Measuring the Severity of Negative and Traumatic Events.

We devised three measures of the general severity of events, which raters applied to participants' narrative descriptions: 1) placing events on a standard normed scale of stressful events, 2) placing events into five bins based on their severity relative to all other events in the sample, and 3) an average of ratings of the events' effects on six distinct areas of the participants' lives. Protocols of negative events were obtained from two non-diagnosed undergraduate samples (n = 688 and 328), a clinically diagnosed undergraduate sample all of whom had traumas and half of whom met PTSD criteria (n = 30), and a clinically diagnosed community sample who met PTSD criteria (n = 75). The three measures of severity correlated highly in all four samples but failed to correlate with PTSD symptom severity in any sample. Theoretical implications for the role of trauma severity in PTSD are discussed.

Narrative centrality and negative affectivity: independent and interactive contributors to stress reactions.

Reactions to stressful negative events have long been studied using approaches based on either the narrative interpretation of the event or the traits of the individual. Here, we integrate these 2 approaches by using individual-differences measures of both the narrative interpretation of the stressful event as central to one's life and the personality characteristic of negative affectivity. We show that they each have independent contributions to stress reactions and that high levels on both produce greater than additive effects. The effects on posttraumatic stress symptoms are substantial for both undergraduates (Study 1, n = 2,296; Study 3, n = 488) and veterans (Study 2, n = 104), with mean levels for participants low on both measures near floor on posttraumatic stress symptoms and those high on both measures scoring at or above diagnostic thresholds. Study 3 included 3 measures of narrative centrality and 3 of negative affectivity to demonstrate that the effects were not limited to a single measure. In Study 4 (n = 987), measures associated with symptoms of posttraumatic stress correlated substantially with either measures of narrative centrality or measures of negative affectivity. The concepts of narrative centrality and negative affectivity and the results are consistent with findings from clinical populations using similar measures and with current approaches to therapy. In broad nonclinical populations, such as those used here, the results suggest that we might be able to substantially increase our ability to account for the severity of stress response by including both concepts.

Two versions of life: emotionally negative and positive life events have different roles in the organization of life story and identity.

Over 2,000 adults in their sixties completed the Centrality of Event Scale (CES) for the traumatic or negative event that now troubled them the most and for their most positive life event, as well as measures of current PTSD symptoms, depression, well-being, and personality. Consistent with the notion of a positivity bias in old age, the positive events were judged to be markedly more central to life story and identity than were the negative events. The centrality of positive events was unrelated to measures of PTSD symptoms and emotional distress, whereas the centrality of the negative event showed clear positive correlations with these measures. The centrality of the positive events increased with increasing time since the events, whereas the centrality of the negative events decreased. The life distribution of the positive events showed a marked peak in young adulthood whereas the life distribution for the negative events peaked at the participants' present age. The positive events were mostly events from the cultural life script-that is, culturally shared representations of the timing of major transitional events. Overall, our findings show that positive and negative autobiographical events relate markedly differently to life story and identity. Positive events become central to life story and identity primarily through their correspondence with cultural norms. Negative events become central through mechanisms associated with emotional distress.

Autobiographical Memories for Very Negative Events: The Effects of Thinking about and Rating Memories.

In three related experiments, 250 participants rated properties of their autobiographical memory of a very negative event before and after writing about either their deepest thoughts and emotions of the event or a control topic. Levels of emotional intensity of the event, distress associated with the event, intrusive symptoms, and other phenomenological memory properties decreased over the course of the experiment, but did not differ by writing condition. We argue that the act of answering our extensive questions about a very negative event led to the decrease, thereby masking the effects of expressive writing. To show that the changes could not be explained by the mere passage of time, we replicated our findings in a fourth experiment in which all 208 participants nominated a very negative event, but only half the participants rated properties of their memory in the first session. Implications for reducing the effects of negative autobiographical memories are discussed.

Life scripts help to maintain autobiographical memories of highly positive, but not highly negative, events.

A representative sample of 1,307 respondents between the ages of 20 and 94 was asked how old they were when they felt most afraid, most proud, most jealous, most in love, and most angry. They were also asked when they had experienced their most important event and whether this event was positive or negative. In general, there was a reminiscence "bump" for positive but not negative events. To provide data on life scripts, 87 psychology students answered the same questions for a hypothetical 70-year-old. The undergraduates were more confident in dating positive than in dating negative events, and when they were confident, the distribution of responses predicted the survey data. The results support the idea of culturally shared life scripts for positive but not negative events, which structure retrieval processes and spaced practice.

Release of outer membrane vesicles by Gram-negative bacteria is a novel envelope stress response.

Conditions that impair protein folding in the Gram-negative bacterial envelope cause stress. The destabilizing effects of stress in this compartment are recognized and countered by a number of signal transduction mechanisms. Data presented here reveal another facet of the complex bacterial stress response, release of outer membrane vesicles. Native vesicles are composed of outer membrane and periplasmic material, and they are released from the bacterial surface without loss of membrane integrity. Here we demonstrate that the quantity of vesicle release correlates directly with the level of protein accumulation in the cell envelope. Accumulation of material occurs under stress, and is exacerbated upon impairment of the normal housekeeping and stress-responsive mechanisms of the cell. Mutations that cause increased vesiculation enhance bacterial survival upon challenge with stressing agents or accumulation of toxic misfolded proteins. Preferential packaging of a misfolded protein mimic into vesicles for removal indicates that the vesiculation process can act to selectively eliminate unwanted material. Our results demonstrate that production of bacterial outer membrane vesicles is a fully independent, general envelope stress response. In addition to identifying a novel mechanism for alleviating stress, this work provides physiological relevance for vesicle production as a protective mechanism.

Increasing Stability of Lithium-Ion Batteries with Ordered Graphene Silicon Negative Electrodes

Currently, lackluster battery capability is restricting the widespread integration of Smart Grids, limiting the long-term feasibility of alternative, green energy conversion technologies. Silicon nanoparticles have great conductivity for applications in rechargeable batteries, but have degradation issues due to changes in volume during lithiation/delithiation cycles. To combat this, we use electrochemical deposition to uniformly space silicon particles on graphene sheets to create a more stable structure. We found the process of electrochemical deposition degraded the graphene binding in the electrode material, severely reducing charge capacity. But, the usage of mechanically mixing silicon particles with grapheme yielded batteries better than those that are commercially available.

Ets-1 p27: A novel Ets-1 isoform with dominant-negative effects on the transcriptional properties and the subcellular localization of Ets-1 p51

The transcription factor Ets-1 is implicated in various physiological processes and invasive pathologies. We identified a novel variant of ets-1, ets-1Delta(III-VI), resulting from the alternative splicing of exons III to VI. This variant encodes a 27 kDa isoform, named Ets-1 p27. Ets-1 p27 lacks the threonine-38 residue, the Pointed domain and the transactivation domain, all of which are required for the transactivation of Ets-1 target genes. Both inhibitory domains surrounding the DNA-binding domain are conserved, suggesting that Ets-1 p27, like the full-length Ets-1 p51 isoform, is autoinhibited for DNA binding. We showed that Ets-1 p27 binds DNA in the same way as Ets-1 p51 does and that it acts both at a transcriptional and a subcellular localization level, thereby constituting a dual-acting dominant negative of Ets-1 p51. Ets-1 p27 blocks Ets-1 p51-mediated transactivation of target genes and induces the translocation of Ets-1 p51 from the nucleus to the cytoplasm. Furthermore, Ets-1 p27 overexpression represses the tumor properties of MDA-MB-231 mammary carcinoma cells in correlation with the known implication of Ets-1 in various cellular mechanisms. Thus the dual-acting dominant-negative function of Ets-1 p27 gives to the Ets-1 p27/Ets-1 p51 ratio a determining effect on cell fate.

Negative hormonal control by the androgen DHT and antiestrogen EM-139 on cell cycle kinetics and proliferation in human breast cancer ZR-75-1 cells

info:eu-repo/semantics/submittedForPublication

Design of differential amplifier with negative impedance compensation

Design of differential amplifier with high gain accuracy and high linearity is presented in the paper. The amplifier design is based on the negative impedance compensation technique reported by the authors in [1]. A negative impedance with high precision, low sensitivity, wide input signal range and simple structure is used for the compensation of differential amplifier. Analysis and simulation results show that gain accuracy and linearity can be improved significantly with the negative impedance compensation

Stability analysis of the amplifier with negative impedance compensation

A novel amplifier design technique based on negative impedance compensation has been proposed in our recent paper. In this paper, we investigate the stability of this amplifier system. The parameter space approach has been used to determine system parameters in the negative impedance circuit such that the stability of the amplifier system can be guaranteed in a certain region represented by those parameters. The simulation results have demonstrated that stable circuit behavior for the amplifier can be achieved

Indications of a negative impact of herring on recruitment of Norway pout

The Norway pout (Trisopterus esmarkii) stock in the North Sea has experienced poor recruitment recently. Herring (Clupea harengus) has been suggested to be a major predator on fish larvae in the North Sea. We investigated possible interactions between herring and Norway pout using a simple statistical analysis and a modified stock - recruit relationship. There was a significant negative relationship (linear regression, r = 20.44, p < 0.05) between total herring biomass and recruitment of Norway pout. The spawning stock of Norway pout is typically dominated by 2-year-olds, and there was a strong negative relationship (linear regression, r = 20.79, p < 0.01) between herring biomass and Norway pout spawning-stock biomass (SSB) 2 years later. A Beverton-Holt model fitted to stock recruit data of Norway pout produced a rather poor correlation (r(2) = 0.04). However, when only the Norway pout SSB not overlapping with herring is considered, the fit between the model and the stock - recruit data improves (r(2) = 0.31). The analyses indicate a negative impact by herring on recruitment of Norway pout, the most plausible cause for this being herring predation on Norway pout larvae, but field studies are needed to verify such predation.