703 research outputs found
Development and validation of the child post-traumatic cognitions inventory (CPTCI)
Background: Negative trauma-related cognitions have been found to be a significant factor in the maintenance of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in adults. Initial studies of such appraisals in trauma-exposed children and adolescents suggest that this is an important line of research in youth, yet empirically validated measures for use with younger populations are lacking. A measure of negative trauma-related cognitions for use with children and adolescents, the Child Post-Traumatic Cognitions Inventory (CPTCI), is presented. The measure was devised as an age-appropriate version of the adult Post-Traumatic Cognitions Inventory (Foa et al., 1999). Methods: The CPTCI was developed and validated within a large (n = 570) sample, comprising community and trauma-exposed samples of children and adolescents aged 6-18 years. Results: Principal components analysis suggested a two-component structure. These components were labelled 'permanent and disturbing change' and 'fragile person in a scary world', and were each found to possess good internal consistency, test-retest reliability, convergent validity, and discriminative validity. The reliability and validity of these sub-scales was present regardless of whether the measure was completed in the acute phase or several months after a trauma. Scores on these sub-scales did not vary with age. Conclusions: The CPTCI is a reliable and valid measure that is not specific to the type of trauma exposure, and shows considerable promise as a research and clinical tool. The structure of this measure suggests that appraisals concerning the more abstract consequences of a trauma, as well as physical threat and vulnerability, are pertinent factors in trauma-exposed children and adolescents, even prepubescent children
Power-law distributions from additive preferential redistributions
We introduce a non-growth model that generates the power-law distribution
with the Zipf exponent. There are N elements, each of which is characterized by
a quantity, and at each time step these quantities are redistributed through
binary random interactions with a simple additive preferential rule, while the
sum of quantities is conserved. The situation described by this model is
similar to those of closed -particle systems when conservative two-body
collisions are only allowed. We obtain stationary distributions of these
quantities both analytically and numerically while varying parameters of the
model, and find that the model exhibits the scaling behavior for some parameter
ranges. Unlike well-known growth models, this alternative mechanism generates
the power-law distribution when the growth is not expected and the dynamics of
the system is based on interactions between elements. This model can be applied
to some examples such as personal wealths, city sizes, and the generation of
scale-free networks when only rewiring is allowed.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures; Changed some expressions and notations; Added
more explanations and changed the order of presentation in Sec.III while
results are the sam
A Yule-Simon process with memory
The Yule-Simon model has been used as a tool to describe the growth of
diverse systems, acquiring a paradigmatic character in many fields of research.
Here we study a modified Yule-Simon model that takes into account the full
history of the system by means of an hyperbolic memory kernel. We show how the
memory kernel changes the properties of preferential attachment and provide an
approximate analytical solution for the frequency distribution density as well
as for the frequency-rank distribution.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures; accepted for publication in Europhysics Letter
IP3 receptor isoforms differently regulate ER-mitochondrial contacts and local calcium transfer
Contact sites of endoplasmic reticulum (ER) and mitochondria locally convey calcium signals between the IP3 receptors (IP3R) and the mitochondrial calcium uniporter, and are central to cell survival. It remains unclear whether IP3Rs also have a structural role in contact formation and whether the different IP3R isoforms have redundant functions. Using an IP3R-deficient cell model rescued with each of the three IP3R isoforms and an array of super-resolution and ultrastructural approaches we demonstrate that IP3Rs are required for maintaining ER-mitochondrial contacts. This role is independent of calcium fluxes. We also show that, while each isoform can support contacts, type 2 IP3R is the most effective in delivering calcium to the mitochondria. Thus, these studies reveal a non-canonical, structural role for the IP3Rs and direct attention towards the type 2 IP3R that was previously neglected in the context of ER-mitochondrial calcium signaling
Alpha-helical destabilization of the Bcl-2-BH4-domain peptide abolishes its ability to inhibit the IP3 receptor
The anti-apoptotic Bcl-2 protein is the founding member and namesake of the Bcl-2-protein family. It has recently been demonstrated that Bcl-2, apart from its anti-apoptotic role at mitochondrial membranes, can also directly interact with the inositol 1,4,5-trisphosphate receptor (IP3R), the primary Ca2+-release channel in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER). Bcl-2 can thereby reduce pro-apoptotic IP3R-mediated Ca2+ release from the ER. Moreover, the Bcl-2 homology domain 4 (Bcl-2-BH4) has been identified as essential and sufficient for this IP3R-mediated anti-apoptotic activity. In the present study, we investigated whether the reported inhibitory effect of a Bcl-2-BH4 peptide on the IP (3)R1 was related to the distinctive alpha-helical conformation of the BH4 domain peptide. We therefore designed a peptide with two glycine "hinges" replacing residues I14 and V15, of the wild-type Bcl-2-BH4 domain (Bcl-2-BH4-IV/GG). By comparing the structural and functional properties of the Bcl-2-BH4-IV/GG peptide with its native counterpart, we found that the variant contained reduced alpha-helicity, neither bound nor inhibited the IP (3)R1 channel, and in turn lost its anti-apoptotic effect. Similar results were obtained with other substitutions in Bcl-2-BH4 that destabilized the alpha-helix with concomitant loss of IP3R inhibition. These results provide new insights for the further development of Bcl-2-BH4-derived peptides as specific inhibitors of the IP3R with significant pharmacological implications
The Size Variance Relationship of Business Firm Growth Rates
The relationship between the size and the variance of firm growth rates is
known to follow an approximate power-law behavior where is the firm size and is an
exponent weakly dependent on . Here we show how a model of proportional
growth which treats firms as classes composed of various number of units of
variable size, can explain this size-variance dependence. In general, the model
predicts that must exhibit a crossover from to
. For a realistic set of parameters, is
approximately constant and can vary in the range from 0.14 to 0.2 depending on
the average number of units in the firm. We test the model with a unique
industry specific database in which firm sales are given in terms of the sum of
the sales of all their products. We find that the model is consistent with the
empirically observed size-variance relationship
Power Law Distribution of Wealth in a Money-Based Model
A money-based model for the power law distribution (PLD) of wealth in an
economically interacting population is introduced. The basic feature of our
model is concentrating on the capital movements and avoiding the complexity of
micro behaviors of individuals. It is proposed as an extension of the Equiluz
and Zimmermann's (EZ) model for crowding and information transmission in
financial markets. Still, we must emphasize that in EZ model the PLD without
exponential correction is obtained only for a particular parameter, while our
pattern will give it within a wide range. The Zipf exponent depends on the
parameters in a nontrivial way and is exactly calculated in this paper.Comment: 5 pages and 4 figure
Towards Computing Inferences from English News Headlines
Newspapers are a popular form of written discourse, read by many people,
thanks to the novelty of the information provided by the news content in it. A
headline is the most widely read part of any newspaper due to its appearance in
a bigger font and sometimes in colour print. In this paper, we suggest and
implement a method for computing inferences from English news headlines,
excluding the information from the context in which the headlines appear. This
method attempts to generate the possible assumptions a reader formulates in
mind upon reading a fresh headline. The generated inferences could be useful
for assessing the impact of the news headline on readers including children.
The understandability of the current state of social affairs depends greatly on
the assimilation of the headlines. As the inferences that are independent of
the context depend mainly on the syntax of the headline, dependency trees of
headlines are used in this approach, to find the syntactical structure of the
headlines and to compute inferences out of them.Comment: PACLING 2019 Long paper, 15 page
Critical and Near-Critical Branching Processes
Scale-free dynamics in physical and biological systems can arise from a
variety of causes. Here, we explore a branching process which leads to such
dynamics. We find conditions for the appearance of power laws and study
quantitatively what happens to these power laws when such conditions are
violated. From a branching process model, we predict the behavior of two
systems which seem to exhibit near scale-free behavior--rank-frequency
distributions of number of subtaxa in biology, and abundance distributions of
genotypes in an artificial life system. In the light of these, we discuss
distributions of avalanche sizes in the Bak-Tang-Wiesenfeld sandpile model.Comment: 9 pages LaTex with 10 PS figures. v.1 of this paper contains results
from non-critical sandpile simulations that were excised from the published
versio
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