Return to Baseline After an Interpretation Training as a Dynamic Predictor for Treatment Response in Social Anxiety Disorder

Background: Despite considerable research efforts, consistent predictors of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) outcome for social anxiety disorder (SAD) are scarce. A dynamic focus on individual symptom reactivity and resilience patterns may show promise in predicting treatment response. This pilot study is the first to investigate whether rate of return to baseline after a one-session positive interpretation training indicates resilience and predicts CBT-response among individuals with SAD. Method: Participants (N = 39) completed an interpretation bias assessment before and after training, and once a day for three days after the training, followed by a six-week CBT-program. Participants completed SAD-assessments pre-treatment, during treatment, and post-treatment. Return to baseline was operationalized as the individualized slope of negative and positive interpretations across interpretation bias assessments. Results: Intention-to-treat analyses showed no significant relation between both negative and positive interpretation bias and CBT-response. Similarly, for completers-only, most analyses also showed no such relationship. Conclusion: These findings suggest that slower return to baseline as a resilience index does not have predictive value for CBT-outcome in individuals with SAD. Future studies should incorporate experience-sampling to capture subtle changes in interpretation bias.</p

Towards dynamic service level agreement negotiation: An approach based on WS-agreement

In Grid, e-Science and e-Business environments Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are often used to establish frameworks for the delivery of services between service providers and the home organisations of the customers. While this high level SLAs, e.g. framework contracts, govern the relationship between the parties, it is desirable for the end-user to have dedicated quality of service (QoS) also for individual services like the orchestration of resources necessary for composed services. Grid level scheduling services typically are responsible for the orchestration and coordination of resources in the Grid, which requires the Grid level scheduler to coordinate resource management systems probably located in different domains. As the site autonomy has to be respected negotiating with the individual sites is the only way to achieve the intended coordination. Electronic SLAs emerged as a new way to negotiate and manage usage of resources in the Grid and are already adopted by a number of management systems. Therefore, it is natural to look for ways to adopt SLAs for Grid level scheduling. To realise this approach we need efficient and flexible protocols supporting dynamic negotiation and creation of SLAs. In this paper we propose and discuss ongoing work on extensions to the WS-Agreement protocol addressing these issues

The effect of an integrated reading and anxiety intervention for poor readers with anxiety

Contains fulltext : 230744.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)A recent systematic review has reported that poor reading is reliably associated with anxiety. However, we currently lack evidence-based intervention for children who have both poor reading and anxiety (PRAX). In this study, we tested a new PRAX intervention in 8- to 12-year-old children using a double-baseline intervention case series design. Analyses of both group and individual data revealed that 12 weeks of PRAX intervention significantly improved children’s reading and spelling accuracy, and significantly reduced both anxiety disorders and symptoms. These results support PRAX intervention as a treatment for comorbid reading and anxiety problems in children and pave the way to a randomised controlled trial.30 p

A WS-Agreement based resource negotiation framework for mobile agents

Abstract. Mobile agents require access to computing resources on heterogeneous systems across the Internet. They need to be able to negotiate their requirements with the systems on which they wish to be hosted. This paper presents a negotiation infrastructure with which agents acquire timelimited resource contracts through negotiation with one or more mediators instead of individual hosting systems. Mediators represent groups of autonomous hosts. The negotiation protocol and language are based on the WS-Agreement Specification, and have been implemented and tested within the AgentScape framework. Key words. mobile agents, resource management, agent-based negotiation, WS-Agreements 1. Introduction. On