. The Big Five model was used to examine their personality (NEO‐FFI). Results: Individual sports champions were characterized by a lower level of neuroticism, a higher level of extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness in relation to other athletes. Conclusion: Each sports discipline is characterized by slightly different psychological requirements for athletes. The undertaken sports activity shapes the personality, and the shaped personality traits have an impact on taking solutions in the starting situation. The level of intensity of neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness may determine the result in competition in individual sports. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several lifetime distributions have played an important role to fit survival data. However, for some of these models, the computation of maximum likelihood estimators is quite difficult due to presence of flat regions in the search space, among other factors. Several well-known derivative-based optimization tools are unsuitable for obtaining such estimates. To circumvent this problem, we introduce the AdequacyModel computational library version 2.0.0 for the R statistical environment with two major contributions: a general optimization technique based on the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) method (with a minor modification of the original algorithm) and a set of statistical measures for assessment of the adequacy of the fitted model. This library is very useful for researchers in probability and statistics and has been cited in various papers in these areas. It serves as the basis for the Newdistns library (version 2.1) published in an impact journal in the area of computational statistics, see . It is also the basis of the Wrapped library (version 2.0), see . A third package making use of the AdequacyModel library can be found in . In addition, the proposed library has proved to be very useful for maximizing log-likelihood functions with complex search regions. The library provides a greater control of the optimization process by introducing a stop criterion based on a minimum number of iterations and the variance of a given proportion of optimal values. We emphasize that the new library can be used not only in statistics but in physics and mathematics as proved in several examples throughout the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of elasticities of substitution between inputs is a standard method for addressing the effect of a change in the mix of inputs used for production from a technical or cost standpoint. Most estimation methods use parametric production or cost functions or frontiers to estimate these elasticities. A potentially useful nonparametric alternative is data envelopment analysis (DEA). The purpose of this paper is to derive elasticities of input substitution for both technical and cost frontiers using DEA, extending the use of this approach in the field of economics and associated fields. The paper provides derivations for both Hicksian (production and cost frontier) and Morishima (cost frontier) elasticities of input substitution, as well as a parsimonious method for estimating them using DEA. The derivations are presented using an agricultural example form Kansas, USA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: To investigate the knowledge and practices of Chinese doctors in the management of osteoporotic fractures after the Chinese osteoporotic fracture guidelines update and aseries of medical education in 2017. Methods: This was a cross‐sectional survey of doctors in 71 cities across Mainland China. Based on the 2017 Chinese guidelines for the diagnosis and treatment of osteoporotic fractures, a questionnaire was designed and pre‐tested for reliability and validity. Doctors were surveyed with the questionnaire after scientific meetings during February 2017 to January 2018 through WeChat or conference digital platforms or in paper form. Descriptive statistics was used to analyze the responses to the questionnaire. Results: Overall, 314 valid questionnaires were confirmed. Regarding diagnosis, 77% agreed that osteoporosis could be diagnosed once an osteoporotic fracture occurred; 83% believed that the bone mineral density criteria for osteoporosis diagnosis would be T ≤ −2.5 SD. For treatment, almost all (99.7%) agreed with anti‐osteoporosis treatment being one of the basic principles of osteoporotic fracture treatment; 71.6% considered bisphosphonates as the most commonly used anti‐osteoporosis drug; 97% believed that patients who have used anti‐osteoporosis drugs should reassess osteoporosis after osteoporotic fractures instead of discontinue; 95% thought that the patients who did not use anti‐osteoporosis medications before osteoporotic fracture should be treated with anti‐osteoporosis drugs after fracture treatment as early as possible; 89% agreed that the standard use of bisphosphonates after osteoporotic fracture would not affect bone healing adversely; 59% believed the course of bisphosphonates treatment for osteoporosis would be 3–5 years, and 27% considered it to be 1–3 years. The patient follow‐up rate was poor: 46% selected follow‐up rate <30%; only 20% selected follow‐up rate >50%. Only 31% of the hospitals had long‐term management programs for osteoporotic fractures. Conclusions: Doctors generally adhered to the updated Chinese guidelines for osteoporotic fractures; frequent participation in medical education can help doctors to increase their awareness of osteoporosis as well as their acceptance and practice of the guidelines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Executives act based on their experiences, values, personality and personal interpretation of the situations which they face in their companies. Investigations in the field of Behavioral Corporate Finance have determined that there are some relations between CEOs’ personal traits and financial decisions of large companies, but these results are based on indirect personal trait measurements and on public companies. To see whether such relations also exist between CEOs’ personal traits and the financial structure of large private companies, we used psychometric tests to measure their level of optimism, risk attitude and affect heuristic, collected financial data for a period of fourteen years, and considered the economic situation of the country as a key factor in these relations. This paper reports the relationship of executives’ personal traits with the financial structure of large Spanish companies for the period 2001–2014. We observed that executives’ high optimism (and risk aversion attitude) is positively (negatively) related to long-term debt, whilst positive affect is directly associated to the financial leverage and short-term debt. This paper also reports a change of relations when taking into account the country’s economic situation. In effect, by considering this new variable, executives’ risk aversion is seen to be associated to financial leverage and short-term debt, whilst CEOs’ positive affect is linked to long-term debt. These relations are strongly moderated and they become statistically significant in a contracting economic period. In conclusion, the links between CEOs’ personal traits and financial structure of large private Spanish companies make sense when the effect of the economic situation is taken into account. Furthermore, the awareness of these links helps to understand the financial decisions taken within large Spanish companies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years there has been increased attention to child neurodevelopment in studies on medication safety in pregnancy. Neurodevelopment is a multifactorial outcome that can be assessed by various assessors, using different measures. This has given rise to a debate on the validity of various measures of neurodevelopment. The aim of this review was twofold. Firstly we aimed to give an overview of studies on child neurodevelopment after prenatal exposure to central nervous system acting medications using psychotropics and analgesics as examples, giving special focus on the use and validity of outcome measures. Secondly, we aimed to give guidance on how to conduct and interpret medication safety studies with neurodevelopment outcomes. We conducted a systematic review in the MEDLINE, Embase, PsycINFO, Web of Science, Scopus, and Cochrane databases from inception to April 2019, including controlled studies on prenatal exposure to psychotropics or analgesics and child neurodevelopment, measured with standardised psychometric instruments or by diagnosis of neurodevelopmental disorder. The review management tool Covidence was used for data-extraction. Outcomes were grouped as motor skills, cognition, behaviour, emotionality, or “other”. We identified 110 eligible papers (psychotropics, 82 papers, analgesics, 29 papers). A variety of neurodevelopmental outcome measures were used, including 27 different psychometric instruments administered by health care professionals, 15 different instruments completed by parents, and 13 different diagnostic categories. In 23 papers, no comments were made on the validity of the outcome measure. In conclusion, establishing neurodevelopmental safety includes assessing a wide variety of outcomes important for the child’s daily functioning including motor skills, cognition, behaviour, and emotionality, with valid and reliable measures from infancy through to adolescence. Consensus is needed in the scientific community on how neurodevelopment should be assessed in medication safety in pregnancy studies. Review registration number: CRD42018086101 in the PROSPERO database. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By utilizing cognitive mapping and leveraging georeferenced text data, this paper aims to suggest a new visualization method that combines the advantages of both conventional and state-of-the-art research techniques to depict the collective identity of place in a single image. The study addressed two research questions: (1) Can crowd-sourced text data be utilized in representing place identity? (2) Can collective place identity be expressed in the form of a cognitive map? By confirming that text data gathered from social media effectively demonstrate people’s behaviors and perceptions related to places, we propose a novel method to create a visual representation of urban identity–a “crowd-sourced cognitive map”. In particular, to improve the conventional cognitive mapping method to depict the collective identity of a city, we draw cognitive maps of Bundang and Ilsan developed in the 1990s, as well as Songdo and Dongtan developed in the 2000s, just outside of the administrative boundaries of Seoul in Korea, through a computational method based on crowd-sourced opinions collected from social media. We open the possibility for the use of social media text data to capture the identity of cities and suggest a graphical image through which people without prior information could also easily apprehend the overall image of a city. The work in this paper is expected to provide a methodological technique for appropriate decision-making and the evaluation of urban identity to shape a more unique and imageable city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social networks influence health-related behavior, such as obesity and smoking. While researchers have studied social networks as a driver for diffusion of influences and behavior, it is less understood how the structure or topology of the network, in itself, impacts an individual's health behavior and wellness state. In this paper, we investigate whether the structure or topology of a social network offers additional insight and predictability on an individual's health and wellness. We develop a method called the Network-Driven health predictor (NetCARE) that leverages features representative of social network structure. Using a large longitudinal data set of students enrolled in the NetHealth study at the University of Notre Dame, we show that the NetCARE method improves the overall prediction performance over the baseline models—that use demographics and physical attributes—by 38%, 65%, 55%, and 54% for the wellness states—stress, happiness, positive attitude, and self-assessed health—considered in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper introduces structural diversity as a new approach to quantify the complexity of technologies. By modeling technologies as combinatorial networks, a measure of technological complexity is derived that represents the diversity of (sub-)network topologies in these networks. It is further argued that this measure can be empirically approximated with the Network Diversity Score (NDS). The paper also presents an application of this approach to European patent data from 1980 to 2015. On this basis, the measure of structural diversity is shown to replicate a number of stylized facts commonly associated with technological complexity: Complexity increases over time and younger technologies are more complex than older technologies. Complex technologies are also associated to larger R&D efforts and require more collaborative R&D activities. Lastly, when controlling for technologies’ size, technologies scoring high on structural diversity are also shown to concentrate in space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Animal movement encodes information that is meaningfully interpreted by natural counterparts. This is a behavior that roboticists are trying to replicate in artificial systems but that is not well understood even in natural systems. This paper presents a count on the cardinality of a discretized posture space—an aspect of expressivity—of articulated platforms. The paper uses an information-theoretic measure, Shannon entropy, to create observations analogous to Moore’s Law, providing a measure that complements traditional measures of the capacity of robots. This analysis, applied to a variety of natural and artificial systems, shows trends in increasing capacity in both internal and external complexity for natural systems while artificial, robotic systems have increased significantly in the capacity of computational (internal) states but remained more or less constant in mechanical (external) state capacity. The quantitative measure proposed in this paper provides an additional lens through which to compare natural and artificial systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose an Emotional Trigger System to impart an automatic emotion expression ability within the humanoid robot REN-XIN, in which the Emotional Trigger is an emotion classification model trained from our proposed Word Mover’s Distance(WMD) based algorithm. Due to the long time delay of the WMD-based Emotional Trigger System, we propose an enhanced Emotional Trigger System to enable a smooth interaction with the robot in which the Emotional Trigger is replaced by a conventional convolution neural network and a long short term memory network (CNN_LSTM)-based deep neural network. In our experiments, the CNN_LSTM based model only need 10 milliseconds or less to finish the classification without a decrease in accuracy, while the WMD-based model needed approximately 6-8 seconds to give a result. In this paper, the experiments are conducted based on the same sub-data sets of the Chinese emotional corpus(Ren_CECps) used in former WMD experiments: one comprises 50% data for training and 50% for testing(1v1 experiment), and the other comprises 80% data for training and 20% for testing(4v1 experiment). The experiments are conducted using WMD, CNN_LSTM, CNN and LSTM. The results show that CNN_LSTM obtains the best F1 score (0.35) in the 1v1 experiment and almost the same accuracy of F1 scores (0.366 vs 0.367) achieved by WMD in the 4v1 experiment. Finally, we present demonstration videos with the same scenario to show the performance of robot control driven by CNN_LSTM-based Emotional Trigger System and WMD-based Emotional Trigger System. To improve the comparison, total manual-control performance is also recorded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to investigate the relationship between women’s social class and their levels of self- and other-objectification. Two online studies comprising of multiple questionnaires were conducted: Study 1 examined the association between the social class (both objective and subjective) of 198 non-student British women and their self-objectification levels, while Study 2 turned towards the relationship between social class and other-objectification among 82 non-student British women. Our results indicated no apparent relationship between social class and each of the relevant objectification measures. As the first paper on the topic of class and objectification, it appears that there is no relationship observed between the two. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding why parenting programmes work or do not work, and for whom, is crucial for development of more effective parenting interventions. In this paper we focus on a specific component of Mellow Bumps: reflection on one’s own childhood/past/life. We explore how this component was implemented, how participants engaged with it, the facilitating and constraining factors shaping this, whether and how it appeared to work, or not, and for whom. The paper analyses data from the Process Evaluation of the Trial of Healthy Relationships Initiatives for the Very Early years, which is evaluating two antenatal interventions delivered to vulnerable women, one of which is Mellow Bumps. Data were collected from January 2014 to June 2018 for 28 groups, 108 participants and 24 facilitators in a comprehensive and rigorous Process Evaluation designed to complement the Outcome Evaluation. Data were gathered at various time points using multiple methods, and were synthesised to triangulate findings. The reflective component was implemented with fidelity and participants engaged with it to varying degrees, dependent largely on the coherence of the group. Patchy attendance compromised the coherence of some groups, with the development of rapport, which is key to delivering reflective exercises, more difficult when group composition varied from week to week. Where there was a coherent group, powerful mechanisms of change, leading to stress reduction, included: relief through unburdening, empowerment through support given and received, reduced isolation through sharing anxieties, and control through self-care advice. A minority of highly vulnerable mothers seemed not to benefit from the reflective exercises and were marginalised within their groups. In order to minimise potential harmful effects of such exercises, allocation of participants to groups should strive to maximise group homogeneity. More research is needed to explore how very vulnerable parents can be supported in attending parenting interventions from start to finish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports the impact of a major life event–death–on the physical, psychological and social well-being of the deceased’s close friends. We utilised data from a large longitudinal survey covering a period of 14 years (2002–2015) consisting a cohort of 26,515 individuals in Australia, of whom 9,586 had experienced the death of at least one close friend. This longitudinal cohort dataset comprises responses to the SF-36 (health related quality of life measure) and allowed for analysis of the short and longer-term impacts of bereavement. In order to manage the heterogeneity of the socio-demographics of respondents who did/not experience a death event, we use a new and robust approach known as the Entropy Balancing method to construct a set of weights applied to the bereaved group and the control group (the group that did not experience death). This approach enables us to match the two groups so that the distribution of socio-demographic variables between the two groups are balanced. These variables included gender, age, marital status, ethnicity, personality traits, religion, relative socio-economic disadvantage, economic resources, and education and occupation and where they resided. The data show, for the first time, a range of negative and enduring consequences experienced by people following the death of a close friend. Significant adverse physical and psychological well-being, poorer mental health and social functioning occur up to four years following bereavement. Bereaved females experienced a sharper fall in vitality, suffered greater deterioration in mental health, impaired emotional and social functioning than the male counterparts up to four years after the death. The data show that the level of social connectedness plays an important role in bereavement outcomes. Specifically, we found that less socially active respondents experienced a longer deterioration in physical and psychological health. Finally, we found evidence that the death of a close friend lowered the respondent’s satisfaction with their health. Since death of friends is a universal phenomenon, we conclude the paper by reflecting on the need to recognise the death of a close friend as a substantial experience, and to offer support and services to address this disenfranchised grief. Recognising bereaved friends as a group experiencing adverse outcomes can be used internationally to prompt health and psychological services to assist this specific group, noting that there may be substantial longevity to the negative sequelae of the death of a friend. Facilitating bereaved people’s support networks may be a fruitful approach to minimising these negative outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The advancements in computer systems and networks have created a new environment for criminal acts, widely known as cybercrime. Cybercrime incidents are occurrences of particular criminal offences that pose a serious threat to the global economy, safety, and well-being of society. This paper offers a comprehensive understanding of cybercrime incidents and their corresponding offences combining a series of approaches reported in relevant literature. Initially, this paper reviews and identifies the features of cybercrime incidents, their respective elements and proposes a combinatorial incident description schema. The schema provides the opportunity to systematically combine various elements—or cybercrime characteristics. Additionally, a comprehensive list of cybercrime-related offences is put forward. The offences are ordered in a two-level classification system based on specific criteria to assist in better classification and correlation of their respective incidents. This enables a thorough understanding of the repeating and underlying criminal activities. The proposed system can serve as a common reference overtaking obstacles deriving from misconceptions for cybercrimes with cross-border activities. The proposed schema can be extended with a list of recommended actions, corresponding measures and effective policies that match with the offence type and subsequently with a particular incident. This matching will enable better monitoring, handling and moderate cybercrime incident occurrences. The ultimate objective is to incorporate the schema-based description of cybercrime elements to a complete incident management system with standard operating procedures and protocols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction. Personality disorders are common mental health disorders, with an estimated lifetime prevalence of 4 to 15%. People living with personality disorders are extensively seeking mental health services, yet few papers focus on their unique occupational needs or effective rehabilitation interventions that may alleviate the occupational issues they face. Occupational therapists are encouraged to support engagement in socially valued occupations, while preventing engagement in damaging ones, despite a lack of evidence on the meaning and the lived experiences of people. Objectives. This paper describes the meaning attributed by people living with personality disorders to their main occupations and the underlying needs they strive to fulfill through occupational engagement, whether or not these occupations are sanctioned. Methods. This exploratory study rests on a descriptive interpretative methodology. The participants were ten men and women, aged between 18 and 35 years old and living with a Cluster B personality disorder. A semistructured interview guide allowed participants to build narratives on occupations that are important to them and discuss how these occupations shape their identity. A thematic content analysis fostered the development of a coding structure that reflected a first-account perspective. Results. The narratives provided by the participants depict a variety of meaningful occupations, many of which are socially disapproved. Many of these occupations serve as a coping strategy to deal with distressing situations, to connect with others who share similar life experiences, or to reestablish a fragile sense of control. Other occupations are socially disapproved due to the overinvestment of the participants' commitment. While participants described how this overinvestment allowed them to control destructive impulses, significant others perceived it as counterproductive and unnecessary. Participants perceived self-care occupations as painful and tedious chores or meaningless occupations. Engaging in productive occupations allowed some participants to gain recognition or to identify their competencies, but also confirmed their differences, creating some form of alienation or marginalisation. Conclusion. This exploratory study invites clinicians and researchers to develop a more responsive understanding of occupational engagement for this population. The results highlight the importance of situating occupations in their context, while endorsing a first-account perspective, to better understand the forces that shape occupational engagement. Ultimately, occupational therapists should critically appraise their assumptions around healthy and unsanctioned occupations, in order to respond with sensitivity to the needs and experience of their clients, without perpetuating the marginalisation and discrimination they face. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The University of KwaZulu-Natal has introduced a new language policy requiring all students who have not done Zulu as a first (or second) language at school to complete a six-month course in Zulu as part of their undergraduate curriculum. Given that English is the medium of instruction that is being used for all their other courses, the time that these students have had to spend learning this new language may be adversely affecting the marks that they could be getting for their other courses. Having to do a course in Zulu is also preventing them from being able to take another course in their chosen area of study. If one were able to randomly assign students to the group who have to take the Zulu course, then any difference in performance between the two groups could be directly attributed to the new language policy that is being introduced at the university. Given the context of this paper, however, such a random allocation is not possible. Students who have not done Zulu at school have to eventually complete a course in Zulu before graduating. If this cohort differs (in any other way) from those who do not have to take this course, then any observed difference in overall performance between the two groups may be a result of these group differences rather than the new rule that has been implemented. Methodology: This paper uses regression adjustment and entropy matching to achieve an appropriate balance between the two groups. Having achieved this balance any difference in the overall performance between the two groups can then be attributed directly to the new language policy that has been implemented. Our results indicate, after matching, that a significant difference in performance between the two groups occurs with Black African Zulu home language speakers in particular not performing as well as students from the other race and language groups. The data came from the University of KwaZulu-Natal and the study has been approved by the University Ethics committee and Research committee. Results and conclusions: Using a weighted mean of marks to measure performance, the ATT estimates that result indicate that students in the treated group would all perform significantly better had they been allowed instead to enrol in the non-treated group. Furthermore, Zulu home language speakers, who are not actually forced to take this course, are significantly underperforming whether they have chosen to take this course in Zulu or not. Surprisingly, their underperformance is worse in the treated group. Because one would expect them to be scoring a higher mark for Zulu in this treated group, forfeiting the chance to take another course in their chosen area of study is clearly affecting the type of mark they could be getting for their other courses had they chosen to remain in the non-treated group. With English being the medium of instruction at this university, should the university not also consider introducing a compulsory course in English for these Zulu home language speakers? Females are doing better than males in both groups. The effect being stronger in the treated group suggests that females appear to cope better with the learning of a new language. Significant college effects are also being observed, suggesting that this new language rule possibly needs to be adjusted for the college a student wants to study in. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Phlebotomine sand flies are vectors of human leishmaniases, important neglected tropical diseases. In this study, we investigated diel patterns of oviposition behavior, effects of visual cues on oviposition-site selection, and whether these affect the attraction of gravid Phlebotomus papatasi (Scopoli), the vector of old-world cutaneous leishmaniasis, to olfactory cues from oviposition sites. Methodology/principal findings: To evaluate these questions, we conducted a series of experiments using attraction and oviposition assays within free-flight test chambers containing gravid females entrained under a 14:10 hrs light:dark photoperiod. By replacing sticky-screens or moist filter papers every three hours, we showed that oviposition site search occurs mainly in the latest part of the night whereas peak oviposition occurs during the early part of the night. Behavioral responses to olfactory oviposition cues are regulated by time-of-day and can be disrupted by transient exposure to a constant darkness photoperiod. Gravid females, but not any other stage, age, or sex, were attracted to dark, round oviposition jars, possibly resembling rodent burrow openings. This visual attraction disappeared in the absence of an illumination source. Egg deposition rate was not affected by jar color. Olfactory cues had the strongest effect when the visual cues were minimal. Conclusion and significance: Our study showed, for the first time, that visual cues in the form of oviposition-site color, lighting level, and photoperiod are important in guiding the oviposition behavior of phlebotomine sand flies. Furthermore, such visual cues could modify the flies’ sensitivity to olfactory oviposition cues. Our results suggest that chemosensory and visual cues are complementary, with visual cues used to orient gravid females towards oviposition sites, possibly at long- to medium-ranges during crepuscular periods, while olfactory cues are used to approach the burrow in darkness and assess its suitability at close-range. Implications to sand fly control are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using bibliographic data extracted from the Web of Science (WoS) and social network analysis techniques, a network of co-authorship for psychology papers published by Iranian authors have been analyzed. The study covered the period from 1970 (the year WoS first included Iranian-authored papers) through the end of 2016. For this period, a total of 2,204 records were retrieved from WoS. Of this, 18.11% were single-authored papers, and 81.88% were multi-authored. The collaboration network has a density of 63%, which is above the average and shows that the network is relatively interconnected, with researchers collaborating on joint publications. Centrality closeness was 16.63%, and the co-authorship network betweenness centrality was 6.64%. The clustering coefficient was 0.82, and the centrality degree of network was 16.5%. Ghorbani, Zarrindast, and Moradi were the most productive and effective authors in the network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to their simplicity and operating mode, magnetic loops are one of the most used traffic sensors in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). However, at this moment, their potential is not being fully exploited, as neither the speed nor the length of the vehicles can be surely ascertained with the use of a single magnetic loop. In this way, nowadays the vast majority of them are only being used to measure traffic flow and count vehicles on urban and interurban roads. This is the reason why we presented in a previous paper the double magnetic loop, capable of improving the features and functionalities of the conventional single loop without increasing the cost or introducing additional complexity. In that paper, it was introduced their design and peculiarities, how to calculate their magnetic field and three different methods to calculate their inductance. Therefore, with the purpose of improving the existing infrastructure and providing it with greater potential and reliability, this paper will focus on justifying and demonstrating the advantages offered by these double loops versus the conventional ones. This will involve analyzing the magnetic profiles generated by the passage of vehicles over double loops and comparing them with those already known. Moreover, it will be shown how the vehicle speed, the traffic direction and many other data can be obtained more easily and with less margin of error by using these new inductance signatures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Up to 1.45 billion people currently suffer from soil transmitted helminth infection, with the largest burden occurring in Africa and Asia. Safe and cost effective deworming treatment exists, but there is a debate about mass distribution of this treatment in high prevalence settings. While the World Health Organization recommends mass administration of anthelmintic drugs for preschool and school-aged children in high (>20%) prevalence settings, and several long run follow up studies of an influential trial have suggested large benefits that persist over time, recent systematic reviews have called this recommendation into question. Methods and findings: This paper analyzes the long-term impact of a cluster-randomized trial in eastern Uganda that provided mass deworming treatment to preschool aged children from 2000 to 2003 on the numeracy and literacy skills of children and young adults living in those villages in 2010-2015. This study uses numeracy and literacy data collected seven to twelve years after the end of the deworming trial in a randomly selected subset of communities from the original trial, by an education-focused survey that had no relationship to the deworming study. Building on an earlier working paper which used data from 2010 and 2011 survey rounds, this paper uses an additional four years of numeracy and literacy data (2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015). Aggregating data from all survey rounds, the difference between numeracy scores in treatment versus control communities is 0.07 standard deviations (SD) (95% CI -0.10, 0.24, p = 0.40), the difference in literacy scores is 0.05 SD (95% CI -0.16, 0.27, p = 0.62), and the difference in total scores is 0.07 SD (95% CI -0.11, 0.25, p = 0.44). There are significant differences in program impact by gender, with numeracy and literacy differentially positively affected for girls, and by age, with treatment effects larger for the primary school aged subsample. There are also significant treatment interactions for those living in households with more treatment-eligible children. There is no evidence of differential treatment effects on age at program eligibility or number of years of program eligibility. Conclusions: Mass deworming of preschool aged children in high prevalence communities in Uganda resulted in no statistically significant gains in numeracy or literacy 7-12 years after program completion. Point estimates were positive but imprecise; the study lacked sufficient power to rule out substantial positive effects or more modest negative effects. However, there is suggestive evidence that deworming was relatively more beneficial for girls, primary school aged children, and children living in households with other treated children. Research approval: As this analysis was conducted on secondary data which is publicly available, no research approval was sought or received. All individual records were anonymized by the data provider prior to public release. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: In order to make informed decisions about how best to support children and young people with disabilities, effective strategies that facilitate active and meaningful participation in school are required. Clinical factors, diagnosis or impairments somewhat helpful in determining what should be provided in interventions. However, clinical factors alone will not offer a clear view of how to support participation. It is helpful then to look at wider psychosocial and environmental factors. The aim of this review was to synthesise evidence of psychosocial and environmental factors associated with school participation of 4–12 year old children with disabilities to inform the development of participation-fostering interventions. Methods: A systematic search and synthesis using realist methods was conducted of published research. Papers had to include consideration of psychosocial and/or environment factors for school participation of children with disabilities. The review was completed in accordance with the Realist and Meta-narrative Evidence Syntheses: Evolving Standards (RAMESES) and Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) guidelines. Papers were identified via Boolean search of the electronic databases MEDLINE, CINAHL, PhycINFO and ERIC (January 2006-October 2018). Appraisal focussed on contributions in terms of whether the articles are appropriate for the review (relevance) and research quality (rigour). Data were analyzed using content and thematic analysis methods using a realist framework. A narrative synthesis of results was reported. Results and implications: We identified 1828 papers in the initial search. Seventy two papers were included in the final synthesis. Synthesis of findings led to three overarching mechanisms representing psychosocial factors for children (1) identity (2) competence and (3) experience of mind and body. Environmental aspects (context) compromised five interrelated areas: (1) structures and organization, (2) peers, (3) adults, (4) space and (5) objects. Our synthesis provides insights on how professionals may organize efforts to improve children’s participation. Consideration of these findings will help to proactively deal with suboptimal participation outcomes. Development of theoretically determined assessments and interventions for management of school participation are now required. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding expression levels of proteins and their interactions is a key factor to diagnose and explain the Down syndrome which can be considered as the most prevalent reason of intellectual disability in human beings. In the previous studies, the expression levels of 77 proteins obtained from normal genotype control mice and from trisomic Ts65Dn mice have been analyzed after training in contextual fear conditioning with and without injection of the memantine drug using statistical methods and machine learning techniques. Recent studies have also pointed out that there may be a linkage between the Down syndrome and the immune system. Thus, the research presented in this paper aim at in silico identification of proteins which are significant to the learning process and the immune system and to derive the most accurate model for classification of mice. In this paper, the features are selected by implementing forward feature selection method after preprocessing step of the dataset. Later, deep neural network, gradient boosting tree, support vector machine and random forest classification methods are implemented to identify the accuracy. It is observed that the selected feature subsets not only yield higher accuracy classification results but also are composed of protein responses which are important for the learning and memory process and the immune system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A diversity of arthropods (myrmecophiles) thrives within ant nests, many of them unmolested though some, such as the specialized Eucharitidae parasitoids, may cause direct damage to their hosts. Ants are known to discriminate between nestmates and non-nestmates, but whether they recognize the strength of a threat and their capacity to adjust their behavior accordingly have not been fully explored. We aimed to determine whether Ectatomma tuberculatum ants exhibited specific behavioral responses to potential or actual intruders posing different threats to the host colony and to contribute to an understanding of complex ant-eucharitid interactions. Behavioral responses differed significantly according to intruder type. Ants evicted intruders that represented a threat to the colony’s health (dead ants) or were not suitable as prey items (filter paper, eucharitid parasitoid wasps, non myrmecophilous adult weevils), but killed potential prey (weevil larvae, termites). The timing of detection was in accordance with the nature and size of the intruder: corpses (a potential source of contamination) were detected faster than any other intruder and transported to the refuse piles within 15 min. The structure and complexity of behavioral sequences differed among those intruders that were discarded. Workers not only recognized and discriminated between several distinct intruders but also adjusted their behavior to the type of intruder encountered. Our results confirm the previously documented recognition capabilities of E. tuberculatum workers and reveal a very fine-tuned intruder discrimination response. Colony-level prophylactic and hygienic behavioral responses through effective removal of inedible intruders appears to be the most general and flexible form of defense in ants against a diverse array of intruders. However, this generalized response to both potentially lethal and harmless intruders might have driven the evolution of ant-eucharitid interactions, opening a window for parasitoid attack and allowing adult parasitoid wasps to quickly leave the natal nest unharmed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Population Veterans with chronic noncancer pain (CNCP) are a vulnerable population whose care remains a challenge for clinicians, policy-makers, and researchers. As a result of military experience, veterans are exposed to high rates of musculoskeletal injuries, trauma, psychological stressors (e.g. post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety, substance abuse), and social factors (e.g. homelessness, social isolation, disability, decreased access to medical care) that contribute to the magnitude and impact of CNCP. In the veteran population, sound theoretical models are needed to understand the specific physiological, psychological, and social factors that influence this unique experience. Objective This paper describes an adaption of Gatchel and colleagues' biopsychosocial model of CNCP to veterans and summarizes research findings that support each component of the revised model. The paper concludes with a discussion of important implications for the use of this revised model in clinical practice and future directions for research. Conclusions The adaption of the biopsychosocial model of CNCP for veterans provides a useful and relevant conceptual framework that can be used to guide future research and improve clinical care in this vulnerable population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract It is inevitable that individuals and groups will experience stress and distress in the harsh and extreme environment of deep space. When these occur, we now have a mission in jeopardy -- not due to hardware failure, but because a psychological breaking point has been reached. It will happen. The question is when. This paper seeks to identify signs of impending breakdowns and suggests strategies for a crew to minimize its impact when it does. This paper begins to create definitions and qualities of breaking points, define the impact on group dynamics, and identify post-breakdown recovery strategies that will be used as a foundation for predictive model development. Highlights • An individual's psychological is vital to the success of the mission itself. • Mission cycle type influences the required skill set for individual success. • Group maturity is as important as the individual's ability to cope with the environment. • An individual's psychological health relative to the group dynamics is key. • Other impacting factors are physical health, culture, grief, and gender relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that dress is not a mere choice an individual makes; rather, it metonymizes almost every aspect of one's identity. Through a critical analysis of Arab British novelists Fadia Faqir's (2014) Willow Trees Don't Weep and Leila Aboulela's (2010) Lyrics Alley, the paper accentuates the skillful employment of dress in these novels and highlights its different implications. It also brings to light the strong relationship between the main characters and their choice of dress. In addition, this study draws on different theories of dress as an interdisciplinary subject in sociology, psychology, and cultural studies. The paper cites textual evidence which focuses on the different implications of dress and shows how these authors have used dress deliberately to comment on important social and political issues in their homelands and/in diaspora. Furthermore, it concentrates on these sartorial episodes to show that the identity construction of the main characters in these novels intricately intertwines with socioeconomic, political, cultural, religious, and psychological circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As Meehl (1978) noted four decades ago, psychology has progressed at a significantly slower rate than the natural sciences. This paper argues that one factor that may account for this discrepancy in problem solving progress is that the scientific methods used by psychologists have not properly taken into account unique characteristics of humans that the natural sciences need not consider. This issue has been called "the second demarcation problem" i.e., that a distinction between the methods of the natural sciences (the Naturwissenshaften) and the human sciences (the Geisteswissenshaften) -- needs to be made in order to properly understand the research methods that are necessary for scientific progress in each. This paper describes four such unique characteristics of humans as justification for this second demarcation: 1) radical idiography, 2) phenomenological experience, 3) the possibility of free will, and 4) radically new knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Text representation can map text into a vector space for subsequent use in numerical calculations and processing tasks. Word embedding is an important component of text representation. Most existing word embedding models focus on writing and utilize context, weight, dependency, morphology, etc., to optimize the training. However, from the linguistic point of view, spoken language is a more direct expression of semantics; writing has meaning only as a recording of spoken language. Therefore, this paper proposes the concept of a pronunciation-enhanced word embedding model (PWE) that integrates speech information into training to fully apply the roles of both speech and writing to meaning. This paper uses the Chinese language, English language and Spanish language as examples and presents several models that integrate word pronunciation characteristics into word embedding. Word similarity and text classification experiments show that the PWE outperforms the baseline model that does not include speech information. Language is a storehouse of sound-images; therefore, the PWE can be applied to most languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Impaired physical function due to chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy (CIPN) symptoms may lead to diminished quality of life. However, even with the knowledge of the effects of CIPN on physical function, clinicians infrequently assess and manage CIPN. Interventions that prioritize the early identification of CIPN to provide prompt treatment may reduce the impact of CIPN on physical function. The purpose of this paper is to compare self-reported physical function in individuals receiving neurotoxic chemotherapy between Electronic Symptom Assessment-Cancer (ESRA-C) intervention group (e.g., opportunity for symptom screening, self-care recommendations, communication coaching, and symptom tracking) and control group participants (i.e., electronic assessment alone). Secondary outcomes include pain intensity, sensory/motor CIPN, depression, fatigue, and insomnia.Methods: The data used in this paper are a subset of a randomized controlled trial that examined the impact of the ESRA-C intervention on symptom distress in individuals receiving cancer treatment. Since the interest in this analysis is on the effects of neurotoxic chemotherapy on physical function, subjects were included if they received platinum and/or taxane-based chemotherapy and completed the baseline and end-of-treatment measures. Participants completed standardized questionnaires of physical function, CIPN, fatigue, depression, pain intensity, and insomnia prior to treatment, 3-6 weeks after treatment initiation, and after the completion of treatment. Changes in mean scores are compared between groups using linear mixed models adjusting for age.Results: Intervention group participants reported significantly less reduction in physical functioning (baseline: 87.4/100; end-of-treatment: 84.5/100) relative to the control (baseline: 90.2/100; end-of-treatment: 81.8/100) (p = 0.011). For secondary measures, significantly less depression (p = 0.005) was observed in the intervention group as compared to the control, but otherwise, there were no between-group differences. Among participants who received high cumulative doses of neurotoxic chemotherapy, the intervention group reported significantly less severe sensory (p = 0.007) and motor CIPN (p = 0.039) relative to the control.Conclusion: Use of the ESRA-C intervention led to less reduction in physical function in comparison to the control in individuals receiving neurotoxic chemotherapy. Further research is needed to confirm our findings and to identify how electronic symptom assessment technology may mediate physical function preservation.Trial Registration: ClinicalTrials.Gov NCT00852852 . Registered 27 February 2009. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on the interview of ten herbalists, ten Babaláwo and twenty farmers and thus asks can one conclude that the love of money, material gain, poverty or yet to be identified via indigenous knowledge enhance farm produce for a better yield; what are some of the factors responsible for this act; what are the psychological implications on the farmer, his/her family and safety on the path of the consumers of such produce; and what is the position of Ifá towards the use of this indigenous intelligence in food production? Hence, it was revealed that there is no place where Ifá recommended the use of magic to enhance crop production, and to a large extent, the love of money, greed and material gain contribute a lot to the reason people indulge in such an act. The paper concludes that the outcome or end product of many of these methods is that it is not advisable to indulge in such an act of planting crops with magic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data has revealed that brain regions can be grouped into functional brain networks (fBNs) or communities. A community in fMRI analysis signifies a group of brain regions coupled functionally with one another. In neuroimaging, functional connectivity (FC) measure can be utilized to quantify such functionally connected regions for disease diagnosis and hence, signifies the need of devising novel FC estimation methods. In this paper, we propose a novel method of learning FC by constraining its rank and the sum of non-zero coefficients. The underlying idea is that fBNs are sparse and can be embedded in a relatively lower dimension space. In addition, we propose to extract overlapping networks. In many instances, communities are characterized as combinations of disjoint brain regions, although recent studies indicate that brain regions may participate in more than one community. In this paper, large-scale overlapping fBNs are identified on resting state fMRI data by employing non-negative matrix factorization. Our findings support the existence of overlapping brain networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Until recently, the Chagas disease vector, Triatoma infestans, was widespread in Arequipa, Perú, but as a result of a decades-long campaign in which over 70,000 houses were treated with insecticides, infestation prevalence is now greatly reduced. To monitor for T. infestans resurgence, the city is currently in a surveillance phase in which a sample of houses is selected for inspection each year. Despite extensive data from the control campaign that could be used to inform surveillance, the selection of houses to inspect is often carried out haphazardly or by convenience. Therefore, we asked, how can we enhance efforts toward preventing T. infestans resurgence by creating the opportunity for vector surveillance to be informed by data? Methodology/principal findings: To this end, we developed a mobile app that provides vector infestation risk maps generated with data from the control campaign run in a predictive model. The app is intended to enhance vector surveillance activities by giving inspectors the opportunity to incorporate the infestation risk information into their surveillance activities, but it does not dictate which houses to surveil. Therefore, a critical question becomes, will inspectors use the risk information? To answer this question, we ran a pilot study in which we compared surveillance using the app to the current practice (paper maps). We hypothesized that inspectors would use the risk information provided by the app, as measured by the frequency of higher risk houses visited, and qualitative analyses of inspector movement patterns in the field. We also compared the efficiency of both mediums to identify factors that might discourage risk information use. Over the course of ten days (five with each medium), 1,081 houses were visited using the paper maps, of which 366 (34%) were inspected, while 1,038 houses were visited using the app, with 401 (39%) inspected. Five out of eight inspectors (62.5%) visited more higher risk houses when using the app (Fisher’s exact test, p < 0.001). Among all inspectors, there was an upward shift in proportional visits to higher risk houses when using the app (Mantel-Haenszel test, common odds ratio (OR) = 2.42, 95% CI 2.00–2.92), and in a second analysis using generalized linear mixed models, app use increased the odds of visiting a higher risk house 2.73-fold (95% CI 2.24–3.32), suggesting that the risk information provided by the app was used by most inspectors. Qualitative analyses of inspector movement revealed indications of risk information use in seven out of eight (87.5%) inspectors. There was no difference between the app and paper maps in the number of houses visited (paired t-test, p = 0.67) or inspected (p = 0.17), suggesting that app use did not reduce surveillance efficiency. Conclusions/significance: Without staying vigilant to remaining and re-emerging vector foci following a vector control campaign, disease transmission eventually returns and progress achieved is reversed. Our results suggest that, when provided the opportunity, most inspectors will use risk information to direct their surveillance activities, at least over the short term. The study is an initial, but key, step toward evidence-based vector surveillance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Participation in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanning is associated with increased anxiety, thus possibly impacting baseline recording for functional MRI studies. The goal of the paper is to elucidate the significant hemispheric asymmetry between blood-oxygenation-level-dependent (BOLD) signals from precentral gyrus (PCG) and insula in 23 healthy individuals without any former MRI experience recently published in a PLOSONE paper. In addition to BOLD signals state anxiety and heart rate variability (HRV) were analyzed in two resting state sessions (R1, R2). Phase-locking and time delays from BOLD signals were computed in the frequency band 0.07–0.13 Hz. Positive (pTD) and negative time delays (nTD) were found. The pTD characterize descending neural BOLD oscillations spreading from PCG to insula and nTD characterize ascending vascular BOLD oscillations related to blood flow in the middle cerebral artery. HRV power in two low frequency bands 0.06–0.1 Hz and 0.1–0.14 Hz was computed. Based on the anxiety change from R1 to R2, two groups were separated: one with a strong anxiety decline (large change group) and one with a moderate decline or even anxiety increase (small change group). A significant correlation was found only between the left-hemispheric time delay (pTD, nTD) and anxiety change, with a dominance of nTD in the large change group. The analysis of within-scanner HRV revealed a pronounced increase of low frequency power between both resting states, dominant in the band 0.06–0.1 Hz in the large change group and in the band 0.1–0.14 Hz in the small change group. These results suggest different mechanisms related to anxiety processing in healthy individuals. One mechanism (large anxiety change) could embrace an increase of blood circulation in the territory of the left middle cerebral artery (vascular BOLD) and another (small anxiety change) translates to rhythmic central commands (neural BOLD) in the frequency band 0.1–0.14 Hz. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowledge and motivation of a teacher are two unchallenged, essential characteristics for successful education. Whilst the relevance of teachers’ professional knowledge for successful students’ learning has been studied in a sophisticated manner for years, the meaning of teachers’ motivational orientations for students’ performance still lacks a differentiated consideration. This construct is conceptualized by three domains: (1) self-efficacy, (2) subject-specific enthusiasm, and (3) enthusiasm for teaching the subject. Motivational orientations overall have shown to be relevant predictors of students’ learning. However, there are several dimensions of motivation and their relative importance remains unclear. Our study goes beyond the available findings by considering in detail each of the three domains’ relations to students’ performance. Thus, we aim to further contribute to the clarification of the predictors of students’ performance in school teaching. For this purpose, we conducted a study with 48 biology teachers and their 1036 students. To assess the three domains of teachers’ motivational orientations, we applied paper and pencil tests. Concept maps and paper and pencil tests were used to measure students’ performance. By specifying multilevel structural equation models, we examined the relationship between the domains of teachers’ motivational orientations and the performance of the students. Our results reveal no relationship between teachers’ self-efficacy and students’ performance, but a significant positive relationship between the latter and teachers’ subject-specific enthusiasm. Moreover, our results show a positive trend in the relationship between enthusiasm for teaching the subject and students’ performance. The results provide a differentiated picture about the importance of motivational orientations for the characterisation of an effective teacher. We discuss our findings in terms of possible effect mechanisms and their relevance for further research on teacher motivation and the improvement of teacher education programmes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a disease which is widely diagnosed using (colour fundus) images. Efficiency and accuracy are critical in diagnosing DR as lack of timely intervention can lead to irreversible visual impairment. In this paper, we examine strategies for scrutinizing images which affect diagnostic performance of medical practitioners via an eye-tracking study. A total of 56 subjects with 0 to 18 years of experience participated in the study. Every subject was asked to detect DR from 40 images. The findings indicate that practitioners use mainly two types of strategies characterized by either higher dwell duration or longer track length. The main findings of the study are that higher dwell-based strategy led to higher average accuracy (> 85%) in diagnosis, irrespective of the expertise of practitioner; whereas, the average obtained accuracy with a long-track length-based strategy was dependent on the expertise of the practitioner. In the second part of the paper, we use the experimental findings to recommend a scanning strategy for fast and accurate diagnosis of DR that can be potentially used by image readers. This is derived by combining the eye-tracking gaze maps of medical experts in a novel manner based on a set of rules. This strategy requires scrutiny of images in a manner which is consistent with spatial preferences found in human perception in general and in the domain of fundus images in particular. The Levenshtein distance-based assessment of gaze patterns also establish the effectiveness of the derived scanning pattern and is thus recommended for image readers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The prevalence of intimate partner violence (IPV) is high (54%) in Bangladesh. Moreover, female garment workers report higher rates of IPV and are also vulnerable to workplace violence (WPV). Experience of violence puts women at increased risk of developing depressive symptoms, which are related with low self-esteem, lower life satisfaction and lower productivity. To our knowledge, there has been no previous research on depression among female garment workers and its connections to IPV and WPV in Bangladesh. This paper aims to address this gap by studying the relationship of IPV, WPV and depression among female garment workers. Methods: The data for this paper comes from a cross-sectional survey of female garment workers (n = 800) conducted as baseline survey of a quasi-experimental study known as HERrespect. Survey data were collected during September-December, 2016 among randomly selected female garment workers from eight garment factories in and around Dhaka city. Structural equation modelling was conducted to explore the relationship among IPV, WPV and depression. Results: The findings show high rates of any IPV (69%); WPV (73%, experienced or witnessed) and depressive symptomatology (40%) among female garment workers. The analysis of pathways shows that IPV impacts a woman’s experience of WPV and work related stress leading to the development of depression; while WPV had direct and mediated pathways to depression. Experience of controlling by their husband leads to WPV and increased work related stress, and thus leads to depression. It also reveals that a worker’s ability to mobilize resources in emergency, however, increased self-esteem and reduced work related stress. Conclusion: This study shows the pathways through which experience of IPV and WPV lead to development of depressive symptoms among female garment workers. The link between women’s ability to mobilize resources with self-esteem and work related stress indicates the need for socio-economic empowerment of women and may suggest that combined intervention to address IPV and women’s empowerment could be successful in dealing with WPV and mental health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study presents first test results of a new performance-based, psychomotor method to measure anger expression and control, based on voice expression and physical force production in directional movement of arms and legs, called the Method of Stamp Strike Shout (MSSS). Recorded are the standardized impact of stamping on a force plate, hitting a punching bag, and the amplitude of shouting in a microphone at various force levels. The premise is, that these body behaviours stand for the ‘urge to act or shout’ that belongs to anger-related emotions. The MSSS is meant to be applied in addition to potentially biased self-report questionnaires and has been designed for diagnostic as well as therapeutic purposes in clinical practice. First, this paper focusses on the instrumentation, internal structure and reliability of the MSSS. An explorative study in a student sample (n = 104) shows correlation patterns between increasing and decreasing levels of force production within each subtest (Stamp, Strike and Shout) and between the three subtests. We found excellent internal consistency of the three subtests and high test-retest reliability. The parameters of increasing and decreasing force levels form the slopes of what we call a force pyramid. To adjust for the clustering within persons, aggregated outcomes were calculated: sum scores per subtest as an indication of total force produced, two linear contrast scores to indicate the rate of increase / decrease, and two quadratic contrast scores as measures of the curvature of the slopes. On all subtests, all aggregated scores showed differences between men and women, also when controlled for weight. To test the validity of the MSSS, the second part of the paper examines the relationship between force parameters and anger coping style, measured by the Self-Expression and Control Scale (SECS). The results suggest that the Shout subtest was the most sensitive indicator for anger coping style, showing negative correlations with Anger In, for women as well as men. For women, higher amplitude was also associated with higher Anger Out and lower amplitude with higher Anger Control. The Stamp subtest showed weak positive correlations with the Anger In subscales, whereas no correlations were found on the Strike subtest. Further, a more robust comparison was made between two groups of participants who reported to have an internalizing versus an externalizing anger coping style. Results indicated that internalizing women as well as men used less force than externalizing participants on all three subtests, especially on the Shout subtest. This was confirmed by lower mean sum scores on the Shout subtest for internalizing women compared with externalizing women. No differences in linear contrast scores were shown between internalizing and externalizing participants. The quadratic contrast scores suggested differences of the curvation of the slopes between women with more or less anger control when stamping, and men with more or less anger control when striking. As this is an explorative study, findings should be interpreted with caution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Food safety is a global public health issue, which often arises from asymmetric information between consumers and suppliers. With the development of information technology in human life, building a food traceability information sharing platform is viewed as one of the best ways to overcome the trust crisis and resolve the problem of information asymmetry in China. However, among the myriad information available from the food supply chain, there is a lack of knowledge on consumer preference. Based on the best-worst scaling approach, this paper investigated consumer preferences for vegetable, pork, and dairy product traceability information. Specifically, this paper measured the relative importance that consumers place on the traceable information. The results indicate that consumers have varying priorities for information in different cases. “Pesticide/veterinary use,” “picking/slaughtering date,” and “fertilizer/feed use” are the most preferred traceable information for Chinese consumers in the case of vegetables, while “picking/slaughtering date” and “history of illness and taking protective measures” are the most preferred information in the case of pork. In the case of dairy products, consumers prefer “processing information,” “environmental information of the origin,” and “traceable tag certification information” most. The results of this study call for the direct involvement of the Chinese government in the food safety information sharing system as following. First, given consumers’ diverse preferences, different types of traceable information should be recorded into the information sharing platform depending on food types. Second, the government could promote the step-by-step construction of such a platform based on the priority of consumers’ preferences. Third, new technology should be applied to guarantee the reliability of traceable information. Finally, local preferences in terms of the way consumers receive and understand information should be taken into consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses text data mining to identify long-term developments in tourism academic research from the perspectives of thematic focus, geography, and gender of tourism authorship. Abstracts of papers published in the period of 1970–2017 in high-ranking tourist journals were extracted from the Scopus database and served as data source for the analysis. Fourteen subject areas were identified using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) text mining approach. LDA integrated with GIS information allowed to obtain geography distribution and trends of scholarly output, while probabilistic methods of gender identification based on social network data mining were used to track gender dynamics with sufficient confidence. The findings indicate that, while all 14 topics have been prominent from the inception of tourism studies to the present day, the geography of scholarship has notably expanded and the share of female authorship has increased through time and currently almost equals that of male authorship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract The present paper seeks to find a notionally neat category for the pragmatic idiom That's what she said. While this may seem like a trivial goal at first glance, this paper will systematically uncarve the internal and contextual complexities of this formula and the challenges entailed in this aim. While That's what she said merges features and functions that have been defined and labelled by scholars of Pragmatics, Cognition and Psychology as well as the highly interdisciplinary field of Humor Studies, these approaches have not been sufficiently aligned. The present discussion thus forms part of a larger-scale issue, i.e. that humor-related utterances on the one hand and aspects and frameworks of formulaic speech on the other hand have so far not explicitly been brought together. The present paper aspires to do exactly that, putting forth an extended formulaic continuum that does not only fit That's what she said in particular, but potentially other similar formulae that may not yet have been assigned their place on e.g. Kecskés's continuum in its present form and scope either (2000, 2003, 2010, 2013). The present paper therefore proposes the new notion of Isolated Formulaic Punchlines for such formulae, acknowledging their supposedly incoherent or isolated occurrence in the discourse, their formulaic makeup and their humorous potential. Highlights • This paper deals with the That's what she said , a pragmatic idiom which has so far hardly received any attention. • An extended formulaic continuum is proposed offering classificational space for That's what she said. • The notion Isolated Formulaic Punchline is introduced as an additional subcategory to pragmatic idioms. • This is done so to ultimately bridge the gap between the state-of-the-art formulaic framework by Kecskés on the one and the wide range of formulaic verbal humor strategies on the other hand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents vehicle-to-vehicle telescreen (VVT) and a multicast scheme to disseminate digital signage multimedia services to vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). Multimedia dissemination in VANETs is challenging because of the high packet losses (PLs), delays and longer disconnection times, which degrade the network quality of service (QoS) and user quality of experience (QoE). To reduce the PLs and delays, most existing multimedia multicast schemes in VANETs primarily select routes based on longer route expiration times (RET) or lowest path delays. The RET-based schemes suffer less from PLs when there are fewer active multicastings in the network. When the number of active multicastings increases, delay-based schemes suffer less from PLs comparatively. This tradeoff implies to design an adaptive mechanism by mutually complementing the RET-based and delay-based schemes to reduce PLs and delays. In this paper, we propose a multicriteria adaptive opportunistic treecast routing protocol (MAOTRP), which adapts the route selection mechanism according to active multicastings for efficient multimedia dissemination in VVT. The MAOTRP adjusts the weights of route selection parameters, including RET and delays, by considering their contribution in improving packet delivery ratio. MAOTRP extends a tree-based multicast protocol to provide robustness through alternate routes for link failures to reduce PLs. Through several experimental evaluations, we show that the proposed dissemination scheme improves QoS and QoE, and reduces the average disconnection time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: There is a need for structure to achieve functional patient engagement within mental healthcare organizations, and for clarification on how to proceed on a strategic level. The aim of this paper is to shed light on the implementation of a strategic organizational structure for patient engagement in mental health by examining why and how to implement a structure, the organizational and environmental factors that facilitate or limit the process, and the perceived consequences of the implementation. Method: This paper evaluates the implementation of a strategic committee for patient engagement in a mental healthcare organization in Montreal (Quebec, Canada). The research was designed as a qualitative single case study using a deductive approach by means of a conceptual framework. Data sources consisted in ten semi-structured interviews, three focus groups, and organizational documents. Results: The strategic committee for patient engagement was implemented as a means to formalize patient partner participation, following the introduction of a vision of full citizenship. Important aspects of its implementation included its composition and role, the elaboration of a framework for patient partner participation, and finally, ongoing application and evaluation of the framework. Several facilitating factors were identified, including executive management support, leadership, and a vision behind the participation. Limiting factors mainly consisted of resistance towards patient participation and the existence of stigma. Consequences included increased and improved patient engagement, as well as reduced stigma within the organization. Conclusion: This study shows that the implementation of a strategic organizational structure for patient engagement is comprehensive. It further shows the importance of a vision and an articulate leadership involving several actors. Further research is needed regarding the impact of this type of strategic structure on a clinical level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In clinical neuropsychology the cognitive abilities of neurological patients are commonly estimated using well-established paper-based tests. Typically, scores on some tests remain relatively well preserved, whilst others exhibit a significant and disproportionate decline. Scores on those tests that measure preserved cognitive functions (so-called ‘hold’ tests) may be used to estimate premorbid abilities, including scores in non-hold tests that would have been expected prior to the onset of cognitive impairment. Many hold tests entail word reading, with each word being graded as correctly or incorrectly pronounced. Inevitably, such tests are likely to contain words that provide little or no diagnostic power (i.e., can be eliminated without negatively affecting prediction accuracy). In this paper, a genetic algorithm is developed and demonstrated, using n = 92 neurologically healthy participants, to identify optimal word subsets from the National Adult Reading Test that minimize the mean error in predicting the most widely used clinical measure of IQ and cognitive ability, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale Fourth Edition IQ. In addition to requiring only 17–20 of the original 50 words (suggesting that this test could be revised to be up to 66% shorter) and minimizing mean prediction error, the algorithm increases the proportion of the variance in the predicted variable explained in comparison to using all words (from r2 = 0.46 to r2 = 0.61). In a clinical setting this would improve estimates of premorbid cognitive function and, if an abbreviated revision to this test were to be adopted, reduce the arduousness of the test for patients. The proposed method is evaluated with jackknifing and leave one out cross validation. The general approach may be used to optimize the relationship between any two psychological tests by finding the question subset in one test that minimizes the prediction error in a second test by training the genetic algorithm using data collected from participants upon whom both tests have been administered. This approach may also be used to develop new predictive tests, since it provides a method to identify an optimal subset of a set of candidate questions (for which empirical data have been collected) that maximizes prediction accuracy and the proportion of variance in the predicted variable that can be explained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ratings are present in many areas of assessment including peer review of research proposals and journal articles, teacher observations, university admissions and selection of new hires. One feature present in any rating process with multiple raters is that different raters often assign different scores to the same assessee, with the potential for bias and inconsistencies related to rater or assessee covariates. This paper analyzes disparities in ratings of internal and external applicants to teaching positions using applicant data from Spokane Public Schools. We first test for biases in rating while accounting for measures of teacher applicant qualifications and quality. Then, we develop model-based inter-rater reliability (IRR) estimates that allow us to account for various sources of measurement error, the hierarchical structure of the data, and to test whether covariates, such as applicant status, moderate IRR. We find that applicants external to the district receive lower ratings for job applications compared to internal applicants. This gap in ratings remains significant even after including measures of qualifications and quality such as experience, state licensure scores, or estimated teacher value added. With model-based IRR, we further show that consistency between raters is significantly lower when rating external applicants. We conclude the paper by discussing policy implications and possible applications of our model-based IRR estimate for hiring and selection practices in and out of the teacher labor market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To explore intersections of social determinants of maternal healthcare utilization using the Classification and Regression Trees (CART) algorithm which is a machine-learning method used to construct prediction models. Methods: Institutional review board approval for this study was granted from Public Health Service—Ethical Review Board (PHS-ERB) and from the Health Ministry Screening Committee (HMSC) facilitated by Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR). IRB review and approval for the current analyses was obtained from University of California, San Diego. Cross-sectional data were collected from women with children aged 0–11 months (n = 5,565) from rural households in 25 districts of Uttar Pradesh, India. Participants were surveyed on maternal healthcare utilization including registration of pregnancy (model-1), receipt of antenatal care (ANC) during pregnancy (model-2), and delivery at health facilities (model -3). Social determinants of health including wealth, social group, literacy, religion, and early age at marriage were captured during the survey. The Classification and Regression Tree (CART) algorithm was used to explore intersections of social determinants of healthcare utilization. Results: CART analyses highlight the intersections, particularly of wealth and literacy, in maternal healthcare utilization in Uttar Pradesh. Model-1 documents that women who are poorer, illiterate and Muslim are less likely to have their pregnancies registered (71.4% vs. 86.0% in the overall sample). Model-2 documents that poorer, illiterate women had the lowest ANC coverage (37.7% vs 45% in the overall sample). Model-3, developed for deliveries at health facilities, highlighted that illiterate and poor women have the lowest representation among facility deliveries (59.6% vs. 69% in the overall sample). Conclusion: This paper explores the interactions between determinants of maternal healthcare utilization indicators. The findings in this paper highlights that the interaction of wealth and literacy can play a very strong role in accentuating or diminishing healthcare utilization among women. The study also reveals that religion and women’s age at marriage also interact with wealth and literacy to create substantial disparities in utilization. The study provides insights into the effect of intersections of determinants, and highlights the importance of using a more nuanced understanding of the impact of co-occurring forms of marginalization to effectively tackle inequities in healthcare utilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a computer model of information behavior to study information security professionals and an architecture, which mimics the way our brain learns new concepts to simulate this behavior computationally. Used to represent and describe any domain of knowledge, ontologies may be used to study human information behavior and show some of the concepts and relationships involved in this field of knowledge. A deep knowledge of the core concepts underpinning this field can provide us with a solid basis for constructing a model. Computer-programming tools can be used not only to capture the ideas that make up this field of Knowledge but can also simulate the human information behavior. The use of computers also allows us to crawl data over the Internet and process large amounts of them in order to find patterns with some specific characteristics. In the paper, we also present the current state of this research and the challenges of the model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]