Performance in a substitution task and state anxiety following yoga in army recruits

140 men (M age = 30.3 yr., SD = 5.7) from the Indian army in north India participated in the study. They were naive to yoga and were assigned to yoga and breath awareness groups randomly, with 70 in each group. 20 healthy males of comparable age (M age = 33.7 yr., SD = 7.0) formed a comparison group. Their performance in a digit-letter substitution task and a state anxiety subscale was assessed immediately before and after two 45-min. sessions. The two groups of soldiers practiced either yoga or breath awareness. The comparison group listened to meditation music. Digit-letter substitution scores increased in both groups of army personnel and in the comparison group. State anxiety decreased after yoga and listening to meditation music, but not after breath awareness. This suggests that even in army personnel naive to yoga, a yoga-based intervention or listening to meditation music could reduce anxiety while increasing performance on an attention task.     

Social Constructionist Approach to Suffering and Healing: Juxtaposing Cassell, Gergen and Kleinman

To understand the experiences of suffering (overwhelming somatic pain or illness and its anticipation and other forms of severe distress arising in the socio-moral context) and facilitate healing (developing an enabling meaning and value for one??s experiences when faced with suffering) have been the focus of medicine as a social institution throughout human history. However, the goals of Western biomedicine in the last few centuries shifted from taking care of these experiential concerns of the sufferers to predominantly the diagnosis and treatment of the symptoms of a disease. This article attempts to illustrate how the assumptions of the social constructionist paradigm (with its deconstructionist and reconstructionist facets highlighted in the writings of Kenneth J. Gergen) serve as a suitable metatheoretical framework to understand human experiences of suffering and healing. A critical review of the writings of Eric J. Cassell and Arthur Kleinman on endorsing and researching such experiences resulted in four themes that reaffirmed the utility of this new paradigm. These themes help comprehend that biomedicine??s ontological claims may enhance human suffering, suffering and healing experiences are socio-historically contextualized, such experiences are performances within human interaction and dialogic partnership between the researcher and the participant becomes a meaningful medium to study such experiences.     

Sattva, Rajas and Tamas Factors and Quality of Life in Patients with Anxiety Disorders: A Preliminary Investigation

The most common approach to define personality has been in terms of characteristics or qualities within a person. A three-dimensional personality theory based on the Sankhya school of Hindu philosophy postulates human personality in terms of three gunas or factors namely sattva, rajas and tamas (SRT). Disequilibrium in any one of these factors has an adverse effect on one??s health and psychological well-being. This preliminary exploratory study assessed SRT factors and quality of life in persons with anxiety disorders. Thirty persons with anxiety disorders were compared with a community sample of 30 participants on measures of anxiety, SRT and quality of life. Results indicated higher scores on rajas and tamas factors in the clinical sample and scores on sattva factor were found to be higher in the community sample. Quality of life was found to be significantly better in the community sample in comparison to clinical sample. Rajasic and tamasic factors were associated with impaired quality of life in the persons with anxiety disorder.     

Structure of the Personality Beliefs Questionnaire-Short-Form: Smallest Space Analysis

Butler et al. (Cognitive Therapy and Research 31:357?C370, 2007) developed the Personality Beliefs Questionnaire-Short Form (PBQ-SF), from an earlier longer version (Beck and Beck 1991), to assess the types of schemata associated with different personality disorders. This study explored the structure of PBQ-SF using Guttman??s Smallest Space Analysis. Participants were 228 students who volunteered for the study. The two facets (each with two subsets) suggested by the analysis to characterize the structure of the personality disorder subscales were Ego Concerns (self-enhancement versus self-protection) and Control Concerns (feelings lack of control versus need for control). Clinical implications of the findings include targeting major dysfunctional thinking, as suggested by the aforementioned two facets and their subsets, in the treatment of personality disorders.     

Mood as a resource in dealing with health recommendations: How mood affects information processing and acceptance of quit-smoking messages

Objective: An experimental study tested the effects of positive and negative mood on the processing and acceptance of health recommendations about smoking in an online experiment. It was hypothesised that positive mood would provide smokers with the resources to systematically process self-relevant health recommendations.

Design: One hundred and twenty-seven participants (smokers and non-smokers) read a message in which a quit smoking programme was recommended. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: positive versus negative mood, and strong versus weak arguments for the recommended action.

Main outcome measures: Systematic message processing was inferred when participants were able to distinguish between high- and low-quality arguments, and by congruence between attitudes and behavioural intentions. Persuasion was measured by participant's attitudes towards smoking and the recommended action, and by their intentions to follow the action recommendation.

Results: As predicted, smokers systematically processed the health message only under positive mood conditions; non-smokers systematically processed the health message only under negative mood conditions. Moreover, smokers’ attitudes towards the health message predicted intentions to quit smoking only under positive mood conditions.

Conclusion: Findings suggest that positive mood may decrease defensive processing of self-relevant health information.     

Orientational high-entropy alloys

In high-entropy alloys (HEA), the configurational entropy arising from the presence of multiple elements, stabilizes a disordered solid solution in preference to the possible formation of compounds. In the current work, we identify cluster compounds (of the type AM₄X₈) as orientational analogues of HEA (as a first report on orientational high-entropy systems). In cluster compounds, orientational disorder increases the entropy and plays a role analogous to positional disorder in HEA. In the GaMo₄S₈ compound, at temperatures greater than 50 K, the entropic benefit more than makes up for the strain energy cost and stabilizes the disordered phase in preference to an orientationally ordered compound.     

Large apparent compressive strain of metallic glasses

Very high plastic strains exceeding 20% in uniaxial compression tests, which show an inflection in the stress–strain curves of Zr-based bulk metallic glasses, are shown to be a spurious effect due to mechanical interlocking of cracks with shear bands. This type of stress–strain behaviour is misinterpreted as an actual deformation in the literature. The effect of mechanical interlocking is explained by fractographic analysis.     

Coexistence of adjacent vacancy-ordered and eutectic phases in Al–Cu–Ni alloys

ABSTRACT

Copper-mould-cast Al–Cu–Ni alloys show adjacent coexistence of in situ grown ordered and eutectic phases. A bimodal microstructure of α–Al and eutectic α-Al+θ-Al₂Cu phases with length-scale hierarchy evolves during solidification. Microstructural analysis through Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) and Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) shows the presence of Vacancy-ordered phases (VOPs) with different morphologies in two different compositions.     

On the synthesis and characterisation of novel composite-structured high-entropy alloys

A study of novel composite-structured CoCrFeNi₃Si, CoCrFe₂Ni₂Si and Co₂CrFeNi₂Si high-entropy alloys, synthesised by vacuum arc melting, is presented. The designing criteria for the formation of such alloys were based on the enthalpy of mixing and the valence electron concentration. X-ray diffraction analysis revealed that all the alloys were composed of face-centered cubic and intermetallic phases. Scanning electron microscopy, along with elemental analysis, indicated that the face-centered cubic phase mainly contains Co, Cr, Fe and Ni, whereas, the intermetallic compound is Ni-Si rich. All the synthesised high-entropy alloys in the present investigation possess excellent compressive strength along with ductility at room temperature, suggesting significant potential application in the engineering field. Furthermore, enhanced hardness, wear resistance and corrosion resistance were achieved in all the designed high-entropy alloys. The previously given design parameters for the composite-structured high-entropy alloys are in good accord with the current research work.