Effects of compliance monitoring of vocal function exercises on voice outcome measures for normal voice

This experimental study examined the efficacy of the vocal function exercise program in improving voice production in individuals with normal voices. 20 young women (M age = 22 yr.) with normal voices, 10 in the Monitored compliance group and 10 in the Unmonitored compliance group, received training in performing vocal function exercises followed by daily practice of the exercises for 28 consecutive days. Participants in the Monitored compliance group were required to submit audio or video recordings of their daily practice of vocal function exercises, and those in the Unmonitored compliance group were not required to record their daily practice sessions. Results indicated that while the participants in both groups significantly increased maximum phonation times and maximum phonational frequency ranges, those in the Monitored group improved significantly more than the participants in the Unmonitored group on these outcome measures.     

Predictors of successful discharge from out-of-home care among children with complex needs

We examined the predictors for successful discharge from out-of-home care of children with complex needs placed in a novel comprehensive service intervention (Manatee Model) and compared their discharge experiences to their out-of-home counterparts from the same county. The study design consisted of a longitudinal two-year comparison of these two groups. A total of 147 cases were included in the analysis, and the propensity scoring technique was used to equate the groups. Among children admitted to the Manatee Model, boys, White children, younger children, those who came from a single-parent family, those who were abused, and those who had a disability (physical or emotional disability or medical condition) were found less likely to successfully exit within the two years when these predictors were examined separately. Multivariate analyses indicated that only age at the time of removal and health status were significantly associated with successful discharge. Implications of the findings are discussed.     

Religious and non-religious predictors of life satisfaction in a sample of American college students

To promote understanding of young people behavioural mechanisms related to health, we evaluated religious attribution, meaning in life, and emotion regulation strategies as predictors of life satisfaction in the sample of 791 religious and non-religious American college students. Participants completed Religious Attribution Scale, Meaning in Life Questionnaire, Satisfaction with Life Scale, and the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire. A multiple linear regression revealed that the strongest predictor of life satisfaction for both groups was the presence of meaning in life, followed by the use of cognitive reappraisal. We found that participants with high levels of presence of meaning in life, regardless of their religious identity, were able to benefit from the use of cognitive reappraisal. Presence of meaning in life and emotion regulation strategy reside outside of the religious confines, supporting the notion that religiosity is not a singular meaning making system. By identifying constructs related to life satisfaction, we can acquire better understanding of what mechanisms contribute to positive coping strategies that religious and non-religious young adults use to achieve positive life outcomes.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">StimulStat</Emphasis>: A lexical database for Russian

In this article, we present StimulStat – a lexical database for the Russian language in the form of a web application. The database contains more than 52,000 of the most frequent Russian lemmas and more than 1.7 million word forms derived from them. These lemmas and forms are characterized according to more than 70 properties that were demonstrated to be relevant for psycholinguistic research, including frequency, length, phonological and grammatical properties, orthographic and phonological neighborhood frequency and size, grammatical ambiguity, homonymy and polysemy. Some properties were retrieved from various dictionaries and are presented collectively in a searchable form for the first time, the others were computed specifically for the database. The database can be accessed freely at http://stimul.cognitivestudies.ru.     

Serial and parallel processes in working memory after practice

Six young adults practiced for 36 sessions on a working-memory updating task in which 2 digits and 2 spatial positions were continuously updated. Participants either did 1 updating operation at a time, or attempted 1 numerical and 1 spatial operation at the same time. In contrast to previous research using the same paradigm with a single digit and a single dot, dual-task costs were not eliminated with practice. Costs of switching between digits and between spatial positions were found throughout practice, supporting the existence of a focus of attention in working memory that can hold 1 digit and 1 spatial position simultaneously, but is not expanded to hold 2 elements of the same kind. The results can be understood by assuming that observed limits on parallel processing, as well as on the capacity of the focus of attention, arise not from structural constraints but rather reflect the optimal configuration of the cognitive system for avoiding information cross-talk in a given task.     

Phase of oral contraceptive cycle and endurance capacity of rowers

Eight female rowers (M age = 21.0 yr., SD = 2.8), using a monophasic oral-contraceptive pill, performed a 1-hr. rowing ergometer test (intensity: 70% VO2max) during the active-pill and non active-pill phases of the oral contraceptive cycle. No significant differences were found in mean energy expenditure, oxygen consumption, respiratory exchange ratio, and heart rate during the endurance test at the two phases of the oral contraceptive cycle. Mean energy expenditure rate, carbohydrate energy expenditure, lipid energy expenditure, and blood lactate during the test were not statistically significantly different among the cycle phases. In conclusion, there was no observed difference in substrate oxidation and blood lactate level during endurance rowing at different phases of the oral contraceptive cycle in these endurance-trained rowers. Endurance-trained female athletes on oral contraceptives should not worry about the possible differences in substrate oxidation during everyday training at different phases of the oral contraceptive cycle.     

Identifying bilingual semantic neural representations across languages

The goal of the study was to identify the neural representation of a noun’s meaning in one language based on the neural representation of that same noun in another language. Machine learning methods were used to train classifiers to identify which individual noun bilingual participants were thinking about in one language based solely on their brain activation in the other language. The study shows reliable (p < .05) pattern-based classification accuracies for the classification of brain activity for nouns across languages. It also shows that the stable voxels used to classify the brain activation were located in areas associated with encoding information about semantic dimensions of the words in the study. The identification of the semantic trace of individual nouns from the pattern of cortical activity demonstrates the existence of a multi-voxel pattern of activation across the cortex for a single noun common to both languages in bilinguals.     

An assessment of the extent of child maltreatment using administrative databases

This study examined the extent of violence toward children and factors associated with child maltreatment in Florida using a cohort of children (N=499,330) who were adjudged to be victims of maltreatment between July 1, 1996, and June 30, 2003. To assess the extent of maltreatment, five indicators were proposed and examined. Multivariate analyses found that prior referral, having more than one type of maltreatment during an initial incident, and caregiver absence best predicted the recurrence of maltreatment. Caregivers' alcohol and substance use were strong predictors of neglect and threatened harm but not of abuse. Finally, multilevel analyses found that older, nonminority girls with histories of prior referrals were significantly (psuedo-zs>2.00) more likely to experience high degrees of incident severity. Caregivers' substance use, excluding alcohol, also was significantly linked to incident severity. Implications of the findings are discussed.     

An Ethical Issue Scale for Community Pharmacy Setting (EISP): Development and Validation

Many problems that arise when providing pharmacy services may contain some ethical components and the aims of this study were to develop and validate a scale that could assess difficulties of ethical issues, as well as the frequency of those occurrences in everyday practice of community pharmacists. Development and validation of the scale was conducted in three phases: (1) generating items for the initial survey instrument after qualitative analysis; (2) defining the design and format of the instrument; (3) validation of the instrument. The constructed Ethical Issue scale for community pharmacy setting has two parts containing the same 16 items for assessing the difficulty and frequency thereof. The results of the 171 completely filled out scales were analyzed (response rate 74.89 %). The Cronbach’s α value of the part of the instrument that examines difficulties of the ethical situations was 0.83 and for the part of the instrument that examined frequency of the ethical situations was 0.84. Test–retest reliability for both parts of the instrument was satisfactory with all Interclass correlation coefficient (ICC) values above 0.6, (for the part that examines severity ICC = 0.809, for the part that examines frequency ICC = 0.929). The 16-item scale, as a self assessment tool, demonstrated a high degree of content, criterion, and construct validity and test–retest reliability. The results support its use as a research tool to asses difficulty and frequency of ethical issues in community pharmacy setting. The validated scale needs to be further employed on a larger sample of pharmacists.