Psychotherapy and social support - Integrating research on psychological helping

Psychotherapy interactions and social support conversations have many similarities, as well as some important differences. Researchers studying these two manifestations of psychological helping - often known as formal and informal helping - usually apply a separate set of concepts and methods to each and tend to locate their work in separate bodies of literature. This paper argues that such a division of the field is unnecessary and unproductive. It outlines several ways in which the two bodies of literature might inform each other and argues for conceptual integration of the two fields. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved

Vibrophonocardiograph Patent

Vibrophonocardiograph comprising low weight and small volume piezoelectric microphone with amplifier having high imput impedance for high sensitivity and low frequency respons

Mutual help groups for mental health problems: A review of effectiveness studies

This paper reviews empirical studies on whether participating in mutual help groups for people with mental health problems leads to improved psychological and social functioning. To be included, studies had to satisfy four sets of criteria, covering: (1) characteristics of the group, (2) target problems, (3) outcome measures, and (4) research design. The 12 studies meeting these criteria provide limited but promising evidence that mutual help groups benefit people with three types of problems: chronic mental illness, depression/anxiety, and bereavement. Seven studies reported positive changes for those attending support groups. The strongest findings come from two randomized trials showing that the outcomes of mutual help groups were equivalent to those of substantially more costly professional interventions. Five of the 12 studies found no differences in mental health outcomes between mutual help group members and non-members; no studies showed evidence of negative effects. There was no indication that mutual help groups were differentially effective for certain types of problems. The studies varied in terms of design quality and reporting of results. More high-quality outcome research is needed to evaluate the effectiveness of mutual help groups across the spectrum of mental health problems

Localization of the Functional Domains of Human Tissue Inhibitor of Metalloproteinases-3 and the Effects of a Sorsby's Fundus Dystrophy Mutation

A transient COS-7 cell expression system was used to investigate the functional domain arrangement of tissue inhibitor of metalloproteinases-3 (TIMP-3), specifically to assess the contribution of the amino- and carboxylterminal domains of the molecule to its matrix metalloproteinase (MMP) inhibitory and extracellular matrix (ECM) binding properties. Wild type TIMP-3 was entirely localized to the ECM in both its glycosylated (27 kDa) and unglycosylated (24 kDa) forms. A COOH-terminally truncated TIMP-3 molecule was found to be a non- ECM bound MMP inhibitor, whereas a chimeric TIMP molecule, consisting of the NH2-terminal domain of TIMP-2 fused to the COOH-terminal domain of TIMP-3, displayed ECM binding, albeit with a lower affinity than the wild type TIMP-3 molecule. Thus the functional domain arrangement of TIMP-3 is analogous to that seen in TIMP-1 and -2, namely that the NH2-terminal domain is responsible for MMP inhibition whereas the COOH-terminal domain is most important in mediating the specific functions of the molecule. A mutant TIMP-3 in which serine 181 was changed to a cysteine, found in Sorsby’s fundus dystrophy, a hereditary macular degenerative disease, was also expressed in COS-7 cells. This gave rise to an additional 48-kDa species (possibly a TIMP-3 dimer) that retained its ability to inhibit MMPs and localize to the ECM. These data favor the hypothesis that the TIMP-3 mutations seen in Sorsby’s fundus dystrophy contribute to disease progression by accumulation of mutant protein rather than by the loss of functional TIMP-3

Super-resolution imaging of a low frequency levitated oscillator

We describe the measurement of the secular motion of a levitated nanoparticle in a Paul trap with a CMOS camera. This simple method enables us to reach signal-to-noise ratios as good as 10$^{6}$ with a displacement sensitivity better than 10$^{-16}\,m^{2}$/Hz. This method can be used to extract trap parameters as well as the properties of the levitated particles. We demonstrate continuous monitoring of the particle dynamics on timescales of the order of weeks. We show that by using the improvement given by super-resolution imaging, a significant reduction in the noise floor can be attained, with an increase in the bandwidth of the force sensitivity. This approach represents a competitive alternative to standard optical detection for a range of low frequency oscillators where low optical powers are require

Analytical simulation of the Langley Research Center integrated life-support system, volume 1

Analytical simulation of integrated life support system and oxygen recovery syste

Exploiting correlogram structure for robust speech recognition with multiple speech sources

This paper addresses the problem of separating and recognising speech in a monaural acoustic mixture with the presence of competing speech sources. The proposed system treats sound source separation and speech recognition as tightly coupled processes. In the first stage sound source separation is performed in the correlogram domain. For periodic sounds, the correlogram exhibits symmetric tree-like structures whose stems are located on the delay that corresponds to multiple pitch periods. These pitch-related structures are exploited in the study to group spectral components at each time frame. Local pitch estimates are then computed for each spectral group and are used to form simultaneous pitch tracks for temporal integration. These processes segregate a spectral representation of the acoustic mixture into several time-frequency regions such that the energy in each region is likely to have originated from a single periodic sound source. The identified time-frequency regions, together with the spectral representation, are employed by a `speech fragment decoder' which employs `missing data' techniques with clean speech models to simultaneously search for the acoustic evidence that best matches model sequences. The paper presents evaluations based on artificially mixed simultaneous speech utterances. A coherence-measuring experiment is first reported which quantifies the consistency of the identified fragments with a single source. The system is then evaluated in a speech recognition task and compared to a conventional fragment generation approach. Results show that the proposed system produces more coherent fragments over different conditions, which results in significantly better recognition accuracy

The 8^8B Neutrino Spectrum

Knowledge of the energy spectrum of $^8$B neutrinos is an important ingredient for interpreting experiments that detect energetic neutrinos from the Sun. The neutrino spectrum deviates from the allowed approximation because of the broad alpha-unstable $^8$Be final state and recoil order corrections to the beta decay. We have measured the total energy of the alpha particles emitted following the beta decay of $^8$B. The measured spectrum is inconsistent with some previous measurements, in particular with a recent experiment of comparable precision. The beta decay strength function for the transition from $^8$B to the accessible excitation energies in $^8$Be is fit to the alpha energy spectrum using the R-matrix approach. Both the positron and neutrino energy spectra, corrected for recoil order effects, are constructed from the strength function. The positron spectrum is in good agreement with a previous direct measurement. The neutrino spectrum disagrees with previous experiments, particularly for neutrino energies above 12 MeV.Comment: 15 pages, 13 figures, 4 tables, submitted to Phys. Rev. C, typos correcte

New broad 8Be nuclear resonances

Energies, total and partial widths, and reduced width amplitudes of 8Be resonances up to an excitation energy of 26 MeV are extracted from a coupled channel analysis of experimental data. The presence of an extremely broad J^pi = 2^+ ``intruder'' resonance is confirmed, while a new 1^+ and very broad 4^+ resonance are discovered. A previously known 22 MeV 2^+ resonance is likely resolved into two resonances. The experimental J^pi T = 3^(+)? resonance at 22 MeV is determined to be 3^-0, and the experimental 1^-? (at 19 MeV) and 4^-? resonances to be isospin 0.Comment: 16 pages, LaTe

Implicit cognition is impaired and dissociable in a head-injured group with executive deficits

Implicit or non-conscious cognition is traditionally assumed to be robust to pathology but Gomez-Beldarrain et al (1999, 2002) recently showed deficits on a single implicit task after head injury. Laboratory research suggests that implicit processes dissociate. This study therefore examined implicit cognition in 20 head-injured patients and age- and I.Q.-matched controls using a battery of four implicit cognition tasks: a Serial Reaction Time task (SRT), mere exposure effect task, automatic stereotype activation and hidden co-variation detection. Patients were assessed on an extensive neuropsychological battery, and MRI scanned. Inclusion criteria included impairment on at least one measure of executive function. The patient group was impaired relative to the control group on all the implicit cognition tasks except automatic stereotype activation. Effect size analyses using the control mean and standard deviation for reference showed further dissociations across patients and across implicit tasks. Patients impaired on implicit tasks had more cognitive deficits overall than those unimpaired, and a larger Dysexecutive Self/Other discrepancy (DEX) score suggesting greater behavioural problems. Performance on the SRT task correlated with a composite measure of executive function. Head-injury thus produced heterogeneous impairments in the implicit acquisition of new information. Implicit activation of existing knowledge structures appeared intact. Impairments in implicit cognition and executive function may interact to produce dysfunctional behaviour after head-injury. Future comparisons of implicit and explicit cognition should use several measures of each function, to ensure that they measure the latent variable of interest