The perception of psychosocial risks and work-related stress in relation to job insecurity and gender differences: a cross-sectional study

Introduction.The perception of psychosocial risks exposesworkers to developwork-related stress. Recently the attention of scientific research has focused on a psychosocial risk already identified as “job insecurity” that regards the “overall concern about the continued existence of the job in the future” and that also depends onworker’s perception, different for each gender. Aimof the Study. The aim of this cross sectional study is to show if job insecurity, in the formof temporary contracts, can influence the perception of psychosocial risks and therefore increase worker’s vulnerability to work-related stress and how the magnitude of this effect differs between genders. Materials and Methods. 338 administrative technical workers (113 males and 225 females) were administered a questionnaire, enquiring contract typology (permanent or temporary contracts), and the Health Safety Executive questionnaire to assess work-related stress. The Health Safety Executive Analysis Tool software was used to process collected questionnaires and theWilcoxon rank-sum test was used to evaluate the statistical significance of the differences obtained. Results. Workers with temporary contracts obtained lower scores than workers with permanent contracts in all the domains explored by theHealth Safety Executive Analysis questionnaire, statistically significant (P<0,05). The female workers obtained lower scores than male workers in all domains explored by the Health Safety Executive questionnaire. Conclusions. Authors conclude that perception of psychosocial risks can be influenced by job insecurity, in the form of temporary contracts, and increases worker’s vulnerability to work-related stress and differs between genders

Quality of life in workers and stress: gender differences in exposure to psychosocial risks and perceived well-being

Background. Quality of working life is the result of many factors inherent in the workplace environment, especially in terms of exposure to psychosocial risks. Objectives. The purpose of this study is to assess the quality of life with special attention to gender differences. Methods. The HSE-IT questionnaire and the WHO-5 Well-Being Index were administered to a group of workers (74 males and 33 females). The authors also used Cronbach’s alpha test to assess the internal consistency of both questionnaires and the Mann–Whitney test to evaluate the significance of gender differences in both questionnaires. Results. The HSE-IT highlighted the existence of work-related stress in all the population with a critical perception regarding the domain “Relationships.” Furthermore, gender analysis highlighted the presence of two additional domains in the female population: “Demand” ( = 0,002) and “Support from Managers” ( = 0,287). The WHO-5 highlighted a well-being level below the standard cut-off point with a significant gender difference ( = 0.009) for males (18, SD = 6) as compared to females (14, SD = 6,4). Cronbach’s alpha values indicated a high level of internal consistency for both of our scales. Conclusions. The risk assessment of quality of working life should take into due account the individual characteristics of workers, with special attention to gender

Investigando uma interrogação brasileira: relatando 16 casos de febre Q em Minas Gerais, Brasil

Q fever has been considered non-existing in Brazil where reports of clinical cases still cannot be found. This case-series of 16 patients is a result of a systematic search for such illness by means of clinical and serologic criteria. Serologic testing was performed by the indirect microimmunofluorescence technique using phase I/II C. burnetii antigens. Influenza-like syndrome was the most frequent clinical form (eight cases - 50%), followed by pneumonia, FUO (fever of unknown origin), mono-like syndrome (two cases - 12.5% each), lymphadenitis (one case - 6.3%) and spondylodiscitis associated with osteomyelitis (one case - 6.3%). The ages varied from four to 67 years old with a median of 43.5. All but one patient had positive serologic tests for phase II IgG whether or not associated with IgM positivity compatible with acute infection. One patient had both phase I and phase II IgG antibodies compatible with chronic Q fever. Seroconvertion was detected in 10 patients. Despite the known limitations of serologic diagnosis, the cases here reported should encourage Brazilian doctors to include Q fever as an indigenous cause of febrile illness.A febre Q continua sendo considerada inexistente no Brasil onde publicações de casos clínicos ainda não são encontráveis. Esta série de casos de 16 pacientes é resultado de uma busca sistemática para esta doença usando-se critérios clínicos e sorológicos. Os testes sorológicos foram realizados pela técnica de microimunofluorescência indireta utilizando-se antígenos de C. burnetii fase I e fase II. Síndrome influenza símile foi a forma clínica mais frequente (oito casos - 50%), seguida pela pneumonia, FOI (febre de origem indeterminada), síndrome mononucleose símile (dois casos - 12,5% cada) e por fim linfoadenite (um caso - 6,3%) e espondilodiscite associada à osteomielite (um caso - 6,3%). As idades variaram de quatro a 67 anos com mediana de 43,5. Todos os pacientes, com exceção de um, tinham testes sorológicos positivos para IgG anti fase II, associado ou não a IgM anti fase II, compatíveis com infecção aguda. Um paciente tinha tanto anticorpos IgG anti fase I quanto anti fase II compatíveis com febre Q crônica. Soroconversão foi detectada em 10 pacientes. A despeito das conhecidas limitações do diagnóstico sorológico os casos aqui relatados devem encorajar os médicos brasileiros a incluir a febre Q como causa nativa de doença febril neste país a ser pesquisada

Can a Humanoid Face be Expressive? A Psychophysiological Investigation

Non-verbal signals expressed through body language play a crucial role in multi-modal human communication during social relations. Indeed, in all cultures, facial expressions are the most universal and direct signs to express innate emotional cues. A human face conveys important information in social interactions and helps us to better understand our social partners and establish empathic links. Latest researches show that humanoid and social robots are becoming increasingly similar to humans, both esthetically and expressively. However, their visual expressiveness is a crucial issue that must be improved to make these robots more realistic and intuitively perceivable by humans as not different from them. This study concerns the capability of a humanoid robot to exhibit emotions through facial expressions. More specifically, emotional signs performed by a humanoid robot have been compared with corresponding human facial expressions in terms of recognition rate and response time. The set of stimuli included standardized human expressions taken from an Ekman-based database and the same facial expressions performed by the robot. Furthermore, participants’ psychophysiological responses have been explored to investigate whether there could be differences induced by interpreting robot or human emotional stimuli. Preliminary results show a trend to better recognize expressions performed by the robot than 2D photos or 3D models. Moreover, no significant differences in the subjects’ psychophysiological state have been found during the discrimination of facial expressions performed by the robot in comparison with the same task performed with 2D photos and 3D models

Soluble/MOF-Supported Palladium Single Atoms Catalyze the Ligand-, Additive-, and Solvent-Free Aerobic Oxidation of Benzyl Alcohols to Benzoic Acids

Metal single-atom catalysts (SACs) promise great rewards in terms of metal atom efficiency. However, the requirement of particular conditions and supports for their synthesis, together with the need of solvents and additives for catalytic implementation, often precludes their use under industrially viable conditions. Here, we show that palladium single atoms are spontaneously formed after dissolving tiny amounts of palladium salts in neat benzyl alcohols, to catalyze their direct aerobic oxidation to benzoic acids without ligands, additives, or solvents. With this result in hand, the gram-scale preparation and stabilization of Pd SACs within the functional channels of a novel methyl-cysteine-based metal-organic framework (MOF) was accomplished, to give a robust and crystalline solid catalyst fully characterized with the help of single-crystal X-ray diffraction (SCXRD). These results illustrate the advantages of metal speciation in ligand-free homogeneous organic reactions and the translation into solid catalysts for potential industrial implementation.This work was supported by the Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Università e della Ricerca (Italy) and the MINECO (Spain) (Projects PID2019−104778GB−I00, CTQ 2017–86735–P, RTC–2017–6331–5, Severo Ochoa program SEV–2016–0683 and Excellence Unit “Maria de Maeztu” CEX2019−000919−M). E.T. and M.M. thank MINECO and ITQ for the concession of a contract. D.A. acknowledges the financial support of the Fondazione CARIPLO/“Economia Circolare: ricerca per un futuro sostenibile” 2019, Project code: 2019–2090, MOCA and Diamond Light Source for awarded beamtime and provision of synchrotron radiation facilities and thanks Dr. Sarah Barnett and David Allan for their assistance at I19 beamline (Proposal No. MT18768-1). Thanks are also extended to the “2019 Post-doctoral Junior Leader-Retaining Fellowship, la Caixa Foundation (ID100010434 and fellowship code LCF/BQ/PR19/11700011” (J.F.-S.) and “La Caixa” scholarship (ID 100010434) LCF/BQ/DI19/11730029 (J.B.-S). E.P. acknowledges the financial support of the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme/ERC Grant Agreement No 814804, MOF reactors. J.O.-M. acknowledges the Juan de la Cierva program for the concession of a contract (IJC2018-036514-I). We gratefully acknowledge to ALBA synchrotron for allocating beamtime and CLÆSS beamline staff for their technical support during our experiment. The computations were performed on the Tirant III cluster of the Servei d’Informàtica of the University of Valencia.Peer reviewe

Interpreting Psychophysiological States Using Unobtrusive Wearable Sensors in Virtual Reality

One of the main challenges in the study of human be- havior is to quantitatively assess the participants’ affective states by measuring their psychophysiological signals in ecologically valid conditions. The quality of the acquired data, in fact, is often poor due to artifacts generated by natural interactions such as full body movements and gestures. We created a technology to address this problem. We enhanced the eXperience Induction Machine (XIM), an immersive space we built to conduct experiments on human behavior, with unobtrusive wearable sensors that measure electrocardiogram, breathing rate and electrodermal response. We conducted an empirical validation where participants wearing these sensors were free to move in the XIM space while exposed to a series of visual stimuli taken from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS). Our main result consists in the quan- titative estimation of the arousal range of the affective stimuli through the analysis of participants’ psychophysiological states. Taken together, our findings show that the XIM constitutes a novel tool to study human behavior in life-like conditions

Different biological and prognostic breast cancer populations identified by FDG-PET in sentinel node-positive patients: Results and clinical implications after eight-years follow-up

Abstract Background Sentinel node (SN) biopsy is the standard method to evaluate axillary node involvement in breast cancer (BC). Positron emission tomography with 2-(fluorine-18)-fluoro-2-deoxy-D-glucose (FDG-PET) provides a non-invasive tool to evaluate regional nodes in BC in a metabolic-dependent, biomolecular-related way. In 1999, we initiated a prospective non-randomized study to compare these two methods and to test the hypothesis that FDG-PET results reflect biomolecular characteristics of the primary tumor, thereby yielding valuable prognostic information. Patients and methods A total of 145 cT1N0 BC patients, aged 24–70 years, underwent FDG-PET and lymphoscintigraphy before surgery. SN biopsy was followed in all cases by complete axillary dissection. Pathologic evaluation in tissue sections for involvement of the SN and other non-SN nodes served as the basis of the comparison between FDG-PET imaging and SN biopsy. Results FDG-PET and SN biopsy sensitivity was 72.6% and 88.7%, respectively, and negative predictive values were 80.5% and 92.2%, respectively. A subgroup of more aggressive tumors (ER-GIII, Her2+) was found mainly in the FDG-PET true-positive (FDG-PET+) patients, whereas LuminalA, Mib1 low-rate BCs were significantly undetected ( p = 0.009) in FDG-PET false-negative (FDG-PET−) patients. Kaplan–Meier survival estimates after a median follow-up of more than 8 years showed significantly worse overall survival for FDG-PET+ patients in node-positive (N+) patients ( p = 0.035) as compared to N+/FDG-PET− patients, which overlapped with survival curves of N− and FDG-PET+ or − patients. Conclusions Our findings suggest that FDG-PET results reflect intrinsic biologic features of primary BC tumors and have prognostic value with respect to nodal metastases. FDG-PET false negative cases appear to identify less aggressive indolent metastases. The possibility to identify a subgroup of N+ BC patients with an outcome comparable with N− BC patients could reduce the surgical and adjuvant therapeutic intervention

VI Seminario di studio. Salute globale e scenari attuali. Nuovi contributi di ricerca. Istituto Superiore di Sanità. Roma, 16 aprile 2015. Riassunti

Esiste un bisogno crescente di chiare evidenze scientifiche che possano supportare le politiche per la salute. Questo vale per una serie di aspetti che vanno dai protocolli diagnostici applicati alle malattie trasmissibili, agli approcci terapeutici, agli studi epidemiologici, alla definizione e identificazione dei determinanti della salute con partico lare riguardo alle situazioni di grave diseguaglianza, alle contaminazioni ambientali, alla relazione tra malattia e diritti così come alla relazione tra malattia e diritto. L’obiettivo del Dottorato di Ricerca in Malattie Infettive, Microbiologia e Scienze della Salute è proprio quello di fornire momenti di crescita, finalizzati alla formazione di nuovi ricercatori, nel campo delle malattie infettive, della microbiologia, della parassitologia, della sanità pubblica e medicina sociale, nella medicina legale e nelle scienze forensi. L’obiettivo di questo sesto appuntamento, nell’ambito della collaborazione tra Istituto Superiore di Sanità e l’Università̀ Sapienza di Roma, con i dottorandi è proprio quello di fornire una cornice il più possibile unitaria a un quadro complesso di ricerche di base e applicate nell’ambito degli obiettivi del dottorato.There is a growing need for clear scientific evidence that can support health policies. This applies to a number of issues including diagnostic protocols applied to communicable diseases, therapeutic approaches, epidemiological studies, the definition and identification of the health determinants (with particular reference to situations of severe inequality), environmental contamination, the relationship between disease and rights as well as the relationship between disease and law. The objective of the PhD Program in Infectious Diseases, Microbiology and Health Sciences is precisely to provide moments of intellectual growth, aimed at the trai ning of new researchers in the field of infectious diseases, microbiology, parasitology, public health and social medicine, in forensic medicine and forensic sciences. The objective of the sixth meeting with graduate students, part of the collaboration between the Italian National Institute of Health, and the Sapienza University of Rome, is precisely to provide a frame as unitary as possible to a complex picture of basic and applied research within the objectives of the doctorat