Only connect: addressing the emotional needs of Scotland's children and young people

A report on the SNAP (Scottish Needs Assessment Programme) Child and Adolescent Mental Health Phase Two survey. It describes a survey of a wide range of professionals working with children and young people in Scotland, and deals with professional perspectives on emotional, behavioural and psychological problems. Conclusions and recommendations are presented

Automatic recognition of schwa variants in spontaneous Hungarian speech

This paper analyzes the nature of the process involved in optional vowel reduction in Hungarian, and the acoustic structure of schwa variants in spontaneous speech. The study focuses on the acoustic patterns of both the basic realizations of Hungarian vowels and their realizations as neutral vowels (schwas), as well as on the design, implementation, and evaluation of a set of algorithms for the recognition of both types of realizations from the speech waveform. The authors address the question whether schwas form a unified group of vowels or they show some dependence on the originally intended articulation of the vowel they stand for. The acoustic study uses a database consisting of over 4,000 utterances extracted from continuous speech, and recorded from 19 speakers. The authors propose methods for the recognition of neutral vowels depending on the various vowels they replace in spontaneous speech. Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients are calculated and used for the training of Hidden Markov Models. The recognition system was trained on 2,500 utterances and then tested on 1,500 utterances. The results show that a neutral vowel can be detected in 72% of all occurrences. Stressed and unstressed syllables can be distinguished in 92% of all cases. Neutralized vowels do not form a unified group of phoneme realizations. The pronunciation of schwa heavily depends on the original articulation configuration of the intended vowel

Developing and testing a nurse-led intervention to support bereavement in relatives in the intensive care (BRIC study): a protocol of a pre-post intervention study

BACKGROUND: When a patient is approaching death in the intensive care unit (ICU), patients' relatives must make a rapid transition from focusing on their beloved one's recovery to preparation for their unavoidable death. Bereaved relatives may develop complicated grief as a consequence of this burdensome situation; however, little is known about appropriate options in quality care supporting bereaved relatives and the prevalence and predictors of complicated grief in bereaved relatives of deceased ICU patients in the Net

Decision support and the Criminal Justice System An assessment of the potential for utilising decision support in undertaking the prosecutorial decision

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DXN028241 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Speaker strategies in the use of prosodic means in spontaneous discourse in Dutch

Ce papier présente les résultats d'une analyse de moyens prosodiques employés par des locuteurs dans la structuration du discours spontané. Huit locuteurs, 4 hommes et 4 femmes, ont lu à haute voix une courte histoire en néerlandais, qu'ils ont ensuite racontée en leurs propres mots ('version racontée'). Le but du papier présent est d'étudier les différentes manières dont les locuteurs ont réalisé les versions racontées sur le plan acoustique. Afin de caractériser les locuteurs nous avons pris des mesures acoustiques et perceptives globales. Celles-ci ont été utilisées à foire des 'profils locuteur'. Des corrélations montrent que les locuteurs peuvent être groupés à partir de l'usage des moyens prosodiques dans le discours. Des jugements perceptifs complètent cette image: plus le locuteur ressemble au 'locuteur idéal' d'une histoire racontée, plus il est apprécié. Les locutrices sont appréciées mieux que les locuteurs, malgré le fait que les moyens utilisés sont les mêmes

Young people who self-harm

Background Self-harm among young people in the UK is possibly increasing but little is known about the reasons young people give for cessation and their link with gender or employment status. Aims To investigate self-harm in young people, prevalence, methods used, motivations for starting and ceasing, service use, and how these are related to gender, parental social class and current labour market position. Method Population-based survey of 1258 18- to 20-year-olds living in the Central Clydeside Conurbation, Scotland. Results Both past and current rates of self-harm were highest among those outside the labour market. This group was most likely to want to kill themselves and did not cite specialist mental health services as helpful in ceasing self-harm. Those in full-time education more often self-harmed for a brief time, mainly to reduce anxiety. Conclusions Current labour market position was a stronger predictor than parental social class or gender for self-harm, and was linked to level of severity, motivation for starting and ceasing, and service utilisation