1,721,060 research outputs found
Exploring the Effect of a Promotion and Prevention Regulatory Focus on Subjective Responses to Vaginal Sensations in a Laboratory Research Design
No full textBACKGROUND: Self-regulation is an important process to explain sexual, emotional, and pain-related responses in the context of genital pain. Although highly relevant, self-regulatory focus theory is not well integrated into the literature on genital pain.AIM: This study explored the impact of a promotion and prevention regulatory focus on genital pain responding. Sex would typically endorse a promotion focus, whereas pain during sex is likely to provoke a prevention focus oriented toward harm avoidance and safety.METHOD: We induced gradually increasing vaginal pressure in a sample of 56 women using an intra-vaginal balloon that simulated potentially painful vaginal sensations. Women were first primed with a promotion vs prevention focus by making them list their ideals vs responsibilities as a sexual partner. We measured trait regulatory focus, pleasant and painful vaginal pressure sensations, sexual arousal, expectations, and approach-avoidance motivational tendencies.MAIN OUTCOME: The effect of trait and state promotion and prevention regulatory focuses on the appraisal of vaginal pressure and sexual arousal.RESULTS: When primed with a prevention compared with a promotion focus, women with a predominant prevention orientation reported less sexual arousal, less pleasant vaginal pressure appraisals, and lower approach tendencies regarding sexual stimuli. Women who experienced a match between their state and trait promotion focus appraised the vaginal pressure as less painful. No significant effects of regulatory focus were found on the expectancy measures.STRENGTHS AND LIMITATIONS: We provided first evidence on self-regulatory motivation in the context of genital pain responses using an experimentally controlled laboratory design. Our sample was small and consisted of young students without (a clinical diagnosis of) genital pain, which limits our conclusions on the effect of promotion vs prevention regulation on genital pain responses.CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS: Future research is needed to examine the clinical value of self-regulation and regulatory fit and to identify possible ways to target self-regulatory motivation in clinical interventions of genital pain.CONCLUSION: Self-regulatory focus theory has clear potential to explain the sexual and motivational correlates of genital pain. M Dewitte and H Kindermans. Exploring the Effect of a Promotion and Prevention Regulatory Focus on Subjective Responses to Vaginal Sensations in a Laboratory Research Design. J Sex Med 2020;XX:XXX-XXX.</p
Identification of a Dynamic Model of Pain and Fear Characteristics During Vaginal Dilation Exercises
No full textTreating dyspareunia, i.e., pain during vaginal penetrative sexual intercourse, may include vaginal dilation exercises that are often perceived as uncomfortable (or worse) by patients. Being able to accurately predict the pain and fear levels of these subjects during the treatments is thus in-strumental in designing effective personalized dilation patterns for therapies. Toward this goal, in this paper, we combine an existing qualitative model of vaginal pressure, pain, and fear relations with experimental data obtained during medical trials to derive a parametric model. More precisely, we: 1) analyze how to deal with the identifiability issues caused by the presence of uninterpretable parameters in the original model, 2) use this analysis to derive a novel model that is better suited for data-driven learning purposes, 3) perform a parameter identification using weighted least squares on online and offline measurement data, and 4) test the capability of the overall approach in predicting signals that are proxies of fear and pain levels, comparing the performance one obtains with this refined approach against purely black box Autoregressive moving average exogenous (ARMAX) models. The results indicate that the proposed method works best as a predictive model of fear and pain levels in response to visual and pressure stimuli but still lacks a high level of generalizability
A switched system for modeling the +-inal dilation exercises
No full textGenito-pelvic pain/penetration disorders, i.e., painful experiences during penetrative sexual intercourse, affect an estimated 30-40% of people with vaginas at some point in their lives. Treatments for Genito-pelvic pain/penetration disorders vary depending on the main cause of the condition but may include the use of vaginal trainers/dilators which are used to stretch the vaginal duct and relax the Pelvic floor muscles. As a step towards understanding how patients respond to vaginal trainers, we investigate the interaction of pain and pleasure characteristics during treatments. In this paper, we adapt an existing qualitative model into a switched system where switches are determined by a patient's subjective level of pleasure. A qualitative model of the pain and fear characteristics is derived for each switched state. Due to sparsity in the experimental data, we adopt a weighted least squares approach for parameter identification using online (constant sampling period) and offline data (sparse and inconsistent sampling). The results indicate that it is a promising method compared to the grey-box model without considering pleasure levels but there is an obvious and variable delay in the reporting of a patient's pleasure levels which affects the overall performance of the switched system
Emotion Recognition from Physiological Signals Collected with a Wrist Device and Emotional Recall
Full text linkImplementing affective engineering in real-life applications requires the ability to effectively recognize emotions using physiological measurements. Despite being a widely researched topic, there seems to be a lack of systems that translate results from data collected in a laboratory setting to higher technology readiness levels. In this paper, we delve into the feasibility of emotion recognition beyond controlled laboratory environments. For this reason, we create a minimally-invasive experimental setup by combining emotional recall via autobiographical emotion memory tasks with a user-friendly Empatica wristband measuring blood volume pressure, electrodermal activity, skin temperature, and acceleration. We employ standard practices of feature-based supervised learning and specifically use support vector machines to explore subject dependency through various segmentation methods. We collected data from 45 participants. After preprocessing, using a data set of 134 segments from 40 participants, the accuracy of the classifier after 10-fold cross-validation was barely better than random guessing (36% for four emotions). However, when extracting multiple segments from each emotion task per participant using 10-fold cross-validation (i.e., including subject-dependent data in the training set), the classification rate increased to up to 75% for four emotions but was still as low as 32% for leave-one-subject-out cross-validation (i.e., subject-independent training). We conclude that highly subject-dependent issues might pose emotion recognition
On the interpersonal dynamics of sexuality
No full textTo date, theory and research on the interpersonal dynamics of sexuality is scarce. This is remarkable because people most often have sex in a relationship. To create more valid models of sexual functioning, it is important to go beyond the study of individual factors and take into account relational and contextual variables, which may act as risk and protective factors for developing, maintaining, and exacerbating sexual problems. This article describes theoretical ideas on how sexuality and relationships can be linked through motivation and emotion regulation. First, the sexual system is conceptualized as an emotion regulation device that involves a dynamic interplay between cognitive, affective, and motivational responses. Then, it is illustrated how partner variables, relationship processes, and sociorelational context may interact with these different responses and eventually shape how sexual emotions are generated and regulated. The author continues with explaining the implications of such emotion-motivational perspective for studying determinants of sexual responding, the role of coregulation in tuning sexual responses in the couple, and the interrelation between the sexual and relational goals of both partners. Linking sexual and nonsexual aspects of relationships and including data of both couple members is necessary for a clearer insight into the nature of sexual dysfunctions
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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