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Changes in UK pre-schooler's mental health symptoms over the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic: data from Co-SPYCE study
No full textBackground
The COVID-19 pandemic caused significant disruption to the lives of children and their families. Pre-school children may have been particularly vulnerable to the effects of the pandemic, with the closure of childcare facilities, playgrounds, playcentres and parent and toddler groups limiting their opportunities for social interaction at a crucial stage of development. Additionally, for parents working from home, caring for pre-school aged children who require high levels of support and care, was likely challenging. We conducted an intensive longitudinal, but not nationally representative, study to examine trajectories of pre-schoolers’ mental symptoms in the United Kingdom during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Methods
UK-based parents and carers (n = 1520) of pre-school-aged children (2–4 years) completed monthly online surveys about their pre-schoolers’ mental health between April 2020 and March 2021. The survey examined changes in children's emotional symptoms, conduct problems and hyperactivity/inattention.
Results
In our final mixed-effects models, our predictors (fixed effects) accounted for 5% of the variance in each of conduct problems, emotional symptoms and hyperactivity/inattention symptoms scores, and the combined random and fixed effects accounted for between 64% and 73% of the variance. Pre-schoolers’ emotional problems and hyperactivity/inattention symptoms declined from April through summer 2020 and then increased again during the autumn and winter 2020/2021 as lockdowns were re-introduced. Pre-schoolers who attended childcare showed greater decline in symptom severity than those who did not. Older children, compared to younger, showed greater lability of emotion symptom severity. Attending childcare predicted lower symptom severity across all three domains of conduct problems, emotional symptoms, and hyperactivity/inattention, while the opposite pattern was observed for children whose parent had a mental health problem.
Conclusions
Our findings reinforce the importance of examining pre-schoolers’ mental health in the context of micro and macro-level factors. Interventions focussing on family factors such as parent mental health, as well as continued provision of childcare, may have most potential to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on young children's mental health
Development of neuropsychological measures: Personal experience and lessons learnt
No full textThis paper briefly reviews the history and purposes of neuropsychological assessment, as well as advancements in this area, and discusses the development of neuropsychological tests, using examples developed by the author and his colleagues to measure different aspects of human memory. These include the Shum Visual Learning Test, the Australian Retrograde Memory Test, the Comprehensive Assessment of Prospective Memory and the Virtual Reality Prospective Memory Task. The intended uses and psychometric properties of these tests, as well as examples of their use in research and clinical settings, will also be discussed. The paper will conclude with recommendations and advice on the development of neuropsychological tests based on the author's own experience.Griffith Health, School of Applied PsychologyNo Full Tex
Fast Transformations with Walsh-Hadamard Functions
No full textTitle: Fast Transformations with Walsh-Hadamard Functions, Author: Frank Y.Y. Shum, Location: ThodeIn this thesis, various techniques to generate Walsh-Hadamard functions are discussed. Efficient algorithms to compute the discrete Walsh-Hadamard transform have been derived and implemented. The design of a simple, but very fast, digital circuit that can perform the transform or its inverse is presented. These algorithms have been applied to the processing of speech for the investigation of bit rate reduction. Intelligible speech has been reconstructed from 8 or 4 dominant Walsh-Hadamard coefficients out of a field of 64, with a constant update time of 8 milliseconds, on a CDC-1700 computer.ThesisMaster of Engineering (ME
Design and development of smart data dissemination system
No full textThis project cannot be completed without the great mentorship of the author’s supervisor, Prof Perry Shum Ping. Hence, the author would like to appreciate his expertise, understanding and generous guidance throughout the process. Especially during Prof Shum’s busy schedule, he still made time to meet the author weekly for project update and give his suggestion on the progress. He not only directed and supervised the author, but also provided pragamtic solution on applying theoretical knowledge onto the real practice.
Moreover, the author would like to express her sincere graditude to her co- supervisor, Dr. Shao Xuguang, for inspiring the student by regular catch up and building the student community to boost the interactive communication within fellow FYP participants.
The appreciation also goes to Du Hao, a current staff in School of Electrical and Electronics, for his constant support and guidance on the technical aspects of the project, as well as the sharing of his previous experience.
Last but not least, the author would like to indicate her deepest gratitude toward School of Electrical and Electronics and Nanyang Technological University, for providing the wonderful academic ambience and the most significant education to the author and trained her to be such a professional in software engineering industry.Bachelor of Engineerin
Changes in UK parental mental health symptoms over 10 months of the COVID-19 pandemic
No full textBackground
The threats to health, associated restrictions and economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic have been linked to increases in mental health difficulties for many. Parents, in particular, have experienced many challenges such as having to combine work with home-schooling their children and other caring responsibilities. Yet, it remains unclear how parental mental health has changed throughout the pandemic or what factors may have mitigated or compounded the impact of the pandemic on parents' mental health.
Methods
We examined monthly survey data from two linked UK-based longitudinal studies: COVID-19: Supporting Parents, Adolescents and Children during Epidemics' (Co-SPACE) and COVID-19: Supporting Parents and Young Children during Epidemics' (Co-SPYCE). Data from 5576 parents/carers of 2–17-year-old children collected between April 2020 and January 2021 was analysed using mixed-effect modelling and latent class growth (mixture) modelling.
Results
Parental stress and depression, but not anxiety, were higher during the periods of restrictions. This pattern was most pronounced for parents with primary-school-aged children, those that worked at home or had other adults in the household. Being younger, reporting secondary or below education, working out of home, having secondary-school-aged children or children with special education needs (SEN)/neurodevelopmental disorders (ND) further moderated whether, how and when parental mental health symptoms changed. Although around three quarters of parents reported consistently low mental health symptoms, a substantial minority reported consistently high or increasing symptoms of anxiety, stress and depression. The latter were more likely to be parents who were younger than average, were a single adult in the household, had a pre-existing mental health diagnosis or had a child with special educational needs or a ND.
Conclusions
These findings emphasise how different personal circumstances and pre-existing inequalities shaped how parents were affected by this unprecedented global pandemic and highlight the need for support and consideration to meet the needs of families in the future
Multi-layer Lattice Model for Real-Time Dynamic Character Deformation
No full textDue to the recent advancement of computer graphics hardware and software algorithms, deformable characters have become more and more popular in real-time applications such as computer games. While there are mature techniques to generate primary deformation from skeletal movement, simulating realistic and stable secondary deformation such as jiggling of fats remains challenging. On one hand, traditional volumetric approaches such as the finite element method require higher computational cost and are infeasible for limited hardware such as game consoles. On the other hand, while shape matching based simulations can produce plausible deformation in real-time, they suffer from a stiffness problem in which particles either show unrealistic deformation due to high gains, or cannot catch up with the body movement. In this paper, we propose a unified multi-layer lattice model to simulate the primary and secondary deformation of skeleton-driven characters. The core idea is to voxelize the input character mesh into multiple anatomical layers including the bone, muscle, fat and skin. Primary deformation is applied on the bone voxels with lattice-based skinning. The movement of these voxels is propagated to other voxel layers using lattice shape matching simulation, creating a natural secondary deformation. Our multi-layer lattice framework can produce simulation quality comparable to those from other volumetric approaches with a significantly smaller computational cost. It is best to be applied in real-time applications such as console games or interactive animation creation
Art as an Investment: Risk, Return and Comovements in Major Painting Markets
No full textThis paper examines the short and long-term price linkages among major art and equity markets over the period 1976-2001. The art markets examined are Contemporary Masters, French Impressionists, Modern European, 19th Century European, Old Masters, Surrealists, 20th Century English and Modern US paintings. A global equity index (with dividends and capitalisation changes) is also included. Multivariate cointegration procedures, Granger non-causality tests, level VAR and generalised variance decomposition analyses based on error-correction and vector autoregressive models are conducted to analyse short and long-run relationships among these markets. The results indicate that there is a stationary long-run relationship and significant short and long-run causal linkages between the various painting markets and between the equity market and painting markets. However, in terms of the percentage of variance explained most painting markets are relatively isolated, and other painting markets are generally more important than the equity market in explaining the variance that is not caused by innovations in the market itself. This suggests that opportunities for portfolio diversification in art works alone and in conjunction with equity markets exist, though in common with the literature in this area the study finds that the returns on paintings are much lower and the risks much higher than in conventional financial markets.Art and collectibles, portfolio diversification, market efficiency, risk and return.
Prospective memory in patients with closed head injury: A review
No full textThis paper aimed to review the limited, but growing literature on prospective memory (PM) following closed head injury (CHI). Search of two commonly used databases yielded studies that could be classified as: self- or other-report of PM deficits; behavioral PM measures in adults with CHI, behavioral PM measures in children and adolescents with CHI, and treatment of PM in adults with CHI. The methodology and findings of these studies were critically reviewed and discussed. Because of the small number of studies, meta-analysis was only conducted for studies that used behavioral PM measures in adults to integrate findings. PM deficits were found to be commonly reported by patients with CHI and their significant others and they could be identified using behavioral measures in adults, children and adolescents with CHI. However, more work is needed to clarify the nature and mechanisms of these deficits. Although some promising results have been reported by studies that evaluated PM treatment, most studies lack tight experimental control and used only a small number of participants. The paper concluded with some suggestions for future research. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved
Often Forgetting to do Things: What, Why and How not to?
No full textWe rely on prospective memory (PM) to carry out intended actions at an appropriate time in the future. This ability is very important for day-to-day functioning, for example, remembering to take medication, attend appointments and pay bills. The literature covering the topic of PM has increased exponentially in the past 20-30 years. This paper will describe this relatively novel form of memory and discuss the debilitating effect PM deficits have on everyday living. It will also examine the populations who experience significantly more frequent and severe PM impairments and explore the causes and mechanisms of PM impairments by reviewing behavioural, clinical, genetic and neuroimaging studies. The paper will conclude by discussing the latest research into ways of treating PM impairments in clinical populations. Where applicable, examples of research conducted by the author and his colleagues will be used to illustrate these topics.Griffith Health, School of Applied PsychologyFull Tex
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