CONSTRUCT VALIDITY OF A LABORATORY AGGRESSION PARADIGM: A MULTITRAIT-MULTIMETHOD APPROACH

There continues to be doubt regarding the validity of laboratory aggression paradigms. This paper provides an investigation of the construct validity of one prominent aggression task, the Taylor Aggression Paradigm (TAP), within a Multitrait Multimethod Matrix (MTMM) methodology. Participants consisted of 151 male undergraduate psychology students with a median age of 19 years old (M=19.45, SD = 2.03). Participants completed self-report and behavioral measures of aggression, impulsivity, and pro-social behavior which were analyzed using a Correlated Trait – Correlated Method Confirmatory Factor Analysis model. Results supported the construct validity of the MTMM model and the TAP. This study provides one of the only a priori tests of construct validity for the TAP and provides a basis for additional validation studies using this methodology

The Use of Natural Product Substrates for the Synthesis of Libraries of Biologically Active, New Chemical Entities

Since Alexander Fleming first noted the killing of a bacterial culture by a mold, antibiotics have revolutionized medicine, being able to treat, and often cure life-threatening illnesses and making surgical procedures possible by eliminating the possibility of opportunistic infection. However, during the past 30 years many of the infections that were once easily cured by the proper antibiotic are no longer so due to a precipitous rise in multi-drug resistant organisms. This rise in multi-drug resistant organisms poses a grave threat to the medical advances that have been made in the past century and underscores the need for new antibiotics. We have developed two promising candidates for pharmaceutical applications, compounds 72 and 71, which are derived from nonactin, a biologically active natural product. Nonactin 40, an ionophore macrotetrolide antibiotic that is produced by Streptomyces griseus ETH A7796, is an ideal candidate for the synthesis of new antimicrobial drugs. This secondary metabolite is composed of two units of (+)-nonactic acid 49 and two units of (-)-nonactic acid 50. Whereas nonactin does not possess a synthetically useful chemical `handle\u27, the nonactic acid subunits do. Through methanolysis of this structure and the separation of the two enantiomers, followed by a series of transformations, easily diversifiable scaffolds have been synthesized, which allows for the relatively rapid synthesis of chemically diverse libraries. From a small library of compounds that were synthesized, the compounds, 72 and 71 were found to show promising activities against vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecalis (VRE) and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). Compounds 88 and 90 were shown to be the active enantiomers. It was also shown by making the 1,4-substituted triazoles and the 1,5-substituted triazoles 91, 92 that only the 1,4-substituted triazoles gave the aforementioned activities. These results illustrate the vital importance of stereochemistry and regiochemistry. To establish the importance of the nonactic acid moiety itself in the triazoloester compounds, analogues of these compounds were made by replacing the nonactic acid moiety with a cyclohexane moiety, specifically starting with both trans and cis 4-cyclohexanol-carboxylic acid. Neither the cis nor the trans analogues 131, 132, 142, 143, 151, 152, 160, 161 of either of the regioisomers of the compounds made to mimic 72 and 71 gave the activities of their nonactate-containing counterparts. As an alternative to chemical synthesis we investigated biotransformation of nonactic acid analogs by Streptomyces griseus. While we were unable to generate new nonactin analogues we did discover an inhibitor of nonactin biosynthesis 186 and we were able to set limits on precursor directed biosynthesis in S. griseus

TESTING THE ROLE OF ANXIETY AS AN UNDERLYING MECHANISM OF THE ALCOHOL-AGGRESSION RELATION

The purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that acute alcohol consumption facilitates aggression through the reduction of adaptive anxiety/fear responses to danger/threat. Participants were 80 healthy male social drinkers between 21 and 33 years of age. They were randomly assigned to one of four groups: 1) Alcohol/anxiety induction (n=20), 2) Placebo/anxiety induction (n=20), 3) Alcohol only (n=20), and 4) Placebo only (n=20). Anxiety was induced by informing participants that they had to deliver a speech about what they liked and disliked about their body in front of a video camera. A modified version of the Taylor Aggression Paradigm (Taylor, 1967) was used to measure aggressive behavior in a situation where electric shocks were administered to, and received from, a fictitious opponent during a supposed competitive reaction-time task. Results indicated that the anxiety induction was successful in reducing aggression for participants who received alcohol. Results are discussed within the context of a number of theories specifying anxiety as a possible mediator of the alcohol aggression relation

Retaining Rural Educators: Characteristics of Teacher Retention Practices of Rural School Districts

The purpose of this study was to determine the reasons high-quality rural veteran educators choose to remain in small, rural district settings and to identify common factors among small rural school districts that have high numbers of highly qualified veteran teachers. The study is relevant to school leaders and school boards within small rural communities seeking to develop policies and encourage strategies to keep high-quality educators from leaving districts. The motivation-hygiene theory of job satisfaction developed by Herzberg, Mausner, and Snyderman (1993), coupled with Rosenholtz’s (1989) 10 essential components for working together were utilized throughout the study to evaluate the motivations of high-quality veteran rural educators. A self-administered survey and telephone interviews were utilized to gather data, which revealed high-quality veteran teachers choose to remain in the small, rural school setting due to intrinsic motivators. It was learned strong support from fellow educators and the community contributed to the desire of rural educators to remain employed within their districts. Data revealed educators were interested in autonomy within the classroom and support from administrators. Research indicated small, rural schools with high numbers of highly qualified veteran teachers have high levels of administrative support. These educators have a sense of belonging within their districts and high levels of job satisfaction. Opportunities for educators to collaborate are readily available and support is given through teacher evaluations. Additionally, these educators feel connections within their school communities, which enable them to better teach the district\u27s students. Lastly, educators voiced school climate played a large role in their decisions to stay in the small, rural setting

Special Issue "Formal Approaches to Grammaticalization": Introduction

Across languages and language families, it has been observed that some changes in the conventions of interpretation of specific functional meanings and their corresponding linguistic markers are not random, but follow clear and consistent patterns. In light of these systematicities, unidirectional grammaticalization "pathways" or "trajectories" have been proposed to capture these diachronic phenomena. Less well-understood, however, is how and why these particular changes occur, why they should be unidirectional or cyclic, and what (communicative) mechanisms and (semantic) representations support them. This special issue of PLSA assembles work from a number of scholars working across different empirical domains – and with different theoretical backgrounds and commitments – to take stock of both advances in this research program over the past decade, as well as the development of new ways of understanding semantic change phenomena

True happiness: The role of morality in the folk concept of happiness

Recent scientific research has settled on a purely descriptive definition of happiness that is focused solely on agents’ psychological states (high positive affect, low negative affect, high life satisfaction). In contrast to this understanding, recent research has suggested that the ordinary concept of happiness is also sensitive to the moral value of agents’ lives. Five studies systematically investigate and explain the impact of morality on ordinary assessments of happiness. Study 1 demonstrates that moral judgments influence assessments of happiness not only for untrained participants, but also for academic researchers and even in those who study happiness specifically. Studies 2 and 3 then respectively ask whether this effect may be explained by general motivational biases or beliefs in a just world. In both cases, we find evidence against these explanations. Study 4 shows that the impact of moral judgments cannot be explained by changes in the perception of descriptive psychological states. Finally, Study 5 compares the impact of moral and non-moral value, and provides evidence that unlike non-moral value, moral value is part of the criteria that govern the ordinary concept of happiness. Taken together, these studies provide a specific explanation of how and why the ordinary concept of happiness deviates from the definition used by researchers studying happiness

Characterizing urban landscapes using fuzzy sets

Characterizing urban landscapes is important given the present and future projections of global population that favor urban growth. The definition of “urban” on a thematic map has proven to be problematic since urban areas are heterogeneous in terms of land use and land cover. Further, certain urban classes are inherently imprecise due to the difficulty in integrating various social and environmental inputs into a precise definition. Social components often include demographic patterns, transportation, building type and density while ecological components include soils, elevation, hydrology, climate, vegetation and tree cover. In this paper, we adopt a coupled human and natural system (CHANS) integrated scientific framework for characterizing urban landscapes. We implement the framework by adopting a fuzzy sets concept of “urban characterization” since fuzzy sets relate to classes of object with imprecise boundaries in which membership is a matter of degree. For dynamic mapping applications, user-defined classification schemes involving rules combining different social and ecological inputs can lead to a degree of quantification in class labeling varying from “highly urban” to “least urban”. A socio-economic perspective of urban may include threshold values for population and road network density while a more ecological perspective of urban may utilize the ratio of natural versus built area and percent forest cover. Threshold values are defined to derive the fuzzy rules of membership, in each case, and various combinations of rules offer a greater flexibility to characterize the many facets of the urban landscape. We illustrate the flexibility and utility of this fuzzy inference approach called the Fuzzy Urban Index for the Boston Metro region with five inputs and eighteen rules. The resulting classification map shows levels of fuzzy membership ranging from highly urban to least urban or rural in the Boston study region. We validate our approach using two experts assessing accuracy of the resulting fuzzy urban map. We discuss how our approach can be applied in other urban contexts with newly emerging descriptors of urban sustainability, urban ecology and urban metabolism.This research was partially supported by "Boston University Initiative on Cities Early Stage Urban Research Awards 2015-16" (Gopal & Phillips) and the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University. We thank the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of our manuscript and their many insightful comments and suggestions. (Boston University Initiative on Cities Early Stage Urban Research Awards; Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University)https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2016.02.002Published versio

Semantic validation of the use of SNOMED CT in HL7 clinical documents

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The HL7 Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) constrains the HL7 Reference Information model (RIM) to specify the format of HL7-compliant clinical documents, dubbed <it>CDA documents</it>. The use of clinical terminologies such as SNOMED CT^®further improves interoperability as they provide a shared understanding of concepts used in clinical documents. However, despite the use of the RIM and of shared terminologies such as SNOMED CT^®, gaps remain as to how to use both the RIM and SNOMED CT^®in HL7 clinical documents. The HL7 implementation guide on <it>Using SNOMED CT in HL7 Version 3 </it>is an effort to close this gap. It is, however, a human-readable document that is not suited for automatic processing. As such, health care professionals designing clinical documents need to ensure validity of documents manually.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We represent the CDA using the Ontology Web Language OWL and further use the OWL version of SNOMED CT^®to enable the translation of CDA documents to so-called OWL <it>ontologies</it>. We formalize a subset of the constraints in the implementation guide on <it>Using SNOMED CT in HL7 Version 3 </it>as OWL <it>Integrity Constraints </it>and show that we can automatically validate CDA documents using OWL reasoners such as Pellet. Finally, we evaluate our approach via a prototype implementation that plugs in the Open Health Workbench.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>We present a methodology to automatically check the validity of CDA documents which make reference to SNOMED CT^®terminology. The methodology relies on semantic technologies such as OWL. As such it removes the burden from IT health care professionals of having to manually implement such guidelines in systems that use HL7 Version 3 documents.</p