Tactile perception of nonpainful unpleasantness in relation to perceived roughness: effects of inter-element spacing and speed of relative motion of rigid 2-D raised-dot patterns at two body loci

Rigid surfaces consisting of spatially jittered 2-D raised-dot patterns with different inter-element spacings were moved back and forth across the skin at three different speeds (10-fold range). Within each psychophysical experiment, participants numerically estimated the perceived magnitude of either unpleasantness (nonpainful) or roughness of 2-D raised-dot surfaces applied to two stationary body sites (experiment 1: fingers; experiment 2: forearm). The psychophysical functions for the two types of perceptual judgment were highly similar at both body loci; more specifically, the perceived magnitude of unpleasantness and roughness both increased monotonically as a power function of increasing inter-element spacing, with the rate of growth declining at the upper end of the continuum. These results suggest that inter-element spacing is a critical determinant of the perceived magnitude of unpleasantness (nonpainful), as well as of roughness. Each perceptual judgment also increased as a function of increasing relative speed at both body loci. However, the magnitude of this effect was significantly greater for perceived unpleasantness than for perceived roughness; conversely, the speed effect was significantly greater on the forearm than on the fingers. Several possible explanations for these findings are considered.     

Evaluation of an Internet-short message service-based intervention for promoting physical activity in Hong Kong Chinese adolescent school children: a pilot study

Evaluation of acceptability and preliminary efficacy of an Internet and short message service (SMS) intervention for promoting physical activity (PA) in Hong Kong Chinese school children. An 8-week quasi-experimental study non-randomly assigned 78 school children (mean age=12.8 years) to (a) an intervention group that received a stage-matched, Internet PA program two times a week and tailored SMS messages daily; or (b) a no-treatment control. Data were collected from September 2008 until June 2009. Acceptability measures included exposure rate and participant's satisfaction. Efficacy measures were changes in stage of motivational readiness (SMR) and self-reported PA level. Intervention participants demonstrated significant pre-post increments in SMR (Z=-2.558, p=0.011) and self-reported PA level [F(1, 76)=4.50, p=0.04]. There was a non-significant trend between groups in both SMR (p=0.24) and PA (p=0.13). Despite the similar ratings of satisfaction between Internet (M=3.12±0.74) and SMS (M=3.12±0.84), participants displayed distinct patterns of exposure with 66% exhibiting a weekly login rate of 0.5 times/person and an average of 3.75 minutes/visit/person. In contrast, 79% of participants read an average of 1.3 SMS/person/week and 47% voluntarily replied to ～3.8 SMS/person. These findings demonstrate the acceptability and preliminary efficacy of an Internet-SMS-based intervention for promoting PA in Hong Kong school children. The divergent exposure rates between the Internet and SMS may be a unique pattern for adolescents in early SMR. Future research should be cognizant of the importance of SMR since it may influence utilization and/or adherence.     

Gender Differences in the Creativity of Hong Kong School Children: Comparison by Using the New Electronic Wallach–Kogan Creativity Tests

Gender differences in creativity scores of the Wallach–Kogan Creativity Tests were found for a sample of 2476 4th- to 9th-graders from 8 primary schools and 4 secondary schools in Hong Kong. Specifically, girls in the junior high grades excelled boys in verbal flexibility, figural fluency, figural flexibility, figural uniqueness, and figural unusualness. These findings contrasted with previous findings of no gender differences in a norming study of the same instrument carried out eight years before this study. The gender differences were explained in terms of environmental effect and cultural effect.     

Bicultural Effects on the Creative Potential of Chinese and French Children

This study examined possible bicultural effects on creative potential of children in four groups of Chinese and French children in Hong Kong and Paris. An international battery of widely used divergent measures (Wallach-Kogan Creativity Tests; WKCT) and newly constructed divergent-plus-integrative measures (Evaluation of Potential Creativity; EPoC) was established for assessment. Study 1 showed that most measures of WKCT and EPoC were reasonably high in reliability and they had expected correlations with the fluency scores of some subtests of Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking. Study 2 found some interestingly mixed bicultural effects favoring verbal divergent responses for French children and graphic integrative responses for Chinese children. Compared with Paris-French children, the bicultural Hong Kong-French children had significantly higher scores in figural fluency, figural flexibility, and figural uniqueness of WKCT (requiring only verbal divergent responses) but significantly lower scores in the graphic divergent-exploratory measure of EPoC. Compared with Hong Kong-Chinese children, the bicultural Paris-Chinese children had significantly higher scores in the graphic convergent-integrative measure of EPoC, but significantly lower scores in verbal fluency, verbal flexibility, figural fluency, figural flexibility, figural uniqueness, and figural unusualness of WKCT. Implications of the mixed bicultural effects in relation to the diverse creativity measures and children groups are discussed.     

Attitudes and Practices Among Internists Concerning Genetic Testing

Many questions remain concerning whether, when, and how physicians order genetic tests, and what factors are involved in their decisions. We surveyed 220 internists from two academic medical centers about their utilization of genetic testing. Rates of genetic utilizations varied widely by disease. Respondents were most likely to have ordered tests for Factor V Leiden (16.8 %), followed by Breast/Ovarian Cancer (15.0 %). In the past 6 months, 65 % had counseled patients on genetic issues, 44 % had ordered genetic tests, 38.5 % had referred patients to a genetic counselor or geneticist, and 27.5 % had received ads from commercial labs for genetic testing. Only 4.5 % had tried to hide or disguise genetic information, and <2 % have had patients report genetic discrimination. Only 53.4 % knew of a geneticist/genetic counselor to whom to refer patients. Most rated their knowledge as very/somewhat poor concerning genetics (73.7 %) and guidelines for genetic testing (87.1 %). Most felt needs for more training on when to order tests (79 %), and how to counsel patients (82 %), interpret results (77.3 %), and maintain privacy (80.6 %). Physicians were more likely to have ordered a genetic test if patients inquired about genetic testing (p?<?.001), and if physicians had a geneticist/genetic counselor to whom to refer patients (p?<?.002), had referred patients to a geneticist/genetic counselor in the past 6 months, had more comfort counseling patients about testing (p?<?.019), counseled patients about genetics, larger practices (p?<?.032), fewer African-American patients (p?<?.027), and patients who had reported genetic discrimination (p?<?.044). In a multiple logistic regression, ordering a genetic test was associated with patients inquiring about testing, having referred patients to a geneticist/genetic counselor and knowing how to order tests. These data suggest that physicians recognize their knowledge deficits, and are interested in training. These findings have important implications for future medical practice, research, and education.     

A comparison of panel designs with routing methods in the multistage test with the partial credit model

In this study, we compared panel designs applied with various routing methods in the multistage test (MST) based on the partial credit model in the context of classification testing. Simulations were performed to compare three routing methods and four panel structures. Conditions of two test lengths and three passing rates were also included. The results showed that, regardless of the routing method used, the same panel structure performed similarly in terms of the precision of the classification decision with the same test length condition. The longer test length produced higher accuracy, whereas the 50 % passing rate yielded the lowest accuracy. Finally, all MST conditions performed well in terms of test security.     

Karl Barth and God in Creation: Towards an Interfaith Dialogue with Science and Religion

Is our neo-orthodox interpretation of Karl Barth correct? Does Barth's theology provide an opportunity to promote creative, equable dialog with natural science and religious pluralism? In this article, I contend that Barth's theological language of analogy, eschatology, nature, and Sabbath integrate with and complement scientific explanations.     

Experimental manipulations of perspective taking and perspective switching in expressive writing

Previous studies suggest that those who naturally vary their pronoun use over the course of expressive writing subsequently report the greatest improvements in physical and mental health. To explore possible perspective taking or perspective switching effects, two studies manipulated writing perspectives about emotional events from either a first-person, second-person, or third-person perspective. In Study 1, 55 students were randomly assigned to one of the three writing perspectives and were asked to write from the same perspective for three 5-minute writing sessions. In Study 2, 129 students wrote for three 5-minute sessions, one from each perspective in a counterbalanced order. The results showed that writing from a first-person perspective conferred more perceived benefits and was associated with using more cognitive mechanism words, whether engaged in perspective taking or perspective switching.     

Pre-attentive mental processing of music expectation: event-related potentials of a partially violating and resolving paradigm

Auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) were investigated in an oddball paradigm to verify electrophysiological evidence of music expectation, which is a key component of artistic presentation. The non-target condition consisted of four-chord harmonic chord sequences, while the target condition was manifested by a partially violating third chord and a resolving fourth chord. The results showed that the specific mismatch negativity (MMN) elicited in the resolving chord is as robust as that elicited in the partially violating chord. Moreover, the P3b (P300) elicited in the resolving chord was smaller than the one in the violating chord. Taken together these data indicates that the human brain pre-attentatively may be able to anticipate a subsequent resolving chord when music expectation is generated by a partially violating chord.