Are shame, guilt, and embarrassment distinct emotions?

182 undergraduates described personal embarrassment, shame, and guilt experiences and rated these experiences on structural and phenomenological dimensions. Contrary to popular belief, shame was no more likely than guilt to be experienced in "public" situations; all 3 emotions typically occurred in social contexts, but a significant proportion of shame and guilt events occurred when respondents were alone. Analyses of participants' phenomenological ratings clearly demonstrated that shame, guilt, and embarrassment are not merely different terms for the same affective experience. In particular, embarrassment was a relatively distant neighbor of shame and guilt, and the differences among the 3 could not be explained simply by intensity of affect or by degree of moral transgression. Finally, participants generally were their own harshest critics in each type of event, evaluating themselves more negatively than they believed others did. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Lymphocyte subclasses and depression.

This study enumerated lymphocyte subclasses in the peripheral circulation of 15 patients with current diagnoses of major depressive disorder using monoclonal antibodies and flow cytometry. Depressed patients were found to have smaller numbers of helper (T4+), suppressor (T8+), and total T cells (T11+) relative to individually matched, normal controls, but no differences occurred between groups in the ratio of helper to suppressor cells. Furthermore, the helper, suppressor, and total T cell counts were found to be inversely related to patients' self-reported depression scores. The peripheral circulation of patients with major depression seems to be characterized by proportionately equal reductions in the numbers of helper and suppressor T cells, with the magnitude of these reductions being related to the severity of clinical depression among such patients. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Predicting episodic memory performance in dementia: Is severity all there is?

Whether individual differences in demographic, psychometric, and biological domains can predict episodic memory in dementia was investigated. Mildly to moderately demented very old persons performed episodic memory tasks (free recall and recognition of slowly and rapidly presented random words, free and cued recall of organizable words, and recognition of dated and contemporary famous faces). A factor analysis of the memory measures yielded 2 factors, 1 indexing recall and 1 recognition. Controlling for severity of dementia, only 2 predictors contributed to performance: (a) Block Design (a marker of fluid intelligence) was positively related to recall, and (b) age was negatively related to recognition. Although these results are similar to data reported on predictors of episodic memory in normal aging, (a) the number of predictive variables appears to be reduced in dementia, and (b) age seems to affect recall and recognition differentially in normal aging and dementia. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Union commitment: Replication and extension.

The union commitment measure developed by M. E. Gordon et al (1980) was administered to 426 nonprofessional and 334 professional members of a white-collar union. Four orthogonal factors were extracted: Union Loyalty, Responsibility to the Union, Willingness to Work for the Union, and Belief in Unionism. Factor comparisons both between the union of the present study and the union of the original study, and between professional and nonprofessional members within the same union, suggest that the factors developed by Gordon et al are consistent and generalizable across these populations. (7 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Photochemical grafting of acrylated azo dyes onto polymeric surfaces,IV. Grafting of 4-(N-ethyl-N-2-acryloxyethyl)amino-4′-nitro-azobenzene onto cellulose

Photochemically induced grafting and graft-polymerization of 4-(N-ethyl-N-2-acryloxyethyl)amino-4′-nitro-azobenzene I , brought into contact in the solid state with cellulose by evaporation of solvent from monomer solutions, has been investigated kinetically at 30°C. Two constant rate periods were observed. The first one was interpreted on the basis of a self-sensitized grafting mechanism of monomeric or oligomeric species of I , photochemically initiated by hydrogen abstraction from the cellulose surface. The second one was explained as a self-sensitized photochemically induced graft-polymerization of I on the first grafted layer. Some particular features, such as concurrent photodegradation of the first grafted layer at low surface coverage, are discussed in the light of the proposed mechanism.     

Numerical experiments on the determination of unsteady state temperature distribution in domains of complicated boundary shape

This paper compares analytical and finite element results for an unsteady heat-conduction problem in simply and doubly connected plates of regular polygonal shape. A numerical solution is obtained by means of the powerful finite element method and the results are shown to agree with an approximate conformal mapping-variational technique previously developed by the first author and coworkers.     

Author index to volume 52

Domains of complicated boundary shape are of great practical importance in several fields of technology and applied science; e.g. solid propellant rocket grains, electromagnetic and acoustic waveguides, and certain elements used in nuclear engineering. The technical literature contains very few comparative studies of analytical and numerical solutions when dealing with such rather complex geometries. The present study constitutes an effort in that direction.     

A Navigation System for Assistant Robots Using Visually Augmented POMDPs

Assistant robots have received special attention from the research community in the last years. One of the main applications of these robots is to perform care tasks in indoor environments such as houses, nursing homes or hospitals, and therefore they need to be able to navigate robustly for long periods of time. This paper focuses on the navigation system of SIRA, a robotic assistant for elderly and/or blind people based on a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) to global localize the robot and to direct its goal-oriented actions. The main novel feature of our approach is that it combines sonar and visual information in a natural way to produce state transitions and observations in the framework of Markov Decision Processes. Besides this multisensorial fusion, a two-level layered planning architecture that combines several planning objectives (such as guiding to a goal room and reducing locational uncertainty) improves the robustness of the navigation system, as its shown in our experiments with SIRA navigating corridors.     

Local diagnostic reference levels in standard X-ray examinations

The national diagnostic reference levels (NDRLs) form an efficient, concise and powerful standard for optimising radiation protection of a patient. However, in a large hospital, where many radiological departments are present, it is also possible to calculate and define lower dose values as local diagnostic reference levels (LDRLs). In our hospital there are eight radiological departments; in each of these, the entrance skin dose (ESD) distributions were determined for 10 standard projections (AP Abdomen, PA and LAT Chest, AP and LAT Lumbar Spine, LAT Lumbo-Sacral Joint, AP Pelvis, PA and LAT Skull and AP Urinary tract) and then the ESDs were compared with data previously published and with Italian NDRLs. All ESD values were below the corresponding NDRLs. The maximum/minimum ratio of ESDs ranged from 3.9 (LAT Skull) to 34.3 (AP Abdomen) for individual adult patients and from 2.1 (PA Skull) to 6.5 (Urinary tract) across the mean values of the radiological departments. Finally, it is shown how LDRLs can be proposed to obtain a more fully optimised radiation protection of patients.     

Effect of residual water content on the physico-chemical properties of sucralfate dried gel obtained by microwave drying

The purpose of this study was to investigate the physico-chemical characteristics of sucralfate humid gel dried by microwaves, in relation to the residual water content. Differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) allowed for the determination of the water state in sucralfate samples. Fourier-transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy was used to monitor the changes in sucralfate gel structure induced by the microwave drying. A boundary value of total water content for sucralfate gel samples was found at 42% (w/w). Below this value only bound water was present, whereas above this value, the increase in total water was due to free water. In the physical form of gel, the strength of the coordination between sulfate anions and the positively charged aluminum hydroxide was dependent on the residual water content. The study of the sedimentation behavior of water suspensions prepared with dried sucralfate allowed for the evaluation of the retention of gel properties. We found that the microwave drying process affected the sedimentation of sucralfate dried gel suspensions independent of the residual water content: when suspensions were prepared from sucralfate dried gel powders containing more than 42% (w/w) of residual water, the sedimentation ratio was higher than 0.9. The non-gel powder suspension showed a sedimentation ratio of 0.68 ± 0.02, whereas the sucralfate humid gel suspension did not sediment.