A Comparative Analysis of the Revised Children's Manifest Anxiety Scale Scores of Traumatized Youth With and Without PTSD Relative to Non-Traumatized Controls

This study compared the Revised Children's Manifest Anxiety Scale (RCMAS) scores of traumatized youth with or without PTSD to the scores of a nonclinical comparison group. Child diagnostic interviews identified children with PTSD (28), traumatized children without PTSD (63), and a nonclinical comparison group (41). In the absence of major comorbid disorders, children with PTSD had significantly higher RCMAS total scores and significantly higher scores on the RCMAS Physiological Anxiety, Worry/Oversensitivity, and Social Concern/Concentration subscales. Nonsignificant differences were observed between groups on the RCMAS Lie subscale. The RCMAS scores of the traumatized PTSD negatives and controls did not significantly differ. Implications for research and practice are considered

Mineralogy of Juventae Chasma: Sulfates in the light‐toned mounds, mafic minerals in the bedrock, and hydrated silica and hydroxylated ferric sulfate on the plateau

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/95351/1/jgre2657.pd

Exploring the role of competing demands and routines during the implementation of a self-management tool for type 2 diabetes: A theory-based qualitative interview study

Background The implementation of new medical interventions into routine care involves healthcare professionals adopting new clinical behaviours and changing existing ones. Whilst theory-based approaches can help understand healthcare professionals’ behaviours, such approaches often focus on a single behaviour and conceptualise its performance in terms of an underlying reflective process. Such approaches fail to consider the impact of non-reflective influences (e.g. habit and automaticity) and how the myriad of competing demands for their time may influence uptake. The current study aimed to apply a dual process theoretical approach to account for reflective and automatic determinants of healthcare professional behaviour while integrating a multiple behaviour approach to understanding the implementation and use of a new self-management tool by healthcare professionals in the context of diabetes care. Methods Following Diabetes UK’s national release of the ‘Information Prescription’ (DUK IP; a self-management tool targeting the management of cholesterol, blood pressure and HbA1c) in January 2015, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 13 healthcare professionals (general practitioners and nurses) who had started to use the DUK IP during consultations to provide self-management advice to people with type 2 diabetes. A theory-based topic guide included pre-specified constructs from a previously developed logic model. We elicited healthcare professionals’ views on reflective processes (outcome expectations, self-efficacy, intention, action and coping planning), automatic processes (habit), and multiple behaviour processes (goal priority, goal conflict and goal facilitation). All interviews were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim and all transcripts were independently double coded and analysed using content analysis. Results The majority of healthcare professionals interviewed reported strong intentions to use the DUK IP and having formed a habit of using them after a minimum of one month continuous use. Pop-up cues in the electronic patient records were perceived to facilitate the use of the tool. Factors that conflicted with the use of the DUK IP included existing pathways of providing self-management advice. Conclusion Data suggests that constructs from dual process and multiple behaviour approaches are useful to provide supplemental understanding of the implementation of new self-management tools such as the DUK IP and may help to advance behavioural approaches to implementation science

Assessment of variation in immunosuppressive pathway genes reveals TGFBR2 to be associated with risk of clear cell ovarian cancer.

BACKGROUND: Regulatory T (Treg) cells, a subset of CD4+ T lymphocytes, are mediators of immunosuppression in cancer, and, thus, variants in genes encoding Treg cell immune molecules could be associated with ovarian cancer. METHODS: In a population of 15,596 epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) cases and 23,236 controls, we measured genetic associations of 1,351 SNPs in Treg cell pathway genes with odds of ovarian cancer and tested pathway and gene-level associations, overall and by histotype, for the 25 genes, using the admixture likelihood (AML) method. The most significant single SNP associations were tested for correlation with expression levels in 44 ovarian cancer patients. RESULTS: The most significant global associations for all genes in the pathway were seen in endometrioid ( p = 0.082) and clear cell ( p = 0.083), with the most significant gene level association seen with TGFBR2 ( p = 0.001) and clear cell EOC. Gene associations with histotypes at p < 0.05 included: IL12 ( p = 0.005 and p = 0.008, serous and high-grade serous, respectively), IL8RA ( p = 0.035, endometrioid and mucinous), LGALS1 ( p = 0.03, mucinous), STAT5B ( p = 0.022, clear cell), TGFBR1 ( p = 0.021 endometrioid) and TGFBR2 ( p = 0.017 and p = 0.025, endometrioid and mucinous, respectively). CONCLUSIONS: Common inherited gene variation in Treg cell pathways shows some evidence of germline genetic contribution to odds of EOC that varies by histologic subtype and may be associated with mRNA expression of immune-complex receptor in EOC patients

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Practical formulations of the Latent Growth Item Response Model

Growth modeling using longitudinal data seems to be a promising direction for improving the methodology associated with the accountability movement. Longitudinal modeling requires that the measurements of ability are comparable over time and on the same scale. One way to create the vertical scale is through concurrent estimation with identification of groups (Bock & Zimowski, 1997). However, there are concerns about how well this vertical scale will function using longitudinal data with few common items between years (Briggs et al., 2008). Other concerns about the adequacy of this and other vertical scaling strategies arise when the common items shift over time. This study explores these two practical issues in application of a Latent Growth Item Response model (LG-IRM). To illustrate how psychological constructs could be tracked over time, an application to psychological data is also included. Since the number of common items between years can be few, it is important to ensure that the growth modeling procedure can produce good estimations in this situation. A concurrent estimation procedure of the scales is examined. To verify the estimability of the growth model using concurrent estimation, a simulation study is conducted. The LG-IRM is then applied to real data from the LSAY. A study of item shifts over time is also included. Models that do not consider item shifts are compared to those that do. An extended version of the Latent Growth Item Response Model is proposed in which estimates growth parameters are produced while allowing for item shift over time. Item Response Theory (IRT) has been applied extensively to research in education. Its use in modeling achievement and student ability has been demonstrated using various IRT model formulations. To a lesser degree IRT has also been applied to personality research. Although the conceptualization of the domain, the item types, and the measurement goals are often different in personality research, IRT tools can still provide valuable information. The LG-IRM also provides a way to explore questions in personality research. For instance, it can provide information on the stability of self-esteem in the Black population over time. In this study the Latent Growth Item Response Model is extended to include polytomous item types. The LG-IRM is then applied to data from a longitudinal study of Black Self-Esteem. Keywords: Growth Modeling, Item Response Theory, Latent-Growth Item Response Model, Longitudinal Survey of American Youth, Measurement Invariance, National Educational Longitudinal Survey, National Survey of Black Americans, Self-Esteem, Vertical Scaling

Mixed reference frame representations underlie the use of multimodal sensory signals for reaching.

The sensory signals that drive movement planning arrive in a variety of `reference frames', and integrating or comparing them requires sensory transformations. I set out to examine how the different forms of sensory signals, and the transformations needed to compare them, affect the representation and integration of multimodal sensory information. I used a combination of human psychophysics and electrophysiological recordings from rhesus macaques to examine how visual and proprioceptive information are used for reach planning and execution.The human experiment was designed to exploit stereotyped patterns of gaze- dependent reach errors to determine whether the reference frame representations for reach planning depend on the visual and proprioceptive sensory information available. The results of this experiment were interpreted with a model of reach planning in which the statistical properties of sensory signals and their transformations determine how these signals are used. I found that no single reference frame representation was adequate to explain the observed error patterns when visual and proprioceptive information were varied. Only by integrating movement plans across multiple reference frame representations was the model able to capture the observed error patterns (Chapter 1).Taking the results from this model, I next looked for evidence of these multiple reference frame representations across different sensory modalities in sensory-motor cortical areas of the rhesus macaque (Area 5 and MIP). I found that neurons in these areas use mixed reference frame representations, which are consistent across reaches to targets specified by different sensory modalities (visual and/or proprioceptive targets, Chapter 2). Additionally, I found that integration of multimodal sensory signals in Area 5 and MIP emerges primarily across the population response rather than within individual cells' responses (Chapter 3). These findings are consistent with the model results showing that sensory information is integrated in multiple reference frame representations, regardless of the reference frame in which sensory information enters the nervous system. These results illustrate one way that the brain can represent and integrate sensory information arriving from different sensory modalities

Experience-driven recalibration of learning from surprising events

Different contexts favor different patterns of adaptive learning. A surprising event that in one context would accelerate belief updating might, in another context, be downweighted as a meaningless outlier. Here, across two experiments, we examined whether participants performing a perceptual judgment task under spatial uncertainty (n=29, n=63) would spontaneously adapt their patterns of predictive gaze according to the informativeness or uninformativeness of surprising events in their current environment. Uninstructed predictive eye movements exhibited a form of metalearning in which surprise came to modulate event-by-event learning rates in opposite directions across contexts. Participants later appropriately readjusted their patterns of adaptive learning when the statistics of the environment underwent an unsignaled reversal. Although significant metalearning occurred in both directions, performance was consistently superior in contexts in which surprising events reflected meaningful change, potentially reflecting a bias toward interpreting surprise as informative. Overall, our results demonstrate remarkable flexibility in contextually adaptive metalearning