Factors associated with parents’ and adolescents’ perceptions of oral health and need for dental treatment

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/72207/1/j.1600-0528.2006.00336.x.pd

Metacognitive monitoring and the hypercorrection effect in autism and the general population: Relation to autism(-like) traits and mindreading

Among neurotypical adults, errors made with high confidence (i.e., errors a person strongly believed they would not make) are corrected more reliably than errors made with low confidence. This “hypercorrection effect” is thought to result from enhanced attention to information that reflects a “metacognitive mismatch” between one’s beliefs and reality. In Experiment 1, we employed a standard measure of this effect. Participants answered general knowledge questions and provided confidence judgements about how likely each answer was to be correct, after which feedback was given. Finally, participants were retested on all questions answered incorrectly during the initial phase. Mindreading ability and ASD-like traits were measured. We found that a representative sample of (n = 83) neurotypical participants made accurate confidence judgements (reflecting good metacognition) and showed the hypercorrection effect. Mindreading ability was associated with ASD-like traits and metacognition. However, the hypercorrection effect was non-significantly associated with mindreading or ASD-like traits. In Experiment 2, 11 children with ASD and 11 matched comparison participants completed the hypercorrection task. Although ASD children showed significantly diminished metacognitive ability, they showed an undiminished hypercorrection effect. The evidence in favour of an undiminished hypercorrection effect (null result) was moderate, according to Bayesian analysis (Bayes factor = 0.21)

Maternal psychological distress in primary care and association with child behavioural outcomes at age three

Observational studies indicate children whose mothers have poor mental health are at increased risk of socio-emotional behavioural difficulties, but it is unknown whether these outcomes vary by the mothers’ mental health recognition and treatment status. To examine this question, we analysed linked longitudinal primary care and research data from 1078 women enrolled in the Born in Bradford cohort. A latent class analysis of treatment status and self-reported distress broadly categorised women as (a) not having a common mental disorder (CMD) that persisted through pregnancy and the first 2 years after delivery (N = 756, 70.1 %), (b) treated for CMD (N = 67, 6.2 %), or (c) untreated (N = 255, 23.7 %). Compared to children of mothers without CMD, 3-year-old children with mothers classified as having untreated CMD had higher standardised factor scores on the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (d = 0.32), as did children with mothers classified as having treated CMD (d = 0.27). Results were only slightly attenuated in adjusted analyses. Children of mothers with CMD may be at risk for socio-emotional and behavioural difficulties. The development of effective treatments for CMD needs to be balanced by greater attempts to identify and treat women. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s00787-015-0777-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users

Bayesian Methods for Exoplanet Science

Exoplanet research is carried out at the limits of the capabilities of current telescopes and instruments. The studied signals are weak, and often embedded in complex systematics from instrumental, telluric, and astrophysical sources. Combining repeated observations of periodic events, simultaneous observations with multiple telescopes, different observation techniques, and existing information from theory and prior research can help to disentangle the systematics from the planetary signals, and offers synergistic advantages over analysing observations separately. Bayesian inference provides a self-consistent statistical framework that addresses both the necessity for complex systematics models, and the need to combine prior information and heterogeneous observations. This chapter offers a brief introduction to Bayesian inference in the context of exoplanet research, with focus on time series analysis, and finishes with an overview of a set of freely available programming libraries.Comment: Invited revie

What do γ\gamma-ray bursts look like?

There have been great and rapid progresses in the field of $\gamma$-ray bursts (denoted as GRBs) since BeppoSAX and other telescopes discovered their afterglows in 1997. Here, we will first give a brief review on the observational facts of GRBs and direct understanding from these facts, which lead to the standard fireball model. The dynamical evolution of the fireball is discussed, especially a generic model is proposed to describe the whole dynamical evolution of GRB remnant from highly radiative to adiabatic, and from ultra-relativistic to non-relativistic phase. Then, Various deviations from the standard model are discussed to give new information about GRBs and their environment. In order to relax the energy crisis, the beaming effects and their possible observational evidences are also discussed in GRB's radiations.Comment: 10 pages, Latex. Invited talk at the Pacific Rim Conference on Stellar Astrophysics, Hong Kong, China, Aug. 199

Efficacy of exposure versus cognitive therapy in anxiety disorders: systematic review and meta-analysis

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>There is growing evidence of the effectiveness of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) for a wide range of psychological disorders. There is a continued controversy about whether challenging maladaptive thoughts rather than use of behavioural interventions alone is associated with the greatest efficacy. However little is known about the relative efficacy of various components of CBT. This review aims to compare the relative efficacy of Cognitive Therapy (CT) versus Exposure (E) for a range of anxiety disorders using the most clinically relevant outcome measures and estimating the summary relative efficacy by combining the studies in a meta-analysis.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Psych INFO, MEDLINE and EMBASE were searched from the first available year to May 2010. All randomised controlled studies comparing the efficacy of exposure with cognitive therapy were included. Odds ratios (OR) or standardised means' differences (Hedges' g) for the most clinically relevant primary outcomes were calculated. Outcomes of the studies were grouped according to specific disorders and were combined in meta-analyses exploring short-term and long-term outcomes.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>20 Randomised Controlled Trials with (n = 1,308) directly comparing the efficacy of CT and E in anxiety disorders were included in the meta-analysis. No statistically significant difference in the relative efficacy of CT and E was revealed in Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), in Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and in Panic Disorder (PD). There was a statistically significant difference favouring CT versus E in Social Phobia both in the short-term (Z = 3.72, p = 0.0002) and the long-term (Z = 3.28, p = 0.001) outcomes.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>On the basis of extant literature, there appears to be no evidence of differential efficacy between cognitive therapy and exposure in PD, PTSD and OCD and strong evidence of superior efficacy of cognitive therapy in social phobia</p

Twitter Watch: Leveraging Social Media to Monitor and Predict Collective-Efficacy of Neighborhoods

Sociologists associate the spatial variation of crime within an urban setting, with the concept of collective efficacy. The collective efficacy of a neighborhood is defined as social cohesion among neighbors combined with their willingness to intervene on behalf of the common good. Sociologists measure collective efficacy by conducting survey studies designed to measure individuals' perception of their community. In this work, we employ the curated data from a survey study (ground truth) and examine the effectiveness of substituting costly survey questionnaires with proxies derived from social media. We enrich a corpus of tweets mentioning a local venue with several linguistic and topological features. We then propose a pairwise learning to rank model with the goal of identifying a ranking of neighborhoods that is similar to the ranking obtained from the ground truth collective efficacy values. In our experiments, we find that our generated ranking of neighborhoods achieves 0.77 Kendall tau-x ranking agreement with the ground truth ranking. Overall, our results are up to 37% better than traditional baselines.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figure

Interpretation of evidence in data by untrained medical students: a scenario-based study

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>To determine which approach to assessment of evidence in data - statistical tests or likelihood ratios - comes closest to the interpretation of evidence by untrained medical students.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Empirical study of medical students (N = 842), untrained in statistical inference or in the interpretation of diagnostic tests. They were asked to interpret a hypothetical diagnostic test, presented in four versions that differed in the distributions of test scores in diseased and non-diseased populations. Each student received only one version. The intuitive application of the statistical test approach would lead to rejecting the null hypothesis of no disease in version A, and to accepting the null in version B. Application of the likelihood ratio approach led to opposite conclusions - against the disease in A, and in favour of disease in B. Version C tested the importance of the p-value (A: 0.04 versus C: 0.08) and version D the importance of the likelihood ratio (C: 1/4 versus D: 1/8).</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In version A, 7.5% concluded that the result was in favour of disease (compatible with p value), 43.6% ruled against the disease (compatible with likelihood ratio), and 48.9% were undecided. In version B, 69.0% were in favour of disease (compatible with likelihood ratio), 4.5% against (compatible with p value), and 26.5% undecided. Increasing the p value from 0.04 to 0.08 did not change the results. The change in the likelihood ratio from 1/4 to 1/8 increased the proportion of non-committed responses.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Most untrained medical students appear to interpret evidence from data in a manner that is compatible with the use of likelihood ratios.</p

Is using the strengths and difficulties questionnaire in a community sample the optimal way to assess mental health functioning?

An important characteristic of a screening tool is its discriminant ability or the measure’s accuracy to distinguish between those with and without mental health problems. The current study examined the inter-rater agreement and screening concordance of the parent and teacher versions of SDQ at scale, subscale and item-levels, with the view of identifying the items that have the most informant discrepancies; and determining whether the concordance between parent and teacher reports on some items has the potential to influence decision making. Cross-sectional data from parent and teacher reports of the mental health functioning of a community sample of 299 students with and without disabilities from 75 different primary schools in Perth, Western Australia were analysed. The study found that: a) Intraclass correlations between parent and teacher ratings of children’s mental health using the SDQ at person level was fair on individual child level; b) The SDQ only demonstrated clinical utility when there was agreement between teacher and parent reports using the possible or 90% dichotomisation system; and c) Three individual items had positive likelihood ratio scores indicating clinical utility. Of note was the finding that the negative likelihood ratio or likelihood of disregarding the absence of a condition when both parents and teachers rate the item as absent was not significant. Taken together, these findings suggest that the SDQ is not optimised for use in community samples and that further psychometric evaluation of the SDQ in this context is clearly warranted