Bringing books back: enhancing the understanding of psychotherapy in psychology students through book club participation

Background: The experiential and reflective nature of psychotherapeutic training is not always captured in undergraduate psychology teaching, therefore, there is a need for educational strategies that provide opportunities for deeper understanding of the therapeutic process. Objective: This article evaluates one such strategy—A Book Club, to support the understanding of psychotherapeutic practice and mental health in Psychology undergraduate students at a private university in Dubai, UAE. Method: Psychotherapy-related books were assigned as prior reading each month, which were then discussed in the group meetings facilitated by clinically experienced Psychology lecturers. Fifteen semi-structured interviews were carried out with students and analyzed using thematic analysis. Results: Four primary themes were generated—(1) Diversity in perspectives, (2) Autonomous learning environment, (3) Reality orientation, and (4) Sparking self-insight. The results highlight that Book Clubs are useful in fostering deeper conceptualizations of the therapeutic relationship, visualizing future careers in psychotherapy, and promoting self-awareness among students. Conclusion: Discussions centred around books can provide students with discourse opportunities that enhance students’ interpersonal skills and improve student engagement. Teaching Implication: Book clubs can be a useful platform for teachers to help students connect the knowledge that they have previously acquired in the classroom with real-life experiences of psychotherapists described in books

Exploring media-induced secondary trauma during COVID-19: A global perspective

Aims: Given the risk of developing vicarious trauma through news media has increased during the pandemic, we explored risk factors associated with media induced secondary trauma, and its behavioral and psychological implications. Methods: An international study (N = 1066), with a diverse sample, was administered in July 2020. We used standardized and validated questionnaires to measure news consumption, media-related trauma, compliance, and paranoia. Results: Greater frequency of news consumption, accessing news via social media and WHO, and believing in conspiracy theories increased likelihood of developing media-induced secondary trauma. News related trauma was associated with greater compliance with safety measures and increased paranoid ideation. Media-trauma however exhibited a greater association with paranoia than compliance. Conclusion: Findings highlight the need to facilitate a collaborative intervention, with public, media houses, health safety officials, and social scientists to have a deeper understanding of potential psychological costs of news consumption patterns

Second-order Democratic Aggregation

Aggregated second-order features extracted from deep convolutional networks have been shown to be effective for texture generation, fine-grained recognition, material classification, and scene understanding. In this paper, we study a class of orderless aggregation functions designed to minimize interference or equalize contributions in the context of second-order features and we show that they can be computed just as efficiently as their first-order counterparts and they have favorable properties over aggregation by summation. Another line of work has shown that matrix power normalization after aggregation can significantly improve the generalization of second-order representations. We show that matrix power normalization implicitly equalizes contributions during aggregation thus establishing a connection between matrix normalization techniques and prior work on minimizing interference. Based on the analysis we present {\gamma}-democratic aggregators that interpolate between sum ({\gamma}=1) and democratic pooling ({\gamma}=0) outperforming both on several classification tasks. Moreover, unlike power normalization, the {\gamma}-democratic aggregations can be computed in a low dimensional space by sketching that allows the use of very high-dimensional second-order features. This results in a state-of-the-art performance on several datasets

Seismic Stability and Rehabilitation Analysis of a Hydraulic Fill Dam

This paper focuses on the seismic stability analysis of a hydraulic fill dam built in the mid-1920’s. The material properties of the dam were characterized using data from soil borings, standard penetration, cone penetration and shear wave velocity tests. An effective stress analysis approach was used for the analysis. A finite difference code, Fast Lagrangian Analysis of Continua (FLAG), provided static and dynamic shear stresses, excess pore water pressures, and deformations. The results obtained from the effective stress analyses are compared to the results of liquefaction potential analyses based on SPT and CPT data. For seismic excitation, a real acceleration-time history and a sinusoidal wave with the same peak ground acceleration are applied to the dam. In addition, constructing a berm to the downstream slope of the dam and increasing the freeboard by lowering the water level in the reservoir are modeled and analyzed as two different rehabilitation alternatives. The analysis revealed the following: 1) Limited liquefaction in the core of the dam would take place under the conditions modeled. 2) The dam would exhibit larger deformations under sinusoidal wave condition, as compared to the real acceleration - time history. 3) Both of the remediation techniques would significantly improve seismic stability of the dam

Wall mediated transport in confined spaces: Exact theory for low density

We present a theory for the transport of molecules adsorbed in slit and cylindrical nanopores at low density, considering the axial momentum gain of molecules oscillating between diffuse wall reflections. Good agreement with molecular dynamics simulations is obtained over a wide range of pore sizes, including the regime of single-file diffusion where fluid-fluid interactions are shown to have a negligible effect on the collective transport coefficient. We show that dispersive fluid-wall interactions considerably attenuate transport compared to classical hard sphere theory

Ligand Exchange Reactions in Some Pentaamminecobalt(III) Complexes

966-96

Dissolution and permeation characteristics of artemether tablets formulated with two gums of different surface activity

Purpose: To evaluate the dissolution and permeation characteristics of artemether tablets formulated with cashew and prosopis gums, and compare with tablets prepared with acacia gum.Methods: Artemether tablets containing varying concentrations (1.0 to 4.0 %w/w) of cashew and prosopis gums or 3 %w/w of acacia (control) gum as binders were formulated by wet granulation method. The tablets were evaluated for crushing strength, friability and disintegration time. Dissolution and permeation characteristics of the formulations were studied using USP methods.Results: Tablets formulated with prosopis gum had higher crushing strength, higher friability and higher disintegration time compared to those of cashew gum at corresponding binder concentrations. Tablets formulated with 3 %w/w cashew gum exhibited complete drug release within 1 h, 95 % drug permeation in 188 min (in simulated gastric fluid [SGF]) and 95 % permeation in 224 min (under simulated intestinal fluid [SIF] condition) while those made with 3 %w/w prosopis gum exhibited 70.7 % drug release in 1 h, 95 % permeation in 135 min (in SGF) and 95 % permeation in 170 min (under SIF condition).Conclusion: Cashew gum is effective as a binder over a relatively wide range of concentrations to achieve fast drug release though with minimal permeation enhancement while prosopis gum is characterized by delayed drug release but enhanced permeation of the released drug.Keywords: Cashew gum, Acacia, Prosopis, Artemether, Drug release, Dissolution, Permeatio

Astrophysical constraints on unparticle-inspired models of gravity

We use stellar dynamics arguments to constrain the relevant parameters of ungravity inspired models. We show that resulting bounds do constrain the parameters of the theory of unparticles, as far as its energy scale satisfies the condition $\Lambda \geq 1 TeV$ and $d$ is close to unity.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Tri-n-butylphosphate Solvent System: Mechanism of Solvolytic & Substitution Reactions in Tri-n-burylphosphate

379-38

CHIANTI - an Atomic Database for Emission Lines. Paper VI: Proton Rates and Other Improvements

The CHIANTI atomic database contains atomic energy levels, wavelengths, radiative transition probabilities and electron excitation data for a large number of ions of astrophysical interest. Version 4 has been released, and proton excitation data is now included, principally for ground configuration levels that are close in energy. The fitting procedure for excitation data, both electrons and protons, has been extended to allow 9 point spline fits in addition to the previous 5 point spline fits. This allows higher quality fits to data from close-coupling calculations where resonances can lead to significant structure in the Maxwellian-averaged collision strengths. The effects of photoexcitation and stimulated emission by a blackbody radiation field in a spherical geometry on the level balance equations of the CHIANTI ions can now be studied following modifications to the CHIANTI software. With the addition of H I, He I and N I, the first neutral species have been added to CHIANTI. Many updates to existing ion data-sets are described, while several new ions have been added to the database, including Ar IV, Fe VI and Ni XXI. The two-photon continuum is now included in the spectral synthesis routines, and a new code for calculating the relativistic free-free continuum has been added. The treatment of the free-bound continuum has also been updated.Comment: CHIANTI is available at http://wwwsolar.nrl.navy.mil/chianti.htm