The Psychosocial Effects of the Li-Fraumeni Education and Early Detection (LEAD) Program on Indivdiuals with Li-Fraumeni Syndrome

Li-Fraumeni syndrome (LFS) is a hereditary cancer syndrome that leads to an increased risk of multiple cancers. In the past five years new screening protocols have been developed that provide improved screening options for individuals with LFS. However, very little has been published on the psychosocial impact of these screening protocols. The goals of this study were to determine how participation in screening impacts individuals psychosocially, to examine the benefits and drawbacks of screening, and to evaluate possible barriers to continued screening. This qualitative study consisted of phone interviews with 20 individuals that took part in an LFS screening program at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. Data analysis showed that benefits of screening include early detection, peace of mind, centralized screening, knowledge providing power, and screening making LFS seem more livable. Perceived drawbacks included logistical issues, difficulty navigating the system, screening being draining, and significant negative emotional reactions such as anxiety, fear, and skepticism. Regardless of the emotions that were present, 100% of participants plan on continuing screening in the program. Our data indicates that the perceived benefits of screening outweigh the drawbacks of screening. Individuals in this screening program appear to have improved psychosocial well-being because of their access to the screening program

Physical and neural entrainment to rhythm: human sensorimotor coordination across tasks and effector systems.

The human sensorimotor system can be readily entrained to environmental rhythms, through multiple sensory modalities. In this review, we provide an overview of theories of timekeeping that make this neuroentrainment possible. First, we present recent evidence that contests the assumptions made in classic timekeeper models. The role of state estimation, sensory feedback and movement parameters on the organization of sensorimotor timing are discussed in the context of recent experiments that examined simultaneous timing and force control. This discussion is extended to the study of coordinated multi-effector movements and how they may be entrained

Web 2.0 Projects at Warwick University Library

About 2 years ago at Warwick our senior managers encouraged Academic Support staff to really explore web 2.0 technologies and find out if anything particularly lent itself to supporting library work or marketing. We were given free reign to find out what worked and what suited the library, and what didn’t. The following brief overviews cover only four of the projects that have been running since then. We have also investigated much more, including Twitter, Google Documents, wiki reading lists, You-Tube and more, but we couldn’t possibly fit it all in here. The brief articles below are just to give a taste of the kind of projects we have worked on. There are many more members of staff involved and many more web 2.0 adventures underway..

Risky Sexual Behavior and the Role of Decision-making

Risky sexual behavior (RSB) is the number one transmission method of HIV among adolescents. Reducing the rates of HIV among adolescents is of dire importance considering the rises in rates during the last several years. Minority adolescents are disproportionately affected by HIV, and a majority of the individuals living in Miami-Dade County (location of the proposed project) are minorities. RSB, externalizing disorders and cannabis use commonly occur together, such that both greater externalizing disorder symptoms and greater amounts of cannabis use have predicted engagement in more RSB. In addition, decision-making (a neurocognitive function) has found to be associated with cannabis use, externalizing disorders, and RSB. Little research has been conducted on these factors among adolescents. No study has evaluated externalizing disorders, cannabis use and decision-making together to determine the unique contribution of each factor to RSB among a sample of adolescents. The current study used the infrastructure and participants of an existing project examining how decision-making abilities and memory performance are impacted by cannabis use during adolescence. Structural equation modeling and multiple linear regression were used to analyze how externalizing disorders, cannabis use, and decision-making predict RSB. Results suggest that externalizing symptoms, cannabis use and some decision-making tasks predict RSB. Several interactions effects emerged between externalizing symptoms and decision-making tasks, cannabis use and decision-making tasks as well as externalizing symptoms and cannabis use to predict RSB. The results of the study will help future prevention and intervention efforts such that interventions can be tailored to address the areas that contribute the most to RSB among adolescents. Furthermore, cognitive skill building is one possible intervention that may be beneficial to adolescents with poorer decision-making performance

Implicit agency in observed actions: evidence for N1 suppression of tones caused by self-made and observed actions

Every day we make attributions about how our actions and the actions of others cause consequences in the world around us. It is unknown whether we use the same implicit process in attributing causality when observing others' actions as we do when making our own. The aim of this research was to investigate the neural processes involved in the implicit sense of agency we form between actions and effects, for both our own actions and when watching others' actions. Using an interval estimation paradigm to elicit intentional binding in self-made and observed actions, we measured the EEG responses indicative of anticipatory processes before an action and the ERPs in response to the sensory consequence. We replicated our previous findings that we form a sense of implicit agency over our own and others' actions. Crucially, EEG results showed that tones caused by either self-made or observed actions both resulted in suppression of the N1 component of the sensory ERP, with no difference in suppression between consequences caused by observed actions compared with self-made actions. Furthermore, this N1 suppression was greatest for tones caused by observed goal-directed actions rather than non-action or non-goal-related visual events. This suggests that top–down processes act upon the neural responses to sensory events caused by goal-directed actions in the same way for events caused by the self or those made by other agents