Reflective functioning moderates the relationship between childhood trauma and psychopathology among adolescent outpatients

Mentalization has been considered a buffer against psychopathology in individuals exposed to trauma and abuse. The initial research on mentalizazion by Fonagy (1996), as well as subsequent empirical studies (e.g. Borelli, 2015; Chiesa & Fonagy, 2013), highlighted the role of reflective functioning (RF) as a protective factor for individuals exposed to trauma in childhood against maladpative outcomes. In recent years, association between mentalization and early traumatic experiences has gained an increasing interest among clinical and empirical studies. With regard to adolescence, literature on the relationship between traumatic experiences and RF is still scarce. Nonetheless, an evaluation of these adaptive and maladaptive developmental processes could have important clinical implications in adolescence. The aim of this study was to examine the role of RF as a resilience factor against the development of several psychiatric conditions in a sample of N = 60 adolescent outpatients. Participants were recruited in public mental health services. Each patient was evaluated, at the intake, with M.I.N.I. (Sheehan et al. 1994), SCID-II (First et al., 1997) and self-report tests: Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (Bernstein & Fink, 1998), Cambridge Depersonalization Scale (CDS; Sierra & Berrios 2000), Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HAM-D; Hamilton, 1960) and Hamilton Rating Scale for Anxiety (HAM-A; Hamilton 1959). During the first month of treatment the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI, George et al., 1985) was also administered, and the AAI transcripts were assessed with the RF Scale (Fonagy et al., 1998). Findings showed that adverse experiences in childhood predicted several psychopathological dimensions; mostly, RF played as a moderator of the relationship between these variables. The clinical implications of these findings were addressed

SPoT: Representing the Social, Spatial, and Temporal Dimensions of Human Mobility with a Unifying Framework

Modeling human mobility is crucial in the analysis and simulation of opportunistic networks, where contacts are exploited as opportunities for peer-topeer message forwarding. The current approach with human mobility modeling has been based on continuously modifying models, trying to embed in them the mobility properties (e.g., visiting patterns to locations or specific distributions of inter-contact times) as they came up from trace analysis. As a consequence, with these models it is difficult, if not impossible, to modify the features of mobility or to control the exact shape of mobility metrics (e.g., modifying the distribution of inter-contact times). For these reasons, in this paper we propose a mobility framework rather than a mobility model, with the explicit goal of providing a exible and controllable tool for modeling mathematically and generating simulatively different possible features of human mobility. Our framework, named SPoT, is able to incorporate the three dimensions - spatial, social, and temporal - of human mobility. The way SPoT does it is by mapping the different social communities of the network into different locations, whose members visit with a configurable temporal pattern. In order to characterize the temporal patterns of user visits to locations and the relative positioning of locations based on their shared users, we analyze the traces of real user movements extracted from three location-based online social networks (Gowalla, Foursquare, and Altergeo). We observe that a Bernoulli process effectively approximates user visits to locations in the majority of cases and that locations that share many common users visiting them frequently tend to be located close to each other. In addition, we use these traces to test the exibility of the framework, and we show that SPoT is able to accurately reproduce the mobility behavior observed in traces. Finally, relying on the Bernoulli assumption for arrival processes, we provide a throughout mathematical analysis of the controllability of the framework, deriving the conditions under which heavy-tailed and exponentially-tailed aggregate inter-contact times (often observed in real traces) emerge

Influence of the anodizing process variables on the acidic properties of anodic alumina films

In the present work, the effect of the different variables involved in the process of aluminum anodizing on the total surface acidity of the samples obtained was studied. Aluminum foils were treated by the electro-chemical process of anodic anodizing within the following variable ranges: concentration=1.5-2.5 M; temperature=303-323 K; voltage=10-20 V; time=30-90 min. The total acidity of the samples was characterized by two different methods: acid-base titration using Hammet indicators and potentiometric titration. The results showed that anodizing time, temperature and concentration were the main variables that determined the surface acid properties of the samples, and to a lesser extent voltage. Acidity increased with increasing concentration of the electrolytic bath, whereas the rest of the variables had the opposite effect. Theresults obtained provide a novel tool for variable selection in order to use synthetized materials as catalytic supports, adding to previous research based on the morphology of alumina layers.Fil: Boldrini, Diego Emmanuel. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Bahía Blanca. Planta Piloto de Ingeniería Química. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Planta Piloto de Ingeniería Química; ArgentinaFil: Yañez, Maria Julia. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Bahía Blanca; ArgentinaFil: Tonetto, Gabriela Marta. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Bahía Blanca. Planta Piloto de Ingeniería Química. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Planta Piloto de Ingeniería Química; Argentin

Social-aware Opportunistic Routing Protocol based on User's Interactions and Interests

Nowadays, routing proposals must deal with a panoply of heterogeneous devices, intermittent connectivity, and the users' constant need for communication, even in rather challenging networking scenarios. Thus, we propose a Social-aware Content-based Opportunistic Routing Protocol, SCORP, that considers the users' social interaction and their interests to improve data delivery in urban, dense scenarios. Through simulations, using synthetic mobility and human traces scenarios, we compare the performance of our solution against other two social-aware solutions, dLife and Bubble Rap, and the social-oblivious Spray and Wait, in order to show that the combination of social awareness and content knowledge can be beneficial when disseminating data in challenging networks

Anna Banti and Virginia Woolf: A Grammar of Responsibility

This paper considers the dialogue that Anna Banti establishes with two female artists, two of her elders and models: the writer Virginia Woolf, and the Renaissance painter Artemisia Gentileschi. But first, let me set the scene – two scenes in fact, striking in their contrast, haunting in their combination. The first is the beginning of Banti’s Artemisia (1947): it is 1944 and the narrator – a projection of Banti herself – is sitting in her nightgown on the ground in the Giardino de’ Boboli, in Florence, where she has taken refuge having escaped the destruction of her home; she hears a voice: ‘non piangere,’ ‘don’t cry.’ The Allied troops were entering Florence, the German army were leaving, blowing up bridges before abandoning the town, and the narrator’s home, her possessions, her nearly completed manuscript of Artemisia Gentileschi were lost under the rubble. The voice that chides and comforts her is Artemisia’s, a painter from three centuries earlier who was raped as a young woman, denounced her rapist in a trial, had to undergo torture to prove that she was telling the truth, was subjected to the humiliation of a gynaecological examination in the court to prove that she had lost her virginity to the rapist, and who went on to become a famous painter, controversial and defiant in her life, sought after by patrons and pupils

Automatic best wireless network selection based on key performance indicators

Introducing cognitive mechanisms at the application layer may lead to the possibility of an automatic selection of the wireless network that can guarantee best perceived experience by the final user. This chapter investigates this approach based on the concept of Quality of Experience (QoE), by introducing the use of application layer parameters, namely Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). KPIs are defined for different traffic types based on experimental data. A model for an ap- plication layer cognitive engine is presented, whose goal is to identify and select, based on KPIs, the best wireless network among available ones. An experimenta- tion for the VoIP case, that foresees the use of the One-way end-to-end delay (OED) and the Mean Opinion Score (MOS) as KPIs is presented. This first implementation of the cognitive engine selects the network that, in that specific instant, offers the best QoE based on real captured data. To our knowledge, this is the first example of a cognitive engine that achieves best QoE in a context of heterogeneous wireless networks