Multicultural training on American Indian issues: Testing the effectiveness of an intervention to change attitudes toward Native-themed mascots

This study investigated attitudes toward Native-themed mascots in the context of color blind racial attitudes (CoBRAs). Results indicate that higher CoBRAs are related to lower awareness of the offensiveness of Native-themed mascots. The researchers tested the effectiveness of a training intervention designed to produce attitudinal change among master’s level counseling students. Results demonstrate that the training intervention produced significantly greater attitudinal change than did a general training session on culturally sensitive counseling practices with American Indian clients, particularly among students with high CoBRAs. Results also indicate that this training intervention on Native-themed mascots contributed to lower color blind racial attitudes, thus increasing the student’s awareness of societal racism. Psychological training programs may benefit from augmenting their multicultural counseling curriculum by specifically addressing the offensive nature of Native-themed mascots. An awareness of the marginalization of American Indians, particularly as it involves racialized mascots, can reduce color blind racial attitudes and may provide psychologists with a more comprehensive understanding of aspects of the reality of American Indian clients that contribute to their worldview

A Survey of the Impact of Self-Supervised Pretraining for Diagnostic Tasks with Radiological Images

Self-supervised pretraining has been observed to be effective at improving feature representations for transfer learning, leveraging large amounts of unlabelled data. This review summarizes recent research into its usage in X-ray, computed tomography, magnetic resonance, and ultrasound imaging, concentrating on studies that compare self-supervised pretraining to fully supervised learning for diagnostic tasks such as classification and segmentation. The most pertinent finding is that self-supervised pretraining generally improves downstream task performance compared to full supervision, most prominently when unlabelled examples greatly outnumber labelled examples. Based on the aggregate evidence, recommendations are provided for practitioners considering using self-supervised learning. Motivated by limitations identified in current research, directions and practices for future study are suggested, such as integrating clinical knowledge with theoretically justified self-supervised learning methods, evaluating on public datasets, growing the modest body of evidence for ultrasound, and characterizing the impact of self-supervised pretraining on generalization.Comment: 32 pages, 6 figures, a literature survey submitted to BMC Medical Imagin

Self-Supervised Pretraining Improves Performance and Inference Efficiency in Multiple Lung Ultrasound Interpretation Tasks

In this study, we investigated whether self-supervised pretraining could produce a neural network feature extractor applicable to multiple classification tasks in B-mode lung ultrasound analysis. When fine-tuning on three lung ultrasound tasks, pretrained models resulted in an improvement of the average across-task area under the receiver operating curve (AUC) by 0.032 and 0.061 on local and external test sets respectively. Compact nonlinear classifiers trained on features outputted by a single pretrained model did not improve performance across all tasks; however, they did reduce inference time by 49% compared to serial execution of separate fine-tuned models. When training using 1% of the available labels, pretrained models consistently outperformed fully supervised models, with a maximum observed test AUC increase of 0.396 for the task of view classification. Overall, the results indicate that self-supervised pretraining is useful for producing initial weights for lung ultrasound classifiers.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, submitted to IEEE Acces

Intra-video Positive Pairs in Self-Supervised Learning for Ultrasound

Self-supervised learning (SSL) is one strategy for addressing the paucity of labelled data in medical imaging by learning representations from unlabelled images. Contrastive and non-contrastive SSL methods produce learned representations that are similar for pairs of related images. Such pairs are commonly constructed by randomly distorting the same image twice. The videographic nature of ultrasound offers flexibility for defining the similarity relationship between pairs of images. In this study, we investigated the effect of utilizing proximal, distinct images from the same B-mode ultrasound video as pairs for SSL. Additionally, we introduced a sample weighting scheme that increases the weight of closer image pairs and demonstrated how it can be integrated into SSL objectives. Named Intra-Video Positive Pairs (IVPP), the method surpassed previous ultrasound-specific contrastive learning methods' average test accuracy on COVID-19 classification with the POCUS dataset by $\ge 1.3\%$. Detailed investigations of IVPP's hyperparameters revealed that some combinations of IVPP hyperparameters can lead to improved or worsened performance, depending on the downstream task. Guidelines for practitioners were synthesized based on the results, such as the merit of IVPP with task-specific hyperparameters, and the improved performance of contrastive methods for ultrasound compared to non-contrastive counterparts.Comment: 18 pages, 5 figure

Rigorous Analytic Combinatorics in Several Variables in SageMath

We introduce the new sage_acsv package for the SageMath computer algebra system, allowing users to rigorously compute asymptotics for a large variety of multivariate sequences with rational generating functions. Using Sage's support for exact computations over the algebraic number field, this package provides the first rigorous implementation of algorithms from the theory of analytic combinatorics in several variables.Comment: 8 pages; Package: https://pypi.org/project/sage-acsv

Early affective changes and increased connectivity in preclinical Alzheimer's disease.

IntroductionAffective changes precede cognitive decline in mild Alzheimer's disease and may relate to increased connectivity in a "salience network" attuned to emotionally significant stimuli. The trajectory of affective changes in preclinical Alzheimer's disease, and its relationship to this network, is unknown.MethodsOne hundred one cognitively normal older adults received longitudinal assessments of affective symptoms, then amyloid-PET. We hypothesized amyloid-positive individuals would show enhanced emotional reactivity associated with salience network connectivity. We tested whether increased global connectivity in key regions significantly related to affective changes.ResultsIn participants later found to be amyloid positive, emotional reactivity increased with age, and interpersonal warmth declined in women. These individuals showed higher global connectivity within the right insula and superior temporal sulcus; higher superior temporal sulcus connectivity predicted increasing emotional reactivity and decreasing interpersonal warmth.ConclusionsAffective changes should be considered an early preclinical feature of Alzheimer's disease. These changes may relate to higher functional connectivity in regions critical for social-emotional processing

Novice Counselors’ Conceptualizations and Experiences of Therapeutic Relationships

This qualitative study investigated three novice counselors’ experiences and characterizations of therapeutic relationships. Thematic analyses of interviews and diaries revealed six common themes: (a) the centrality of supervision and training experiences to navigating interpersonal experiences with clients; (b) anxiety about counselors’ roles in therapeutic relationships; (c) the perception of the therapeutic relationship as less directive than outside (lay) helping relationships; (d) experimentation with different interpersonal styles; (e)awareness of countertransference; and, (f) impact of therapeutic relationships on outside relationships. Findings expand upon the therapeutic relationship as a focal point for the training and supervision of novice counselors

Content Analysis of the Psychology of Men and Masculinity (2000 to 2008)

In 2010, the Psychology of Men and Masculinity (PMM) celebrates the 10th anniversary of its inception as the official journal of the Society for the Psychological Study of Men andMasculinity. This article commemorates this significant milestone by examining the journal’s current trends and future directions through a content analysis of 154 articles published in PMM from 2000 to 2008. The authors found that PMM scholarship was dominated by theories associated with the gender role strain paradigm, addressed clinically-related topics, relied largely on White male college samples, and had a growing impact on clinically-focused scholarly journals and books. Recommendations for addressing theoretical orientations, topics, and populations underrepresented in PMM scholarship are provided