The effect of the Violence Prevention through Urban Upgrading (VPUU) intervention on violence-related injuries presenting to health facilities in Khayelitsha and Nyanga

Background: Violence is one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality in South Africa's Western Cape province. Recent efforts, both globally and locally, have focused on using emergency room surveillance systems to collect data on violent injuries and to use these data to inform comprehensive, sustainable interventions such as urban upgrading. Drawing on insights from criminology, these urban upgrading interventions have sought to use environmental design to ameliorate socio-ecological factors related to violence. Objective: To use injury surveillance data in order to describe the pattern of violent injuries presenting to health facilities in the communities of Khayelitsha and Nyanga and to assess the effect of the Violence Prevention through Urban Upgrading programme (VPUU) on risk of violent non-fatal injury in these two areas. Methods: We conducted a case-control study using data from a series of semi-annual rapid assessments to compare violent and non-violent injuries in adults presenting to five heath facilities in Khayelitsha and Nyanga between September 2013 and October 2015. Multivariable logistic regression was used to assess the risk of violent injury with respect to demographic and behavioural characteristics and exposure to the VPUU intervention. Results: Multivariable analysis of 1,753 complete cases revealed that living in a VPUU intervention area was protective against presentation for violent injury when controlling for other risk factors (OR=0.75, p=0.022). Age, gender, race, and alcohol consumption were also found to be significantly associated with presentation for violent injury. There was a statistically significant interaction effect between alcohol and gender; the association between alcohol consumption and violent injury was stronger in women than in men. Conclusion: This study highlights the demographic and behavioural factors associated with violent injury and provides preliminary evidence of the reduction of violent injury risk in VPUU intervention areas

Effect of Maternal Borderline Personality Disorder on Emotional Availability in Mother-Child Interactions

Individuals with borderline personality disorder (BPD) experience severe and pervasive disturbances in the development of attachment relationships, identity, and emotion regulation. Given these deficits, mothers diagnosed with BPD are likely to experience significant difficulties in parenting their children. The present study examined the effect of maternal BPD and borderline personality features on emotional availability in interactions between mothers with BPD and their 4- to 7-year-old children. In a low socioeconomic status (SES) sample of n = 35 children of mothers diagnosed with BPD and n = 35 normative comparisons, groups were compared on maternal and child emotional availability, and self-reported maternal borderline personality features were assessed across the sample as a whole. No significant differences in emotional availability were found between groups. Across the sample as whole, however, maternal borderline personality features of affective instability, identity disturbance, negative relationships, and self-harm were significantly correlated with maternal intrusiveness and maternal hostility. Maternal borderline personality features of affective instability and negative relationships were significantly associated with maternal sensitivity, child responsiveness, and child involvement. Results are discussed in terms of putative precursors to BPD and preventive interventions

The Effect of Maternal Borderline Personality Disorder and Social Support on Patterns of Emotional Availability in Mother-Child Interactions

Individuals with borderline personality disorder (BPD) experience severe and pervasive disturbances in the development of attachment relationships, identity, and emotion regulation. Given these deficits, there is an important need to understand the unique challenges mothers diagnosed with BPD are likely to face in parenting their children, as well as identify contextual variables that might be associated with maternal functioning and parenting outcomes. The current study used a low socioeconomic sample of children aged 4-7 of mothers with BPD, and a comparison group of children of mothers without BPD, to examine associations between maternal BPD, maternal borderline features, social support, and emotional availability. Results of the study found that social support played a mediating role on the relationship between (1) affective instability and maternal emotional availability, (2) identity problems and maternal emotional availability, (3) self-harm/impulsivity and maternal emotional availability, and (4) self-harm/impulsivity and child emotional availability. Contrary to hypothesis, the moderating effects of social support were strongest for mothers with low levels of borderline features; social support did not seem to buffer the effects of higher levels of borderline features on emotional availability. Results of cluster analysis also revealed 4 unique patterns of both optimal and nonoptimal mother-child emotional availability, labeled (1) High Functioning—Sensitive, (2) Low Functioning—Intrusively Hostile, (3) Low Functioning—Passive/Disengaged, and (4) Low-Functioning—Inconsistent. Mothers in Cluster 1 reported the highest levels of social support and the lowest levels of borderline features, while mothers in Cluster 2 reported the lowest levels of social support and highest levels of borderline features; furthermore, mothers in Cluster 2 endorsed significantly more problems with Negative Relationships when compared to mothers in Cluster 1. Mothers in Clusters 3 and 4 reported levels of borderline features and social support that were similar to the overall group mean. The results of the study are discussed in terms of developmental precursors to BPD, clinical implications for parent-child interventions, directions for future research, and strengths and limitations

Motivating Students Positively Through Restorative Justice Discipline

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of discipline formats on student development and analyze if the practice of restorative justice can decrease the school to prison pipeline. Does criminalizing every discrepancy against the law create better law-abiding citizens? Is the zero-tolerance policy change an effective mechanism for school discipline? Do restorative justice practices reduce the school to prison pipeline? To investigate this, the infraction rates at various high schools have been observed in regard to their discipline practices to analyze the number of incidences that students incur and how they were managed

Reliability of rating spontaneous speech in the Western Aphasia Battery: Implications for classification

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Paucity vs. Verbosity: Another Analysis of Right Hemisphere Communication Deficits

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Altered resting-state network connectivity in stroke patients with and without apraxia of speech

Motor speech disorders, including apraxia of speech (AOS), account for over 50% of the communication disorders following stroke. Given its prevalence and impact, and the need to understand its neural mechanisms, we used resting state functional MRI to examine functional connectivity within a network of regions previously hypothesized as being associated with AOS (bilateral anterior insula (aINS), inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), and ventral premotor cortex (PM)) in a group of 32 left hemisphere stroke patients and 18 healthy, age-matched controls. Two expert clinicians rated severity of AOS, dysarthria and nonverbal oral apraxia of the patients. Fifteen individuals were categorized as AOS and 17 were AOS-absent. Comparison of connectivity in patients with and without AOS demonstrated that AOS patients had reduced connectivity between bilateral PM, and this reduction correlated with the severity of AOS impairment. In addition, AOS patients had negative connectivity between the left PM and right aINS and this effect decreased with increasing severity of non-verbal oral apraxia. These results highlight left PM involvement in AOS, begin to differentiate its neural mechanisms from those of other motor impairments following stroke, and help inform us of the neural mechanisms driving differences in speech motor planning and programming impairment following stroke

Attracting majors through recruitment talks in introductory geoscience classes

Work published in Geological Society of America Abstracts with Programs

Effectiveness of Retraining Phoneme to Grapheme Conversion

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