Effect of ICT on Achievement of Concepts in Teacher Education in Relation to Styles of Learning and Thinking

Information and communication (ICT) technology into teaching/learning is commonly used to expand knowledge that is helping to determine learning outcomes and manage the quality of teacher education. Present research was conducted on a purposive sample of 80 pupil teachers of DAV College of Education of Abohar of Punjab state. A self-constructed achievement test was used to find out the effect of information and communication technology on achievement of concepts in Teacher Education in relation to styles oflearning and thinking.Two sub groups based on styles of learning and thinking inventory were identified. For treatment whole sample was divided into experimental and control group. Experimental group was taught with the help of ICT and control group was taught with conventional method. Difference in pretest and post- test was calculated and gain scores were computed for both groups. A 2×2 two wayanalysis of variance was used to arrive at the following conclusions: (i) Experimental group was found to attain significantly higher achievement scores as compared to control group, (ii) Achievement of pupil teachers with differenthemispheric preferences was not found significant, (iii)No significant interaction effect was found to exist between the two variables

The Subjective Response to Nitrous Oxide is a Potential Pharmaco-Endophenotype for Alcohol Use Disorder: A Preliminary Study with Heavy Drinkers.

BACKGROUND: Healthy people with a family history of alcohol problems show a pattern of subjective responses to alcohol that resemble those of affected probands. Studies on ketamine suggest that up-regulation of N-methyl-D-aspartate receptors (NMDARs) underlies these effects, and point to a pharmacologically-responsive endophenotype reflecting enhanced risk for alcohol-use disorders. METHODS: Subjective stimulant and sedative effects were assessed before and during nitrous oxide (N2O; 50%) inhalation in heavy drinkers who were otherwise healthy. RESULTS: Participants with an ostensible family history of alcohol-use disorders (n = 23) were distinguishable from those without such familial risk (n = 37) by an enhanced stimulation-to-sedation ratio during N2O inhalation. CONCLUSION: The pattern of subjective effects of N2O according to familial risk is remarkably similar to that previously seen with ketamine, supporting the idea of a common, NMDAR-mediated mechanism of action. N2O may prove to be a safe and accessible alternative to ketamine for probing heritable NMDAR dysregulation in neuropsychiatric disorders

DEVELOPMENT AND VALIDATION OF UV SPECTROSCOPIC METHODS FOR SIMULTANEOUS ESTIMATION OF SALBUTAMOL SULPHATE AND DOXOPHYLLINE IN COMBINED SOLID DOSAGE FORM

Objective: Salbutamol sulphate (SBS) and doxophylline (DOX) was used for the treatment of asthma and bronchitis. In the present study, two simple, accurate, precise, reproducible and economical UV-spectroscopic methods (A and B) for simultaneous estimation of SBS and DOX in tablet dosage form have been developed.Methods: In the present study the simultaneous estimation of SBS and DOX was carried out by two methods. Method A employs solving of simultaneous equations based on the measurement of absorbance at two wavelengths, 272 nm and 276 nm which are the ðœ†max values of SBS and DOX respectively in phosphate buffer (pH 7.4). Method B is based on the principle of Q-Analysis where in, absorbance was measured at 225 nm (iso-absorptive point, ðœ†1) and 276 nm (ðœ†max of DOX, ðœ†2) in phosphate buffer (pH 7.4).Results: Both SBS and DOX shows linearity at all the selected wavelengths and obeys beer's law in the concentration range of between 0.2-1.6ðœ‡g/ml and 0.1-3.5μg/ml at 276 nm; 0.2-1.6 µg/ml and 0.1-4.5 µg/ml at 272 nm and 0.2-2.0µg/ml and 0.2-3.5μg/ml at iso-absorptive point 225 nm. Recovery studies for SBS and DOX were performed and the percentage recovery for both the drugs was obtained in the range of 97.45-98.63% (Method A) and 97.49–98.87 % (Method B) confirming the accuracy of the proposed method.Conclusion: Both the methods showed good reproducibility and recovery with % RSD less than 2. Statistical validation of the data shows that the proposed methods can be successfully applied for the routine analysis of drugs in commercial tablets. Hence, it could be used in the analysis of laboratory samples and marketed formulations containing these two drugs in combined dosage form without the interference of common excipients

Meditation trips: A thematic analysis of the combined naturalistic use of psychedelics with meditation practices

Similarities between meditative and psychedelic states have long been recognized. Recently, parallels in the psychological mechanisms mediating the beneficial effects of mindfulness and psychedelic treatments-as well as their potential therapeutic complementarity-have been noted. However, empirical research in this area remains limited. Here, we explore the naturalistic use of meditation practices among psychedelic users recruited outside of treatment/retreat or research settings. Participants with ≥ 1 psychedelic drug experience(s) were included in an online survey. The majority (n = 875; 66.5%) indicated that they engaged in meditation, 39.4% (n = 345) of whom had combined psychedelic use with meditation practices on ≥ 1 occasion. The majority (74.2%; n = 256) provided written accounts describing their experiences of "psychedelic-meditation," which were the basis for the present thematic analytic study. Six overarching themes were identified: (1) Compatibility Between Psychedelic and Meditative States; (2) Enhancement of the Meditative and Psychedelic Experience; (3) Beneficial Changes in Relating to the Internal and External World (encompassing acceptance, connection, peacefulness, and transformation); (4) Negative Effects of Combined Use; (5) Meditation as a Preparatory and Navigational Tool; and (6) Contextual Considerations (including reflections upon, and practical advice about, combining meditation and psychedelics). Participants' experiences appear to support recent empirical and theoretical work on the parallels and complementarity between psychedelic drug effects and meditation. The findings identify facilitating conditions for combining psychedelics with meditation, which may have implications for their combined therapeutic use. For example, the use of meditation techniques might represent a "psychedelic-sparing" strategy, potentially enabling therapeutically important psychedelic effects to emerge at lower doses. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Breastfeeding experience differentially impacts recognition of happiness and anger in mothers

Breastfeeding is a dynamic biological and social process based on hormonal regulation involving oxytocin. While there is much work on the role of breastfeeding in infant development and on the role of oxytocin in socio-emotional functioning in adults, little is known about how breastfeeding impacts emotion perception during motherhood. We therefore examined whether breastfeeding influences emotion recognition in mothers. Using a dynamic emotion recognition task, we found that longer durations of exclusive breastfeeding were associated with faster recognition of happiness, providing evidence for a facilitation of processing positive facial expressions. In addition, we found that greater amounts of breastfed meals per day were associated with slower recognition of anger. Our findings are in line with current views of oxytocin function and support accounts that view maternal behaviour as tuned to prosocial responsiveness, by showing that vital elements of maternal care can facilitate the rapid responding to affiliative stimuli by reducing importance of threatening stimuli

Transfer: Cross Modality Knowledge Transfer using Adversarial Networks -- A Study on Gesture Recognition

Knowledge transfer across sensing technology is a novel concept that has been recently explored in many application domains, including gesture-based human computer interaction. The main aim is to gather semantic or data driven information from a source technology to classify / recognize instances of unseen classes in the target technology. The primary challenge is the significant difference in dimensionality and distribution of feature sets between the source and the target technologies. In this paper, we propose TRANSFER, a generic framework for knowledge transfer between a source and a target technology. TRANSFER uses a language-based representation of a hand gesture, which captures a temporal combination of concepts such as handshape, location, and movement that are semantically related to the meaning of a word. By utilizing a pre-specified syntactic structure and tokenizer, TRANSFER segments a hand gesture into tokens and identifies individual components using a token recognizer. The tokenizer in this language-based recognition system abstracts the low-level technology-specific characteristics to the machine interface, enabling the design of a discriminator that learns technology-invariant features essential for recognition of gestures in both source and target technologies. We demonstrate the usage of TRANSFER for three different scenarios: a) transferring knowledge across technology by learning gesture models from video and recognizing gestures using WiFi, b) transferring knowledge from video to accelerometer, and d) transferring knowledge from accelerometer to WiFi signals

A systematic review of the pharmacological modulation of autobiographical memory specificity

BACKGROUND: Over-general autobiographical memory (AM) retrieval is proposed to have a causal role in the maintenance of psychological disorders like depression and PTSD. As such, the identification of drugs that modulate AM specificity may open up new avenues of research on pharmacological modeling and treatment of psychological disorders. AIM: The current review summarizes randomized, placebo-controlled studies of acute pharmacological modulation of AM specificity. METHOD: A systematic search was conducted of studies that examined the acute effects of pharmacological interventions on AM specificity in human volunteers (healthy and clinical participants) measured using the Autobiographical Memory Test. RESULTS: Seventeen studies were identified (986 total participants), of which 16 were judged to have low risk of bias. The presence and direction of effects varied across drugs and diagnostic status of participants (clinical vs. healthy volunteers). The most commonly studied drug-hydrocortisone-produced an overall impairment in AM specificity in healthy volunteers [g = -0.28, CI (-0.53, -0.03), p = 0.03], although improvements were reported in two studies of clinical participants. In general, studies of monoamine modulators reported no effect on specificity. CONCLUSION: Pharmacological enhancement of AM specificity is inconsistent, although monaminergic modulators show little promise in this regard. Drugs that reduce AM specificity in healthy volunteers may be useful experimental-pharmacological tools that mimic an important transdiagnostic impairment in psychological disorders. SYSTEMATIC REVIEW REGISTRATION: PROSPERO, identifier CRD42020199076, https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/display_record.php?ID=CRD42020199076