Examining arts psychotherapies practice elements: Early findings from the Horizons Project

Background: Arts Psychotherapies (art, music, drama and dance/movement) have been integral to mental health care services for several decades, however consensus and transparency about the clinical process is still being established. This study investigates practice with a team of six arts psychotherapists working with severe mental illnesses in London, inpatient and community services. The study examines what in-session practice elements are used, whether there is consensus about what the practice elements are and why the arts therapists use them. Method: The methods employed in the first phase of the project are interview-based with thematic analysis; repertory grid technique and nominal group techniques are used to analyse the data with the aim of triangulating results to establish greater validity. Results: The results showed that there is scope for developing a shared language about in-session practice elements within a mental health context. However the research examining the timing and reasons for employing those practice elements is still being undertaken. In this study the first results from an extract of the interviews illustrates a complex relationship between theory and practice. Conclusion: From the findings so far it would appear that within this specific context it is possible to see that there are ways of categorising the therapist’s actions that become comparable across the arts psychotherapies. From the therapist’s personal descriptions of his or her own practice, there also appears to be a close correlation between arts psychotherapies in a mental health community and inpatient context. Additionally, evidence-based practice models such as mentalisation-based therapies appear to have a close correlation

The economic value of tourism and recreation across a large protected area network

© 2019 The Authors Environmental economists routinely use travel cost methods to value recreational services from protected areas, but a number of limitations remain. First, most travel cost studies focus on a single protected area or a small handful of protected area sites; value estimates that relate to a protected area network across a larger geographic area or jurisdiction are rare. Second, most protected area travel cost studies use on-site sampling techniques that bias value estimates towards those reported by frequent visitors. Values derived from such studies are unlikely to be representative of those held by the broader community, and as such they are of limited utility for strategic land-use planning. We have overcome these limitations to estimate the total value of tourism and recreation for a network of 728 protected areas across 800,000 km2 in New South Wales (NSW) in south-eastern Australia. This is one of the largest studies of its kind undertaken to date, drawing on data from a stratified random phone-survey of more than 62,000 individuals in which interviewers collected detailed information on the number of visits to any and all of the 728 protected areas within NSW. Our study provides new insights into protected area visitation through the use of a random effects ordered logit model, which allows explicit examination of the distribution of recreational value amongst households. Our modelling estimates the value of tourism and recreation services provided by the NSW protected area network at $AUD 3.3 billion per annum. Most of this value accrues to frequent users from within NSW, particularly those from regional areas. The comparative values presented in our study indicate that the recreational services provided by protected areas and other sites can be a similar order of magnitude to, and perhaps even greater than, the extractive uses that are traditionally assigned economic values. It follows that land-use decisions that fail to account for these values are unlikely to optimise societal benefits from land-use allocation

Optimising recreation services from protected areas – Understanding the role of natural values, built infrastructure and contextual factors

© 2017 The Authors Effective management of recreation within protected areas requires a comprehensive understanding of the drivers of site visitation. To date, large multi-site studies that compare recreation demand for protected areas in response to underlying site attributes are rare, and have generally been restricted to high-profile, high-visitation sites. Our study, undertaken in south-eastern Australia, is the first to use random utility travel cost methods to explore recreational preferences across all sites within a large protected area network. We applied a novel zero-inflation statistical correction to identify the value of recreation demand arising in response to a broad range of site attributes, including protected area size, remoteness, natural values and built infrastructure. We find a strong influence of built infrastructure on recreation demand, but only a subset of the 9 infrastructure types modelled consistently generated recreation demand across the protected areas network. Other infrastructure contributed positively or negatively to tourism demand depending on contextual factors like site remoteness and the availability of recreation substitutes. We discuss the implications for protected area management at both the site- and network- scales, and as well as implications for designing more effective travel cost studies that allow the robust transfer of study findings to other protected area sites

Willingness-to-pay for coastline protection in New South Wales: Beach preservation management and decision making

Coastal erosion is a global and pervasive phenomenon that predicates a need for a strategic approach to the future management of coastal assets (both built and natural): should we invest in protective structures such as seawalls that aim to preserve specific coastal features, or allow natural coastline retreat to preserve sandy beaches and other coastal ecosystems? Determining the most suitable management approach in a specific context requires a better understanding of the full suite of economic values the population holds for coastal assets, including non-market values. In this study, we characterise New South Wales residents' willingness to pay to maintain sandy beaches (width and length) in the face of coastal erosion along the Australian state's nearly 2200 km coastline. The measurement instrument is a stated preference referendum task administered state-wide to a sample of 2014 respondents, with the payment mechanism defined as a purpose-specific incremental levy of a fixed amount over a set period of years. We use an innovative application of a Latent Class Binary Logit model to deal with “Yea-sayers” and “Nay-sayers”, as well as revealing the latent heterogeneity among sample members. We find that 65% of the population would be willing to pay some amount of levy, dependent on the policy setting. In most cases, there is no effect of degree of beach deterioration – characterised as loss of width and/or length of sandy beaches of between 5% and 100% - on respondents' willingness to pay for a management levy. This suggests that respondents who agreed to pay a management levy were motivated to preserve sandy beaches in their current state irrespective of the severity of sand loss likely to occur as a result of coastal erosion. Willingness to pay also varies according to beach type (amongst Iconic, Main, Bay and Surf beaches) – a finding that can assist with spatial prioritisation of coastal management. Not recognizing the presence of nay-sayers in the data or recognizing them but eliminating them from the estimation will result in biased WTP results and, consequently, biased policy propositions by coastal managers

Mutations in Genes Encoding Sorting Nexins Alter Production ofIntracellular and Extracellular Proteases in Aspergillus nidulans

XprG, a putative p53-like transcriptional activator, regulates production of extracellular proteases in response to nutrient limitation and may also have a role in programmed cell death. To identify genes that may be involved in the XprG regulatory pathway, xprG2 revertants were isolated and shown to carry mutations in genes which we have named sogA-C (suppressors of xprG). The translocation breakpoint in the sogA1 mutant was localized to a homolog of Saccharomyces cerevisiae VPS5 and mapping data indicated that sogB was tightly linked to a VPS17 homolog. Complementation of the sogA1 and sogB1 mutations and identification of nonsense mutations in the sogA2 and sogB1 alleles confirmed the identification. Vps17p and Vps5p are part of a complex involved in sorting of vacuolar proteins in yeast and regulation of cell-surface receptors in mammals. Protease zymograms indicate that mutations in sogA-C permit secretion of intracellular proteases, as in S. cerevisiae vps5 and vps17 mutants. In contrast to S. cerevisiae, the production of intracellular protease was much higher in the mutants. Analysis of serine protease gene expression suggests that an XprG-independent mechanism for regulation of extracellular protease gene expression in response to carbon starvation exists and is activated in the pseudorevertants