26 research outputs found
The big five personality traits, perfectionism and their association with mental health among UK students on professional degree programmes
Background
In view of heightened rates of suicide and evidence of poor mental health among healthcare occupational groups, such as veterinarians, doctors, pharmacists and dentists, there has been increasing focus on the students aiming for careers in these fields. It is often proposed that a high proportion of these students may possess personality traits which render them vulnerable to mental ill-health.
Aim
To explore the relationship between the big five personality traits, perfectionism and mental health in UK students undertaking undergraduate degrees in veterinary medicine, medicine, pharmacy, dentistry and law.
Methods
A total of 1744 students studying veterinary medicine, medicine, dentistry, pharmacy and law in the UK completed an online questionnaire, which collected data on the big five personality traits (NEO-FFI), perfectionism (Frost Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale), wellbeing (Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale), psychological distress (General Health Questionnaire-12), depression (Beck Depression Inventory-II) and suicidal ideation and attempts.
Results
Veterinary, medical and dentistry students were significantly more agreeable than law students, while veterinary students had the lowest perfectionism scores of the five groups studied. High levels of neuroticism and low conscientiousness were predictive of increased mental ill-health in each of the student populations.
Conclusions
The study highlights that the prevailing anecdotal view of professional students possessing maladaptive personality traits that negatively impact on their mental health may be misplaced
Nonzero-sum Stochastic Games
This paper treats of stochastic games. We focus on nonzero-sum games and provide a detailed survey of
selected recent results. In Section 1, we consider stochastic Markov games. A correlation of strategies of the players, involving ``public signals'', is described, and a correlated equilibrium theorem proved recently by Nowak and Raghavan for discounted stochastic games with general state space is presented. We also report an extension of this result to a class of undiscounted stochastic games, satisfying some uniform ergodicity condition.
Stopping games are related to stochastic Markov games. In
Section 2, we describe a version of Dynkin's game related to
observation of a Markov process with random assignment mechanism of states to the players. Some recent contributions of the second author in this area are reported. The paper also contains a brief overview of the theory of nonzero-sum stochastic games and stopping games which is very far from being complete
Optimal stopping problems by two or more decision makers: a survey
Dynamic programming, Game theory, Group decisions, Optimal stopping,