There is a limit to your openness: Mental illness stigma mediates effects of individual traits on preference for psychiatry specialty

Objective: The widening gap between the need for mental health professionals and the low percentages of medical students pursuing a psychiatric career urges an examination of how individual traits, stigma attitudes, and related intended behaviors interact to better explain the variance in preferences for psychiatry as a specialty choice. Methods: Participants were second-year, preclinical medical students at Bologna University, Italy. The study consisted in completion of an online questionnaire evaluating preferences for the psychiatry specialty (one single item and a scenario-based response), personality traits (the Big Five Questionnaire), attitudes (Mental Illness for Clinicians\u2019 Attitude scale), behaviors (Reported and Intended Behavior Scale), and fears toward mental illness (questionnaire created ad hoc). Sociodemographic data were also collected. Results: A total of 284 medical students [58.8% female, mean (SD) age 20.47 \ub1 1.90] completed the questionnaire. Preference for the psychiatry specialty was significantly and positively associated with openness to experience and negatively related with Mental Illness for Clinicians\u2019 Attitude scale and Reported and Intended Behavior Scale. The full-mediation model provided good indices explaining 18% of the variance. Mental illness stigma was strongly and negatively associated with both openness to experience and preference for psychiatry, and the mediation results evidenced a positive and significant effect. Conclusions: Mental illness stigma influences medical students\u2019 choice of psychiatry as a specialty, accounting for the effects of the openness to experience trait. Stigma awareness and reduction programs should be introduced as early as possible in medical education

Ehlers symmetry at the next derivative order

We analyse four-dimensional gravity in the presence of general curvature squared corrections and show that Ehlers' SL(2,R) symmetry, which appears in the reduction of standard gravity to three dimensions, is preserved by the correction terms. The mechanism allowing this is a correction of the SL(2,R) transformation laws which resolves problems with the different scaling behaviour of various terms occurring in the reduction.Comment: 13 pages. v2: updated referenc

Reduced recognition of facial emotional expressions in global burnout and burnout depersonalization in healthcare providers

The healthcare provider profession strongly relies on the ability to care for others' emotional experiences. To what extent burnout may relate to an actual alteration of this key professional ability has been little investigated. In an experimentally controlled setting, we investigated whether subjective experiences of global burnout or burnout depersonalization (the interpersonal component of burnout) relate to objectively measured alterations in emotion recognition and to what extent such alterations are emotion specific. Healthcare workers (n = 90) completed the Maslach Burnout Inventory and a dynamic emotion recognition task in which faces with neutral emotional expressions gradually changed to display a specific basic emotion (happiness, anger, fear, or sadness). Participants were asked to identify and then classify each displayed emotion. Before the task, a subsample of 46 participants underwent two salivary cortisol assessments. Individuals with global burnout were less accurate at recognizing others' emotional expressions of anger and fear, tending to misclassify these as happiness, compared to individuals without global burnout. Individuals with high burnout depersonalization were more accurate in recognizing happiness and less accurate in recognizing all negative emotions, with a tendency to misclassify the latter as positive ones, compared to healthcare workers with moderate/low depersonalization. Moreover, individuals with high depersonalization-but not participants with global burnout-were characterized by higher cortisol levels. These results suggest that the subjective burnout experience relates to an actual, but selective, reduction in the recognition of facial emotional expressions, characterized by a tendency to misclassify negative emotional expressions as positive ones, perhaps due to an enhanced seeking of positive social cues. This study adds to the understanding of emotional processing in burnout and paves the way for more nuanced studies on the role of altered processing of threat signals in the development and/or persistence of burnout

Silo collapse under granular discharge

We investigate, at a laboratory scale, the collapse of cylindrical shells of radius $R$ and thickness $t$ induced by a granular discharge. We measure the critical filling height for which the structure fails upon discharge. We observe that the silos sustain filling heights significantly above an estimation obtained by coupling standard shell-buckling and granular stress distribution theories. Two effects contribute to stabilize the structure: (i) below the critical filling height, a dynamical stabilization due to granular wall friction prevents the localized shell-buckling modes to grow irreversibly; (ii) above the critical filling height, collapse occurs before the downward sliding motion of the whole granular column sets in, such that only a partial friction mobilization is at play. However, we notice also that the critical filling height is reduced as the grain size, $d$, increases. The importance of grain size contribution is controlled by the ratio $d/\sqrt{R t}$. We rationalize these antagonist effects with a novel fluid/structure theory both accounting for the actual status of granular friction at the wall and the inherent shell imperfections mediated by the grains. This theory yields new scaling predictions which are compared with the experimental results.Comment: Original work, 13 pages and 11 figure

Piccole e medie imprese e finanziamento del progetto imprenditoriale: una ricerca per un nuovo tipo di emittente

L’esigenza finanziaria della piccola e media impresa, manifestata anche ed esemplarmente tramite il c.d. crowdfunding, evoca la partecipazione, quanto al reperimento del c.d. capitale di rischio, di un “socio”, né c.d. risparmiatore, né c.d. imprenditore e neppure interessato alla gestione dell’impresa. Un socio, allora, “inedito”, non incline alla gestione (ed al controllo) dell’impresa ma neppure ad essa indifferente. Socio, invero, che aderisce (non tanto ad una società con un oggetto sociale bensì) ad un progetto imprenditoriale, ad una “idea che sposa”, all’attuazione del quale è, in primo luogo, interessato. Un nuovo emittente, dunque, che “organizzativamente” sia acconcio a questo interesse: dal che la necessità, nel silenzio normativo e per arginare regolamenti pattizi incerti, difformi e non comparabili, di individuare le informazioni necessarie ad una adesione consapevole e gli strumenti atti ad appurare una “attuazione conforme” del progetto imprenditoriale a quello promesso e, prima, in “cerca” di finanziamenti

Psychological distress in hospitalized patients without COVID-19 symptoms: The role of fear of infection and remote contact with informal caregivers

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Data from 14,597 penile measurements of vietnamese men

Background Penis size is a highly sensitive topic, which has often raised concerns associated with human masculinity and male sexual health. Although data regarding penile dimensions have been published worldwide, little is known about these measurements in South-East Asian countries.Objective This study aimed to provide the reference range in penile length, circumference, and diameter of Vietnamese men and their variations among men with erectile dysfunction and other diseases.Materials and Methods Information about flaccid length, stretched length, mid-shaft circumference, and glans diameter from the health records of 14,597 men attending the Andrology Consultation was collected. These men were classified into three groups being regular reproductive health screening group, sexual dysfunction group, and other disease groups.Results We found that penile dimensions follow a non-parametric distribution, as tested by Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. The median values are 9.03 cm for flaccid length, 14.67 cm for stretched length, 8.39 cm for mid-shaft circumference, and 2.86 cm for unaroused glans diameter. Length and girth of the penis also changed among the different groups, especially in flaccid state; specifically, men with erectile dysfunction had a greater value in all penile dimensions except for change ratio compared with other groups. Circumcision, which rarely occurs in Vietnam, was associated with a 2 mm reduced penis length.Discussion Findings on correlations between penile dimensions and somatometric parameters from previous studies are questionable and some measurements, such as glans dimension, have not been thoroughly investigated so far. Nevertheless, penile dimensions provide useful insight concerning conditions affecting sexual development and might be a valuable parameter in the assessment of erectile dysfunction.Conclusion Results of this study provide informative materials for the assessment of penile size, including reference values drawn from a large sample of Vietnamese men that can be useful in clinical practice and sexual health education