Prosocial Behavior as a Stress Moderator: The Physiological and Psychological Components

Stress is a major part of everyday life for the majority of people, especially college students. Stress has a physiological response and serves an important purpose in the body. If an individual does not take the proper measures to reduce stress and it continues for long periods of time, the outcome can be damaging to the stressed individual. Stress can cause problems both physically and mentally. There are many different ways to reduce stress and to counteract the damage that stress can cause on the body. Prosocial behavior is an action that elevates others’ needs over an individual’s needs. Studies have been completed to see if this type of behavior is capable of reducing stress. This coping mechanism appears to be effective because the physiological effects and psychological effects that prosocial behavior has on the body are opposite of the effects that stress produces in the body. Prosocial behavior also allows the individual performing the action to take his or her mind off the overwhelming circumstance and thus, stop the effects from taking a toll on the body. This paper will review the literature in order to determine if prosocial behavior would be a better coping mechanism in reducing stress, specifically in college students, than other coping mechanisms, such as exercise or temporal distancing. The paper will also try to determine if prosocial behavior can be effective in preventing long-term stress or if it is only helpful in reducing stress after it has occurred

Investigation and Validation of Imaging Techniques for Mitral Valve Disease Diagnosis and Intervention

Mitral Valve Disease (MVD) describes a variety of pathologies that result in regurgitation of blood during the systolic phase of the cardiac cycle. Decisions in valvular disease management rely heavily on non-invasive imaging. Transesophageal echocardiography (TEE) is widely recognized as the key evaluation technique where backflow of high velocity blood can be visualized under Doppler. In most cases, TEE imaging is adequate for identifying mitral valve pathology, though the modality is often limited from signal dropout, artifacts and a restricted field of view. Quantitative analysis is an integral part of the overall assessment of valve morphology and gives objective evidence for both classification and guiding intervention of regurgitation. In addition, patient-specific models derived from diagnostic TEE images allow clinicians to gain insight into uniquely intricate anatomy prior to surgery. However, the heavy reliance on TEE segmentation for diagnosis and modelling has necessitated an evaluation of the accuracy of the oft-used mitral valve imaging modality. Dynamic cardiac 4D-Computed Tomography (4D-CT) is emerging as a valuable tool for diagnosis, quantification and assessment of cardiac diseases. This modality has the potential to provide a high quality rendering of the mitral valve and subvalvular apparatus, to provide a more complete picture of the underlying morphology. However, application of dynamic CT to mitral valve imaging is especially challenging due to the large and rapid motion of the valve leaflets. It is therefore necessary to investigate the accuracy and level of precision by which dynamic CT captures mitral valve motion throughout the cardiac cycle. To do this, we design and construct a silicone and bovine quasi-static mitral valve phantom which can simulate a range of ECG-gated heart rates and reproduce physiologic valve motion over the cardiac cycle. In this study, we discovered that the dynamic CT accurately captures the underlying valve movement, but with a higher prevalence of image artifacts as leaflet and chordae motion increases due to elevated heart rates. In a subsequent study, we acquire simultaneous CT and TEE images of both a silicone mitral valve phantom and an iodine-stained bovine mitral valve. We propose a pipeline to use CT as the ground truth to study the relationship between TEE intensities and the underlying valve morphology. Preliminary results demonstrate that with an optimized threshold selection based solely on TEE pixel intensities, only 40\% of pixels are correctly classified as part of the valve. In addition, we have shown that emphasizing the centre-line rather than the boundaries of high intensity TEE image regions provides a better representation and segmentation of the valve morphology. This work has the potential to inform and augment the use of TEE for diagnosis and modelling of the mitral valve in the clinical workflow for MVD

Effect of Evening Food Composition on Pre-Breakfast Fasting and Overall Glucose Control in Type 1 and Type 2 Diabetes : A Review

This paper reviews current data on medical nutrition therapy (MNT) strategies related to evening food composition and the effect on pre-breakfast fasting and overall blood glucose control in people with type 1 and type 2 diabetes. A comprehensive literature search was conducted to locate pertinent articles, and a review of literature was completed. Eight studies related to type 1 diabetes and nine studies related to type 2 diabetes were identified and reviewed. The available evidence shows that people living with type 1 diabetes should consume a daily bedtime snack composed of carbohydrate and protein, but not high in fat. People with type 2 diabetes may not benefit from a bedtime snack, since eliminating the snack does not result in hypoglycemia and studies have not definitively shown that a snack reduces pre-breakfast fasting glucose compared to placebo. People with type 2 diabetes should also avoid a supper meal high in kilocalories

A New Mathematical Programming Framework for Facility Layout Design

We present a new framework for efficiently finding competitive solutions for the facility layout problem. This framework is based on the combination of two new mathematical programming models. The first model is a relaxation of the layout problem and is intended to find good starting points for the iterative algorithm used to solve the second model. The second model is an exact formulation of the facility layout problem as a non-convex mathematical program with equilibrium constraints (MPEC). Aspect ratio constraints, which are frequently used in facility layout methods to restrict the occurrence of overly long and narrow departments in the computed layouts, are easily incorporated into this new framework. Finally, we present computational results showing that both models, and hence the complete framework, can be solved efficiently using widely available optimization software. This important feature of the new framework implies that it can be used to find competitive layouts with relatively little computational effort. This is advantageous for a user who wishes to consider several competitive layouts rather than simply using the mathematically optimal layout

Feasibility study for a scanning celestial attitude determination system SCADS on the IMP spacecraft Final report

System design analysis to establish feasibility of using electro-optical celestial scanning sensor on IMP spacecraft for determination of spacecraft attitude by star measurement

Impact of Stress Management Strategies and Intervention on the Mental Health of Farmers: A Critically Appraised Topic

The dynamic transactions between the environment, person, and occupation play a role in the success of the farmer, their access to healthcare, and their willingness to seek support with their stressors or difficulties. Depression, stress, and other mental health conditions are highly prevalent within the farming community. This population is less likely to seek out and utilize available mental health resources and services, and in many cases, mental health resources are not available in rural areas (Gunn et al., 2021; Kennedy et al., 2020)