A Group Music Therapy Method to Promote Mentalization Skills in Clients with Narcissistic Personality Disorder

Abstract This paper investigates the development of a group music therapy method by adapting elements of mentalization-based treatment (MBT) to help clients with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). A prominent characteristic of NPD is a deficiency in empathy. The fostering of empathy and emotional awareness forms the basis of MBT. Music therapy offers a means to explore these skills on a nonverbal level. This work is even more impactful in a group setting. Unfortunately, there is a dearth of literature specific to music therapy and NPD. Furthermore, despite the availability of writings separately concerning NPD, MBT, group therapy, and music therapy, there is little research synthesizing these topics, indicating that additional study is warranted. At this author’s internship placement at a private psychiatric hospital, there was a significant number of residents with high narcissistic traits. Since mentalization theory is one of the hospital’s foundational orientations, the development of this method aligned with both the institutional philosophy and the needs of the population. The resulting intervention plan consisted of nonverbal musical dialogues performed by residents and observed by peers. These were followed by verbal discussions guessing at their emotional and relational content. In addition, I incorporated weekly receptive group sessions aimed at deepening connections among residents and building trust in the therapeutic relationship. The results suggest that this intervention indeed facilitated the MBT component of affect elaboration by engaging the group’s interest and engendering a variety of interpretations and perspectives

ConStance: Modeling Annotation Contexts to Improve Stance Classification

Manual annotations are a prerequisite for many applications of machine learning. However, weaknesses in the annotation process itself are easy to overlook. In particular, scholars often choose what information to give to annotators without examining these decisions empirically. For subjective tasks such as sentiment analysis, sarcasm, and stance detection, such choices can impact results. Here, for the task of political stance detection on Twitter, we show that providing too little context can result in noisy and uncertain annotations, whereas providing too strong a context may cause it to outweigh other signals. To characterize and reduce these biases, we develop ConStance, a general model for reasoning about annotations across information conditions. Given conflicting labels produced by multiple annotators seeing the same instances with different contexts, ConStance simultaneously estimates gold standard labels and also learns a classifier for new instances. We show that the classifier learned by ConStance outperforms a variety of baselines at predicting political stance, while the model's interpretable parameters shed light on the effects of each context.Comment: To appear at EMNLP 201

One year of monitoring the Vela pulsar using a Phased Array Feed

We have observed the Vela pulsar for one year using a Phased Array Feed (PAF) receiver on the 12-metre antenna of the Parkes Test-Bed Facility. These observations have allowed us to investigate the stability of the PAF beam-weights over time, to demonstrate that pulsars can be timed over long periods using PAF technology and to detect and study the most recent glitch event that occurred on 12 December 2016. The beam-weights are shown to be stable to 1% on time scales on the order of three weeks. We discuss the implications of this for monitoring pulsars using PAFs on single dish telescopes.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables. Accepted for publication in PAS

Beyond the Farm Gate: Postharvest Loss and the Role of Agro‐Processors in Sub‐Saharan African Food Security

The paper examines the challenge of postharvest loss (PHL) in Sub‐Saharan Africa. It focuses on strategies to address PHL at the agro‐processing level through more coordinated approaches to nutrition‐sensitive agriculture programmes. Looking beyond the traditional focus of on‐farm storage facilities and smallholder behavioural change, the paper examines three interrelated issue areas that ought to be included in broad‐based strategies to curb PHL: accurate measurement of losses; better coordination of agriculture and nutrition interventions; and addressing informational and infrastructural challenges. The paper argues that improvements  made in any or all downstream components have the potential to reduce rates of PHL. It emphasizes the value of a systems approach when developing multi‐stakeholder strategies to combat PHL

Rote learning : the ugly duckling of student paramedic education?

The intent of this commentary is to ask questions and stimulate discussion amongst academics and paramedic educators as to whether the inherent value of rote learning has simply been lost in the shadow of more recent learning and teaching practices

Evidence of longterm cyclic evolution of radio pulsar periods

The measurements of pulsar frequency second derivatives have shown that they are 1e2...1e6 times larger than expected for standard pulsar spin-down law. Moreover, the second derivatives as well as braking indices are even negative for about half the pulsars. We explain these paradoxical results on the basis of the statistical analysis of the rotational parameters f0, f1 and f2 of the subset of 295 pulsars taken mostly from the ATNF database. We have found a strong correlation between f2 and f1 for both f2 > 0 (correlation coefficient r ~ 0.9) and f2 < 0 (r ~ 0.85), as well as between f0 and f1 (r ~ 0.6...0.7). We interpret these dependencies as evolutionary ones due to f1 being nearly proportional to the pulsars' age. The derived statistical relations as well as "anomalous" values of f2 are well described by assuming the existence of long-time variations of the spin-down rate. The pulsar frequency evolution, therefore, consists of secular change of f0_{ev}(t), f1_{ev}(t) and f2_{ev}(t) according to the power law with n ~ 5, the irregularities, observed within the timespan as timing noise, and the non-monotonous variations on the timescale of several tens of years, which is larger than that of the timespan. It is possible that the nature of long-term variations is similar to that of short-term ones. The idea of non-constant secular pulsars' braking index n is also analysed.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures. To appear in Advances in Space Research in the proceedings of the 36th COSPAR Scientific Assembly, Beijing, July 200

Rote learning: the ugly duckling of student paramedic education?

The intent of this commentary is to ask questions and stimulate discussion amongst academics and paramedic educators as to whether the inherent value of rote learning has simply been lost in the shadow of more recent learning and teaching practices

Exploring weight loss services in primary care and staff views on using a web-based programme

Although primary care staff felt they should deliver weight loss services, low levels of faith in the efficacy of current treatments resulted in provision of under-resourced and 'ad hoc' services. Integration of a web-based weight loss programme that promotes service evaluation and provides a cost-effective option for supporting patients may encourage practices to invest more in weight management service

Primary care interventions and current service innovations in modifying long-term outcomes after stroke: a protocol for a scoping review.

INTRODUCTION: Interventions delivered by primary and/or community care have the potential to reach the majority of stroke survivors and carers and offer ongoing support. However, an integrative account emerging from the reviews of interventions addressing specific long-term outcomes after stroke is lacking. The aims of the proposed scoping review are to provide an overview of: (1) primary care and community healthcare interventions by generalist healthcare professionals to stroke survivors and/or their informal carers to address long-term outcomes after stroke, (2) the scope and characteristics of interventions which were successful in addressing long-term outcomes, and (3) developments in current clinical practice. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: Studies that focused on adult community dwelling stroke survivors and informal carers were included. Academic electronic databases will be searched to identify reviews of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) and controlled trials, trials from the past 5 years; reviews of observational studies. Practice exemplars from grey literature will be identified through advanced Google search. Reports, guidelines and other documents of major health organisations, clinical professional bodies, and stroke charities in the UK and internationally will be included. Two reviewers will independently screen titles, abstracts and full texts for inclusion of published literature. One reviewer will screen search results from the grey literature and identify relevant documents for inclusion. Data synthesis will include analysis of the number, type of studies, year and country of publication, a summary of intervention components/service or practice, outcomes addressed, main results (an indicator of effectiveness) and a description of included interventions. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: The review will help identify components of care and care pathways for primary care services for stroke. By comparing the results with stroke survivors' and carers' needs identified in the literature, the review will highlight potential gaps in research and practice relevant to long-term care after stroke.The work on the protocol is the part of the programme of research ‘Developing primary care services for stroke survivors’ funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR)'s Programme Grants for Applied Research Programme (grant reference number PTC-RP-PG-0213-20001).This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from BMJ Publishing Group via https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2016-01284

Working with young dynamos: the benefits of patient public involvement in research design [Abstract only]

This study examined the attitudes and perceptions towards continuous professional development (CPD) of Australasian paramedics working in private and state or territory ambulance services. For the purpose of the study, CPD is described as commitment to both formal and informal life-long learning (LLL) opportunities which are linked to clinical advancements, practitioner competence, professionalism, and the delivery of gold standard patient care. Constructivist grounded theory was used as the methodological framework for this study. Study participants (n = 10) completed their paramedic qualification through two main pathways, namely a postemployment in-house Vocational Education and Training (VET) diploma or a preemployment university degree and had worked as a paramedic for a minimum of 2 years. Ethical approval was obtained from the Queensland University of Technology, and the participants signed consent forms prior to participating in the study. Data were collected by semistructured interviews, which were recorded digitally for transcription and analysis purposes. The study found there was not a considerable step up for paramedics to engage in CPD and LLL, as this was already expected prior to professional registration for paramedics commencing late 2018. Some older paramedics expressed fear about keeping up to date with new technologies and a shift in the paramilitary paramedic culture was identified, where education is forming a new hierarchical stigmatisation. A framework of paramedic CPD has been created from the study’s findings and builds on the extant literature. The framework acknowledges professional, industrial, social, personal, political, organisational, and economic factors which influence or change engagement in CPD