Intergenerational transmission of conflict-related trauma in Northern Ireland: A behaviour analytic approach

Intergenerational transmission of trauma describes the impact that traumatic events experienced by one generation have for the subsequent generation. In Northern Ireland, violent conflict raged between 1969 and 1998, when a peace process begun. This study explored to what extent (if any) parents’ experiences of the conflict influenced how children perceived life in this society. Parents completed a questionnaire, and their children drew 2 pictures, depicting Northern Ireland now and before they were born. Children’s behaviors and awareness of the conflict were influenced by their parents’ experiences and narratives, their age, gender, and school. Parental narrative about the violence was influenced by individual learning history, the child’s age and gender, and present circumstances. A behavior analytic approach is offered.

Privacy-Protected Facial Biometric Verification via Fuzzy Forest Learning

Although visual surveillance has emerged as an effective technolody for public security, privacy has become an issue of great concern in the transmission and distribution of surveillance videos. For example, personal facial images should not be browsed without permission. To cope with this issue, face image scrambling has emerged as a simple solution for privacyrelated applications. Consequently, online facial biometric verification needs to be carried out in the scrambled domain thus bringing a new challenge to face classification. In this paper, we investigate face verification issues in the scrambled domain and propose a novel scheme to handle this challenge. In our proposed method, to make feature extraction from scrambled face images robust, a biased random subspace sampling scheme is applied to construct fuzzy decision trees from randomly selected features, and fuzzy forest decision using fuzzy memberships is then obtained from combining all fuzzy tree decisions. In our experiment, we first estimated the optimal parameters for the construction of the random forest, and then applied the optimized model to the benchmark tests using three publically available face datasets. The experimental results validated that our proposed scheme can robustly cope with the challenging tests in the scrambled domain, and achieved an improved accuracy over all tests, making our method a promising candidate for the emerging privacy-related facial biometric applications.

Facial cleanliness and risk of trachoma in families

Trachoma is the leading infectious cause of blindness worldwide, and epidemiologic studies of factors that may increase the transmission of ocular Chlamydia trachomatis are needed. In two villages in a hyperendemic area of Central Tanzania, 472 (90%) of 527 preschool-aged children were examined for specific signs of unclean faces and presence of trachoma. The odds of trachoma were 70% higher in children with flies and nasal discharge on their faces. Other facial signs were not important. In large families, the odds of trachoma increased 4.8-fold if a sibling had trachoma and 6.8-fold if a sibling had trachoma and an unclean face. Health education strategies aimed at improving face washing need to target cleaning nasal discharge and keeping flies off children's faces.

Reliability of reports of childhood trauma in bipolar disorder: A test–retest study over 18 months

This study aimed to explore the reliability of self-reported trauma histories in a population with a diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder using the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire. Previous studies in other populations suggest high reliability of trauma histories over time and it was postulated that a similar high reliability would be demonstrated in this population. Thirty-nine patients with a confirmed diagnosis (DSM-IV criteria) were followed-up and re-administered the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire after 18 months. Cohen's kappa scores and intraclass correlations suggest reasonable test-retest reliability over the 18-month time period of the study for all types of childhood abuse, namely emotional, physical, sexual, and physical abuse and emotional neglect. Intraclass correlations ranged from r = .50 to (sexual abuse) to r = .96 (physical abuse). Cohen's kappas ranged from .44 (sexual abuse) to .76 (physical abuse). Retrospective reports of childhood trauma can be seen as reliable and are in keeping with results found with other mental health populations.