Psychology

Williams Syndrome (WS) is a developmental disorder typified by deficits in visuospatial cognition. To understand the nature of this deficit, we characterized how people with WS perceive visual orientation, a fundamental ability related to object identification. We compared WS participants to typically developing children (3-6 years of age) and typical adults in an orientation discrimination task with four stimulus types (small circular, large circular, collinear elongated and parallel elongated gratings). We measured orientation discrimination thresholds and the proportion of orthogonal errors (i.e., mirror-image reversal errors). We evaluated how these metrics (1) are modulated by stimulus condition, and (2) vary with chronological or mental age. We found that orientation perception in WS is comparable to that of typically developing children. Orientation discrimination thresholds were better for elongated gratings than circular gratings across all participant groups. For large circular gratings, the proportion of orthogonal errors was disproportionately greater in WS participants and typically developing 3-6 year old children than in typical adults. Moreover, we found that the ability to judge orientation in WS improves with increasing mental age, but not chronological age. These results suggest that orientation discrimination in WS is developmentally arrested, as opposed to abnormal or delayed.

Adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs, a term coined by Drs. Vincent Felitti and Robert Anda, is used to describe traumatic events that occur during a child's life. During the mid-1980s, Dr. Felitti was employed as a specialist in preventative medicine at Kaiser Permanente in San Diego, California . During this time, he was assisting obese adults with weight loss through the Positive Choice program. He was perplexed that persons who were successfully losing weight were also most likely to drop out of the program. Upon further investigation, Dr. Felitti discovered that many of these patients reported abuse during their childhoods and were likely using obesity as a defense against further unwanted sexual attention or physical aggression. His clients also reported excessive use of alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs . To further examine the relationship between adversity in childhood and adult outcomes, Dr. Felitti partnered with Dr. Robert Anda, a researcher at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in Atlanta, Georgia. Dr. Anda had particular interest in the broad impact of childhood adversity on subsequent social and public health outcomes. Together, Drs. Felitti and Anda designed the first ACE questions and added them to a comprehensive health survey that was administered to more than 17,000 adults aged 18 to 94 who were enrolled in the Kaiser Permanente health insurance plan in the early 1990s. The ACE questions assessed the presence of childhood abuse (emotional, physical, and sexual), neglect (emotional and physical), and household dysfunction (battered mothers, criminal behavior, parental divorce or separation, mental illness, and substance abuse). Additionally, the survey also included

Despite advances in other aspects of cardiac catheterization, manual or mechanical compression followed by 4 to 8 hours of bed rest remains the mainstay of postprocedural femoral access site management. Suture-mediated closure may prove to be an effective alternative, offering earlier sheath removal and ambulation, and potentially a reduction in hemorrhagic complications. The Suture To Ambulate aNd Discharge trial (STAND

The NIR stent is a novel second generation tubular stent that was designed to overcome some of the limitations of the earlier Palmaz-Schatz (PS) stent design. The NIR Vascular Advanced North American (NIRVANA) trial randomized 849 patients with single coronary lesions to treatment with the NIR stent or the PS stent. The study was an “equivalency” trial, designed to demonstrate

Objective: To compare levator ani muscle injury rates in primiparous women who had a forceps delivery owing to fetal distress with women delivered by forceps for second stage arrest; and to compare these injury rates with a historical control group of women who delivered spontaneously. Methods: Primiparous women who delivered by forceps were recruited retrospectively into 2 groups: forceps for fetal distress with short second stage (25 ± 11 minutes; n = 19); and forceps delivery for second stage arrest (137 ± 26 minutes; n = 19). MR images of the levator ani muscles were compared with a historical control group of women from a previous study who had delivered spontaneously (n = 129). Results: Major defect rates were: 42% for forceps and short second stage; 63% for forceps and second stage arrest; and 6% for spontaneous delivery. The odds ratios for major injury were: 11.0 for forceps and short second stage compared with spontaneous delivery; 25.9 for forceps and second stage arrest compared with spontaneous delivery; and 2.3 for forceps and second stage arrest compared with short second stage (P = 0.07). Conclusion: Women delivered by forceps have a higher rate of levator ani injury compared with spontaneous delivery controls; the difference between the forceps groups did not reach significance.

CREATINE is widely distributed throughout the body and while it occurs in greatest concentration in muscles where, as is well known, it plays a fundamental role in the process of contraction, it is probably present in most, if not all, cells. Thus the red cells contain creatine but apart from a few values given by no work on this component has been traced.

Rapid and quantitative measurements of cellulose concentrations in ionic liquids (ILs) are difficult. In this study, FTIR operated in attenuated total reflectance (ATR) mode was investigated as a tool to measure cellulose concentration in 1-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium acetate ([emim][OAc]) and the spectra were subjected to partial least squares (PLS) regression for the quantitative determination of cellulose content. Additionally, the spectra were subjected to 7 data preprocessing methods to reduce physical effects in the spectra. Peak normalization was found to be the technique that most improved the prediction of dissolved cellulose in [emim] [OAc]. When peak normalization was used for data preprocessing, a model for the quantitative estimation of cellulose content between 0 wt.% and 4 wt.% with an error of 0.53 wt.% was generated. The methods described here provide the basis for a rapid and facile technique for the determination of dissolved cellulose content in [emim] [OAc].

Specification search problems refer to two important but under-addressed issues in testing for factorial invariance: how to select proper reference indicators and how to locate specific non-invariant parameters. In this study, we propose a two-step procedure to solve these issues. Step 1 is to identify a proper reference indicator using the Bayesian structural equation modeling approach. An item is selected if it is associated with the highest likelihood to be invariant across groups. Step 2 is to locate specific non-invariant parameters, given that a proper reference indicator has already been selected in Step 1. A series of simulation analyses show that the proposed method performs well under a variety of data conditions, and optimal performance is observed under conditions of large magnitude of non-invariance, low proportion of non-invariance, and large sample sizes. We also provide an empirical example to demonstrate the specific procedures to implement the proposed method in ap...

This study explored the impact of partial factorial invariance on cross-group comparisons of latent variables, including latent means, latent variances, structural relations (or correlations) with other constructs, and regression coefficients as predicting external variables. The results indicate that the estimates of factor mean differences are sensitive to violations of invariance on both factor loadings and intercepts. Noninvariant factor loadings were also found to influence the cross-group comparisons of factor variances and regression coefficients (slopes, in the raw metric) with external variables. However, cross-group comparisons of standardized slopes and interfactor correlations were not subject to noninvariance. Under conditions of partial invariance, we further compared the performance of four different model specification strategies. In general, fitting partially invariant models with all noninvariant parameters that were freely estimated yielded more accurate estimates...

This study examined the performance of the weighted root mean square residual (WRMR) through a simulation study using confirmatory factor analysis with ordinal data. Values and cut scores for the WRMR were examined, along with a comparison of its performance relative to commonly cited fit indexes. The findings showed that WRMR illustrated worse fit when sample size increased or model misspecification increased. Lower (i.e., better) values of WRMR were observed when nonnormal data were present, there were lower loadings, and when few categories were analyzed. WRMR generally illustrated expected patterns of relations to other well-known fit indexes. In general, a cutoff value of 1.0 appeared to work adequately under the tested conditions and the WRMR values of "good fit" were generally in agreement with other indexes. Users are cautioned that when the fitted model is misspeficifed, the index might provide misleading results under situations where extremely large sample sizes are used.

Visual word recognition is central to skilled silent reading. This project investigated the situation in which two words within a sentence share phonological information. Previous eye movement reading studies have made attempts to understand how prior exposure to a word could influence the speed of recognizing another phonologically and/or orthographically similar word. Results have been accounted for by different visual word recognition models which agree on the competition among similar words in the lexicon. However, a closer inspection revealed several concerns. First, there is little direct evidence demonstrating the across-word effect in normal reading. Second, the existing work in English often confounded the phonological repetition patterns and the concurrent orthographic repetition. Finally, conflicts arise between the existing evidence and the lexical competition models employed to account for it. This project consists of three eye movement reading experiments to explore the phonological repetition effects with and without orthographic repetition across words. Results are interpreted from the perspective of the Lexical Quality Hypothesis, which highlights the roles of phonology in different levels of reading processing.

Over the past two decades schools have been identified as the de facto mental health system for youth. Therefore, improving and expanding school mental health (SMH) has become a pressing agenda item for researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and funders. Advancing this agenda includes not only translating intervention research into practice within schools, but building capacities for these interventions to occur. The interactive systems framework (ISF) of Wandersman and colleagues, and the focus of this special issue, provides guidance in bridging the gap between research and practice through multisystem capacity building. There is some evidence that application of the ISF has helped to build capacity for SMH in states, but this evidence is preliminary. In addition, application of the ISF has not occurred in SMH at the community level or in relation to the specific stresses a community undergoes in relation to a disaster. The purpose of this article was to conduct a preliminary attempt to connect these three areas-the ISF, SMH and strengthening SMH through the ISF to better address impacts of a community level disaster; in this case, we explore the impacts of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans schools, their students and families, and SMH programming within them.