Are happier people less vulnerable to rumination, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress? : evidence from a large scale disaster

The present longitudinal study tested hypotheses about the relationship of subjective well-being and neuroticism with rumination, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress in university students after a large scale disaster. Measures of subjective well-being and personality were obtained two months before the 2013 Santa Maria’s fire. Measures of rumination, PTSD and anxiety were collected five months after the disaster with the same students. The results provide evidence that life satisfaction correlated negatively with rumination, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress. Positive affect presented similar but slightly smaller negative correlations with these variables, while negative affect presented higher correlations with rumination, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress. These findings provide evidence that subjective well-being components may constitute important predictors of psychopathological symptomatology after a disaster and may be helpful to plan clinical interventions

Estilos de pensamento, personalidade e bem-estar subjetivo: avanços e polêmicas

O objetivo deste artigo é apresentar algumas possíveis relações entre ruminação e reflexão com sexo, Neuroticismo/ajustamento emocional e bem-estar subjetivo (BES), decorrentes de uma análise crítica da literatura científica da área. O pensamento ruminativo, cujo conteúdo é negativo e desadaptado à resolução de problemas, deve estar inversamente associado ao BES. Porém, é possível que a reflexão melhore o BES, pois poderia amenizar o impacto negativo da ruminação. Nesse contexto, discute-se se ruminação e reflexão poderiam explicar BES independentemente do que as facetas da dimensão de personalidade Neuroticismo já predizem. Uma tipologia definida por diferentes níveis de ruminação e reflexão combinados é sugerida para verificação das diferenças de BES em homens e mulheres com diferentes níveis de ruminação e reflexão. As contribuições destas relações para intervenções são apresentadas

An Application of Item Response Theory to Psychological Test Development

Item response theory (IRT) has become a popular methodological framework for modeling response data from assessments in education and health; however, its use is not widespread among psychologists. This paper aims to provide a didactic application of IRT and to highlight some of these advantages for psychological test development. IRT was applied to two scales (a positive and a negative affect scale) of a self-report test. Respondents were 853 university students (57 % women) between the ages of 17 and 35 and who answered the scales. IRT analyses revealed that the positive affect scale has items with moderate discrimination and are measuring respondents below the average score more effectively. The negative affect scale also presented items with moderate discrimination and are evaluating respondents across the trait continuum; however, with much less precision. Some features of IRT are used to show how such results can improve the measurement of the scales. The authors illustrate and emphasize how knowledge of the features of IRT may allow test makers to refine and increase the validity and reliability of other psychological measures

Regularised Model Identification Improves Accuracy of Multisensor Systems for Noninvasive Continuous Glucose Monitoring in Diabetes Management

Continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) by suitable portable sensors plays a central role in the treatment of diabetes, a disease currently affecting more than 350 million people worldwide. Noninvasive CGM (NI-CGM), in particular, is appealing for reasons related to patient comfort (no needles are used) but challenging. NI-CGM prototypes exploiting multisensor approaches have been recently proposed to deal with physiological and environmental disturbances. In these prototypes, signals measured noninvasively (e.g., skin impedance, temperature, optical skin properties, etc.) are combined through a static multivariate linear model for estimating glucose levels. In this work, by exploiting a dataset of 45 experimental sessions acquired in diabetic subjects, we show that regularisation-based techniques for the identification of the model, such as the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (better known as LASSO), Ridge regression, and Elastic-Net regression, improve the accuracy of glucose estimates with respect to techniques, such as partial least squares regression, previously used in the literature. More specifically, the Elastic-Net model (i.e., the model identified using a combination of ${l}_{1}$ and ${l}_{2}$ norms) has the best results, according to the metrics widely accepted in the diabetes community. This model represents an important incremental step toward the development of NI-CGM devices effectively usable by patients

Model Predictive Control With Environment Adaptation for Legged Locomotion

Re-planning in legged locomotion is crucial to track the desired user velocity while adapting to the terrain and rejecting external disturbances. In this work, we propose and test in experiments a real-time Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) tailored to a legged robot for achieving dynamic locomotion on a variety of terrains. We introduce a mobility-based criterion to define an NMPC cost that enhances the locomotion of quadruped robots while maximizing leg mobility and improves adaptation to the terrain features. Our NMPC is based on the real-time iteration scheme that allows us to re-plan online at $25\,\mathrm{Hz}$ with a prediction horizon of $2$ seconds. We use the single rigid body dynamic model defined in the center of mass frame in order to increase the computational efficiency. In simulations, the NMPC is tested to traverse a set of pallets of different sizes, to walk into a V-shaped chimney,and to locomote over rough terrain. In real experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our NMPC with the mobility feature that allowed IIT's $87\, \mathrm{kg}$ quadruped robot HyQ to achieve an omni-directional walk on flat terrain, to traverse a static pallet, and to adapt to a repositioned pallet during a walk.Comment: Video available on: https://youtu.be/r0-KIiw0eW

Satisfaction with Life Scale: Evidences of validity and reliability among Portuguese college students

Este artigo apresenta novos dados sobre a precisão e validade dos resultados na Escala de Satisfação com a Vida (SWLS) junto de estudantes universitários. Uma amostra de 545 estudantes provenientes de uma universidade pública portuguesa foi considerada. A unidimensionalidade da escala foi confirmada, apresentando todos os itens cargas fatoriais superiores a .60, ainda que a sua invarância em função do género dos estudantes não se tenha confirmado, desaconselhando comparações de resultados entre homens e mulheres. As correlações moderadas em sentido positivo e negativo com os afetos positivos e negativos avaliados através da Escala de Afetos Positivos e Negativos (PANAS) traduzem evidências de validade de critério. A consistência interna dos resultados nos cindo itens da ESV situou-se em .77, sendo considerada adequada até pelo número reduzido de itens.This paper presents new data on the reliability and validity of results in the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS) among university students. A sample of 545 students from a Portuguese public university was considered. The unidimensionality of the scale was confirmed, with all factor loadings higher than .60, although their invariance according to the gender of the students was not confirmed, and it was not advisable to compare the results between men and women. Moderate positive and negative correlations with positive and negative affects assessed through the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) translate evidence of criterion validity. The internal consistency of the results in the fifth items of the ESV was .77, considered adequate face the reduced number of itemsFCT/SFRH/BD/117902/201

Optimization of left ventricular pacing site plus multipoint pacing improves remodeling and clinical response to cardiac resynchronization therapy at 1 year

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Gemini NIFS survey of feeding and feedback processes in nearby active galaxies : VI. Stellar populations

We use Gemini Near-Infrared Integral Field Spectrograph (NIFS) adaptive optics assisted data cubes to map the stellar population of the inner few hundred parsec of a sample of 18 nearby Seyfert galaxies. The near-infrared light is dominated by the contribution of young to intermediate-age stellar populations, with light-weighted mean ages ‹t›L ≲ 1.5 Gyr. Hot dust (HD) emission is centrally peaked (in the unresolved nucleus), but it is also needed to reproduce the continuum beyond the nucleus in nearly half of the sample. We have analysed the stellar population properties of the nuclear region and their relation with more global properties of the galaxies. We find a correlation between the X-ray luminosity and the contributions from the HD, featureless continuum (FC), and reddening AV. We attribute these correlations to the fact that all these properties are linked to the mass accretion rate to the active galactic nuclei (AGNs). We also find a correlation of the bolometric luminosity log(LBolobs) with the mass-weighted mean age of the stellar population, interpreted as due a delay between the formation of new stars and the triggering/feeding of the AGN. The gas reaching the supermassive black hole is probably originated from mass loss from the already somewhat evolved intermediate-age stellar population (‹t›L ≲ 1.5 Gyr). In summary, our results show that there is a significant fraction of young to intermediate-age stellar populations in the inner few 100 pc of active galaxies, suggesting that this region is facing a rejuvenation process in which the AGN, once triggered, precludes further star formation, in the sense that it can be associated with the lack of new star formation in the nuclear region