The Relationship Between Spiritual Belief, Life Attitude, and Mental Health Among Physical Fitness Participants in Northern Indiana

Problem. The purpose of this study is to explore spiritual beliefs as defined by an interconnectedness with self and others, generated from a relationship with a higher power, and consider its impact on attitude toward life and mental health. Method. This study employed the survey research method to collect data investigating the relationships between spiritual beliefs, attitude toward life, and mental health. A battery of three instruments was selected for this study. The Royal Free Questionnaire on Beliefs and Experiences, developed by King, Speck, and Thomas (1994), was used for measuring spiritual beliefs. The Optimism and Pessimism Questionnaire provided a global perspective of optimism and pessimism on the participants. The Mental Health Inventory (MHI) assessed the psychological distress or psychological well-being of the participants\u27 focusing on the frequency or intensity of a psychological symptom during the past month. Results. The relationship between spiritual belief and overall psychological well-being and the relationship between spiritual belief and depression were significant. As the commitment to a particular spiritual belief system strengthened, depression significantly decreased. The relationship between spiritual beliefs and loss of behavioral/emotional control was significant. Participants with a stronger commitment to a particular spiritual belief system reflected lower levels of uncontrollable behavior or emotion. General positive affect, emotional ties, and psychological distress also demonstrated significant relationships with spiritual belief. No relationships between spiritual beliefs and anxiety or life satisfaction were found. Conclusions. There appeared co be no significant correlation between the spiritual beliefs scores and attitude toward life scores. There was some indication that spiritual beliefs affected mental health. Participants presented with strong general positive affect, suffered significantly less psychological distress in their lives, were less depressed, more in control of their emotions and behaviors, and better able to establish emotional ties with others. Spiritual belief, attitude toward life and mental health, as a set, were significantly related to age. Specific predictors include anxiety, loss of emotional/behavioral control, and psychological distress. Only psychological distress and psychological well-being differentiated the men and women participants

Modified NASA-Lewis chemical equilibrium code for MHD applications

A substantially modified version of the NASA-Lewis Chemical Equilibrium Code was recently developed. The modifications were designed to extend the power and convenience of the Code as a tool for performing combustor analysis for MHD systems studies. The effect of the programming details is described from a user point of view

Cosmic Calibration: Constraints from the Matter Power Spectrum and the Cosmic Microwave Background

Several cosmological measurements have attained significant levels of maturity and accuracy over the last decade. Continuing this trend, future observations promise measurements of the statistics of the cosmic mass distribution at an accuracy level of one percent out to spatial scales with k~10 h/Mpc and even smaller, entering highly nonlinear regimes of gravitational instability. In order to interpret these observations and extract useful cosmological information from them, such as the equation of state of dark energy, very costly high precision, multi-physics simulations must be performed. We have recently implemented a new statistical framework with the aim of obtaining accurate parameter constraints from combining observations with a limited number of simulations. The key idea is the replacement of the full simulator by a fast emulator with controlled error bounds. In this paper, we provide a detailed description of the methodology and extend the framework to include joint analysis of cosmic microwave background and large scale structure measurements. Our framework is especially well-suited for upcoming large scale structure probes of dark energy such as baryon acoustic oscillations and, especially, weak lensing, where percent level accuracy on nonlinear scales is needed.Comment: 15 pages, 14 figure

Anatomy of an Encounter

The project Anatomy of an Encounter was driven by the idea that we should not take for granted that we already know what ‘encounters’ are. What does ‘meeting’ another person — with a different cultural or disciplinary background — mean? How much of an encounter is in all actuality a ‘finding one another’? How much of ‘being in touch’ is depending on the work of the imagination — fed by assumptions, existing cultural frames, stereotypes, fantasies about the other?Encounters are at the heart of every ethnographic project: anthropologists no longer claim to be speaking about the other (define the other in his/her otherness; know the other). They study what occurs between themselves and others when they meet. Encounters are also at the heart of the ENCOUNTERS project, where artistically inclined ethnographers and ethnographically inclined artists meet each other. The project Anatomy of an Encounter was driven by the idea that we should not take for granted that we already know what ‘encounters’ are. What does ‘meeting’ another person — with a different cultural or disciplinary background — mean? How much of an encounter is in all actuality a ‘finding one another’? How much of ‘being in touch’ is depending on the work of the imagination — fed by assumptions, existing cultural frames, stereotypes, fantasies about the other

How ancestral trauma informs patients\u27 health decision making

This article considers intergenerational trauma by drawing on the experience of a 37-year-old Black woman whose great-grandfather died as a result of involuntary involvement in the US Public Health Service Syphilis Study at Tuskegee. Although she never met her great-grandfather, the abuse, exploitation, and human rights violations he suffered at the hands of the US government profoundly influenced her health experiences. This article contextualizes her experiences in light of past medical abuse and microethics

Interactional Structure Applied to the Identification and Generation of Visual Interactive Behavior: Robots that (Usually) Follow the Rules

Peer reviewe

Say Hi to Eliza. An Embodied Conversational Agent on the Web

The creation and support of Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) has been quite challenging, as features required might not be straight-forward to implement and to integrate in a single application. Furthermore, ECAs as desktop applications present drawbacks for both developers and users; the former have to develop for each device and operating system and the latter must install additional software, limiting their widespread use. In this paper we demonstrate how recent advances in web technologies show promising steps towards capable web-based ECAs, through some off-the-shelf technologies, in particular, the Web Speech API, Web Audio API, WebGL and Web Workers. We describe their integration into a simple fully functional web-based 3D ECA accessible from any modern device, with special attention to our novel work in the creation and support of the embodiment aspects.Comment: 4 Pages, 1 figure, 17th International Conference Intelligence Virtual Agents (IVA

Local experience in the treatment of acute non-lymphoblastic leukaemia

Seventy-six patients suffering from various forms of acute non-lymphoblastic leukaemia were seen at the Johannesburg Hospital over an 8-year period. During this time various forms of therapy were used. Results with 6-mercaptopurine and prednisone were very poor, with less than 10% of patients achieving complete remission. Daunorubicin, when used alone, proved too toxic, but when given in a smaller dose with other agents, was more effective. The best results were obtained in 22 patients in whom a combination of daunorubicin and cytosine arabinoside was used. Complete remissions occurred in 9 patients and partial remissions in 2. The median survival of these 11 patients was 42 weeks. It is noteworthy that 3 of these patients were still alive one-and-a-half years from the time of diagnosis, and 1 of them is still in complete remission, two years after she was first treated.S. Afr. Med. J., 48, 963 (1974)

Minimal immersions of closed surfaces in hyperbolic three-manifolds

We study minimal immersions of closed surfaces (of genus $g \ge 2$) in hyperbolic 3-manifolds, with prescribed data $(\sigma, t\alpha)$, where $\sigma$ is a conformal structure on a topological surface $S$, and $\alpha dz^2$ is a holomorphic quadratic differential on the surface $(S,\sigma)$. We show that, for each $t \in (0,\tau_0)$ for some $\tau_0 > 0$, depending only on $(\sigma, \alpha)$, there are at least two minimal immersions of closed surface of prescribed second fundamental form $Re(t\alpha)$ in the conformal structure $\sigma$. Moreover, for $t$ sufficiently large, there exists no such minimal immersion. Asymptotically, as $t \to 0$, the principal curvatures of one minimal immersion tend to zero, while the intrinsic curvatures of the other blow up in magnitude.Comment: 16 page