Cognitive behaviour therapy-trained staff’s views on professional accreditation

Many cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) trained mental health professionals seek non-mandatory accreditation with the British Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapies (BABCP), despite self-regulation of talking therapies being a divisive issue. This raises the question: what views do CBT-trained mental health professionals have towards BABCP accreditation and what motivates them to become accredited? This qualitative study recruited seven postgraduate CBT-trained mental health professionals from NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde during 2015. Individual semi-structured interviews were completed and verbatim transcripts produced. Thematic analysis revealed the value participants place on accreditation, and that an absence of motivating factors and barriers during the application process means that not all CBT therapists become accredited

Unemployment, Inflation, and Wages in the American Depression: Are There Lessons for Europe?

In this paper, we consider whether there are lessons to be drawn from the experience of the American economy during the 1930's for the current European situation. The comparison reveals some important differences: In particular, the persistence of American unemployment in the 1930's reflected to a much greater degree a sequence of large destabilizing shocks, and much less a low-level equilibrium trap, than does modern European unemployment. The self-correcting tendencies of the 1930's U.S. economy were probably much stronger than is generally acknowledged. However, the experience of the Depression era confirms the modern observation that the level of unemployment does not much affect the rate of inflation--an observation that, we argue, is consistent with macro theory. The Depression experience also supports the impression that political factors are important in real wage determination.

To how many politicians should government be left?

The quality of governance of institutions, corporations and countries depends on the ability of efficient decision making within the respective boards or cabinets. Opinion formation processes within groups are size dependent. It is often argued - as now e.g. in the discussion of the future size of the European Commission - that decision making bodies of a size beyond 20 become strongly inefficient. We report empirical evidence that the performance of national governments declines with increasing membership and undergoes a qualitative change in behavior at a particular group size. We use recent UNDP, World Bank and CIA data on overall government efficacy, i.e. stability, the quality of policy formulation as well as human development indices of individual countries and relate it to the country's cabinet size. We are able to understand our findings through a simple physical model of opinion dynamics in groups.Comment: main text 5 pages and 4 eps figures, appendi

Motion into and out of the blind spot: evidence for spatial extrapolation of moving objects

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Procyclical Labor Productivity and Competing Theories of the Business Cycle: Some Evidence from Interwar U.S. Manufacturing Industries

Each of the main explanations of procyclical labor productivity, or short-run increasing returns to labor (SRIRL), is closely associated with a competing theory of the business cycle: Real business cycle theorists attribute SRIRL to procyclical technological shocks, proponents of recent theories based on non-convexities believe that SRIRL reflects true increasing returns, and Keynesians favor a labor hoarding explanation. Thus evidence on the sources of SRIRL may be important for discriminating among alternative theories of the cycle. This paper studies the sources of SRIRL in a sample of ten interwar U.S. manufacturing industries. Our main findings are that SRIRL was common in the interwar period and that the pattern of SRIRL across industries was similar to that observed in the postwar period. we argue that, under the presumption that the Depression was not caused by large negative technological shocks, these findings are inconsistent with the technological shocks hypothesis and provide evidence against real business cycle theory in general. we propose tests for discriminating between the increasing returns and labor hoarding explanations but find that our conclusions differ by industry.

Comparison of T-cell Receptor Diversity of people with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis versus controls

Objective: Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME; sometimes referred to as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome) is a chronic disease without laboratory test, detailed aetiological understanding or effective therapy. Its symptoms are diverse, but it is distinguished from other fatiguing illnesses by the experience of post-exertional malaise, the worsening of symptoms even after minor physical or mental exertion. Its frequent onset after infection suggests autoimmune involvement or that it arises from abnormal T-cell activation. Results: To test this hypothesis, we sequenced the genomic loci of and T-cell receptors (TCR) from 40 human blood samples from each of four groups: severely affected people with ME; mildly or moderately affected people with ME; people diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis, as disease controls; and, healthy controls. Seeking to automatically classify these individuals’ samples by their TCR repertoires, we applied P-SVM, a machine learning method. However, despite working well on a simulated data set, this approach did not allow statistically significant partitioning of samples into the four subgroups. Our findings do not support the hypothesis that blood samples from people with ME frequently contain altered T-cell receptor diversity