Anxiety, depression, stress and trauma in couples attending an assisted conception unit and reasons for their reluctance to participate in a stress management program

INTRODUCTION: Infertility has a major impact on the emotional well being of a couple. As many as one quarter of couples could experience some delay in starting a family (Green and Vassey, 1990). However, many of these couples are reluctant to attend therapy sessions intended to help them with the stresses involved in experiencing infertility.OBJECTIVES: To investigate the levels of anxiety, depression, stress and trauma in couples attending an Assisted Conception Unit (ACU) compared to the general population and to investigate the ACU patients' reluctance to participate in a Clinical Psychologist-led stress management group.DESIGN: A between subjects design was employed to compare results from participants attending an ACU to a matched control group from the general population. Members of the control group were matched for age, gender, relationship status and level of qualifications with individual ACU participants.METHODS: All subjects were invited to complete a short questionnaire consisting of assessments of anxiety, depression, stress and trauma along with demographic questions. Couples attending the ACU were also asked to complete a questionnaire designed specifically for this study to elicit their reasons for non-participation in a stress management programRESULTS: As hypothesised the results indicate that the ACU group was more stressed than the general population and that the women in this group appeared to be more severely affected. Their reasons for reluctance to participate in stress management varied as a function of the distress levels experienced. All results are discussed in relation to previously published findings.CONCLUSIONS: Although the experience of infertility is stressful infertile couples are reluctant to attend stress management groups. The introduction of any psychosocial intervention should take these findings into consideration. Clinical implications and suggestions for future research are discussed

Non-financial shareholder activism: A process model for influencing corporate environmental and social performance

Shareholders have become increasingly active in endeavouring to influence companies’ environmental and social practices. In comparison with the mature field of financially motivated shareholder activism, limited enquiries have been carried out on its non-financial counterparts. This paper synthesizes the knowledge base through a review of the academic literature, exploring shareholder activism intended to affect corporate environmental and social performance. Theoretical perspectives appropriate to this phenomenon are critically appraised: in particular, insights from social movement theory, Hirschman's theory of exit, voice and loyalty and stakeholder salience theory, as well as the roles of signalling and symbolic management actions. Data from the literature are organized into a process model of non-financial shareholder influence. Underpinned by the influencing context, this conceptualization centres on three primary shareholder interventions: divestment, dialogue and shareholder proposals. These interventions are enabled through a range of actors and tools: coalitions, non-governmental organizations, codes and indices, the media and regulators. The interaction between interventions and the enabling actors and tools helps to determine managers’ perceptions of shareholder salience. These perceptions subsequently shape the organizational behaviours that affect companies’ symbolic and substantive environmental and social performance. An agenda to direct future research in this burgeoning field is articulated

Extending Native Winter Pasture Use with Spring Grazing Practices

Improving profitability will help sustain the economic viability of ranch operations. Feed costs typically represent well over half of annual cow-calf production costs. Two things, 1) grazing strategies aimed at increasing the proportion of feed supplied through grazing and 2) decreasing reliance on high-cost harvested forages, have the potential to improve profit

After Wildfire: Range Recovery

In the grip of drought, livestock producers often must deal with the additional impact of wildfire. While drought conditions develop gradually and can be anticipated, losses due to wildfire are sudden and devastating

Re-evaluation of cosmic ray cutoff terminology

The study of cosmic ray access to locations inside the geomagnetic field has evolved in a manner that has led to some misunderstanding and misapplication of the terminology originally developed to describe particle access. This paper presents what is believed to be a useful set of definitions for cosmic ray cutoff terminology for use in theoretical and experimental cosmic ray studies

Strain induced half-metal to semiconductor transition in GdN

We have investigated the electronic structure and magnetic properties of GdN as a function of unit cell volume. Based on the first-principles calculations of GdN, we observe that there is a transformation in conduction properties associated with the volume increase: first from halfmetallic to semi-metallic, then ultimately to semiconducting. We show that applying stress can alter the carrier concentration as well as mobility of the holes and electrons in the majority spin channel. In addition, we found that the exchange parameters depend strongly on lattice constant, thus the Curie temperature of this system can be enhanced by applying stress or doping impurities.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figure

‘RE/TRS’ is a Girl’s Subject: Talking about Gender and the Discourse of ‘Religion’ in UK Educational Spaces

This article addresses what appears to be a retrenchment into narrower forms of identification and an increased suspicion of difference in the context of educational policy in the UK – especially in relation to ‘Religious Education’. The adoption of standardized management protocols – ‘managerialism’ – across most if not all policy contexts including public educational spaces reduces spaces for encountering or addressing genuine difference and for discovering something new and different. A theory of the ‘feminization of religion’ associated historically with Barbara Welter, provides some useful insights as to why this might be, suggesting that those in British society who would prefer to see greater separation from ‘religion’ in ‘secular’ schools may well also be caught up in forms of gender stereotyping

Classical generalized constant coupling model for geometrically frustrated antiferromagnets

A generalized constant coupling approximation for classical geometrically frustrated antiferromagnets is presented. Starting from a frustrated unit we introduce the interactions with the surrounding units in terms of an internal effective field which is fixed by a self consistency condition. Results for the magnetic susceptibility and specific heat are compared with Monte Carlo data for the classical Heisenberg model for the pyrochlore and kagome lattices. The predictions for the susceptibility are found to be essentially exact, and the corresponding predictions for the specific heat are found to be in very good agreement with the Monte Carlo results.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, 2 columns. Discussion about the zero T value of the pyrochlore specific heat correcte

Parallaxes of Five L Dwarfs with a Robotic Telescope

We report the parallax and proper motion of five L dwarfs obtained with observations from the robotic Liverpool Telescope. Our derived proper motions are consistent with published values and have considerably smaller errors. Based on our spectral type versus absolute magnitude diagram, we do not find any evidence for binaries among our sampleor, at least no comparable mass binaries. Their space velocities locate them within the thin disk, and based on the model comparisons, they have solar-like abundances. For all five objects, we derived effective temperature, luminosity, radius, gravity, and mass from an evolutionary model (CBA00) and our measured parallax; moreover, we derived their effective temperature by integrating observed optical and near-infrared spectra and model spectra (BSH06 or BT-Dusty) at longer wavelengths to obtain bolometric flux using the classical Stefan-Boltzmann law. Generally, the three temperatures for one object derived using two different methods with three models are consistent, although at lower temperature (e.g., for L4) the differences among the three temperatures are slightly larger than those at higher temperature (e.g., for L1).Peer reviewe