Possible Causes of Increased Domestic Violence among Military Veterans: PTSD or Mefloquine Toxicity?

After more than a decade at war, our returning service members and their families are facing enormous amounts of difficulty when returning home. PTSD and TBI, the signature wounds of these wars, have been well covered in the media. The family struggles have remained hidden and mostly undiscussed. These families are facing very specific issues in military relationships like infidelity, substance misuse, and intimate partner violence; the latter of which military families are three times more likely to experience when compared to the civilian population. There is a potential effect on caregiver burden in the role of PTSD as a factor for relationship difficulties as well. Many times, spouses can struggle with no longer a being just a wife; they have become full-time, exclusive caregivers. This loss of personal identity is one of many things that can cause a cascade of mental health problems for the spouse. As much as spouses are excited to have their service member home, incorporating the service member back into the family can be stressful. Spouses may be taken off guard to find themselves experiencing deep sadness at the changes they perceive in their veteran. These are some of the more common relationship issues in a marriage where PTSD is present. Yet there seems to be a darker side to all of this. With the higher rates of domestic violence, this paper is researching the possibility of being wrong about PTSD or potentially there may be some previously unrecognized confounder that has not been looked at yet. Mefloquine is an anti-malaria pill given to our military members that is already known to confound the diagnoses of PTSD and TBI. This literature review will assess the difficulties that these veterans and family members are facing by looking at the different possibilities of what could be making veterans more violent

Educating Spouses May Be Key to Helping Veterans

Veterans’ and family members are facing great difficulties when the veteran returns home to transition into civilian life. Marriages are struggling, and families are being torn apart when the veteran returns home with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Although there are many programs that have been created to educate spouses about PTSD, however, they often fall short of being able to prepare a family for the actual experience of transition. The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is starting to come up with programs to help couples and research is starting to gain empirical support; there are still many couples left with no idea what to do. In a group already prone to higher rates of divorce, infidelity, and domestic violence, it is important to analyze every plausible explanation and treatment possible to make sure the best care is being given. This paper analyzes empirical literature on spouse’s perceptions, education on PTSD, and relationship dynamics. The results of this analysis, along with the creation of the PTSD Marriage Triangle and Couples Perception Grid, could pave the way for creating a proactive peer education course for spouses before they leave the military. That will give them a much better understanding of PTSD, perceptions, and creating a “we” united front in their marriage. This could have a positive impact both on the spouse’s mental and emotional health while improving their marriage by not letting it get to a dysfunctional state

Effects of decision-making on the transport costs across complex networks

We analyze the effects of agents' decisions on the creation of congestion on a centralized network with ring-and-hub topology. We show that there are two classes of agents each displaying a distinct set of behaviours. The dynamics of the system are driven by an interplay between the formation of, and transition between, unique stable states that arise as the network is varied. We show how the flow of objects across the network can be understood in terms of the ordering and allocation of strategies. Our results show that the existence of congestion in a network is a dynamic process that is as much dependent on the agents' decisions as it is on the structure of the network itself.Comment: Special Issue on Complex Networks, edited by Dirk Helbin

Nutrient Management Approaches and Tools for Dairy Farms in Australia and the U.S.

Nutrient surpluses in industrialized nations like the U.S. and Australia are causing problems on dairy farms and posing a threat to the rest of the environment. This paper discusses tools that dairy farmers can use to manage the excess nutrients while continuing to meet demands and profit. The authors suggest improvements in these tools that will not only quantify the amount of nutrient balances on dairy farms, but also identify opportunities for enhanced nutrient use and reduced nutrient losses.Nutrient Management Tools, Australian Dairy Farms, U.S. Dairy Farms, Confinement-based Dairy Operations, Grazing-based Diary Operations, Environmental Economics and Policy, Farm Management, Land Economics/Use,

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Exploring the relationship between anxiety sensitivity and heart rate variability

Anxiety sensitivity (AS) is a multifaceted construct based on individual beliefs that anxiety symptoms and sensations will have harmful consequences. In general, literature demonstrates three underlying dimensions of AS: fear of cognitive dyscontrol (i.e., cognitive concerns), fear of physiological anxiety sensations (i.e., physical concerns), and fear of negative evaluation (i.e., social concerns). Elevated AS and underlying dimensions have been shown to underlie psychopathology, including anxiety and depression broadly, and are predictive of fear responding in the context of behavioral challenge paradigms whereby individuals with elevated AS demonstrate higher fear and sympathetic nervous system activation. To date, few studies have investigated AS alongside heart rate variability (HRV), a biomarker of autonomic activity. Like AS, HRV has been well studied in clinical samples. High-frequency heart rate variability (HF-HRV), which indexes parasympathetic activity, has been shown to be lower among clinical samples, relative to controls and during behavioral challenge paradigms designed to induce stress. Lower HF-HRV has shown associations with other traits thought to underlie psychopathology (e.g., worry, difficulty with thought suppression). The present study sought to explore a plausible relationship between AS and HRV. Participants were recruited from the Eastern Michigan University campus community to take part in a brief online screening using the Anxiety Sensitivity Index-3 (ASI-3). Participants with normative (n = 60) and high (n = 60) levels of AS were invited to participate in an in-person study whereby HRV and participant-reported subjective distress were measured at baseline and during engagement in three behavioral challenge paradigms. Challenges were designed to induce mild distress related to underlying AS dimensions (i.e., cognitive, physical, and social concerns). Study findings revealed high AS participants to exhibit significantly greater increases in distress following each challenge, relative to baseline, than normative AS participants. After controlling for variance due to age, HF-HRV was significantly higher among normative AS participants at baseline and during the social challenge, compared with high AS participants. Unexpected findings also arose , whereby, after controlling for age, normative AS participants demonstrated significantly higher low-frequency HRV at baseline and during physical and social challenges, relative to high AS participants.

Voting Preference, Religion and Ethnicity’s Impact on Party Identification

Voting in the Presidential election always comes down to the wire, which leads political scientists to contemplate the most efficient ways for candidates to target and seize voters. The study explores how ethnic and religious values affect a voter’s party identification. This study will identify theories of opinion formation and connect these theories to the values that religious and ethnic voters rely on when voting for a candidate. This study hypothesizes three things: first, religious groups will tend to vote for candidates that hold the same religious values. Second, Ethnic groups will tend to vote for candidates that share the same ethnic background; and lastly, it hypothesizes that religion is a more reliable indicator of partisanship than ethical values that voter’s hold. In this research paper, the independent factors that are being observed are religious values such as importance of religion, guidance in day-to-day life, as well as church attendance and ethnic diversity. The research will help candidates better target the audience they currently have and maintain good relations as well as seek where lack of constituency is with certain ethnic groups. Among the expected results is that while ethnic groups support candidates that relate to their shared ethnicity, religion will be a leading indicator on how a constituent will vote

Alien Registration- Gourley, Hugh (Willimantic, Piscataquis County)

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