Marriage and the spiritual realm: The role of proximal and distal religious constructs in marital functioning.

Ninety-seven couples completed questionnaires about their involvement in joint religious activities and their perceptions regarding the sanctification of marriage, including perceived sacred qualities of marriage and beliefs about the manifestation of God in marriage. In contrast to individual religiousness and religious homogamy (distal religious constructs), these proximal religious variables directly reflect an integration of religion and marriage, and they were associated with greater global marital adjustment, more perceived benefits from marriage, less marital conflict, more verbal collaboration, and less use of verbal aggression and stalemate to discuss disagreements for both wives and husbands. The proximal measures also added substantial unique variance (adjusted R2 change ranged from .06 to .48) to specific aspects of marital functioning after controlling demographic factors and distal religious variables in hierarchical regression analyses. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Coping through emotional approach: Scale construction and validation.

Four studies demonstrate the psychometric adequacy and validity of scales designed to assess coping through emotional approach. In separate undergraduate samples, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses of dispositional (Study 1) and situational (Study 3) coping item sets yielded 2 distinct emotional approach coping factors: emotional processing (i.e., active attempts to acknowledge and understand emotions) and emotional expression. The 2 scales yielded high internal consistency and test-retest reliability, as well as convergent and discriminant validity. A study (Study 2) of young adults and their parents established the scales' interjudge reliabilities. Longitudinal (Study 3) and experimental (Study 4) research supported the predictive validity of the emotional approach coping scales with regard to adjustment to stressful encounters. Findings highlight the utility of functionalist theories of emotion as applied to coping theory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Psychosocial aspects of selected issues in women's reproductive health: Current status and future directions.

Emphasizing research published in the past decade, this article presents a summary and evaluation of psychosocial investigations of women's reproductive health, with a focus on selected aspects of menstruation, pregnancy and birth, infertility, and menopause. In some areas, studies have focused on negative physical and psychological concomitants of these health issues. However, research reveals substantial individual variability, with most women adapting well to reproductive health changes. Although methodological and conceptual shortcomings have limited firm conclusions, research has advanced our understanding of the multivariate biological, psychological, and social influences on women's reproductive health and associated outcomes. Understanding and promoting women's reproductive health across the lifespan requires biopsychosocial approaches to research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

On the Possibility of s+d Wave Superconductivity Within a Two-Band Scenario for High Tc Cuprates

A variety of different experimental results show substantial evidence that the order parameter in high-temperature superconducting copper oxides is not of pure d-wave symmetry, but that an s-wave component exists, which especially shows up in experiments that test the c-axis properties. These findings are modeled theoretically within a two-band model with interband interactions, where the superconducting order parameters in the two bands are allowed to differ in symmetry. It is found that the coupling of order parameters with different symmetries (s+d) leads to substantial enhancements of the superconducting transition temperature T _c as compared to order parameters with only s-wave symmetry. An additional enhancement factor of T _c is obtained from the coupling of the bands to the lattice where moderate couplings favor superconductivity while too strong couplings lead to electron (hole) localization and consequently suppress superconductivity.     

Context and the interpretation of likelihood information: The role of intergroup comparisons on perceived vulnerability.

Four experiments investigated how people's perceptions about a group's (e.g., women's) vulnerability to a disease are influenced by information about the prevalence of the disease in a comparable group (e.g., men). Participants read symptom and prevalence information about fictitious diseases before answering questions regarding target group vulnerability. Participants used the prevalence rate for a nontarget group as an immediate comparison standard for intuitively interpreting the degree of vulnerability of a target group, resulting in robust contrast effects. Experiments 3 and 4 illustrated that these contrast effects can cause a person's intuitive perceptions about a group's vulnerability to selected diseases to conflict with his or her knowledge of the prevalence rates for the diseases. The results support a distinction between 2 components of psychological uncertainty--beliefs in objective probability and more intuitive perceptions of certainty. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Characterization of pink diamonds of different origin: Natural (Argyle,non-Argyle), irradiated and annealed,treated with multi-process,coated and synthetic

One of the commercial challenges today in the gem industry is to quickly identify the origin of color in pink diamonds — natural, treated and synthetic by use of standard and advanced gemological instruments.An analytical technique that is used by many gem labs involves UV fluorescence. The principle factors in the technique are the excitation wavelengths and the emission spectra. No systematic study of fluorescence of pink natural diamonds, pink treated and pink synthetic diamonds has been undertaken. This study is mainly focused on using fluorescence techniques to characterize pink diamonds and to compile a reference library of emission spectra. Longwave (LW) and shortwave (SW) fluorescence of 365, 254 and 220 nm illumination were used in a custom built microscope with a fluorescence camera to record images and a spectrometer to record spectral data with which to establish a correlation with the cause of color.Other advanced instruments (CL imaging, UV–VIS–NIR, FTIR, PL spectroscopy and electrical conductance) were used to establish additional criteria for distinguishing natural, treated and synthetic pink diamonds and to find a correlation with the “EGL USA CIS (Cross-reference Identification System) fluorescence method”.     

The location of inhibitory specificities in human mucus proteinase inhibitor (MPI): separate expression of the COOH-terminal domain yields an active inhibitor of three different proteinases

Human mucus proteinase inhibitor (MPI) consists of 107 aminoacids arranged in two domains showing high homology to eachother. This protein is an inhibitor of different serine proteinasesincluding trypsin, chymotrypsin, leukocyte elastase and cathepsinG. On the basis of sequence comparisons it has been suggestedthat the first domain inhibits trypsin, whereas the second onewas thought to be active against chymotrypsin and elastase.To prove the location of the different inhibitory activitiesgene fragments for both domains have been cloned separatelyand expressed in Escherichia coli. Inhibition assays with theisolated recombinant domains showed that the second domain isactive against chymotrypsin, neutrophil elastase and trypsin,whereas for the first domain only a weak activity against trypsincould be detected. These results suggest that the inhibitoryactivities of the native molecule towards these three proteinasesare all located in the second domain.     

Trading goods versus sharing money: An experiment testing whether fairness and efficiency are frame dependent.

Systematic experiments with distribution games have shown that participants are strongly motivated by considerations of fairness and efficiency. This evidence, however, results mainly from experimental designs in which money is shared directly. Furthermore, fairness does not necessarily require equal payoffs, but may instead require equal allocations. We investigate experimentally the frame dependency of reaching equal (commodity or payoff) splits by systematically comparing net-trade proposals and payoff proposals for the same exchange economy with two traders, two commodities and multi-period negotiations. We can confirm the hypothesis that asking participants to allocate money directly, rather than more naturally via the allocation of commodities, is far from being harmless and likely overstates fairness and efficiency concerns. What is more, we try to apply the insights gained from our experiment to management problems. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Successfully detecting and correcting false friends using channel profiles

The detection and correction of false friends—also called real-word errors—is a notoriously difficult problem. On realistic data, the break-even point for automatic correction so far could not be reached: the number of additional infelicitous corrections outnumbered the useful corrections. We present a new approach where we first compute a profile of the error channel for the given text. During the correction process, the profile (1) helps to restrict attention to a small set of “suspicious” lexical tokens of the input text where it is “plausible” to assume that the token represents a false friend. In this way, recognition of false friends is improved. Furthermore, the profile (2) helps to isolate the “most promising” correction suggestion for “suspicious” tokens. Using a conventional word trigram statistics for disambiguation we obtain a correction method that can be successfully applied to unrestricted text. In experiments for OCR documents, we show significant accuracy gains by fully automatic correction of false friends.     

A power analysis and data acquisition system for ocean wave energy device testing

In the testing of ocean wave energy devices, the demand for a portable and robust data acquisition and electrical loading system has become apparent. This paper investigates the development of a 30 kW inclusive system combining loading capabilities, real-time power analysis, and data acquisition for the testing of deployed ocean wave energy devices. Hardware results for ocean testing are included.