Sensitive Mother-to-Adolescent Disclosures After Divorce: Is the Experience of Sons Different From That of Daughters?

This study addressed two main questions: (a) Are adolescent sons and daughters exposed to sensitive maternal disclosures after divorce with similar frequency and in similar detail? and (b) Does gender act as a moderator in the association between maternal disclosures and adolescent adjustment difficulties? Forced-choice and open-ended data were collected from 194 adolescents within 2 years after their parents' divorce. Quantitative analyses revealed that although the majority of adolescents experience some level of maternal disclosure, neither frequency nor detail of maternal disclosure differed as a function of adolescent gender. Frequent and detailed maternal disclosures were associated with adolescent adjustment difficulties, primarily psychological distress. Gender did not moderate that significant association. Qualitative analysis shed light on the link between maternal disclosures and adolescent distress, suggested the importance of how disclosures are made, and revealed several gender differences in reactions to maternal disclosures. Implications of the findings are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

An aldose reductase inhibitor and aminoguanidine prevent vascular endothelial growth factor expression in rats with long-term galactosemia

OBJECTIVE: To study the effects of an aldose reductase inhibitor (ARI-509, Wyeth-Ayerst, Princeton, NJ) and aminoguanidine (AMG), agents that have been reported to prevent or delay diabetic retinopathy, on retinal vascular abnormalities and the immunocytochemical expression in the retina of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) in rats maintained for up to 2 years on a 50% galactose diet. METHODS: Albino rats were placed on a control diet, a diet containing 50% galactose, or the 50% galactose diet containing either ARI-509 or AMG. Treatment with ARI-509 or AMG was initiated at the beginning of the experiment or after 12 months of galactose feeding. After 22 to 24 months, the rats were killed and the retinal vasculature from half of one eye was isolated by trypsin-elastase digestion for semiquantitative evaluation of retinal vascular lesions. The other half of the retina was prepared for immunocytochemistry and stained for the presence of VEGF, factor VIII, vimentin, and glial fibrillary acidic protein. Red blood cells, sciatic nerves, and a portion of the retina from the second eye were assayed for glucose, galactose, fructose, sorbitol, galactitol, and myo-inositol. Red blood cells were also assayed for galactosylated hemoglobin. RESULTS: Galactose-fed animals developed a vascular retinopathy characterized by severe cellular loss in the retinal capillaries and intensification of periodic acid-Schiff staining of the vascular basement membranes. Some animals also displayed dilation and hypercellularity of vessels in the posterior retina. These changes were substantially reduced in animals receiving ARI-509 from the beginning of the galactose diet, but were unaffected in all of the other treatment groups. None of the rats receiving ARI-509 or AMG treatment, whether initiated from the onset or after 12 months of galactosemia, demonstrated VEGF immunoreactivity. With the exception of the animals receiving ARI-509 from the beginning of the experiment, all of the galactose-fed animals developed dense cataracts within 6 weeks of the beginning of the galactose diet. Galactitol levels in animals receiving ARI-509 were 86% to 93% lower in red blood cells, retina, and sciatic nerve than those in the other galactose-fed groups. CONCLUSIONS: Although ARI-509 and AMG have different abilities to delay or prevent the diabetic-like retinopathy in galactosemic rats, even when substantial retinal microvascular acellularity occurs, both drugs prevent the immunocytochemical expression of VEGF. These results suggest that factors other than hypoxia may be responsible for VEGF expression in the retina, and that aldose reductase inhibitors and AMG have potential roles in preventing such expression and, thus, perhaps preventing retinal neovascularization.     

Estimating local mean signal strength of indoor multipathpropagation

We explore techniques for the measurement of local mean signal strength at 900 MHz and 2 GHz. In particular, we characterize the impact of transmitter and receiver antenna rotation on the estimated local mean. Then, we explore the collection of high resolution data while moving along a linear trajectory and using linear averaging techniques to estimate the local mean. With this information, the best measurement techniques can be chosen depending on the required speed versus accuracy tradeoff. Finally, we use a ray tracing propagation model to evaluate different methods of calculating the local mean signal strength for indoor environments     

Progress in the development of polymer cholesteric liquid crystal flakes for display applications

Polymer cholesteric liquid crystal (PCLC) flake technology is being developed as an alternative display technology for flexible, reflective particle displays. The motion of PCLC flakes suspended in a host fluid can be controlled with an electric field, creating a way to electrically control the flakes' ability to brightly reflect light that is circularly polarized. The PCLC flake/host fluid dispersion has been successfully microencapsulated both in a polymer matrix and in gelatin micro-capsules. Microencapsulation will not only expand the applications scope of the technology, but also may aid in addressing some potential problem areas that are inherent to many forms of particle display technology. A second important development in PCLC flake technology involves the manufacture of shaped flakes based on soft lithography techniques. The size and shape of a flake impact its reorientation, and uniformly shaped flakes respond in a similar manner. The unique reflective properties of PCLC flakes also provide possible applications in areas such as optics and photonics, switchable ‘smart windows’ or conformal coatings, and information displays such as ‘electronic paper.’     

Experience, Context, and the Visual Perception of Human Movement.

Why are human observers particularly sensitive to human movement? Seven experiments examined the roles of visual experience and motor processes in human movement perception by comparing visual sensitivities to point-light displays of familiar, unusual, and impossible gaits across gait-speed and identity discrimination tasks. In both tasks, visual sensitivity to physically possible gaits was superior to visual sensitivity to physically impossible gaits, supporting perception-action coupling theories of human movement perception. Visual experience influenced walker-identity perception but not gait-speed discrimination. Thus, both motor experience and visual experience define visual sensitivity to human movement. An ecological perspective can be used to define the conditions necessary for experience-dependent sensitivity to human movement. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Parametric modeling of somatosensory evoked potentials

In this paper, we examine methods of characterizing somatosensory evoked potentials (SEP's) in both the time and frequency domains. We have found that the truncated impulse response (TIR) method produced an accurate time domain model of the SEP signals at model orders greatly reduced from the original state space matrix. The TIR method was valuable for smoothing signals that were slightly corrupted by noise. In this case, the simulated data sequence was close to the original data sequence in the mean squared error sense. For signals that were greatly corrupted by noise, the TIR method was not able to perform as well. Therefore, the TIR method was not a feature extraction method but was valuable for data simulation. In the frequency domain, we have used the autoregressive moving average model (ARMA) to parameterize the SEP signal. An overdetermined set of Yule-Walker equations was created to determine the autoregressive (AR) parameters of the original data with the model order established by the singular value decomposition. From these AR parameters, a residual time series was generated which was used to find the moving average parameters. The resulting ARMA model was used to produce a simulated data sequence. The frequency domain characteristics of the simulated sequence and the corresponding power spectral density of the ARMA filter were very close to the periodogram of the original data sequence. Accurate parameterization was achieved for the SEP waveforms at low filter lengths.     

Fungal carriage in lizards

The occurrence of fungi was investigated in the gut of 200 common garden lizards (Agama agama). The most important pathogenic fungus isolated was Basidiobolus haptosporus, an aetiological agent of subcutaneous zygomycosis. It was recovered from the intestinal contents of 112 (56%) lizards. Other important fungi isolated included Aspergillus spp. in 24 (12%) lizards, Candida spp. in 12 (6%), Penicillium spp. in 12 (6%) and Fusarium spp. in 12 (6%). Mucor spp. were isolated from eight (4%) male lizards only. Agamid lizards are plentiful in rural and urban areas of Nigeria. As they live in close vicinity to man, they are likely to play an important role in the spread of disease that may be caused by these fungi and its transmission to man. None of the animals investigated that yielded fungal cultures revealed any external fungal infection.     

The validity of new memory complaints in the elderly

OBJECTIVE: To determine the validity of new subjective memory complaints (MCs) from individuals who previously, when without dementia, denied having MCs. DESIGN: Prospective cohort. SETTING: Longitudinal, community-based study of aging and dementia. PATIENTS: One hundred thirty-three community-dwelling elderly individuals who were part of a registry for the study of conditions related to aging in North Manhattan, NY. Patients were selected if they were initially without dementia and had completed at least 2 successive annual clinical and neuropsychological evaluations and provided their own medical history. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Performance on memory tests--the Buschke Selective Reminding Test and a visual memory task--and global performance on a neuropsychological test battery and clinical evaluation, by which questionable dementia or dementia was diagnosed according to a well-defined paradigm. RESULTS: Fifty-three subjects with MCs at the initial evaluation performed no worse on the memory test than the 80 subjects who denied MCs initially. There was a weak association between MCs and the diagnosis of questionable dementia at baseline (P = .04), but this was nonsignificant after adjusting for age and education. At 1-year follow-up, 21 of the 80 without baseline MCs now reported MCs. At the follow-up evaluation, these 21 subjects performed significantly worse on the memory tests, were 5 times more likely to have significant cognitive impairment, and had shown significantly greater decline over the preceding year on several of the cognitive measures than the 59 who continued to deny MCs. CONCLUSION: New MCs from individuals, who when without dementia recently denied MCs, may suggest the presence of significant impairment of memory or cognition.