A Qualitative Study of Stress in Individuals Self-Employed in Solo Businesses

This qualitative study involved 54 individuals who were self-employed in a variety of solo businesses. All participants were administered a semistructured interview that inquired into various aspects of their work experience with the data subject to reliability and validity checks. The study identified stressful incidents, coping strategies, and emotional strains arising from those stressful incidents. Uncertainty about income was a common background stressor. Recent specific stressors included dramatic slowdowns in business, reputational threat, betrayal, unreasonable customers, and medical problems. Commonly occurring strains included apprehension/anxiety, frustration, anger, and sadness/depression. The self-employed used problem-focused coping much more often than emotion-focused coping. We also identified a third kind of coping that we labeled humanitarian coping. A number of questions/hypotheses for future research emerged, including identifying (a) a tipping point bearing on when the psychological benefits of self-employment (e.g., autonomy) are overtaken by business losses outside the individual’s control and (b) the coping strategies that are most useful in managing work-related stressors

Spatial differences in estuarine utilization by seasonally resident species in Mid-Atlantic Bight, USA

Climate-driven distributional shifts have been well-documented for fisheries resources along the East Coast of the United States, yet little attention has been given to adjacent estuarine systems. The Chesapeake Bay is the largest estuary in the continental United States and serves as important habitat for a diversity of fishes and invertebrates, many of which are seasonal residents. Survey data indicate that relative abundance of finfish in Chesapeake Bay has diminished substantially, while coastwide stock status has remained unchanged. In response to warming, seasonal estuarine residents may remain in coastal waters or inhabit a northerly estuary, but the extent to which changing environmental conditions may drive exchange between the coastal ocean and estuarine systems remains unresolved. This study analyzed data collected from 2008 to 2019 by three fisheries-independent trawl surveys to explore temporal patterns and associated environmental drivers of the estuarine–coastal ocean exchange in the Mid-Atlantic for eight economically and ecologically important species. Relative habitat utilization of Chesapeake Bay declined for most species, while utilization patterns for Delaware Bay were largely constant or increasing over time. Broad-scale, multispecies analyses of relative habitat utilization time series revealed that the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) was an important driver of Chesapeake Bay exchange, but that average Apr/May coastal ocean bottom temperature was significant for Delaware Bay. Collectively, the results demonstrate that several Mid-Atlantic species have altered their estuarine habitat use over time, climate drivers associated with estuarine–coastal ocean exchange operate on different time scales, and that the impacts of warming within the Mid-Atlantic vary spatially

Are We Ready and Willing to Address the Mental Health Needs of Children? Implications From September 11th

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/40308/2/Schonfeld_Are We Ready and Willing_2004.pd

Two-Stage Friend Recommendation Based on Network Alignment and Series Expansion of Probabilistic Topic Model

© 2017 IEEE. Precise friend recommendation is an important problem in social media. Although most social websites provide some kinds of auto friend searching functions, their accuracies are not satisfactory. In this paper, we propose a more precise auto friend recommendation method with two stages. In the first stage, by utilizing the information of the relationship between texts and users, as well as the friendship information between users, we align different social networks and choose some "possible friends." In the second stage, with the relationship between image features and users, we build a topic model to further refine the recommendation results. Because some traditional methods, such as variational inference and Gibbs sampling, have their limitations in dealing with our problem, we develop a novel method to find out the solution of the topic model based on series expansion. We conduct experiments on the Flickr dataset to show that the proposed algorithm recommends friends more precisely and faster than traditional methods

Testing the Assumption of Measurement Invariance in the SAMHSA Mental Health and Alcohol Abuse Stigma Assessment in Older Adults

This study examined the assumption of measurement invariance of the SAMSHA Mental Health and Alcohol Abuse Stigma Assessment. This is necessary to make valid comparisons across time and groups. The data come from the Primary Care Research in Substance Abuse and Mental Health for Elderly trial, a longitudinal multisite, randomized trial examining two modes of care (Referral and Integrated). A sample of 1,198 adults over the age of 65 who screened positive for depression, anxiety, and/or at-risk drinking was used. Structural equation modeling was used to assess measurement invariance in a two-factor measurement model (Perceived Stigma, Comfort Level). Irrespective of their stigma level, one bias indicated that with time, respondents find it easier to acknowledge that it is difficult to start treatment if others know they are in treatment. Other biases indicated that sex, mental quality of life and the subject of stigma had undue influence on respondents' feeling people would think differently of them if they received treatment and on respondents' comfort in talking to a mental health provider. Still, in the present study, these biases in response behavior had little effect on the evaluation of group differences and changes in stigma. Stigma decreased for patients of both the Referral and Integrated care group

Soldier’s beliefs in abstinence before and after the implementation of a novel army nicotine-free policy

United States Army soldiers have used tobacco for decades1 despite known health risks associated with these products.2 Material connections between the tobacco industry and the military during the early part of the 20th century, coupled with pervasive advertising images of soldiers using tobacco during combat, served to promote tobacco use among young recruits entering training.3 A variety of policieshave been instituted during the training period, to varied and sometimes suboptimal effect.4 Currently, tobacco (defined as any non-therapeutic nicotine product) is banned during basic combat training (BCT), the first phase of training in a soldier’s career, which lasts 10 weeks. It is allowed in the longer subsequent advanced individual training (AIT), during which soldiers learn their military occupationspecialty. Trainee soldiers in an AIT aviation battalion on Fort Eustis in Virginia previously reported a reduction in overall tobacco use following BCT,5 prompting a decision to institute a proposed nicotine-free policy during AIT, which lasts approximately 3–6 months. This study aimed to determine if the AIT nicotine-free policy implementation process would change the tobacco user’s intentionto remain abstinent following AIT, when tobacco use would not be restricted

Chern-simon type photon mass from fermion electric dipole moments at finite temperature in 3+1 dimensions

We study the low energy effective field theory of fermions with electric and magnetic dipole moments at finite temperature. We find that at one loop there is an interaction term of the Chern-Simon form ${\cal L_I}=m_\mu\>A_\nu {\tilde F}^{\mu\nu}$. The four vector $m_\mu \simeq d_i \mu_i m_i^2 ~{\partial_\mu}\>(ln T)$ is interpreted as a Chern- Simon type mass of photons, which is determined by the electric (magnetic) dipole moments $d_i$ ($\mu_i$) of the fermions in the vacuum polarisation loop diagram. The physical consequence of such a photon mass is that, photons of opposite circular polarisations, propagating through a hot medium, have different group velocities. We estimate that the time lag between the arrival times of the left and right circularly polarised light signals from pulsars. If the light propagates through a hot plasma (where the temperature in some regions is $T \sim 100 MeV$) then the time lag between the two circularly polarised signals of frequency $\omega$ will be $\Delta t(\omega) \simeq 10^{-6} /\omega$. It may be possible to observe this effect in pulsar signals which propagate through nebula at high temperatures.Comment: plain TeX, 9 page