Decision Support for International Agreements Regulating Nanomaterials

Nanomaterials are handled in global value chains for many different products, albeit not always recognisable as nanoproducts. The global market for nanomaterials faces an uncertain future, as the international dialogue on regulating nanomaterials is still ongoing and risk assessment data are being collected. At the same time, regulators and civil society organisations complain about a lack of transparency about the presence of nanomaterials on the market. In the project on Sustainable Nanotechnologies (SUN, www.sun-fp7.eu ), a Decision Support System (SUNDS) has been developed, primarily for confidential use by risk and sustainability managers inside a company or consortium. In this article, we formulate a scenario concerning a potential role for an open access decision support system in negotiations on international agreements regulating trade in nanomaterials. The scenario includes design rules for decision support systems as well as procedures for use of such a system in stakeholder dialogue and policy-making on governance of these and other emerging technologies. This article incorporates analysis of results of stakeholder engagement on nanomaterials as well as literature and internet sources suggested by these stakeholders.     

Global Collaborative Team Performance for the Revision of the International Classification of Diseases: A Case Study of the World Health Organization Field Studies Coordination Group

Background/Objective: Collaborative teamwork in global mental health presents unique challenges, including the formation and management of international teams composed of multicultural and multilingual professionals with different backgrounds in terms of their training, scientific expertise, and life experience. The purpose of the study was to analyze the performance of the World Health Organization (WHO) Field Studies Coordination Group (FSCG) using an input-processes-output (IPO) team science model to better understand the team's challenges, limitations, and successes in developing the eleventh revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD). Method: We thematically analyzed a collection of written texts, including FSCG documents and open-ended qualitative questionnaires, according to the conceptualization of the input-processes-output model of team performance. Results: The FSCG leadership and its members experienced and overcame numerous barriers to become an effective international team and to successfully achieve the goals set forth by WHO. Conclusions: Research is necessary regarding global mental health collaboration to understand and facilitate international collaborations with the goal of contributing to a deeper understanding of mental health and to reduce the global burden of mental disorders around the world.     

Altered bodily self‐consciousness in multiple sclerosis

In this study, we assessed the impact of multiple sclerosis (MS) on bodily self‐consciousness (BSC) using the Rubber Hand Illusion. Patients with MS showed a dissociation between body ownership and self‐location: they did report an explicit ownership of the rubber hand, but they did not point towards it, showing a defective ability of localizing body parts in space. This evidence indicates that MS may affect selective components of BSC, whose impairment may contribute to, and even worsen, the functional disability of MS.     

Improving Written Argumentative Synthesis by Teaching the Integration of Conflicting Information from Multiple Sources

The goal of this study was to assess the effectiveness of 2 different types of intervention aimed at improving written argumentative synthesis by integrating conflicting information from different sources. Both interventions combined the use of a guide with collaborative practice, but one of them also included explicit strategy instruction. Only students who received additional explicit instruction showed an improved ability to integrate conflicting information and increased the number of arguments they selected from the sources.     

Bayesian inference for graphical factor analysis models

We generalize factor analysis models by allowing the concentration matrix of the residuals to have nonzero off-diagonal elements. The resulting model is named graphical factor analysis model. Allowing a structure of associations gives information about the correlation left unexplained by the unobserved variables, which can be used both in the confirmatory and exploratory context. We first present a sufficient condition for global identifiability of this class of models with a generic number of factors, thereby extending the results in Stanghellini (1997) and Vicard (2000). We then consider the issue of model comparison and show that fast local computations are possible for this purpose, if the conditional independence graphs on the residuals are restricted to be decomposable and a Bayesian approach is adopted. To achieve this aim, we propose a new reversible jump MCMC method to approximate the posterior probabilities of the considered models. We then study the evolution of political democracy in 75 developing countries based on eight measures of democracy in two different years. We acknowledge support from M.U.R.S.T. of Italy and from the European Science Foundation H.S.S.S. Network. We are grateful to the referees and the Editor for many useful suggestions and comments which led to a substantial improvement of the paper. We also thank Nanny Wermuth for stimulating discussions and Kenneth A. Bollen for kindly providing us with the data-set.     

Brain activation on pre-reading tasks reveals at-risk status for dyslexia in 6-year-old children

In this fMRI-study, 6-year-old children considered at risk for dyslexia were compared with an age-/gender-matched control group for differences in brain activation when presented with visual stimuli differing in demands for literacy processing. Stimuli were nameable pictures, brand logos familiar to children, and written words - these were either regularly spelled using early-acquired rules ("alphabetic") or more complex ("orthographic"). Brain responses distinguished between the presentation conditions, as a function of group, within many cortical areas. Activation in the alphabetic and orthographic conditions in the left angular gyrus correlated with individual at-risk index scores, and activation in inferior occipito-temporal regions further indicated differential activation for the two groups related to orthographic processing, especially. Since similar patterns are reported in adult dyslexics when processing written words, it appears that sensitivity to the cortical differentiation of reading networks is established prior to formal literacy training.     

Lexically restricted utterances in Russian, german, and english child-directed speech

This study investigates the child-directed speech (CDS) of four Russian-, six German, and six English-speaking mothers to their 2-year-old children. Typologically Russian has considerably less restricted word order than either German or English, with German showing more word-order variants than English. This could lead to the prediction that the lexical restrictiveness previously found in the initial strings of English CDS by Cameron-Faulkner, Lieven, and Tomasello (2003 ) would not be found in Russian or German CDS. However, despite differences between the three corpora that clearly derive from typological differences between the languages, the most significant finding of this study is a high degree of lexical restrictiveness at the beginnings of CDS utterances in all three languages.     

Early Experience Predicts Later Plasticity for Face Processing: Evidence for the Reactivation of Dormant Effects

ABSTRACT— Research has shown that experience acquired in infancy dramatically affects face-discrimination abilities. Yet much less is known about whether face processing retains any flexibility after the 1st year of life. Here, we show that early experience with an individual infant face can modulate the recognition performance of 3-year-old children and the perceptual processes they use to recognize infant faces ( Experiment 1 ). Similar experience acquired in adulthood does not produce measurable effects ( Experiment 2 ). We also show that the effects of early-acquired experience with an infant face become dormant during development in the absence of continued experience ( Experiment 3 ) and can be reactivated in adulthood by reexposure to the original experience ( Experiment 2 ). Overall, the results indicate that early experience can preserve the face-processing system from the loss of plasticity that would otherwise take place between childhood and adulthood.     

Factor Structure,Internal Consistency and Criterion Validity of the Full‐form and Short‐form Versions of the Centrality of Events Scale in Young People

The perceived centrality of a traumatic event has been hypothesized to impact subsequent responses to that event and shown to be positively associated to a number of psychological problems. In order to understand the role of this construct in adjustment to stress and trauma, reliable and valid measures are needed. The objective of this study was to evaluate the factor structure, internal consistency and convergent validity of the full‐form and short‐forms of the Centrality of Event Scale when used with young people. A sample of 262 undergraduate students completed this study. Confirmatory factor analyses, Cronbach alpha coefficients and Pearson correlation coefficients were performed. The findings support a one‐factor structure of the full 20‐item and the short 7‐item versions. We also found that both versions provide reliable and valid scores when used with young people. We recommend the use of the 7‐item version to minimize assessment burden. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.