'What do they tell their friends?' - Intimacy and self-disclosure in young children's friendships

The research investigated the development of verbal intimacy in young children's (3.5-6.5 years of age) friendships by measuring their capacity for restrictive self-disclosure (i. e. the greater disclosure of information of highly personal content to friends than other individuals, as opposed to the equal disclosure of information of low personal content to all individuals). Young children's capacity for intimate friendships is ill understood, partly due to limited or unsubstantiated data regarding the types of information that are considered high and low in personal content at this age, as the First Study (N = 110) showed. The Second Study (N = 93) attempted to fill this gap in our knowledge by investigating the sort of information that children consider secret. The results showed that children's ability to differentiate secret and non-secret information increased with age: 4-year-old children could not systematically differentiate secret from non-secret information, 5-year-old children systematically identified information that was not secret but were not consistent in their identification of secret items, while 6-year-old children systematically identified and differentiated secret and non-secret items. However, children of all ages identified as secrets the statements which included a specific cue, such as the word surprise, in their wording. The Third Study (N = 209) investigated whether young children employ the restrictive disclosure-to-friends pattern when revealing the secret pieces of information. Moreover, the study investigated whether specific cues influence young children in applying the restrictive disclosure pattern, and to this effect participants were allocated randomly to either the 'clue condition' group (where they were given a clue that some information might be secret) or the 'no clue condition' group. Children in the 'clue condition' group treated the majority of the statements as secret information and therefore tended to only share it with a friend or with nobody. In contrast, in the `no clue condition' group statistically significant differences were found only in the secret items, suggesting that, when not influenced by an adult, children have the ability to identify highly personal/secret information and to treat it by accordingly applying the restrictive disclosure-to-friends pattern. Taken together, the findings suggest that young children engage in restrictive self-disclosure to friends in some, but not all, circumstances, and thus display signs of verbal intimacy in their friendships.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceAlexandros S. Onassis FoundationGBUnited Kingdo

Implementation of an End-to-End Standards-based Patient Monitoring Solution

A proof-of-concept design of a patient monitoring solution for intensive care unit environments has been presented. It is end-to-end standard-based, using ISO/IEEE 11073 (X73) in the bedside environment and EN13606 to communicate the information to an electronic healthcare record (EHR) server. At the bedside end, the system is a plug-and-play sensor network communicating with a gateway that collects medical information and sends the data to a monitoring server. The monitoring server transforms this information into an EN13606 extract to be stored on the EHR server. The system has been implemented to comply with the last X73 and EN13606 available versions and tested in a laboratory environment to demonstrate the feasibility of an end-to-end standard-based solution

Diet and body constitution in relation to subgroups of breast cancer defined by tumour grade, proliferation and key cell cycle regulators

BACKGROUND: The general lack of clear associations between diet and breast cancer in epidemiological studies may partly be explained by the fact that breast cancer is a heterogeneous disease that may have disparate genetic associations and different aetiological bases. METHOD: A total of 346 incident breast cancers in a prospective cohort of 17,035 women enrolled in the Malmö Diet and Cancer study (Sweden) were subcategorized according to conventional pathology parameters, proliferation and expression of key cell cycle regulators. Subcategories were compared with prediagnostic diet and body measurements using analysis of variance. RESULTS: A large hip circumference and high body mass index were associated with high grade tumours (P = 0.03 and 0.009, respectively), whereas low energy and unadjusted fat intakes were associated with high proliferation (P = 0.03 and 0.004, respectively). Low intakes of saturated, monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fatty acids were also associated with high proliferation (P = 0.02, 0.004 and 0.003, respectively). Low energy and unadjusted fat intakes were associated with cyclin D(1 )overexpression (P = 0.02 and 0.007, respectively), whereas cyclin E overexpression was positively correlated with fat intake. Oestrogen receptor status and expression of the tumour suppressor gene p27 were not associated with either diet or body constitution. CONCLUSION: Low energy and low total fat (polyunsaturated fatty acids in particular) intakes, and high body mass index were associated with relatively more malignant breast tumours. Dietary behaviours and body constitution may be associated with specific types of breast cancer defined by conventional pathology parameters and cyclin D(1 )and cyclin E expression. Further studies including healthy control individuals are needed to confirm our results

Consent and cooperation in the Greek context: Rhetoric and praxis

The core alternative measures in Greece have traditionally been implemented without supervision in the community. Since the early 1990s, however, new community measures have been introduced, following European developments and under the pressure of prison overcrowding. This article examines how issues of consent and cooperation in the supervision of offenders have been addressed in practice in relation to four community measures that are currently available in Greece: treatment interventions for substance abuse offenders, the community service order, the suspended sentence with probation and home detention with electronic monitoring. Different types and scales of approaches in relation to consent and cooperation are observed in different stages of the criminal procedure and between different community measures. An explanation of these variations is proposed with reference to the framework of the different ‘visions’ of community sanctions and measures – managerial, punitive, rehabilitative and reparative. Official language – rhetoric – is utilized in this exploration, while possible further action – praxis – is proposed. © 2014, © The Author(s) 2014

Finding meaning, making links, creating space: an early intervention with children on the autistic spectrum and their families

A novel psychoanalytic intervention with young children on the autistic spectrum is presented, addressing the family as a whole and focusing on the relationships between the family members. The intervention is based on the philosophy of the Tavistock Clinic’s ‘Under Fives Counselling Service’, taking into account the principles of psychoanalytic observation as introduced by Esther Bick, and the tenets which Didier Houzel put forward regarding the work with parents of autistic children. In the paper, the therapeutic journey of young Jason and his family is depicted. The therapists’ primary objective was to establish a cohesive narrative of the story of the family as a whole, and of each member separately. This effort implied, first of all, that their story would become an object of thought. Based on the clinical material presented, it is argued that this type of psychoanalytic intervention offered the family the necessary psychic space to process their fragmented story, to contain life-threatening anxieties and to gradually change their way of functioning and relating to one another. © 2020, © 2020 Association of Child Psychotherapists