Child\u27s Perception of Parental Attitude and Its Relationship to Academic Achievement and Problem Awareness

This study was aimed at finding relationships between the triad of academic achievement, child\u27s perception of parental attitude, and his problem awareness. The study was designed with reference to three postulates of phenomenological psychology. (a) The perceptual field of an individual at any moment determines his behavior of the moment. (b) The term phenomenal self is formed by the individual\u27s interaction with others. (c) The basic need of the organism is the maintenance and actualization of the self. A survey of the literature tended to support the thesis that there was a positive relationship between educational achievement and parental acceptance. On the other hand, research in this area also contained some evidence showing that parents of achieving children tended to adopt power assertive techniques of child rearing. Sixty achievers and sixty underachievers of both sexes were administered the Father and Mother form of the Parent-Child Relationship Questionnaire and the Mooney Problem Check List and their relationships were noticed. The results showed that the scales on the Mooney Problem Check List distinguished the underachieving and achieving boy but not the under achieving and achieving girl, except the School scale. The only scales which significantly differentiated the underachiever from the achiever for both boys and girls on both the forms were Punishment Direct-Object and Loving. The study did not reveal any significant relationship between the scales on the two forms of PCRQ and MPCL

Guarded and Unguarded Responses to Sentence Completion Tests Among Normal Adolescents and Juvenile Delinquents

This study was designed to test the responses of a group of juvenile delinquests and a group of normal adolescents to a sentence completion test. The test used was a modified form of Sack\u27s Sentence Completion test in two forms--form A, first person stems and form B, third person stems. The hypothesis to be tested were (1) people project more in the third person, (2) the normal projects more, and (3) there would be no difference in projection on neutral items. The results bear out the three hypothesis. The sex scale, however, was an exception. This may be due to the deficiency of items on this particular scale

Development of a single-chain peptide agonist of the relaxin-3 receptor using hydrocarbon stapling

Structure activity studies of the insulin super family member, relaxin-3, have shown that its G protein-coupled receptor (RXFP3) binding site is contained within its central B-chain a-helix and this helical structure is essential for receptor activation. We sought to develop a single B-chain mimetic that retained agonist activity. This was achieved by use of solid phase peptide synthesis together with on-resin ruthenium-catalyzed ring closure metathesis of a pair of judiciously placed i,i+4 alpha-methyl, alpha-alkenyl amino acids. The resulting hydrocarbon stapled peptide was shown by solution NMR spectroscopy to mimic the native helical conformation of relaxin-3 and to possess potent RXFP3 receptor binding and activation. Alternative stapling procedures were unsuccessful, highlighting the critical need to carefully consider both the peptide sequence and stapling methodology for optimal outcomes. Our result is the first successful minimization of an insulin-like peptide to a single-chain alpha-helical peptide agonist which will facilitate study of the function of relaxin-3

Design, synthesis, and characterization of a single-chain peptide antagonist for the relaxin-3 receptor RXFP3

Relaxin-3 is a two-chain disulfide-rich peptide that is the ancestral member of the relaxin peptide family and, together with its G protein-coupled receptor RXFP3, is highly expressed in the brain. Strong evolutionary conservation of relaxin-3 suggests a critical biological function and recent studies have demonstrated modulation of sensory, neuroendocrine, metabolic, and cognitive systems. However, detailed studies of central relaxin-3-RXFP3 signaling have until now been severely hampered by the lack of a readily available high-affinity antagonist for RXFP3. Previous studies have utilized a complex two-chain chimeric relaxin peptide, R3(B Delta 23-27)R/I5, in which a truncated relaxin-3 B-chain carrying an additional C-terminal Arg residue was combined with the insulin-like peptide S (INSL5) A-chain. In this study we demonstrate that, by replacing the native Cys in this truncated relaxin-3 B-chain with Ser, a single-chain linear peptide of 23 amino acids that retains high-affinity antagonism for RXFP3 can be achieved. In vivo studies demonstrate that this peptide, R3 B1-22R, antagonized relaxin-3/RXFP3 induced increases in feeding in rats after intracerebroventricular injection. Thus, R3 B1-22R represents an excellent tool for biological studies probing relaxin pharmacology and a lead molecule for the development of synthetically tractable, single-chain RXFP3 modulators for clinical use

Dietary natural products and their potential to influence health and disease including animal models

Although biological and pharmacological effects of dietary natural products have been intensively studied, there has been no bibliometric analysis performed on this research field up to now. The current study has aimed to identify and analyze the manuscripts on dietary natural products and their potential to influence health and disease including studies using animal models. Data, including words from titles and abstracts, publication and citation data, have been extracted from Web of Science database and analyzed by the VOSviewer software. Our search has yielded 1,014 manuscripts. The ratio of original articles to reviews was identified to be 1.5:1. Over half of the manuscripts have been published since 2010. The manuscripts have been contributed by 4,301 authors from 1,445 organizations in 76 countries/territories and published in 499 journals. The results from the current study point out that scientific research focusing on the potential of dietary natural products to affect health and disease status (including animal model studies) is expanding, and suggests an increasing significance of this scientific area. With the progressive development and improvement of animal studies, it should be expected that animal models of different human diseases (especially civilization ones) would be an integral part of the research for the evaluation of pharmaceuticals originated from dietary natural products like plants or plant materials. Moreover, natural products can also be fed to animals to improve the quality of animal products, with numerous resulting functional effects