Stress reducing effects of real and artificial nature in a hospital waiting room

Objectives: This field study investigated the potential stress-reducing effects of exposure to real or artificial nature on patients in a hospital waiting room. Additionally, it was investigated whether perceived attractiveness of the room could explain these effects. Design: In this between-patients experimental design, patients were exposed to one of the following: real plants, posters of plants, or no nature (control). These conditions were alternately applied to two waiting rooms. Location: The location of this study was two waiting rooms at the Radiology Department of a Dutch hospital. Subjects: The subjects comprised 457 patients (60% female and 40% male) who were mostly scheduled for echocardiogram, dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry, magnetic resonance imaging, computed tomography scans, or nuclear research. Results: Patients exposed to real plants, as well as patients exposed to posters of plants, report lower levels of experienced stress compared to the control condition. Further analyses show that these small but significant effects of exposure to nature are partially mediated by the perceived attractiveness of the waiting room. Conclusions: Natural elements in hospital environments have the potential to reduce patients' feelings of stress. By increasing the attractiveness of the waiting room by adding either real plants or posters of plants, hospitals can create a pleasant atmosphere that positively influences patients' well-being

Mach's Principle and the Origin of Inertia

The current status of Mach's principle is discussed within the context of general relativity. The inertial properties of a particle are determined by its mass and spin, since these characterize the irreducible unitary representations of the inhomogeneous Lorentz group. The origin of the inertia of mass and intrinsic spin are discussed and the inertia of intrinsic spin is studied via the coupling of intrinsic spin with rotation. The implications of spin-rotation coupling and the possibility of history dependence and nonlocality in relativistic physics are briefly mentioned.Comment: 14 pages. Dedicated to Carl Brans in honor of his 80th birthday. To appear in the Brans Festschrift; v2: typo corrected, published in: At the Frontier of Spacetime, edited by T. Asselmeyer-Maluga (Springer, 2016), Chapter 10, pp. 177-18

Further insights into the operation of the Chinese number system: Competing effects of Arabic and Mandarin number formats

Here we report the results of a speeded relative quantity task with Chinese participants. On each trial a single numeral (the probe) was presented and the instructions were to respond as to whether it signified a quantity less than or greater than five (the standard). In separate blocks of trials, the numerals were either presented in Mandarin or in Arabic number formats. In addition to the standard influence of numerical distance, a significant predictor of performance was the degree of physical similarity between the probe and the standard as depicted in Mandarin. Additionally, competing effects of physical similarity, defined in terms of the Arabic number format, were also found. Critically the size of these different effects of physical similarity varied systematically across individuals such that larger effects of one compensated for smaller effects of the other. It is argued that the data favor accounts of processing that assume that different number formats access different format-specific representations of quantities. Moreover, for Chinese participants the default is to translate numerals into a Mandarin format prior to accessing quantity information. The efficacy of this translation process is itself influenced by a competing tendency to carry out a translation into Arabic format

Social robots as psychometric tools for cognitive assessment: a pilot test

Recent research demonstrated the benefits of employing robots as therapeutic assistants and caregivers, but very little is known on the use of robots as a tool for psychological assessment. Socially capable robots can provide many advantages to diagnostic practice: engage people, guarantee standardized administration and assessor neutrality, perform automatic recording of subject behaviors for further analysis by practitioners. In this paper, we present a pilot study on testing people’s cognitive functioning via social interaction with a humanoid robot. To this end, we programmed a social robot to administer a psychometric tool for detecting Mild Cognitive Impairment, a risk factor for dementia, implementing the first prototype of robotic assistant for mass screening of elderly population. Finally, we present a pilot test of the robotic procedure with healthy adults that show promising results of the robotic test, also compared to its traditional paper version

First report of generalized face processing difficulties in möbius sequence.

Reverse simulation models of facial expression recognition suggest that we recognize the emotions of others by running implicit motor programmes responsible for the production of that expression. Previous work has tested this theory by examining facial expression recognition in participants with Möbius sequence, a condition characterized by congenital bilateral facial paralysis. However, a mixed pattern of findings has emerged, and it has not yet been tested whether these individuals can imagine facial expressions, a process also hypothesized to be underpinned by proprioceptive feedback from the face. We investigated this issue by examining expression recognition and imagery in six participants with Möbius sequence, and also carried out tests assessing facial identity and object recognition, as well as basic visual processing. While five of the six participants presented with expression recognition impairments, only one was impaired at the imagery of facial expressions. Further, five participants presented with other difficulties in the recognition of facial identity or objects, or in lower-level visual processing. We discuss the implications of our findings for the reverse simulation model, and suggest that facial identity recognition impairments may be more severe in the condition than has previously been noted

Impact of COVID-19 pandemic on eye cancer care in United Kingdom

The COVID-19 pandemic has had an unprecedented impact on the National Health Service in United Kingdom. The UK Ocular Oncology Services evaluated the impact on the adult eye cancer care in the UK. All four adult Ocular Oncology centres participated in a multicentre retrospective review comparing uveal melanoma referral patterns and treatments in a 4-month period during the national lockdown and first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 with corresponding periods in previous 2 years. During the national lockdown, referral numbers and confirmed uveal melanoma cases reduced considerably, equalling to ~120 fewer diagnosed uveal melanoma cases compared to previous 2 years. Contrary to the recent trend, increased caseloads of enucleation and stereotactic radiosurgery (p > 0.05), in comparison to fewer proton beam therapy (p < 0.05), were performed. In the 4-month period following lockdown, there was a surge in clinical activities with more advanced diseases (p < 0.05) presenting to the services. As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to mount pressure and reveal its hidden impact on the eye cancer care, it is imperative for the Ocular Oncology Services to plan recovery strategies and innovative ways of working

Asymmetric WIMP dark matter

In existing dark matter models with global symmetries the relic abundance of dark matter is either equal to that of anti-dark matter (thermal WIMP), or vastly larger, with essentially no remaining anti-dark matter (asymmetric dark matter). By exploring the consequences of a primordial asymmetry on the coupled dark matter and anti-dark matter Boltzmann equations we find large regions of parameter space that interpolate between these two extremes. Interestingly, this new asymmetric WIMP framework can accommodate a wide range of dark matter masses and annihilation cross sections. The present-day dark matter population is typically asymmetric, but only weakly so, such that indirect signals of dark matter annihilation are not completely suppressed. We apply our results to existing models, noting that upcoming direct detection experiments will constrain a large region of the relevant parameter space.Comment: 32 pages, 6 figures, updated references, updated XENON100 bounds, typo in figure caption correcte

Testing the theory of immune selection in cancers that break the rules of transplantation

Modification of cancer cells likely to reduce their immunogenicity, including loss or down-regulation of MHC molecules, is now well documented and has become the main support for the concept of immune surveillance. The evidence that these modifications, in fact, result from selection by the immune system is less clear, since the possibility that they may result from reorganized metabolism associated with proliferation or from cell de-differentiation remains. Here, we (a) survey old and new transplantation experiments that test the possibility of selection and (b) survey how transmissible tumours of dogs and Tasmanian devils provide naturally evolved tests of immune surveillance

The level set method for the two-sided eigenproblem

We consider the max-plus analogue of the eigenproblem for matrix pencils Ax=lambda Bx. We show that the spectrum of (A,B) (i.e., the set of possible values of lambda), which is a finite union of intervals, can be computed in pseudo-polynomial number of operations, by a (pseudo-polynomial) number of calls to an oracle that computes the value of a mean payoff game. The proof relies on the introduction of a spectral function, which we interpret in terms of the least Chebyshev distance between Ax and lambda Bx. The spectrum is obtained as the zero level set of this function.Comment: 34 pages, 4 figures. Changes with respect to the previous version: we explain relation to mean-payoff games and discrete event systems, and show that the reconstruction of spectrum is pseudopolynomia

Constraining noncommutative field theories with holography

An important window to quantum gravity phenomena in low energy noncommutative (NC) quantum field theories (QFTs) gets represented by a specific form of UV/IR mixing. Yet another important window to quantum gravity, a holography, manifests itself in effective QFTs as a distinct UV/IR connection. In matching these two principles, a useful relationship connecting the UV cutoff $\Lambda_{\rm UV}$, the IR cutoff $\Lambda_{\rm IR}$ and the scale of noncommutativity $\Lambda_{\rm NC}$, can be obtained. We show that an effective QFT endowed with both principles may not be capable to fit disparate experimental bounds simultaneously, like the muon $g-2$ and the masslessness of the photon. Also, the constraints from the muon $g-2$ preclude any possibility to observe the birefringence of the vacuum coming from objects at cosmological distances. On the other hand, in NC theories without the UV completion, where the perturbative aspect of the theory (obtained by truncating a power series in $\Lambda_{\rm NC}^{-2}$) becomes important, a heuristic estimate of the region where the perturbative expansion is well-defined $E/ \Lambda_{\rm NC} \lesssim 1$, gets affected when holography is applied by providing the energy of the system $E$ a $\Lambda_{\rm NC}$-dependent lower limit. This may affect models which try to infer the scale $\Lambda_{\rm NC}$ by using data from low-energy experiments.Comment: 4 pages, version to be published in JHE