Multicomponent positive psychology intervention for health promotion of Brazilian retirees : a quasi-experimental study

This study evaluated the effects and impact of a multicomponent positive psychology program for health promotion of retirees. A quasi-experimental longitudinal design was used, and the baseline and end of intervention evaluations were analyzed. The intervention consisted of six weekly group sessions for 2 h each. Eighty-eight retirees (females = 72) aged 49–86 (M = 65.66, SD = 7.53) from South Brazil took part in the study, 54 (females = 48) in the experimental group (M = 66.37 years old, SD = 7.42), and 34 (females = 24) waitlist controls (M = 64.53 years old, SD = 7.68). The instruments used were a sociodemographic questionnaire and the Brazilian version of the scales: Interpersonal Reactivity Index; 12- item General Health Questionnaire; Life Orientation Test-Revised;14-item Perceived Stress Scale; Resilience Scale; and Satisfaction with Life Scale. Mixed factorial ANOVA models revealed significant decrease in depression and anxiety symptoms and perceived stress levels, whereas improvement in life satisfaction and resilience was detected in the experimental group at the end of the program. No main effect was found for empathy and optimism. Interaction effects yielded significant difference between groups for measures of empathy, optimism, depression, and anxiety symptoms after the program. There was no significant interaction effect for the other outcome variables. The usefulness and applicability of this model of intervention to aid future health practices and policies are discussed. Contextual issues in the fields of health promotion and disease prevention in Brazil are also problematized

Youth well-being in Brazil : an index for cross-regional comparisons

This study constructs three indices to measure how well Brazil's young people are surviving their transition to adulthood. Youth development is difficult to quantify because of the multi-dimensionality of youth behavior. Most monitoring use individual indicators in specific sectors, making it difficult to track overall progress. The study adapts to the Brazilian case a methodology developed by Duke University to measure the well-being of U.S. children and youth. It uses readily available data to construct three indices for each Brazilian state based on 36 indicators encompassing the health, behavior, school performance, institutional connectedness, and socioeconomic conditions. The indices conclude that young people in the states of Santa Catarina and the Federal District are doing particularly well and those in Alagoas and Pernambuco are the worst off. While these rankings are expected to continue into the next generation, young people in other states have a brighter (Espiritu Santo) or more dismal (Rio Grande de Sul, Tocatins) future due to underinvestment in today's children. Still others (Rio de Janeiro) are underutilizing their resources so their young citizens are in a worse situation than they could be if the state were to invest more. The hope is that the methodology can be used in Brazil as it has been used in the United States to estimate the indices annually, thus allowing policymakers, young people, and society to track the well-being of youth in each state over time.Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Adolescent Health,Youth and Governance,Population Policies,Children and Youth

Esquemas Iniciais Desadaptativos como Preditores de Sintomatologia entre Vítimas e Não Vítimas de Violência no Namoro

This study investigated how early maladaptive schemas (EMSs) can predict the development of symptoms of depression, anxiety, and stress in a large sample of dating violence victims.  A total of 525 high school adolescents, aged 14 to19 years old from the metropolitan region of the city of Porto Alegre, Southern Brazil, participated in the study. Participants were divided into two groups: Group of victims of dating violence (n = 396, 60.4% female, M = 16.67 years old, SD = 1.18) and non-victims (n = 129, 52.7% female, M = 16.50 years old, SD = 1.23). The Young Schema Questionnaire for Adolescents – Brief Form, the Conflict in Adolescent Dating Relationships Inventory and the Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale for Adolescents were applied. Results indicated greater endorsement of depression, anxiety and stress symptoms among victims in comparison with non-victims and among girls in comparison with boys. Dating violence victims showed higher scores in Abandonment, Mistrust/Abuse, Entitlement/Grandiosity, Self-Sacrifice, Approval/Recognition seeking, Negativity/Pessimism and Unrelenting Standards/Hypercriticalness schemas, as compared to non-victims. For female adolescents, the multiple regressions pointed out that early maladaptive schemas (EMSs) explained the variance of the depressive (36%), anxiety (28%), and stress symptoms (26%). For males, the multiple regressions indicated that EMSs explained the variance of the depressive (43%), anxiety (38%), and stress symptoms (39%). The results are discussed from the assumptions of Schema Therapy. Implications for public policy and practice are considered.Este estudo investigou como os esquemas iniciais desadaptativos (EIDs) podem predizer o desenvolvimento de sintomas de depressão, ansiedade e estresse em uma aamostra alargada de adolescentes vítimas de violência no namoro. Um total de 525 adolescentes, de 14 a 19 anos de idade, oriundos da região metropolitana de Porto Alegre/RS, participaram no estudo. Os participantes foram divididos em dois grupos:  Grupo de adolescentes vítimas (n = 396 adolescentes, 60,4% do sexo feminino, M = 16,67 anos de idade, DP = 1,18 anos) e não-vítimas (n = 129 adolescentes, 52,7% do sexo feminino, M = 16,50 anos de idade, DP = 1,23 anos). O Questionário de Esquemas para Adolescentes-Forma Breve, o Inventário de Conflitos nas Relações de Namoro na Adolescência e a Escala de Depressão, Ansiedade e Estresse para Adolescentes foram aplicados. Os resultados indicaram maior sintomatologia de depressão, ansiedade e sintomas de estresse entre as vítimas, em comparação com as não vítimas, e entre as meninas vítimas, em comparação com os meninos vítimas. Vítimas de violência no namoro apresentaram significativamente escores mais altos nos EIDs de Abandono, Desconfiança/abuso, Arrogo/grandiosidade, Autossacrifício, Busca por Aprovação, Negativismo/pessimismo e em Padrões Inflexíveis, quando comparadas ao grupo de não-vítimas. Para o grupo de vítimas do sexo feminino, regressões múltiplas indicaram que os EIDs explicam a variância dos sintomas de depressão (36%), ansiedade (28%) e estresse (26%). Para os adolescentes do sexo masculino, os EIDs também explicam a variância dos sintomas de depressão (43%), ansiedade (38%) e estresse (39%). Os resultados são discutidos a partir dos pressupostos da Terapia dos Esquemas. Implicações para políticas públicas e práticas de intervenção são consideradas

Butterfly learning and the diversification of plant leaf shape

Visual cues are important for insects to find flowers and host plants. It has been proposed that the diversity of leaf shape in Passiflora vines could be a result of negative frequency dependent selection driven by visual searching behavior among their butterfly herbivores. Here we tested the hypothesis that Heliconius butterflies use leaf shape as a cue to initiate approach toward a host plant. We first tested for the ability to recognize shapes using a food reward conditioning experiment. Butterflies showed an innate preference for flowers with three and five petals. However, they could be trained to increase the frequency of visits to a non-preferred flower with two petals, indicating an ability to learn to associate shape with a reward. Next we investigated shape learning specifically in the context of oviposition by conditioning females to lay eggs on two shoots associated with different artificial leaf shapes: their own host plant, Passiflora biflora, and a lanceolate non-biflora leaf shape. The conditioning treatment had a significant effect on the approach of butterflies to the two leaf shapes, consistent with a role for shape learning in oviposition behavior. This study is the first to show that Heliconius butterflies use shape as a cue for feeding and oviposition, and can learn shape preference for both flowers and leaves. This demonstrates the potential for Heliconius to drive negative frequency dependent selection on the leaf shape of their Passiflora host plants

Nomi personali femminili a Laterza. Tra vecchie e nuove identità

This paper aims to contribute to ongoing reflections on Italian onomastics. Italian names are changing. According to recent research, the most common male first names of the 1900s are still given to baby boys in the south of Italy, while for the female ones something is changing. People prefer trendier names for baby girls. With this in mind, I began a research project on personal names and naming practices in the towns of the Diocese of Castellaneta, with a special look at those that belong to the “Alta Murgia Tarantina”, starting from Laterza, without forgetting the neighboring towns of Matera and Montescaglioso. This essay presents the first data on the female first names of Laterza, focusing on names that nowadays are very uncommon or, on the contrary, have been given throughout the last century, and last but not least the names that are written in different ways. The main target of the study is to understand the impact of modernity and globalization on the traditional system of choosing a name to honor the family tradition of both parents

ChImp:Visualizing Ontology Changes and their Impact in Protégé

Today, ontologies are an established part of many applications and research. However, ontologies evolve over time, and ontology editors---engineers and domain experts---need to be aware of the consequences of changes while editing. Ontology editors might not be fully aware of how they are influencing consistency, quality, or the structure of the ontology, possibly causing applications to fail. To support editors and increase their sensitivity towards the consequences of their actions, we conducted a user survey to elicit preferences for representing changes, e.g., with ontology metrics such as number of classes and properties. Based on the survey, we developed ChImp---a Protégé plug-in to display information about the impact of changes in real-time. During editing of the ontology, ChImp lists the applied changes, checks and displays the consistency status, and reports measures describing the effect on the structure of the ontology. Akin to software IDEs and integrated testing approaches, we hope that displaying such metrics will help to improve ontology evolution processes in the long run

Towards a Top-K SPARQL Query Benchmark Generator

The research on optimization of top-k SPARQL query would largely benefit from the establishment of a benchmark that allows comparing different approaches. For such a benchmark to be meaningful, at least two requirements should hold: 1) the benchmark should resemble reality as much as possible, and 2) it should stress the features of the topk SPARQL queries both from a syntactic and performance perspective. In this paper we propose Top-k DBPSB: an extension of the DBpedia SPARQL benchmark (DBPSB), a benchmark known to resemble reality, with the capabilities required to compare SPARQL engines on top-k queries.Web Information System

Towards A Question Answering System over Temporal Knowledge Graph Embedding

Question Answering (QA) over knowledge graphs is a vital topic within information retrieval. Questions with temporal intent are a special case of questions for QA systems that have received only limited attention so far. In this paper, we study using temporal knowledge graph embeddings (TKGEs) for temporal QA. Firstly, we propose a microservice-based architecture for building temporal QA systems on pre-trained TKGE models. Secondly, we present a Bayesian model average (BMA) ensemble method, where results of several link prediction tasks on separated TKGE models are combined to find better answers. Within the system built using the microservice-based architecture, the experiments on two benchmark datasets show that BMA provides better results than the individual models.</p

Visualising the effects of ontology changes and studying their understanding with ChImp

Due to the Semantic Web's decentralised nature, ontology engineers rarely know all applications that leverage their ontology. Consequently, they are unaware of the full extent of possible consequences that changes might cause to the ontology. Our goal is to lessen the gap between ontology engineers and users by investigating ontology engineers’ understanding of ontology changes’ impact at editing time. Hence, this paper introduces the Protégé plugin ChImp which we use to reach our goal. We elicited requirements for ChImp through a questionnaire with ontology engineers. We then developed ChImp according to these requirements and it displays all changes of a given session and provides selected information on said changes and their effects. For each change, it computes a number of metrics on both the ontology and its materialisation. It displays those metrics on both the originally loaded ontology at the beginning of the editing session and the current state to help ontology engineers understand the impact of their changes. We investigated the informativeness of materialisation impact measures, the meaning of severe impact, and also the usefulness of ChImp in an online user study with 36 ontology engineers. We asked the participants to solve two ontology engineering tasks – with and without ChImp (assigned in random order) – and answer in-depth questions about the applied changes as well as the materialisation impact measures. We found that ChImp increased the participants’ understanding of change effects and that they felt better informed. Answers also suggest that the proposed measures were useful and informative. We also learned that the participants consider different outcomes of changes severe, but most would define severity based on the amount of changes to the materialisation compared to its size. The participants also acknowledged the importance of quantifying the impact of changes and that the study will affect their approach of editing ontologies