Classifying Socially-Valued Role Functioning Among Community Residents with Psychiatric Disorders

An increased emphasis on community-based care has not ensured that people recovering from psychiatric disorders return to active and valued roles in their local communities. Although clinical recovery remains a priority for mental health services there is increasing recognition of the need for functional recovery to be attained and demonstrated in roles valued by the wider community. With this need in mind, a method for classifying socially-valued role functioning among people with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder was developed and trialed. Participants (n = 104) were recruited via mental health, psychosocial rehabilitation, and other community support services. Socially-valued roles were investigated via participation in five categories: (1) self-care and home duties; (2) caring for others; (3) self-development, voluntary work or rehabilitation; (4) formal education or training; and (5) employment. Activities were classified by primary role type and role status level at baseline, six, and 12 months. Current role status was assessed along with highest and lowest status in the previous year. Preliminary psychometric results were favorable. Research applications are now recommended for monitoring socially-valued role functioning in community settings.

Affect, attention, or anticipatory arousal? Human blink startle modulation in forward and backward affective conditioning

Affect modulates the blink startle reflex in the picture-viewing paradigm, however, the process responsible for reflex modulation during conditional stimuli (CSs) that have acquired valence through affective conditioning remains unclear. In Experiment 1, neutral shapes (CSs) and valenced or neutral pictures (USs) were paired in a forward (CS → US) manner. Pleasantness ratings supported affective learning of positive and negative valence. Post-acquisition, blink reflexes were larger during the pleasant and unpleasant CSs than during the neutral CS. Rather than affect, attention or anticipatory arousal were suggested as sources of startle modulation. Experiment 2 confirmed that affective learning in the picture–picture paradigm was not affected by whether the CS preceded the US. Pleasantness ratings and affective priming revealed similar extents of affective learning following forward, backward or simultaneous pairings of CSs and USs. Experiment 3 utilized a backward conditioning procedure (US → CS) to minimize effects of US anticipation. Again, blink reflexes were larger during CSs paired with valenced USs regardless of US valence implicating attention rather than anticipatory arousal or affect as the process modulating startle in this paradigm.

Philosophy, behaviour disorders, and the school

The recent exponential rise in the number of behaviour disorders has been the focus of a wide range of commentaries, ranging from the pedagogic and the administrative, to the sociological, and even the legal. This book will be the first to apply, in a systematic and thorough manner, the ideas of the foundational discipline of philosophy. A number of philosophical tools are applied here, tools arising through the medium of the traditional philosophical debates, such as those concerning governance, truth, logic, ethics, free-will, law and language. Each forms a separate chapter, but together they constitute a comprehensive, rigorous and original insight into what is now an important set of concerns for all those interested in the governance of children. The intention is threefold: first, to demonstrate the utility, accessibility and effectiveness of philosophical ideas within this important academic area. Philosophy does not have to be regarded an arcane and esoteric discipline, with only limited contemporary application, far from it. Second, the book offers a new set of approaches and ideas for both researchers and practitioners within education, a field is in danger of continually using the same ideas, to endlessly repeat the same conclusions. Third, the book offers a viable alternative to the dominant psychological model which increasingly employs pathology as its central rationale for conduct. The book would not only be of interest to mainstream educators, and to those students and academics interested in philosophy, and more specifically, the application of philosophical ideas to educational issues, it would also be an appropriate text for courses on education and difference, and due to the breadth of the philosophical issues addressed, courses on applied philosophy.

Teachers' recognition and referral of anxiety disorders in primary school children

This study investigated the ability of primary school teachers to recognise and refer children with anxiety symptoms. Two hundred and ninety-nine primary school teachers completed a questionnaire exploring their recognition and referral responses to five hypothetical vignettes that described boys and girls with varying severity of anxiety symptoms. Results revealed that teachers were generally able to recognise and make the decision to refer children with severe levels of anxiety. However, they had difficulty distinguishing between children with moderate anxiety symptoms and a severe anxiety disorder. Female teachers were more likely to refer children than were male teachers. The implications and future research are discussed.

The role of anxiety and perspective-taking strategy on affective empathic responses

Empathy is an important pro-social behaviour critical to a positive clientetherapist relationship. Therapist anxiety has been linked to reduced ability to empathise and lower client satisfaction with therapy. However, the nature of the relationship between anxiety and empathy is currently unclear. The current study investigated the effect of experimentally-induced anxiety on empathic responses elicited during three different perspective-taking tasks. Perspective-taking was manipulated within-subjects with all participants (N¼ 52) completing imagine-self, imagine-other and objective conditions. A threat of shock manipulation was used to vary anxiety between-subjects. Participants in the threat of shock condition reported higher levels of anxiety during the experiment and lower levels of empathyrelated distress for the targets than participants in the control condition. Perspective-taking was associated with higher levels of empathy-related distress and concern compared to the objective condition. The present results suggest that perspective-taking can to a large extent mitigate the influence of heightened anxiety on an individual’s ability to empathise.

The effects of verbal instruction on affective and expectancy learning

The current research assessed the effects of verbal instruction on affective and expectancy learning during repeated contingency reversals (Experiment 1 and during extinction (Experiment 2) in a picture–picture paradigm. Affective and expectancy learning displayed contingency reversal and extinction, but changes were slower for affective learning. Instructions facilitated reversal and extinction of expectancy learning but did not impact on affective learning. These findings suggest a differential susceptibility of affective and expectancy learning to verbal instruction and question previous reports that verbal instructions can accelerate the extinction of non-prepared fear learning in humans.

No evidence for subliminal affective priming with emotional facial expression primes

The present study investigated whether facial expressions of emotion presented outside consciousness awareness will elicit evaluative responses as assessed in affective priming. Participants were asked to evaluate pleasant and unpleasant target words that were preceded by masked or unmasked schematic (Experiment 1) or photographic faces (Experiments 1 and 2) with happy or angry expressions. They were either required to perform the target evaluation only or to perform the target evaluation and to name the emotion expressed by the face prime. Prime-target interval was 300 ms in Experiment 1 and 80 ms in Experiment 2. Naming performance confirmed the effectiveness of the masking procedure. Affective priming was evident after unmasked primes in tasks that required naming of the facial expressions for schematic and photographic faces and after unmasked primes in tasks that did not require naming for photographic faces. No affective priming was found after masked primes. The present study failed to provide evidence for affective priming with masked face primes, however, it indicates that voluntary attention to the primes enhances affective priming.

In the pursuit of effective affective computing : the relationship between features and registration

For facial expression recognition systems to be applicable in the real world, they need to be able to detect and track a previously unseen person's face and its facial movements accurately in realistic environments. A highly plausible solution involves performing a "dense" form of alignment, where 60-70 fiducial facial points are tracked with high accuracy. The problem is that, in practice, this type of dense alignment had so far been impossible to achieve in a generic sense, mainly due to poor reliability and robustness. Instead, many expression detection methods have opted for a "coarse" form of face alignment, followed by an application of a biologically inspired appearance descriptor such as the histogram of oriented gradients or Gabor magnitudes. Encouragingly, recent advances to a number of dense alignment algorithms have demonstrated both high reliability and accuracy for unseen subjects [e.g., constrained local models (CLMs)]. This begs the question: Aside from countering against illumination variation, what do these appearance descriptors do that standard pixel representations do not? In this paper, we show that, when close to perfect alignment is obtained, there is no real benefit in employing these different appearance-based representations (under consistent illumination conditions). In fact, when misalignment does occur, we show that these appearance descriptors do work well by encoding robustness to alignment error. For this work, we compared two popular methods for dense alignment-subject-dependent active appearance models versus subject-independent CLMs-on the task of action-unit detection. These comparisons were conducted through a battery of experiments across various publicly available data sets (i.e., CK+, Pain, M3, and GEMEP-FERA). We also report our performance in the recent 2011 Facial Expression Recognition and Analysis Challenge for the subject-independent task.

Work related musculoskeletal disorders amongst therapists in physically demanding roles: Qualitative analysis of risk factors and strategies for prevention

Background Physiotherapy and occupational therapy are two professions at high risk of work related musculoskeletal disorders (WRMD). This investigation aimed to identify risk factors for WRMD as perceived by the health professionals working in these roles (Aim 1), as well as current and future strategies they perceive will allow them to continue to work in physically demanding clinical roles (Aim 2). Methods A two phase exploratory investigation was undertaken. The first phase included a survey administered via a web based platform with qualitative open response items. The second phase involved four focus group sessions which explored topics obtained from the survey. Thematic analysis of qualitative data from the survey and focus groups was undertaken. Results Overall 112 (34.3%) of invited health professionals completed the survey; 66 (58.9%) were physiotherapists and 46 (41.1%) were occupational therapists. Twenty-four health professionals participated in one of four focus groups. The risk factors most frequently perceived by health professionals included: work postures and movements, lifting or carrying, patient related factors and repetitive tasks. The six primary themes for strategies to allow therapists to continue to work in physically demanding clinical roles included: organisational strategies, workload or work allocation, work practices, work environment and equipment, physical condition and capacity, and education and training. Conclusions Risk factors as well as current and potential strategies for reducing WRMD amongst these health professionals working in clinically demanding roles have been identified and discussed. Further investigation regarding the relative effectiveness of these strategies is warranted.