Introducing a brief measure of cultural and religious identification in American Jewish identity.

The authors conducted 3 studies to develop and investigate the psychometric properties of the American Jewish Identity Scales (AJIS), a brief self-report measure that assesses cultural identification and religious identification. Study 1 assessed the content validity of the item pool using an expert panel. In Study 2, 1,884 Jewish adults completed the initial AJIS and various measures of ethnic identity, collective self-esteem, and religiosity. Using confirmatory factor analyses, the authors selected and cross-validated 33 items that loaded highly and differentially on the 2 theorized latent factors. Study 3 assessed the AJIS's short-term stability and its relation to social desirability. Tests of reliability and construct validity provided initial psychometric support for the measure and confirmed the theorized primary salience of cultural identification. Participants reported significantly more private than public collective self-esteem, and the most Jewish-identified participants reported greater private self-esteem, acculturative stress, and perceived discrimination than did their more assimilated counterparts. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Analyzing relational control in family therapy interviews.

Extends Ericson and Rogers's (1973) Relational Communication Control Coding System (RCCCS) to family contexts. The original system operationalized the constructs of symmetry and complementarity in dyadic communication by allowing a mapping of interpersonal control dynamics in 2-person relations. Because the RCCCS was devised for dyads only, we made several modifications in order to handle the complexity of communication among 3 or more persons. New coding rules were necessary because in families messages are not always reciprocal or direct. One person may intercept the exchange between 2 others, disconfirm another by turning to a 3rd, or speak indirectly to someone through a 3rd party. Speakers often send multiple messages that attempt a coalition, that is, joining with one party to challenge another. An illustrative excerpt shows the kinds of indexes provided by the system. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Ray-mode analysis of complex resonances of an open cavity [radartargets]

Complex resonances furnish valuable inputs for classification of radar signatures from irregularly shaped objects. An important class of targets involves open-ended enclosures with exterior-interior coupling. If the interior has waveguide-like properties, modal expansions can model the wave phenomena there, while ray methods can be employed to account for multiple diffraction at the aperture edges, and for wave interactions around the exterior boundary. By self-consistent ray-mode coupling in a hybrid format, one can construct a global resonance equation whose solutions yield the complex resonant frequencies for the composite object. The importance of evanescent modes and of coupling to nearest neighbor modes is investigated, as is the contribution from low-Q interactions around the external circumference     

Asymptotic bias of the high-order autoregressive estimates of sinusoidal frequencies

Fitting a high-order autoregressive model to data is often used to estimate the frequencies of sinusoids from their noisy measurements. This paper analyzes the asymptotic bias of the frequency estimates obtained by this method. It is shown that the bias decreases significantly with increasing model order.The work of B. Friedlander was supported by the Office of Naval Research under contract No. N000014-84-C-0408.     

Transferring psychotherapy clients: State of the art.

Transferring psychotherapy clients from one therapist to another is a common event that may pose clinical and administrative problems. Clinicians and therapists in training transfer clients when their professional role or activities change or when they leave their clinical settings. We review the literature on transferring psychotherapy clients and report on aspects of the transfer process and procedures used by a national sample of psychology training clinics. We also report and discuss the results of an exploratory analysis training clinic records in which we investigated the relation between transfer outcome (successful vs. unsuccessful) and a set of treatment and demographic factors. Last, we suggest several ways of handling difficulties that arise as a result of clinical and administrative reassignment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

On instrumental variable estimation of sinusoid frequencies and the parsimony principle

Multiple sinusoids in noise can be modeled as an ARMA process with the AR parameters satisfying certain symmetry relations. According to the "parsimony principle" the constraints on the AR parameters should he taken into account to get improved estimation accuracy. It is shown in this note that when estimating the AR parameters by a general instrumental-variable method, such a parsimony does not necessarily apply. However, the parsimony principle does hold when an optimal instrumental-variable method is used.     

Effects of clients' attributional explanations and reasons for seeking help on counselors' impressions.

On the basis of an impression-management view of the counseling interaction, the effects of clients' initial self-presentations on counselors' impressions were investigated. It was predicted that a client offering personal attributional explanations (claiming responsibility for his/her problematic behavior) would be seen in a more favorable light than would one who attributed his/her predicament to others or to the situation. It was also expected that the client who expressed an intrinsic (self-improvement) reason for seeking help would make a better impression than would one who offered an extrinsic (nontherapeutic) reason. Ratings by 77 graduate psychology or social work students of stimulus tapes that manipulated these variables supported the hypotheses. The client who expressed personal attributions was viewed as more motivated and attractive than was the client who made situational attributions. When the reason for seeking help was intrinsic, Ss perceived the client to be more motivated and as having a better prognosis for change. There were, however, no uniquely significant effects on specific outcome expectancies or on judgments of problem severity. (16 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Eigenstructure methods for direction finding with sensor gain and phase uncertainties

An eigenstructure-based method for direction finding in the presence of sensor gain and phase uncertainties is presented. The method provides estimates of the Directions of Arrival (DOA) of all the radiating sources as well as calibration of the gain and phase of each sensor in the observing array. The technique is not limited to a specific array configuration and can be implemented in a'ny eigenstructure-based DOA system to improve its performance.This work was supported by the Army Research Office under Contract No. DAAL03-89-C-0007.     

TENT4A Non-Canonical Poly(A) Polymerase Regulates DNA-Damage Tolerance via Multiple Pathways That Are Mutated in Endometrial Cancer

TENT4A (PAPD7) is a non-canonical poly(A) polymerase, of which little is known. Here, we show that TENT4A regulates multiple biological pathways and focuses on its multilayer regulation of translesion DNA synthesis (TLS), in which error-prone DNA polymerases bypass unrepaired DNA lesions. We show that TENT4A regulates mRNA stability and/or translation of DNA polymerase η and RAD18 E3 ligase, which guides the polymerase to replication stalling sites and monoubiquitinates PCNA, thereby enabling recruitment of error-prone DNA polymerases to damaged DNA sites. Remarkably, in addition to the effect on RAD18 mRNA stability via controlling its poly(A) tail, TENT4A indirectly regulates RAD18 via the tumor suppressor CYLD and via the long non-coding antisense RNA PAXIP1-AS2, which had no known function. Knocking down the expression of TENT4A or CYLD, or overexpression of PAXIP1-AS2 led each to reduced amounts of the RAD18 protein and DNA polymerase η, leading to reduced TLS, highlighting PAXIP1-AS2 as a new TLS regulator. Bioinformatics analysis revealed that TLS error-prone DNA polymerase genes and their TENT4A-related regulators are frequently mutated in endometrial cancer genomes, suggesting that TLS is dysregulated in this cancer.