Does Work Stress Predict the Occurrence of Cold, Flu and Minor Illness Symptoms in Clinical Psychology Trainees?

Objectives: The present study examined the three/four-day lagged relationship between daily work stress and upper respiratory tract infection (URTI) and other minor illness symptoms. Methods: Twenty-four postgraduate clinical psychology trainees completed work stress, cold/flu symptoms and somatic symptoms checklists daily for four weeks. Results: Increases in work stress were observed two days prior to a cold/flu episode but not three or four days preceding a cold/flu episode. Work stress was unrelated to peaks in somatic symptom reporting. Conclusions: There was some evidence of a lagged relationship between work stress and symptoms, but not of the expected duration, suggesting that the relationship between work stress and URTI symptoms was not mediated by the immune system

Schramm's proof of Watts' formula

G\'{e}rard Watts predicted a formula for the probability in percolation that there is both a left--right and an up--down crossing, which was later proved by Julien Dub\'{e}dat. Here we present a simpler proof due to Oded Schramm, which builds on Cardy's formula in a conceptually appealing way: the triple derivative of Cardy's formula is the sum of two multi-arm densities. The relative sizes of the two terms are computed with Girsanov conditioning. The triple integral of one of the terms is equivalent to Watts' formula. For the relevant calculations, we present and annotate Schramm's original (and remarkably elegant) Mathematica code.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/11-AOP652 the Annals of Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aop/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Math anxiety, intrusive thoughts and performance: Exploring the relationship between mathematics anxiety and performance: The role of intrusive thoughts

The current study examined the relationship between math anxiety and arithmetic performance by focusing on intrusive thoughts experienced during problem solving. Participants (N = 122) performed two-digit addition problems on a verification task. Math anxiety significantly predicted response time and error rate. Further, the extent to which intrusive thoughts impeded calculation mediated the relationship between math anxiety and per cent of errors on problems involving a carry operation. Moreover, results indicated that participants experienced a range of intrusive thoughts and these were related to significantly higher levels of math anxiety. The findings lend support to a deficient inhibition account of the math anxiety-to-performance relationship and highlight the importance of considering intrusive thoughts in future work

Internal DLA and the Gaussian free field

In previous works, we showed that the internal DLA cluster on \Z^d with t particles is a.s. spherical up to a maximal error of O(\log t) if d=2 and O(\sqrt{\log t}) if d > 2. This paper addresses "average error": in a certain sense, the average deviation of internal DLA from its mean shape is of constant order when d=2 and of order r^{1-d/2} (for a radius r cluster) in general. Appropriately normalized, the fluctuations (taken over time and space) scale to a variant of the Gaussian free field.Comment: 29 pages, minor revisio

Logarithmic fluctuations for internal DLA

Let each of n particles starting at the origin in Z^2 perform simple random walk until reaching a site with no other particles. Lawler, Bramson, and Griffeath proved that the resulting random set A(n) of n occupied sites is (with high probability) close to a disk B_r of radius r=\sqrt{n/\pi}. We show that the discrepancy between A(n) and the disk is at most logarithmic in the radius: i.e., there is an absolute constant C such that the following holds with probability one: B_{r - C \log r} \subset A(\pi r^2) \subset B_{r+ C \log r} for all sufficiently large r.Comment: 38 pages, 5 figures, v2 addresses referee comments. To appear in Journal of the AM

Brief report: self-compassion, physical health and the mediating role of health-promoting behaviours

To test the hypothesis that self-compassion predicts better physical health and that this is partially mediated through health-promoting behaviours, 147 adults completed self-report measures of self-compassion, health-promoting behaviours and physical health. Self-compassion and health-promoting behaviours were negatively associated with physical symptom scores. Self-compassion was positively associated with health-promoting behaviours. A bootstrapped mediation model confirmed a significant direct effect of self-compassion on physical health through health-promoting behaviours (R(2) = 0.13, b = -8.98, p = 0.015), which was partially mediated through health-promoting behaviours (R(2) = 0.06, b = -3.16, 95 per cent confidence interval [-6.78, -0.86]). Findings underscore the potential health-promoting benefits of self-compassion.non

The Impact of Children’s Connection to Nature: A Report for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB)

Connecting with nature should be part of every child’s life as it has the potential to aid nature’s revival while benefiting the child. To embed nature connection within our social norms, there is a need to be able to understand the benefits and set targets for levels of nature connection. This report presents findings on the impact of connection to nature from a survey of 775 children, using the child as the unit of analysis, rather than aggregated data. The results demonstrated that children who were more connected to nature had significantly higher English attainment, although this wasn’t repeated for Mathematics. Further, the 1.5 Connection to Nature Index (CNI) level was found to be a significant threshold across other measures, with those children with a CNI of 1.5 or above having significantly higher health, life satisfaction, pro-environmental behaviours and pro-nature behaviours. The analysis found strong correlations between CNI and pro-nature behaviours and pro-environmental behavior. A positive correlation was also evident between CNI and days spent outdoors and days spent in nature over the past week, suggesting that the more time spent in nature is associated with child’s connection to nature. Finally, weak correlations were found between connection to nature, health and life satisfaction. When more refined attainment results for English were explored, (n = 512) further weak correlations were found between English attainment and attendance, English and life satisfaction, and between English attainment and connection to nature. There are a multitude of factors associated with a child’s English attainment, so, although the correlations are weak, it is noteworthy that connection to nature is as important to children’s achievement in English as life satisfaction and attendance at school