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“We can all relate": patient experience of an emotion-oriented group intervention
Get PDFIntroduction: Group interventions are carried out routinely acrossneuropsychological rehabilitation services, to improve understanding of braininjury and aspects of impairment. Treatment provided in a group modality canbring additional perceived benefits, such as co-operative learning. However, there are very few studies which explore patient perceptions and experiences of such interventions. In the present study we investigated the experience of attending a group-based educational intervention for the consequences of acquired brain injury (ABI), which had a strong focus on emotion and emotion regulation.Methods: Using qualitative semi-structured interviews (approximately 20minutes), the study explores the lived experience of participating in the sevensession programme, the better to identify the perceived efficacy, salienceand value of individual elements. Twenty participants with ABI took part inindividual interviews, after completion of the group programme (the Brain InjurySolutions and Emotions Programme, BISEP). The study adopted a descriptivephenomenological philosophy, which focuses on lived experience to explorea phenomenon (i.e. the experience of BISEP). As regards methods, the studyemployed thematic analysis to cluster experiences into themes of meaning.Results: Five themes were identified: (1) ‘Long term consequences and psychological needs’, which related to the persistent nature of direct consequences of injury and adjustment, and how these result in a need for interventions such as BISEP. (2) ‘Positive experiences of participating in the programme’, referred to participants’ overall experience of the programme and valued elements within it. The remaining themes referred to the programme as (3) a social milieu; (4) a place to learn; and (5) a place to promote positive emotional experiences.Discussion: Similar to previous studies, many people reported high acceptabilityand perceived value of the group programme, and its role in facilitatingadjustment and understanding of injury. Of particular importance was theopportunity to socialise with people who “can all relate”, in line with a growingemphasis on social rehabilitation. The findings especially highlight the relevanceof emotion-focused group programmes for ABI, promoting emotion regulation,and practical tools that are delivered optimistically. Further implications forpractice and future research include to focus on long term rehabilitation, asocial milieu, and strategies to support adjustment
Socialness Effects in Lexical-Semantic Processing
Get PDFContemporary theories of semantic representation posit that social experience is an important source of information for deriving meaning. However, there is a lack of behavioural evidence in support of this proposal. The aim of the present work was to test whether words’ degree of social relevance, or socialness, influences lexical-semantic processing. In Study 1, across a series of item-level regression analyses, we found (1) that socialness can facilitate responses in lexical, semantic and memory tasks, and (2) limited evidence for an interaction of socialness with concreteness. In Studies 2-3, we tested the pre-registered hypothesis that social words, compared to non-social words, will be associated with faster and more accurate responses during a syntactic classification task. We found that socialness has a facilitatory effect on noun decisions (Study 3), but not verb decisions (Study 2). Overall, our results suggest that the socialness of a word affects lexical-semantic processing but also that this is task-dependent. These findings constitute novel evidence in support of proposals that social information is an important dimension of semantic representation
Thirty years of longitudinal talent development research: A systematic review and meta-aggregation
Get PDFTalent pathways are longitudinal and multidimensional in nature offering developmental environments for athletes that incorporate multiple processes at multiple timepoints. Recent reviews have unilaterally targeted static talent areas (i.e., talent detection and identification). The present review aimed to identify quantitative and qualitative studies with longitudinal designs, within an elite athlete population, that considered development and selection literature collectively. Taking a novel pragmatic approach achieved pluralism in a strive to greatly advance our methodological understanding to acquire knowledge of more effective talent development in sport. The present review followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and used a Meta-aggregation methodology. A search of talent development and selection literature identified 41 quantitative and 3 qualitative longitudinal studies. Overall, ten (quantitative) studies investigated interactions between multidimensional selection (i.e., measures of performance) and development characteristics; performance variables changed non-linearly alongside talent development characteristics. No longitudinal mixed-method research studies were found. For practitioners, multiple performance measures need to be considered alongside development characteristics to better assess talent. For researchers, the design of the present review models an epistemological and ontological congruent approach that can be used to facilitate the design of future mixed-method and longitudinal research; capturing the dynamic and multifaceted individual differences of talent development
A retrospective comparison of the biceps femoris long head muscle structure in athletes with and without hamstring strain injury history
Get PDFHamstring strain injuries (HSI) and re-injuries are endemic in high-speed running sports. The biceps femoris long head (BFlh) is the most frequently injured muscle among the hamstrings. Structural parameters of the hamstring muscle are stated to be susceptible to strain injuries at this location. This retrospective study targeted comparing the BFlh's structural parameters between previously injured and uninjured athletes. Nineteen male athletes with previous BFlh strain injury history and nineteen athletes without former lower extremity injury history were included in this study. Fascicle length, mid-muscle belly and distal musculotendinous (MTJ) passive stiffnesses of the biceps femoris long head (BFlh) were examined via b-mode panoramic ultrasound scanning and ultrasound-based shear-wave elastography. Parameter comparisons of both legs within and between athletes with and without injury history were performed. Comparison of the BFlh fascicle length between the injured leg of the injured group and the legs of the controls revealed a trend to shorter fascicle lengths in the injured leg (p = 0.067, d = -0.62). However, the mid-muscle belly passive stiffness of the BFlh was significantly higher in the injured legs (p = 0.009, d = 0.7) compared with the controls. Additionally, the distal MTJ stiffness was much higher in the previously injured legs compared with controls (p < 0.001, d = 1.6). Outcomes support the importance of BFlh properties related to stiffness, and fascicle length for injury susceptibility in athletes. Future prospective studies should determine whether the higher stiffness in the injured athletes is a cause or consequence of the HSI. Physical therapy and rehabilitation programmes after HSI should focus on BFlh muscle properties i.e., elasticity and fascicle length for reducing re-injury and increasing sports performance. [Abstract copyright: Copyright: © 2024 Yagiz et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Development of a value-based scoring system for the MobQoL-7D:a novel tool for measuring quality-adjusted life years in the context of mobility impairment
Get PDFPURPOSE: To create a preference-based value set scoring system for the MobQoL-7D outcome measure, and to examine differences in the health state preferences of the general population and individuals with impaired mobility.METHODS AND MATERIALS: A preference elicitation study was undertaken to ascribe utility weights to all health states (i.e., all unique combination of answers) described by the MobQoL-7D. The elicitation exercise was developed using the Online Elicitation of Personal Utility Functions (OPUF) tool. Two UK sample groups were recruited; firstly a representative general population sample (N = 504), secondly a balanced sample of individuals with impaired mobility (N = 368). Distinct preference-based value sets were developed for each sample. Differences in dimension ranking, weighting, and overall utility values were assessed.RESULTS: The general population sample considered most health states, especially the more severe states, to be worse than the mobility impaired sample comparatively. Statistically significant differences between the samples were observed in four of the seven MobQoL-7D dimensions.CONCLUSIONS: This study is the first to provide preference-based value sets for the MobQoL-7D, ready for use in economic evaluations, QALY calculation, and other clinical or research applications. The study demonstrates how the general public and individuals with impaired mobility value health states differently.</p
ROBVALU: A tool for assessing risk of bias in studies about peoples’ values, utilities, or the importance of health outcomes
Get PDFPeople’s values are an important driver in healthcare decision making. The certainty of an intervention’s effect on benefits and harms relies on two factors: the certainty in the measured effect on an outcome in terms of risk difference and the certainty in its value, also known as utility or importance. The GRADE (Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development, and Evaluations) working group has proposed a set of questions to assess the risk of bias in a body of evidence from studies investigating how people value outcomes. However, these questions do not address risk of bias in individual studies that, similar to risk-of-bias tools for other research studies, is required to evaluate such evidence. Thus, the Risk of Bias in studies of Values and Utilities (ROBVALU) tool was developed. ROBVALU has good psychometric properties and will be useful when assessing individual studies in measuring values, utilities, or the importance of outcomes. As such, ROBVALU can be used to assess risk of bias in studies included in systematic reviews and health guidelines. It also can support health research assessments, where the risk of bias of input variables determines the certainty in model outputs. These assessments include, for example, decision analysis and cost utility or cost effectiveness analysis for health technology assessment, health policy, and reimbursement decision making.</p
Mapping Semantic Space: Exploring the Higher-order Structure of Word Meaning
Get PDFMultiple representation theories posit that concepts are represented via a combination of properties derived from sensorimotor, affective, and linguistic experiences. Recently, it has been proposed that information derived from social experience, or socialness, represents another key aspect of conceptual representation. How these various dimensions interact to form a coherent conceptual space has yet to be fully explored. To address this, we capitalized on openly available word property norms for 6339 words and conducted a large-scale investigation into the relationships between 18 dimensions. An exploratory factor analysis reduced the dimensions to six higher-order factors: sub-lexical, distributional, visuotactile, body action, affective and social interaction. All these factors explained unique variance in performance on lexical and semantic tasks, demonstrating that they make important contributions to the representation of word meaning. An important and novel finding was that the socialness dimension clustered with the auditory modality and with mouth and head actions. We suggest this reflects experiential learning from verbal interpersonal interactions. Moreover, formally modelling the network structure of semantic space revealed pairwise partial correlations between most dimensions and highlighted the centrality of the interoception dimension. Altogether, these findings provide new insights into the architecture of conceptual space, including the central importance of inner and social experience, and highlight important avenues for future research
An interactive online tool (PALTIDE) for sea level and ocean model simulations of the northwest European shelf seas since the Last Glacial Maximum
Get PDFComparing thematic and search term-based coding in understanding sense of place in survey research
Get PDFSense of place is a fundamental concept in human geography, yet challenging to measure given its intangibility and idiosyncrasy. Meanwhile, there are increasing opportunities for social scientists to utilize big data and automated approaches to data analysis, albeit with some wariness, but few researchers directly compare automated to manual analysis in the context of sense of place. This study applies two analytical approaches to a survey question on sense of place: semi-automatic search term analysis around semantic fields, and inductive thematic analysis. Results show high agreement between the approaches, with more tangible aspects of place (recreation) better correlated than more abstract concepts (appreciation). Variation mainly relates to the ability of inductive coding to address false negatives, implied meaning, or obscure search terms. This demonstrates the potential value of hybridizing to improve the accuracy of a search term-based approach, and overcome the limitations, such as subjectivities, of one analytical approach
