Psychology in Malaysia : looking ahead

Psychology touches almost every aspect of our lives, from the self to the family and to society as a whole. lVhat is our nature, how is personality developed or shaped, and why do people behave the way they do? Why and how are people different in their intelligence and temperaments and can we treat abnonnal behaviors with psychological techniques? These and many other questions arise in our minds at least some time in our lives. Especially in the modern world when man has advanced tremendously in science and technolog}~ he has yet to comprehend his own selfand his fellow beings for increased selfand mutual understanding that would hopefully result in a more harmonious world. There are many views on human behaviors and mental processes offered by psychologists. The development of modem psychology has taken place mostly in the West, particularly in the United State

Decoding of Ankle Joint Movements in Stroke Patients Using Surface Electromyography

Stroke is a cerebrovascular disease (CVD), which results in hemiplegia, paralysis, or death. Conventionally, a stroke patient requires prolonged sessions with physical therapists for the recovery of motor function. Various home-based rehabilitative devices are also available for upper limbs and require minimal or no assistance from a physiotherapist. However, there is no clinically proven device available for functional recovery of a lower limb. In this study, we explored the potential use of surface electromyography (sEMG) as a controlling mechanism for the development of a home-based lower limb rehabilitative device for stroke patients. In this experiment, three channels of sEMG were used to record data from 11 stroke patients while performing ankle joint movements. The movements were then decoded from the sEMG data and their correlation with the level of motor impairment was investigated. The impairment level was quantified using the Fugl-Meyer Assessment (FMA) scale. During the analysis, Hudgins time-domain features were extracted and classified using linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and artificial neural network (ANN). On average, 63.86% ± 4.3% and 67.1% ± 7.9% of the movements were accurately classified in an offline analysis by LDA and ANN, respectively. We found that in both classifiers, some motions outperformed others (p < 0.001 for LDA and p = 0.014 for ANN). The Spearman correlation (ρ) was calculated between the FMA scores and classification accuracies. The results indicate that there is a moderately positive correlation (ρ = 0.75 for LDA and ρ = 0.55 for ANN) between the two of them. The findings of this study suggest that a home-based EMG system can be developed to provide customized therapy for the improvement of functional lower limb motion in stroke patients

Stack-run adaptive wavelet image compression using wavelet packets

We report on the development of an adaptive wavelet image coder based on stack-run representation of the quantized coefficients. The coder works by selecting an optimal wavelet packet basis for the given image and encoding the quantization indices for significant coefficients and zero runs between coefficients using a 4-ary arithmetic coder. Due to the fact that our coder exploits the redundancies present within individual sub bands, its addressing complexity is much lower than that of the wavelet zerotree coding algorithms. Experimental results show coding gains of up to 1.4 dB over the benchmark wavelet coding algorithm

Trends of Narcissism among Medical and Non-medical Undergraduate Students of Lahore

Background: Narcissism is a personality disorder that has an impact on interpersonal relationship with friends, family and colleagues. These individuals can be more shy, arrogant or over-sensitive. These traits are also present among normal individual. A lot of features of behaviour are still unknown. Objective: To observe the narcissism score among medical and allied health students and the association of narcissism with their academic performance. Study type, settings & duration: This cross-sectional study was conducted at Fatima Memorial College of Medicine & Dentistry, Lahore from March 2019 to October 2019. Methodology: In this cross-sectional study of six months duration the “Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI-40)” tool was administrated on 385 medical and allied health undergraduate students. NPI scores were calculated. Comparative analysis was carried out. Multiple linear regression was also performed to observe the dependence of NPI score on demographic variables. Results: NPI score of males were found to be higher (18.27) than females scores (14.66). The odds for NPI were 21.98 times higher in males as compared to females. Similarly, hostilities were 3.42 times at more risk of narcissism. Last exam percentage was significantly associated with narcissism score (0.024). Conclusion: Students of Allied health sciences exhibit more narcissistic traits than MBBS undergraduates. Institutes should encourage student counseling & mentoring sessions and they should have taught to overcome negative personality characteristics