Bodily awareness in depersonalization-derealization disorder

Depersonalization-derealization disorder (DDD), a dissociative disorder encompassing disconnections from the self and from reality, remains a widely unknown and underdiagnosed condition. The broad aim of this thesis is to generate a better understanding of DDD from a body-based perspective and to present DDD as a suitable candidate for Dance Movement Therapy (DMT). In the current literature, there is a clear lack of work exploring the potential benefits of body-based therapies for DDD. I first explore DMT and the often-neglected neurocognitive concepts that may be involved including embodied cognition and interoception, with Chapter 2 presenting an in-depth review of controlled trials of DMT for clinical mental health conditions. Chapters 3 and 4 are focused on better characterizing and understanding DDD. Chapter 3 presents a latent profile analysis of psychometric measures of depersonalizationderealization, anxiety, and dissociation to determine whether symptom heterogeneity in DDD is attributable to the presence of latent subgroups. Chapter 4 presents a study examining the role of verbal suggestibility in DDD and its relationship to depersonalization-derealization symptoms, mindfulness, anxiety, and visual imagery. Both of these chapters have implications for the aetiology, mechanisms, treatment, and classification of DDD. Chapters 5 and 6 explore DMT for DDD, with Chapter 5 presenting an online intervention study and Chapter 6 presenting an in-person intervention study. Two controlled dance tasks to differentially engage with the body as a means of symptom reduction in DDD were developed: one promoting explicit body awareness and the other implicitly boosting the salience of bodily signals. Dance is presented as a bespoke and efficacious tool to reduce symptoms in DDD whilst improving a sense of body awareness. This research highlights the need for a better understanding of bodily processes in DDD and provides compelling evidence for the continued development of body-based interventions targeting both interoception and mindfulness in this population and in dissociation, more broadly

Word made flesh: sensory ideas as meanings of bodily signs in Descartes

Are we bodies, souls, or both? Each of these metaphysical positions comes with its own distinctive problems. If we’re nothing more than material, mechanistic bodies, how can we explain those features of mind that seem irreducible to pure material mechanism? If we’re just souls that entertain fleeting ideas, how can we explain the structure of the external world that we seem to share with others? And if we’re compounds of souls and bodies, then how can we explain their connection? I begin this project by looking at the positions of two Early Modern philosophers – Hobbes and Berkeley – each with their very different metaphysical systems. Hobbes is a mechanist materialist, and Berkeley an idealist. I argue that both philosophers make an appeal to language in order to resolve or reinterpret their respective metaphysical problems. My first aim in this thesis is to argue that Descartes fits into this pattern of explanation. He too makes an appeal to language in order to resolve or reinterpret his own distinctive metaphysical problem: the problem of body-mind connection in the case of sensory perception. I argue the appeals of the three philosophers have something in common: they all reap the explanatory benefits of language which exist because language is something that is intimately familiar to us. Their appeals hold explanatory weight at least in part because they are appeals to the familiar. The second aim in this thesis is to show that Descartes’ appeal to language is successful in that it truly illuminates the problem of body-mind connection in sensation. Even though Descartes cannot offer a properly metaphysical explanation of the body-mind relation in sensory perception, that is, an explanation that is grounded in clear and distinct ideas (the kind of answer that might have been satisfying to Princess Elisabeth), he offers us, through the analogy with language, a genuinely useful way to understand two of the key aspects of the body-mind problem in the case of sensory perception. Descartes’ language analogy, I will argue, illuminates both the issue of body-mind causation and the issue of the representationality of sensory ideas and brain states

Using the Instructional Quality Assessment toolkit to investigate the quality of reading comprehension assignments and student work (CSE Report 669)

This study presents preliminary findings from research developing an instructional quality assessment (IQA) toolkit that could be used to monitor the influence of reform initiatives on students' learning environments and to guide professional development efforts within a school or district. This report focuses specifically on the portion of the IQA used to evaluate the quality of teachers' reading comprehension assignments and student work. Results are limited due to a very small sample of participating teachers (N = 13, 52 assignments), and indicate a poor to moderate level of inter-rater agreement and a good degree of consistency for the dimensions measuring academic rigor, but not the clarity of teachers' expectations. The rigor of the assignments collected from teachers also was associated with the rigor of observed instruction. Collecting four assignments (two challenging and two recent) from teachers did not yield a stable estimate of quality. Additional analyses looking separately at the two different assignment types indicate, however, that focusing on one assignment type would yield a stable estimate of quality. This suggests that the way in which assignments are collected from teachers should be revised. Implications for professional development are also discussed. The 2003 Draft Observation and Assignment Rubrics for Reading Comprehension is appended. (Contains 6 tables, 4 figures, and 4 footnotes.

Wastewater discharges and urban land cover dominate urban hydrology signals across England and Wales

Urbanisation is an important driver of changes in streamflow. These changes are not uniform across catchments due to the diverse nature of water sources, storage, and pathways in urban river systems. While land cover data are typically used in urban hydrology analyses, other characteristics of urban systems (such as water management practices) are poorly quantified which means that urbanisation impacts on streamflow are often difficult to detect and quantify. Here, we assess urban impacts on streamflow dynamics for 711 catchments across England and Wales. We use the CAMELS-GB dataset, which is a large-sample hydrology dataset containing hydro-meteorological timeseries and catchment attributes characterising climate, geology, water management practices and land cover. We quantify urban impacts on a wide range of streamflow dynamics (flow magnitudes, variability, frequency, and duration) using random forest models. We demonstrate that wastewater discharges from sewage treatment plants and urban land cover dominate urban hydrology signals across England and Wales. Wastewater discharges increase low flows and reduce flashiness in urban catchments. In contrast, urban land cover increases flashiness and frequency of medium and high flow events. We highlight the need to move beyond land cover metrics and include other features of urban river systems in hydrological analyses to quantify current and future drivers of urban streamflow

Knowledge acquisition for the internationalization of the smaller firm: content and sources

Internationalization process research emphasizes accumulated experience and networks as sources of knowledge for internationalization. Our understanding, however, as to what this knowledge is in practice for smaller firms, the challenges they face in acquiring it, and how they address those challenges is limited. Integrating organizational learning concepts with our theoretical understanding of the small firm internationalization process, we develop a new framework for understanding knowledge acquisition processes, which are examined with a case study of 10 Scottish internationalizing firms. We find smaller firms may not have relevant experience or useful networks, and rely on sources rarely recognised before. Firms used recruitment, government advisors and consultants to acquire indirect experience. Recruitment is a source of market and technological knowledge and government advisors and consultants a source of internationalization knowledge. Accessing internal information is important for firms that have internationalized. Our integrated theoretical framework identifies knowledge content and sources that are critical for internationalization, but that may be absent

Educational testing of an auditory display regarding seasonal variation of martian polar ice caps

Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD), Boston, MA, July 7-9, 2003.During Fall 2002, planetary scientists and astronomy education researchers from the University of Arizona and the National Optical Astronomy Observatory collaborated with composer Marty Quinn of Design Rhythmics Sonification Research Lab in New Hampshire to create both a visual and auditory display of recent gamma ray data from Mars. This product will be used both to highlight the value of data from the current Mars 2001 Odyssey mission and to serve as a testbed for research into the use and effectiveness of auditory displays in science education. This paper provides background on the Mars data presented, an overview of the animation/sonification product, preliminary results from educational testing of the product, and future research plans. The authors hope to present both the sonification and preliminary results of educational research at the ICAD conference this summer

LSST: from Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products

(Abridged) We describe here the most ambitious survey currently planned in the optical, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). A vast array of science will be enabled by a single wide-deep-fast sky survey, and LSST will have unique survey capability in the faint time domain. The LSST design is driven by four main science themes: probing dark energy and dark matter, taking an inventory of the Solar System, exploring the transient optical sky, and mapping the Milky Way. LSST will be a wide-field ground-based system sited at Cerro Pach\'{o}n in northern Chile. The telescope will have an 8.4 m (6.5 m effective) primary mirror, a 9.6 deg$^2$ field of view, and a 3.2 Gigapixel camera. The standard observing sequence will consist of pairs of 15-second exposures in a given field, with two such visits in each pointing in a given night. With these repeats, the LSST system is capable of imaging about 10,000 square degrees of sky in a single filter in three nights. The typical 5$\sigma$ point-source depth in a single visit in $r$ will be $\sim 24.5$ (AB). The project is in the construction phase and will begin regular survey operations by 2022. The survey area will be contained within 30,000 deg$^2$ with $\delta<+34.5^\circ$, and will be imaged multiple times in six bands, $ugrizy$, covering the wavelength range 320--1050 nm. About 90\% of the observing time will be devoted to a deep-wide-fast survey mode which will uniformly observe a 18,000 deg$^2$ region about 800 times (summed over all six bands) during the anticipated 10 years of operations, and yield a coadded map to $r\sim27.5$. The remaining 10\% of the observing time will be allocated to projects such as a Very Deep and Fast time domain survey. The goal is to make LSST data products, including a relational database of about 32 trillion observations of 40 billion objects, available to the public and scientists around the world.Comment: 57 pages, 32 color figures, version with high-resolution figures available from https://www.lsst.org/overvie