Establishing School Counselors as Leaders in Bullying Curriculum Delivery: Evaluation of a Brief, School-Wide Bystander Intervention

The authors evaluated a brief, school-wide bystander bullying intervention (STAC) designed to establish school counselors as leaders in curriculum delivery. Elementary school students trained in the program reported an increase in perceived knowledge and confidence to act as “defenders,” utilizing the STAC strategies when they observed bullying, and a decrease in bullying victimization and perpetration at a 4-month follow-up. We discuss implications for school counselors

Comparison and Mapping Facilitate Relation Discovery and Predication

Relational concepts play a central role in human perception and cognition, but little is known about how they are acquired. For example, how do we come to understand that physical force is a higher-order multiplicative relation between mass and acceleration, or that two circles are the same-shape in the same way that two squares are? A recent model of relational learning, DORA (Discovery of Relations by Analogy; Doumas, Hummel & Sandhofer, 2008), predicts that comparison and analogical mapping play a central role in the discovery and predication of novel higher-order relations. We report two experiments testing and confirming this prediction

Evaluation of a Program Designed to Increase Retention in Counselor Education: Reaching Year Two

Student retention is a key issue in maintaining academic programs’ viability. This study evaluated a program designed to increase retention for first year Masters in Counseling students (N = 44). The program consisted of a series of activities developed to increase social integration with both students and faculty. Results of this study indicated that students in the cohort who participated in the program reported higher retention rates than students in the control cohort. Findings suggest that implementing a program designed to increase social integration may be a promising approach to retaining first year students in Counselor Education (CE) programs

Storytelling with objects to explore digital archives

Finding media in archives is difficult while storytelling with photos can be fun and supports memory retrieval. Could the search for media become a natural part of the storytelling experience? This study investigates spatial interactions with objects as a means to encode information for retrieval while being embedded in the story flow. An experiment is carried out in which participants watch a short video and re-tell the story using cards each of which shows a character or object occurring in the video. Participants arrange the cards when telling the story. It is analyzed what information interactions with cards carry and how this information relates to the language of storytelling. Most participants align interactions with objects with the sentences of the story while some arrange the cards corresponding to the video scene. Spatial interactions with objects can carry information on their own or complemented by language

Tensors and compositionality in neural systems

Neither neurobiological nor process models of meaning composition specify the operator through which constituent parts are bound together into compositional structures. In this paper, we argue that a neurophysiological computation system cannot achieve the compositionality exhibited in human thought and language if it were to rely on a multiplicative operator to perform binding, as the tensor product (TP)-based systems that have been widely adopted in cognitive science, neuroscience and artificial intelligence do. We show via simulation and two behavioural experiments that TPs violate variable-value independence, but human behaviour does not. Specifically, TPs fail to capture that in the statements fuzzy cactus and fuzzy penguin, both cactus and penguin are predicated by fuzzy(x) and belong to the set of fuzzy things, rendering these arguments similar to each other. Consistent with that thesis, people judged arguments that shared the same role to be similar, even when those arguments themselves (e.g., cacti and penguins) were judged to be dissimilar when in isolation. By contrast, the similarity of the TPs representing fuzzy(cactus) and fuzzy(penguin) was determined by the similarity of the arguments, which in this case approaches zero. Based on these results, we argue that neural systems that use TPs for binding cannot approximate how the human mind and brain represent compositional information during processing. We describe a contrasting binding mechanism that any physiological or artificial neural system could use to maintain independence between a role and its argument, a prerequisite for compositionality and, thus, for instantiating the expressive power of human thought and language in a neural system

Non-Invasive Assessment of Micro- and Macrovascular Function after Initiation of JAK Inhibitors in Patients with Rheumatoid Arthritis

Background: Janus kinase (JAK) inhibitors constitute a novel class of oral biologic disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs for patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). However, their use has been associated with increased risk of major cardiovascular events. We investigated whether treatment with JAK inhibitors exerts significant alterations in the micro- and microvasculature in RA patients. Methods: Thirteen patients with RA initiating treatment with JAK inhibitors were prospectively studied. Eventually, data from 11 patients who completed the study were analyzed. Procedures were performed at baseline and 3 months after treatment. Nailfold videocapillaroscopy was applied to detect alterations of the dermal capillary network. Participants underwent 24 h ambulatory blood pressure monitoring (Mobil-O-Graph device) for the assessment of blood pressure (both brachial and aortic) and markers of large artery stiffening [pulse wave velocity (PWV), augmentation index] throughout the whole 24 h and the respective day- and nighttime periods. Carotid intima–media thickness was assessed with ultrasound. Results: Three-month treatment with JAK inhibitors was not associated with any differences in brachial and aortic blood pressure, arterial stiffness, and carotid atherosclerosis, with the only exception of nighttime PWV, which was significantly elevated at follow-up. However, three-month treatment with JAK inhibitors induced significant microvascular alterations and increased the total number of capillaroscopic abnormalities. Conclusions: Three-month treatment with JAK inhibitors may exert significant effects on microcirculation as assessed with nailfold videocapillaroscopy, whereas macrovascular structure and function appears largely unaffected. Further research toward this direction may add substantial information to the available literature regarding cardiovascular aspects of JAK inhibitors in RA

Statin therapy, fitness, and mortality risk in middle-aged hypertensive male veterans

BACKGROUND Hypertension often coexists with dyslipidemia, accentuating cardiovascular risk. Statins are often prescribed in hypertensive individuals to lower cardiovascular risk. Higher fitness is associated with lower mortality, but exercise capacity may be attenuated in hypertension. The combined effects of fitness and statin therapy in hypertensive individuals have not been assessed. Thus, we assessed the combined health benefits of fitness and statin therapy in hypertensive male subjects. METHODS Peak exercise capacity was assessed in 10,202 hypertensive male subjects (mean age = 60.4±10.6 years) in 2 Veterans Affairs Medical Centers. We established 4 fitness categories based on peak metabolic equivalents (METs) achieved and 8 categories based on fitness status and statin therapy. RESULTS During the follow-up period (median = 10.2 years), there were 2,991 deaths. Mortality risk was 34% lower (hazard ratio (HR) = 0.66; 95% confidence interval (CI) = 0.59–0.74; P \u3c 0.001) among individuals treated with statins compared with those not on statins. The fitness-related mortality risk association was inverse and graded regardless of statin therapy status. Risk reduction associated with exercise capacity of 5.1–8.4 METs was similar to that observed with statin therapy. However, those achieving ≥8.5 METs had 52% lower risk (HR = 0.48; 95% CI = 0.37–0.63) when compared with the least-fit subjects (≤5 METs) on statin therapy. CONCLUSIONS The combination of statin therapy and higher fitness lowered mortality risk in hypertensive individuals more effectively than either alone. The risk reduction associated with moderate increases in fitness was similar to that achieved by statin therapy. Higher fitness was associated with 52% lower mortality risk when compared with the least fit subjects on statin therapy

Microorganisms involved in deep neck infection (DNIs) in Greece: detection, identification and susceptibility to antimicrobials

Background: To determine, from October 2010 to October 2018, the epidemiology of Deep Neck Infections (DNIs), regarding the detection, the identification and the susceptibility to antimicrobials of causative microorganisms, in Thessaly-Central Greece. Methods: An analysis of data from a prospective database was conducted on 610 consecutive patients with DNIs treated in the Otolaryngology / Head & Neck Surgery Department of University Hospital of Larissa. Demographics, clinical features and microbiological data were analyzed. Results: Among the 610 patients (1,9/1 male to female ratio, mean age: 39,24 ± 17,25) with DNIs, 579 had a single space (94,9%), while the remaining 31 had a multi-space (5,1%) DNI. The most common areas affected were the peritonsillar space (84,6%) followed by the submandibular space (6,5%). Clinical samples were obtained from 462 patients, and were tested by culture and by the application of 16S rRNA PCR. Two hundred fifty-five samples (55,2%) gave positive cultures, in which Streptococcus pyogenes and Staphylococcus aureus were predominant. The application of the 16S rRNA PCR revealed that 183 samples (39,6%) were positive for bacterial DNA; 22 of them, culture negative, were found to be positive for anaerobic (Fusobacterium necrophorum, Actinomyces israellii etc) and for fastidious microorganisms (Brucella mellitensis, Mycobacterium avium). Conclusion: DNIs represent a medical and surgical emergency and evidence-guided empirical treatment with intravenous infusion of antibiotics at the time of diagnosis is mandatory, highlighting the importance of epidemiological studies regarding the causative microorganisms. Although, in our study, the predominant pathogens were S. pyogenes and S. aureus, the combination of culture and molecular assay revealed that anaerobic bacteria play also a significant role in the pathogenesis of DNIs. Based on the local epidemiology, we propose as empirical therapy the intravenous use of a beta-lactam /beta-lactamase inhibitor; metronidazole or clindamycin can be added only in specific cases such as in immunocompromised patients

A mechanism for the cortical computation of hierarchical linguistic structure

Biological systems often detect species-specific signals in the environment. In humans, speech and language are species-specific signals of fundamental biological importance. To detect the linguistic signal, human brains must form hierarchical representations from a sequence of perceptual inputs distributed in time. What mechanism underlies this ability? One hypothesis is that the brain repurposed an available neurobiological mechanism when hierarchical linguistic representation became an efficient solution to a computational problem posed to the organism. Under such an account, a single mechanism must have the capacity to perform multiple, functionally related computations, e.g., detect the linguistic signal and perform other cognitive functions, while, ideally, oscillating like the human brain. We show that a computational model of analogy, built for an entirely different purpose—learning relational reasoning—processes sentences, represents their meaning, and, crucially, exhibits oscillatory activation patterns resembling cortical signals elicited by the same stimuli. Such redundancy in the cortical and machine signals is indicative of formal and mechanistic alignment between representational structure building and “cortical” oscillations. By inductive inference, this synergy suggests that the cortical signal reflects structure generation, just as the machine signal does. A single mechanism—using time to encode information across a layered network—generates the kind of (de)compositional representational hierarchy that is crucial for human language and offers a mechanistic linking hypothesis between linguistic representation and cortical computatio