Our Grandparents, Our Parents, Our Future Selves: Optimizing Function in Old Age. Syracuse Seminar Series on Aging.

Most of my research at Yale University School of Medicine over the past several years has focused on identifying older adults at risk of functional decline and disability, identifying events that may precipitate the transition from functional independence to disability, and developing strategies to postpone or reduce frailty and disability. As a result of the Precipitating Events Project (PEP) and other research conducted by the Yale Center on Aging/Pepper Center, we now realize that age is only a proxy for other factors that lead to disability, and that some of these factors can be modified to reduce the risk of disability. In fact, disability rates have been steadily declining among older adults for decades.geriatrics, aging, gerontology, disability, precipitating event, functional decline, vulnerability, compression of morbidity, reserve organ capacity, exercise, physical activity, falls, Yale PREHAB study, lifestyle interventions, independence, elders, FICSIT trial, frailty

Fearing Compassion Impacts Psychological Well-being but has no Effect on Physiological Indicators.

Fearing Compassion Impacts Psychological Well-being but has no Effect on Physiological Indicators. Objective: Fears of compassion are feelings of threat towards receiving and giving kindness. This study examined the fears towards compassion on physiological responses during compassionate exercises. It has been argued that such fears are a barrier to a relaxation system normally reducing physiological activity but there has been no empirical evidence to support this. Exercises have been developed to increase compassion by activating a physiological soothing system, however if fears to compassion block the effectiveness of compassion then new methods may need to be developed to increase self-compassion. Participants and Methods: A non-clinical sample of sixty participants took part in two compassionate exercises. Heart rate and skin conductance were recorded during these exercises to indicate physiological activity. Social safeness, self-criticism and symptoms of depression were also assessed via the Fears of Compassion Scale, the Forms of Self-Criticism/Self-Reassuring Scale, the Social Safeness Scale and the Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale (DASS). Results: Multivariate analysis indicated there was no effect between high and low fears of compassion on both heart rate and skin conductance. However, social safeness and symptoms of mental illness were significantly affected by fears of compassion from psychological indicators of well-being, (F(3,56)= 5.721, p<.01, Wilks Lambda = .765, partial n2=.235). Independent analysis found differences in social safeness (F(1,58)= 14.46, p<.01, partial n2=.20) and DASS (F(1,58)= 6.53, p<.05, partial n2= .101). Social safeness was higher in the low fears of compassion group, 46.87 (SD= 6.06), whilst DASS was greater in the high fears group, 23.34 (SD=12.91). Conclusions: The findings did not support that fears are a barrier towards building compassion suggesting that compassionate exercises can be effective for both higher and lower fears of compassion. These results support a dynamic relationship between social safeness and fears towards compassion. The implications are that fears do not prevent activation of the self-soothing system but have an effect on social safeness and abnormal behaviour development

An invitation to quantum tomography (II)

The quantum state of a light beam can be represented as an infinite dimensional density matrix or equivalently as a density on the plane called the Wigner function. We describe quantum tomography as an inverse statistical problem in which the state is the unknown parameter and the data is given by results of measurements performed on identical quantum systems. We present consistency results for Pattern Function Projection Estimators as well as for Sieve Maximum Likelihood Estimators for both the density matrix of the quantum state and its Wigner function. Finally we illustrate via simulated data the performance of the estimators. An EM algorithm is proposed for practical implementation. There remain many open problems, e.g. rates of convergence, adaptation, studying other estimators, etc., and a main purpose of the paper is to bring these to the attention of the statistical community.Comment: An earlier version of this paper with more mathematical background but less applied statistical content can be found on arXiv as quant-ph/0303020. An electronic version of the paper with high resolution figures (postscript instead of bitmaps) is available from the authors. v2: added cross-validation results, reference

Eudaimonic Pathways of Activating Compassion Reduce Vulnerabilities to Paranoia

This study aimed to identify if compassion benefits paranoia and, if so what type of compassion. Following a series of different compassionate exercises in 104 participants it was found that mindfulness approaches were the most significant in reducing paranoia suggesting a new approach for psychological problems characterised by paranoia

Atomic and molecular intracules for excited states

Intracules in position space, momentum space and phase space have been calculated for low-lying excited states of the He atom, Be atom, formaldehyde and butadiene. The phase-space intracules (Wigner intracules) provide significantly more information than the position- and momentum-space intracules, particularly for the Be atom. Exchange effects are investigated through the differences between corresponding singlet and triplet states.This work was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council through the award of an Advanced Research Fellowship (GR/R77636) to NAB and a Joint Research Equipment Initiative grant (GR/R62052)

Mediated intimacy: Sex advice in media culture

The bold argument of Mediated Intimacy (Barker et al., 2018)1 is that media of various kinds play an increasingly important role in shaping people’s knowledge, desires, practices and expectations about intimate relationships. While arguments rage about the nature and content of sex and relationship education in schools, it is becoming clear that more and more of us – young and old – look not to formal education, or even to our friends, for information about sex, but to the media (Albury, 2016; Attwood et al., 2015). This is not simply a matter of media ‘advice’ in the form of self-help books, magazine problem pages, or online ‘agony’ columns – though these are all proliferating and are discussed at length in the book. It is also about the wider cultural habitat of images, ideas and discourses about intimacy that circulate through and across media: the ‘happy endings’ of romantic comedies; the ‘money shots’ of pornography; the celebrity gossip about who is seeing whom, who is ‘cheating’, and who is looking ‘hot’; the lifestyle TV about ‘embarrassing bodies’ or being ‘undateable’; the newspaper features on how to have a ‘good’ divorce or ‘ten things never to say on a first date’; the new apps that incite us to quantify and rate our sex lives, and so forth. These constitute the ‘taken for granted’ of everyday understandings of intimacy, and they are at the heart of Mediated Intimacy

The uniform electron gas

The uniform electron gas or UEG (also known as jellium) is one of the most fundamental models in condensed-matter physics and the cornerstone of the most popular approximation --- the local-density approximation --- within density-functional theory. In this article, we provide a detailed review on the energetics of the UEG at high, intermediate and low densities, and in one, two and three dimensions. We also report the best quantum Monte Carlo and symmetry-broken Hartree-Fock calculations available in the literature for the UEG and discuss the phase diagrams of jellium.Comment: 37 pages, 8 figures, 8 tables, accepted for publication in WIRES Computational Molecular Scienc

Exact energy of the spin-polarized two-dimensional electron gas at high density

We derive the exact expansion, to $O(r_s)$, of the energy of the high-density spin-polarized two-dimensional uniform electron gas, where $r_s$ is the Seitz radius.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figure and 1 table, submitted to Phys. Rev.