Speech stress recognition using semi-eager learning

Homo-sapiens suffer from psychogenic pain due to current day lifestyle. According to psychologists, stress is the most destructive form of psychalgia and it is a vicious companion for this species. Immoderate levels of stress may lead to the death of many individuals. Normally, the presence of stress gives rise to certain emotions which can be detected to predict stress levels of a person. This paper proposes the development of mechanized and efficient Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) for stress level analysis. The paper investigates the performance of perceptual based speech features like Revised Perceptual Linear Prediction Coefficients, Bark Frequency Cepstral Coefficients, Perceptual Linear Predictive Cepstrum, Gammatone Frequency Cepstral coefficient, Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficient, Gammatone Wavelet Cepstral Coefficient and Inverted Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients on SER. The novelty of this work involves application of a SemiEager (SemiE) learning algorithm for evaluating auditory cues. SemiE offers advantages over eager and lazy based learning by reducing the computational cost. Stress level recognition being the main objective, the Speech Under Simulated and Actual Stress (SUSAS) benchmark database is used for performance analysis. A comparative analysis is presented to demonstrate the improvement in the SED performance. An overall accuracy of 90.66% recognition of stress related emotions is achieved.     

El procesamiento de palabras ambiguas

Resumen

En este trabajo se revisan los principales modelos de ambigüedad léxica, así como algunas de las investigaciones más significativas llevadas a cabo en los últimos años en este ámbito. Para explicar cómo se procesan las palabras ambiguas se han postulado tres tipos de modelos: el modelo de acceso selectivo, el modelo de acceso ordenado y el modelo de acceso múltiple o exhaustivo. Todos ellos han recibido en distintos momentos cierto grado de apoyo experimental, a pesar de que de cada uno se derivan predicciones diferentes. Esto podría deberse a que los distintos investigadores han empleado un sinfín de procedimientos experimentales (fundamentalmente, tareas de complejidad de procesamiento, tareas de detección de la ambigüedad y tareas de priming), algunos de los cuales presentan ciertas deficiencias metodológicas. No obstante, se puede decir que determinado tipo de datos se ha ido imponiendo a través de diferentes tareas experimentales. Concretamente, y en ausencia de la influencia de otros factores, por lo general se produce una activación simultánea de todos los significados de una palabra polisémica. Pero en los últimos años también se ha puesto de manifiesto la importancia del contexto y la necesidad de controlar variables como la frecuencia de uso de los distintos significados de una misma palabra. En efecto, los datos más recientes favorecen la idea de que, al menos cuando el contexto está fuertemente sesgado hacia el significado dominante de una palabra ambigua, puede restringir el acceso léxico a ese único significado. Estos datos son congruentes con los modelos interactivos de activación y los modelos PDP.     

Associations between Positive Parenting Practices and Child Externalizing Behavior in Underserved Latino Immigrant Families

This study examined whether five specific parenting practices (i.e., monitoring, discipline, skill encouragement, problem solving, and positive involvement) were associated with reduced child externalizing behaviors among a sample of Latino immigrant families. It utilized baseline data from 83 Latino couples with children participating in a larger randomized controlled trial of a culturally adapted parenting intervention. Results reveal that monitoring, discipline, skill encouragement, and problem solving each made independent contributions to the prediction of child externalizing behavior, although not all in the expected direction. Further analyses examining mothers and fathers separately suggest that mother‐reported monitoring and father‐reported discipline practices uniquely contributed to these findings. These results may have important implications for prevention and clinical intervention efforts with Latino immigrant families, including the cultural adaptation and implementation of parenting interventions with this underserved population.     

Ideational action impairments in Alzheimer's disease

We report data from a group of patients with mild Alzheimer's disease on a range of tasks requiring either stored semantic knowledge about objects (e.g., naming object use) or the execution of action to objects (e.g., miming and using objects). We found that the patients were impaired at miming in response to objects, even when they could describe the object's function. On the other hand, copying gestures was not impaired relative to naming gestures, indicating that an ideomotor deficit in action execution, per se, was unlikely to explain the impairments in object use. We suggest instead that the patients had an impairment in stored motor programmes for action, over and above their deficits in semantic knowledge. Despite this, the patients were better at using than at miming to objects, consistent with the view that proprioceptive input (when using objects) can directly constrain selection of the appropriate motor programme for action.     

父母家校沟通与小学生参与数学课外补习的关系研究

基于某特大型城市学区658名小学四年级学生及其父母的调查数据,讨论小学生参与数学课外补习的影响因素,特别是家校沟通的作用。数据分析结果表明：在控制学生数学学业成绩与家庭社会经济地位的情况下,母亲的家校沟通行为可以显著预测四年级学生的数学课外补习参与情况,而未发现父亲的家校沟通行为的预测作用,研究结论印证了信息沟通在家庭教育决策中的重要作用。     

高校教师人格对心理资本与心理健康的影响研究

该研究探讨高校教师人格对心理资本与心理健康状况的影响。研究对南昌三所高校270名教师进行了心理资本、症状自评量表和人格测验,分别用SPSSl7．0和LISREL$．71进行了t检验和建构了结构方程模型。结果表明,心理资本、心理健康和人格测验分数的性别差异、职称差异不显著,t值在0．11到1．28之间,均有P〉0．05。大学教师人格的三个维度均对其心理健康与心理资本有中等程度的影响,E维度和P雏度对心理健康的影响系数为-0．39和0．52;E雏度、N维度和P维度对心理资本的影响系数为0．54、-0．43和0．52;人格E、N、P维度经心理资本的部分中介作用,时心理健康的间接效应是-0．23、0．18和O．23,t值分别为-3．25、2．96和3．25,P值均小于O．01。结论：大学教师的人格与其心理资本和心理健康问题具有紧密的关联性。关注大学教师的心理健康问题。必须同时关注他们的人格与心理资本的问题。     

Elaboración de un modelo empírico sobre la realización de actividades delictivas en la mujer mediante la técnica del Rep-Test

RESUMEN

El objetivo de nuestra investigación era encontrar un modelo explicativo de la conducta delictiva de la mujer de carácter psicosocial (habida cuenta de la falta de la operatividad de las teorías encontradas), y que no fuera específico como tal de la delincuencia femenina. Para ello se emplea la técnica de la rejilla, pero sin las connotaciones de Kelly sobre la misma, puesto que el motivo de este trabajo no era estudiar la complejidad cognitiva. Se hipotetizó que encontrar este modelo era posible, pero no se formularon hipótesis dado el carácter correlational del estudio. A la vista de los resultados obtenidos, se constata que era necesaria la creación de dos modelos diferentes, según que las acciones cometidas por los sujetos sean de satisfacción individual, o de que sean de satisfacción grupal. Dichos modelos ponen de manifiesto que no es posible establecer distinciones entre sujetos delincuentes y no delincuentes.     

Aqua vitae,aqua permanens: dreaming,drowning, swimming and surfing in analysis

In response to the question ‘Who is My Jung?’, this paper describes the profound personal impact of Jung's creative / artistic approach to the unconscious, beginning with my discovery of The Red Book at the age of twelve. Echoing the flow of my own dream‐life, I trace the course of two analyses through the alchemical process of solutio, which began with numinous dreams of tidal waves and plunged us into inter‐ and intra‐psychic analytic relationships that evoked vestigial memories of our first aquatic world in utero.     

Changing systems by changing individuals: the incubation approach to systems change

This article describes and evaluates the implementation of an innovative approach to systems change, the incubation approach, which was developed on a systems change project designed to increase the capacity of multiple systems (e.g., law enforcement, child protection, domestic violence, mental health, early education) to respond to children’s exposure to violence. The incubation approach encourages change agents to collaborate with project staff to gently nurture, or “incubate,” feasible and warranted change in target systems. Project staff gain concrete commitment from motivated and accessible change agents and collaborate with those agents to implement change actions. This approach works well with committed, executive-level change agents in target systems, with stable systems that have low turnover and well-integrated subsystems, and when seed funds are provided to key organizations.