Personality and Fear Conditioning: Effects of Neuroticism

Fear conditioning is an associative learning paradigm that can be used to examine the acquisition and extinction of learned fear in various populations. Unusual patterns in fear conditioning are known to be associated with different types of psychopathology, and anxiety in particular has been studied extensively in relation to fear conditioning. However, far less is known about fear conditioning in nonclinical samples, particularly with regards to personality. The aim of the current study is to examine the acquisition and extinction of conditioned fear as it relates to neuroticism. The study utilized both physiological and subjective measures of learned fear, allowing for comparison across domains of fear expression. Eyeblink startle responses indicated that fear conditioning did not take place, with no significant differences in startle response magnitude in the presence of the conditioned and the unconditioned stimulus. Neuroticism was not found to be associated with greater eyeblink startle to either stimulus type. However, subjective fear ratings revealed an increase in fear of the conditioned stimulus following the acquisition phase, and a decrease in fear of the conditioned stimulus following the extinction phase, indicating that fear conditioning did in fact take place. Neuroticism was positively correlated with fear of the conditioned stimulus in the acquisition phase, indicating that more neurotic individuals may in fact acquire fear more readily than less neurotic individuals. Neuroticism was also associated with greater fear of the conditioned stimulus following extinction, suggesting that neurotic individuals may have difficulty learning when a stimulus no longer predicts threat. These findings indicate that neuroticism does impact both acquisition and extinction of conditioned fear, and there is a need for further replication in order to better understand the discrepancies between physiological and subjective measures in assessing fear conditioning

Policies to Achieve a Smoke-Free Society: A Research Agenda for 2010-2015

Summarizes key research priorities on tobacco control policies for taxes and prices, product regulation, marketing, public education, clean indoor air laws and restrictions, proven cessation treatments, and accountability and performance

So near, yet so far: Tobacco dependence treatment for pregnant women.

Almost one-half million babies in the United States are born yearly to women who report smoking while pregnant. Almost all of these pregnant women have access to prenatal care, through federally financed health clinics, state and county health programs, or private providers. However, many pregnant smokers are unlikely to receive any type of counseling or assistance to help them stop smoking-despite the availability of evidence-based treatment and the considerable return on investment. This article recommends four next steps to ensure that tobacco dependence treatment is available for all pregnant women. These steps are (a) expanding Medicaid coverage for, and promotion of, effective counseling services for pregnant smokers, (b) improving health care systems by building the capacity of prenatal providers and health care systems to deliver effective treatments, (c) encouraging purchasers of private and public health benefit packages to demand coverage for, and promotion of, effective counseling services for pregnant smokers, and (d) redirecting state resources to ensure a statewide system of care for pregnant smokers. Implementation of these steps requires leadership, diligence, and action by the public health community-as well as ongoing monitoring to assess progress in improving coverage, capacity, and coordination

Effects of a Tailored Follow-Up Intervention on Health Behaviors, Beliefs, and Attitudes

Background: The high rates of relapse that tend to occur after short-term behavioral interventions indicate the need for maintenance programs that promote long-term adherence to new behavior patterns. Computer-tailored health messages that are mailed to participants or given in brief telephone calls offer an innovative and time-efficient alternative to ongoing face-to-face contact with healthcare providers. Methods: Following a 1-year behavior change program, 22 North Carolina health departments were randomly assigned to a follow-up intervention or control condition. Data were collected from 1999 to 2001 by telephone-administered surveys at preintervention and postintervention for 511 low-income, midlife adult women enrolled in the Well-Integrated Screening and Evaluation for Women Across the Nation (WISEWOMAN) program at local North Carolina health departments. During the year after the behavior change program, intervention participants were mailed six sets of computer-tailored health messages and received two computer-tailored telephone counseling sessions. Main outcomes of dietary and physical activity behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes were measured. Results: Intervention participants were more likely to move forward into more advanced stages of physical activity change (p = 0.02); control participants were more likely to increase their level of dietary social support at follow-up (p = 0.05). Both groups maintained low levels of reported saturated fat and cholesterol intake at follow-up. No changes were seen in physical activity in either group. Conclusions: Mailed computer-tailored health messages and telephone counseling calls favorably modified forward physical activity stage movement but did not appreciably affect any other psychosocial or behavioral outcomes

Declarative visitors to ease fine-grained source code mining with full history on billions of AST nodes

Software repositories contain a vast wealth of information about software development. Mining these repositories has proven useful for detecting patterns in software development, testing hypotheses for new software engineering approaches, etc. Specifically, mining source code has yielded significant insights into software development artifacts and processes. Unfortunately, mining source code at a large-scale remains a difficult task. Previous approaches had to either limit the scope of the projects studied, limit the scope of the mining task to be more coarse-grained, or sacrifice studying the history of the code due to both human and computational scalability issues. In this paper we address the substantial challenges of mining source code: a) at a very large scale; b) at a fine-grained level of detail; and c) with full history information. To address these challenges, we present domain-specific language features for source code mining. Our language features are inspired by object-oriented visitors and provide a default depth-first traversal strategy along with two expressions for defining custom traversals. We provide an implementation of these features in the Boa infrastructure for software repository mining and describe a code generation strategy into Java code. To show the usability of our domain-specific language features, we reproduced over 40 source code mining tasks from two large-scale previous studies in just 2 person-weeks. The resulting code for these tasks show between 2.0x--4.8x reduction in code size. Finally we perform a small controlled experiment to gain insights into how easily mining tasks written using our language features can be understood, with no prior training. We show a substantial number of tasks (77%) were understood by study participants, in about 3 minutes per task

Outcomes and Cost-Effectiveness of Two Nicotine Replacement Treatment Delivery Models for a Tobacco Quitline

Many tobacco cessation quitlines provide nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) in the U.S. but consensus is lacking regarding the best shipping protocol or NRT amounts. We evaluated the impact of the Minnesota QUITPLAN® Helpline’s shift from distributing NRT using a single eight-week shipment to a two-shipment protocol. For this observational study, the eight week single-shipment cohort (n = 247) received eight weeks of NRT (patches or gum) at once, while the split-shipment cohort (n = 160) received five weeks of NRT (n = 94), followed by an additional three weeks of NRT if callers continued with counseling (n = 66). Patient satisfaction, retention, quit rates, and cost associated with the three groups were compared. A higher proportion of those receiving eight weeks of NRT, whether in one or two shipments, reported that the helpline was “very helpful” (77.2% of the single-shipment group; 81.1% of the two-shipment group) than those receiving five weeks of NRT (57.8% of the one-shipment group) (p = 0.004). Callers in the eight week two-shipment group completed significantly more calls (3.0) than callers in the five week one-shipment group (2.4) or eight week single-shipment group (1.7) (p < 0.001). Using both responder and intent-to-treat calculations, there were no significant differences in 30-day point prevalence abstinence at seven months among the three protocol groups even when controlling for demographic and tobacco use characteristics, and treatment group protocol. The mean cost per caller was greater for the single-shipment phase than the split-shipment phase ($350 vs.$326) due to the savings associated with not sending a second shipment to some participants. Assuming no difference in abstinence rates resulting from the protocol change, cost-per-quit was lowest for the five week one-shipment group ($1,155), and lower for the combined split-shipment cohort ($1,242) than for the single-shipment cohort ($1,350). Results of this evaluation indicate that while satisfaction rates increase among those receiving more counseling and NRT, quit rates do not, even when controlling for demographic and tobacco use characteristics

Treating tobacco dependence in older adults: a survey of primary care clinicians’ knowledge, attitudes, and practice

BACKGROUND: The benefits of smoking cessation among older people are well documented. Despite this, evidence suggests that older smokers are rarely engaged in smoking cessation efforts, and that existing tobacco dependence treatments require further tailoring to the specific needs of older smokers. This study assesses the knowledge, attitudes, and clinical practice of primary care clinicians in relation to addressing tobacco dependence among older people. METHODS: A cross-sectional survey of 427 NHS primary care clinicians in a large English city was conducted using modified version of a previously validated questionnaire. RESULTS: One hundred and seventy one clinicians (40 % response rate) completed the survey. While the majority (90.0 %) of respondents reported enquiring regularly about older patients’ smoking status, just over half (59.1 %) reported providing older patients with smoking cessation support. A lack of awareness in relation to the prevalence and impact of smoking in later life were apparent: e.g. only 47 % of respondents were aware of that approximately 10 life years are lost due to smoking related disease, and only 59 % knew that smoking can reduce the effectiveness of medication prescribed for conditions common in later life. Self-reported attendance at smoking-related training was significantly associated with proactive clinical practice. CONCLUSIONS: There is a need to improve clinicians’ knowledge, in relation to smoking and smoking cessation in older patients and to build clinician confidence in seizing teachable moments. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12875-015-0317-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users

Recommendation to Reduce Patients’ Blood Pressure and Cholesterol Medication Costs

The Community Preventive Services Task Force recommends reducing patient out-of-pocket costs (ROPC) for medications to control high blood pressure and high cholesterol when combined with additional interventions aimed at improving patient–provider interaction and patient knowledge, such as team-based care with medication counseling, and patient education