EMOTION REGULATION DIFFICULTIES IN OBSESSIVE-COMPULSIVE DISORDER: THE ROLE OF NON-ACCEPTANCE OF EMOTIONS

Master'sMASTER OF PSYCHOLOGY (CLINICAL

The effects of brief emotional acceptance instructions on emotional distress and compulsive urges of various obsessive-compulsive symptoms dimensions

Background and Objectives: Emotion regulation (ER) deficits are increasingly implicated in obsessive-compulsive symptoms (OCS). The ER difficulty of ‘non-acceptance of emotions’ has been most consistently found to correlate with OCS – albeit not uniformly with all OCS dimensions. This study examined the causal relationships between the acceptance of emotions and four OCS dimensions: contamination, responsibility of harm, unacceptable thoughts and symmetry. Methods: Participants in this online study rated their baseline emotional distress and compulsive urges to OC scenarios corresponding to each OCS dimension. After completing questionnaires on ER, OCS, anxiety and depressive symptoms, participants were randomly assigned to two conditions and instructed to observe and accept their emotions (acceptance condition; n = 180) or observe their emotions (control condition; n = 185) as they re-read the scenarios. Participants then rated their post-manipulation emotional distress and compulsive urges to each scenario. Results: The instructions to accept emotions resulted in lower compulsive urges to the responsibility of harm scenario, for participants with lower baseline compulsive urges. There were no other group differences on post-manipulation measures. Conclusions: The current findings suggest that even brief instructions to accept one’s emotions reduced compulsive urges, pointing to the potential clinical utility of enhancing the acceptance of emotions

The Impact of Third-Party Financing on Transnational Litigation

Third-party litigation finance is a growing industry. The practice, also termed “litigation lending,” allows funders with no other connection to the lawsuit to invest in a plaintiff’s claim in exchange for a share of the ultimate recovery. Most funding agreements have focused on domestic litigation in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. However, the industry is poised for growth worldwide, and the recent environmental lawsuit brought by Ecuadorian plaintiffs against Chevron demonstrates that litigation funding is also beginning to play a role in transnational litigation. This article, prepared for a symposium on “International Law in Crisis,” speculates about how the growing litigation-finance industry may reshape transnational litigation in the coming decades. It argues that the individual economic incentives created by third-party financing will likely increase the number of transnational lawsuits filed, raise the settlement values of those lawsuits, and spread out the lawsuits among a larger number of countries than was typical in the past. It further hypothesizes that these individual choices about transnational litigation will lead countries to reassess their internal balance of litigation and regulation and will create pressure for greater international coordination of litigation procedure, including transnational forum choice and cross-border judgment enforcement

Fuzzy optimization of the esterification conditions in biodiesel production using karanja oil as feedstock

Current biodiesel production remains unsustainable and costly because of the use of refined edible oils as feedstock. The use of non-edible oils such as Karanja oil would contribute to making biodiesel production more economically competitive because of its availability and low cost. Many studies have performed optimization techniques on biodiesel production which only includes local optimization of operating variables without consideration of cost. This paper performs a case study on the esterification conditions in biodiesel production from Karanja oil which utilizes fuzzy optimization in the multiobjective decision-making process to determine optimized values for the conversion of the free fatty acid (FFA) content in Karanja oil with its cumulative uncertainty error (YQ) and its corresponding total operating cost (CT). This paper also incorporates cumulative uncertainty into the variables and an operating cost equation which is both essential in studying the economic feasibility of the process. The operating variables include the methanol-to-oil ratio, catalyst loading, reaction time, and duty cycle. The Pareto front was generated from the objective functions to determine the boundary limits for YQ and CT. Results indicated an overall satisfaction level of 64.68% for conversion and cost. The optimal conditions of the variables were 5:1 for molar ratio, 0.85 wt% for catalyst loading, 79% for duty cycle, and 89.35 min for reaction time. These conditions yielded a YQ of 68% and a total operating cost of USD 0.12 per liter of Karanja oil esterified. Comparison with previous literature showed a conversion that was 13.51% lower but at a cost that was 24.86% cheaper