The Romantic Jealousy as Multidimensional Construct: A Study on the Italian Short Form of the Multidimensional Jealousy Scale

Background: Romantic jealousy is a complex construct composed of several dimensions. Given the multidimensional nature of romantic jealousy, it would be useful to have a measurement scale that would take into account its several components. Objective: The aims of the present study were to provide the Italian adaptation of the Short Form of the Multidimensional Jealousy Scale (SF- MJS - Elphinson, Feeney & Noller, 2011) verifying its factorial structure, reliability, and predictive validity. Finally, gender differences in the tree main dimensions of romantic jealousy- cognitive, emotional and behavioral- were explored. Method: 361 participants (168 males and 193 females), aged 20 to 40 (M = 26.50; SD = 4.99) were recruited. A confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) was performed to test the multidimensional structure of the scale. Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was used to verify the reliability. The predictive validity was assessed examining associations between different dimensions of the romantic jealousy and insecure romantic attachment. Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was implemented in order to verify gender differences. Results: Confirmatory factor analyses verified the three-factor structure, supporting the presence of these distinct latent constructs, assessing cognitive, emotional and behavioral components of romantic jealousy. The internal consistency coefficients were satisfactory for all the three factors of the scale, and ranged from .80 to .85. Consistent evidence supported the predictive validity of the ISF-MJS. Significant gender differences were registered. Conclusion: The ISF-MJS constitutes a reliable instrument for measuring romantic jealousy in the Italian context. Limitations, strengths, and further development of the present study are discussed

A bidimensional instrument to assess the sense of guilt in childwood: the Guilt Feelings Scale for Children (GFS_C).

In the psychoanalytical theoretical perspective the Sense of Guilt has been formulated in terms of the two related constructs: Persecutory Guilt and Reparative Guilt. The focus of this paper is to develop a bi-dimensional Scale of the Sense of Guilt for Children and verify its conceptual structure via exploratory and confirmatory approaches. Starting from two scales for adults prosed by Caprara and colleagues (1990), the authors develop the Guilt Feeling Scale for Children (GFS_C) that in the final version includes 9 items for Persecutory Guilt (P-GFS_C), 9 items for Reparative Guilt (R-GFS_C), and 6 control items. The sample was composed of 242 Italian children (132 males and 110 females), aged 8-11. Overall, results confirmed the hypothesized structure of the scale providing a good level of fit of the model to the data. Finally, the results showed a good internal consistency of the global scale and of both the subscales

Health Technology Assessment on the use of the Wearable Cardioverter Defibrillator in Patients with Myocardial Infarction and with ICD Explant

The objective of the present work is to conduct a Health Technology Assessment (HTA) on the use of the Wearable Cardioverter Defibrillator (WCD) in patients at risk of Sudden Cardiac Arrest (SCA) following Myocardial Infarction (MI) or with an explanted Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator (ICD)

Prevalence of anxiety and depression symptoms in a sample of outpatients with ATTR cardiac amyloidosis

Patients with ATTR cardiac amyloidosis (ATTR-CA) face rare disease that could negatively influence psychological well-being with consequences on the course of the disease and quality of life. However, to date, no study analyzed the prevalence of anxiety and depression in patients with ATTR-CA and which clinical and sociodemographic characteristics are linked with these psychopathological conditions. A total of 109 consecutive patients (83% males) aged 62–90 years with ATTR-CA were recruited. In order to better understand the prevalence of anxiety and depression in ATTR-CA, a control group composed by 33 individuals equaling gender, education, and age were recruited. The level of anxiety and depression was measured using the Italian version of the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS). Sociodemographic and clinic characteristics were registered. Almost half of patients (49%) reported a clinical level of depression or anxiety, or both. ATTR-CA patients reported higher levels of anxiety and depression than control group. Results showed that older patients with ATTR-CA, especially females, with more advanced disease could be more at risk to develop an anxious disorder. Furthermore, being a woman, and presenting with a greater severity of symptoms, would appear to be a risk factor for developing a depressive disorder. Overall, these results highlighted the high presence of anxiety and depression in ATTR-CA patients, suggesting to physicians to pay attention to the psychological well-being of ATTR-CA patients. In fact, a psychological support for patients with high level of psychopathological disease could reduce disease burden and improve quality of life in ATTR-CA population

Agreement on classification of clinical photographs of pigmentary lesions: exercise after a training course with young dermatologists.

Smartphone apps may help promoting the early diagnosis of melanoma. The reliability of specialist judgment on lesions should be assessed. Hereby, we evaluated the agreement of 6 young dermatologists, after a specific training. Clinical judgment was evaluated during 2 online sessions, 1 month apart, on a series of 45 pigmentary lesions. Lesions were classified as highly suspicious, suspicious, non-suspicious or not assessable. Cohen's and Fleiss' kappa were used to calculate intra- and inter-rater agreement. The overall intra-rater agreement was 0.42 (95% confidence interval - CI: 0.33-0.50), varying between 0.12-0.59 on single raters. The inter-rater agreement during the first phase was 0.29 (95% CI: 0.24-0.34). When considering the agreement for each category of judgment, kappa varied from 0.19 for not assessable to 0.48 for highly suspicious lesions. Similar results were obtained in the second exercise. The study showed a less than satisfactory agreement among young dermatologists. Our data point to the need for improving the reliability of the clinical diagnoses of melanoma especially when assessing small lesions and when dealing with thin melanomas at a population level

Comprehensive In Vitro Toxicity Testing of a Panel of Representative Oxide Nanomaterials: First Steps towards an Intelligent Testing Strategy

Nanomaterials (NMs) display many unique and useful physico-chemical properties. However, reliable approaches are needed for risk assessment of NMs. The present study was performed in the FP7-MARINA project, with the objective to identify and evaluate in vitro test methods for toxicity assessment in order to facilitate the development of an intelligent testing strategy (ITS). Six representative oxide NMs provided by the EC-JRC Nanomaterials Repository were tested in nine laboratories. The in vitro toxicity of NMs was evaluated in 12 cellular models representing 6 different target organs/systems (immune system, respiratory system, gastrointestinal system, reproductive organs, kidney and embryonic tissues). The toxicity assessment was conducted using 10 different assays for cytotoxicity, embryotoxicity, epithelial integrity, cytokine secretion and oxidative stress. Thorough physico-chemical characterization was performed for all tested NMs. Commercially relevant NMs with different physico-chemical properties were selected: two TiO2 NMs with different surface chemistry – hydrophilic (NM-103) and hydrophobic (NM-104), two forms of ZnO – uncoated (NM-110) and coated with triethoxycapryl silane (NM-111) and two SiO2 NMs produced by two different manufacturing techniques – precipitated (NM-200) and pyrogenic (NM-203). Cell specific toxicity effects of all NMs were observed; macrophages were the most sensitive cell type after short-term exposures (24-72h) (ZnO>SiO2>TiO2). Longer term exposure (7 to 21 days) significantly affected the cell barrier integrity in the presence of ZnO, but not TiO2 and SiO2, while the embryonic stem cell test (EST) classified the TiO2 NMs as potentially ‘weak-embryotoxic’ and ZnO and SiO2 NMs as ‘non-embryotoxic’. A hazard ranking could be established for the representative NMs tested (ZnO NM-110 > ZnO NM-111 > SiO2 NM-203 > SiO2 NM-200 > TiO2 NM-104 > TiO2 NM-103). This ranking was different in the case of embryonic tissues, for which TiO2 displayed higher toxicity compared with ZnO and SiO2. Importantly, the in vitro methodology applied could identify cell- and NM-specific responses, with a low variability observed between different test assays. Overall, this testing approach, based on a battery of cellular systems and test assays, complemented by an exhaustive physico-chemical characterization of NMs, could be deployed for the development of an ITS suitable for risk assessment of NMs. This study also provides a rich source of data for modeling of NM effects

A pan-European epidemiological study reveals honey bee colony survival depends on beekeeper education and disease control

Reports of honey bee population decline has spurred many national efforts to understand the extent of the problem and to identify causative or associated factors. However, our collective understanding of the factors has been hampered by a lack of joined up trans-national effort. Moreover, the impacts of beekeeper knowledge and beekeeping management practices have often been overlooked, despite honey bees being a managed pollinator. Here, we established a standardised active monitoring network for 5 798 apiaries over two consecutive years to quantify honey bee colony mortality across 17 European countries. Our data demonstrate that overwinter losses ranged between 2% and 32%, and that high summer losses were likely to follow high winter losses. Multivariate Poisson regression models revealed that hobbyist beekeepers with small apiaries and little experience in beekeeping had double the winter mortality rate when compared to professional beekeepers. Furthermore, honey bees kept by professional beekeepers never showed signs of disease, unlike apiaries from hobbyist beekeepers that had symptoms of bacterial infection and heavy Varroa infestation. Our data highlight beekeeper background and apicultural practices as major drivers of honey bee colony losses. The benefits of conducting trans-national monitoring schemes and improving beekeeper training are discussed

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Uno strumento per rilevare la timidezza nella preadolescenza: l’adattamento italiano della Revised Cheek and Buss Shyness Scale

La preadolescenza rappresenta un periodo evolutivo poco indagato dalla letteratura sulla timidezza, soprattutto in riferimento alla percezione che i soggetti hanno di sé. Ciò è dovuto, in parte, alla carenza di strumenti self-report adatti a rilevare tale costrutto in questa fase di sviluppo. Obiettivo: Scopo del presente lavoro è pertanto quello di predisporre un adattamento italiano della Revised Cheek and Buss Shyness Scale (RCBS; Cheek, 1983), una scala self-report di misurazione della timidezza, verificando la sua tenuta anche su soggetti di età preadolescenziale. Metodologia: La versione italiana della RCBS, la sottoscala di ansia/depressione dello Youth Self-Report Questionnaire (Achenbach, 1991) e la Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (Rosenberg, 1965), considerate come misure di validità discriminante, sono state somministrate a 502 soggetti: 250 preadolescenti dagli 11 ai 13 anni e 252 adolescenti dai 17 ai 19 anni. Discussione critica e conclusioni: I risultati hanno confermato la struttura originale unidimensionale della RCBS e la sua generalizzabilità anche in riferimento al gruppo di preadolescenti. Lo strumento ha mostrato inoltre buoni indici di attendibilità e di validità discriminante. Nel complesso, quindi, la RCBS rappresenta uno strumento self-report idoneo a rilevare la timidezza anche all’interno del contesto italiano. Le analisi condotte permettono inoltre di misurare tale costrutto attraverso le percezioni dei soggetti anche durante il periodo preadolescenziale