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Foods (Basel, Switzerland) Jun 2024The aim of the present research was to determine if the developed ovo-vegetarian sausage (SO), which was made with 15% chickpea flour, 51% albumin and 34% soy protein...
The aim of the present research was to determine if the developed ovo-vegetarian sausage (SO), which was made with 15% chickpea flour, 51% albumin and 34% soy protein concentrate, exhibited improved physicochemical and sensory characteristics compared to vegetarian sausages available on the local market (classic vegan sausage, SC; vegan fine herb sausage, SH; and quinoa sausage, SQ). According to the physicochemical results, the developed sample, SO, presented significant differences ( < 0.05) compared to the others, including higher protein content, lower pH and a higher a* value. Three types of sensory analyses were conducted-flash profile, overall liking and purchase intention (to determine consumers' willingness to purchase the product)-with the first involving 15 consumers and the second and third involving 60 participants each. Descriptors for each sample were determined using the vocabulary provided by consumers in the flash profile analysis. Descriptors for SO included 'elastic', 'smell of cooked corn', 'characteristic flavor', 'pasty', 'soft' and 'pastel color', contributing to its greater overall liking and purchase intention compared to the others. Through the hierarchical multiple factor analysis, a positive correlation was observed between the texture and sensory descriptors of the flash profile. Conversely, a correlation was found between the physicochemical characteristics (pH, a, color) and overall liking and purchase intention.
PubMed: 38890961
DOI: 10.3390/foods13111733 -
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology Jun 2024Recent studies have shown that children benefit from orthography when learning new words. This orthographic facilitation can be explained by the fact that written...
Recent studies have shown that children benefit from orthography when learning new words. This orthographic facilitation can be explained by the fact that written language acts as an anchor device due to the transient nature of spoken language. There is also a close and reciprocal relationship between spoken and written language. Second-language word learning poses specific challenges in terms of orthography-phonology mappings that do not fully overlap with first-language mappings. The current study aimed to investigate whether orthographic information facilitates second-language word learning in developing readers, namely third and fifth graders. In a first experiment French children learned 16 German words, and in a second experiment they learned 24 German words. Word learning was assessed by picture designation, spoken word recognition, and orthographic choice. In both experiments, orthographic facilitation was found in both less and more advanced readers. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.
PubMed: 38889479
DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2024.105978 -
Journal of Medical Internet Research Jun 2024Families of individuals with neurodevelopmental disabilities or differences (NDDs) often struggle to find reliable health information on the web. NDDs encompass various...
Families of individuals with neurodevelopmental disabilities or differences (NDDs) often struggle to find reliable health information on the web. NDDs encompass various conditions affecting up to 14% of children in high-income countries, and most individuals present with complex phenotypes and related conditions. It is challenging for their families to develop literacy solely by searching information on the internet. While in-person coaching can enhance care, it is only available to a minority of those with NDDs. Chatbots, or computer programs that simulate conversation, have emerged in the commercial sector as useful tools for answering questions, but their use in health care remains limited. To address this challenge, the researchers developed a chatbot named CAMI (Coaching Assistant for Medical/Health Information) that can provide information about trusted resources covering core knowledge and services relevant to families of individuals with NDDs. The chatbot was developed, in collaboration with individuals with lived experience, to provide information about trusted resources covering core knowledge and services that may be of interest. The developers used the Django framework (Django Software Foundation) for the development and used a knowledge graph to depict the key entities in NDDs and their relationships to allow the chatbot to suggest web resources that may be related to the user queries. To identify NDD domain-specific entities from user input, a combination of standard sources (the Unified Medical Language System) and other entities were used which were identified by health professionals as well as collaborators. Although most entities were identified in the text, some were not captured in the system and therefore went undetected. Nonetheless, the chatbot was able to provide resources addressing most user queries related to NDDs. The researchers found that enriching the vocabulary with synonyms and lay language terms for specific subdomains enhanced entity detection. By using a data set of numerous individuals with NDDs, the researchers developed a knowledge graph that established meaningful connections between entities, allowing the chatbot to present related symptoms, diagnoses, and resources. To the researchers' knowledge, CAMI is the first chatbot to provide resources related to NDDs. Our work highlighted the importance of engaging end users to supplement standard generic ontologies to named entities for language recognition. It also demonstrates that complex medical and health-related information can be integrated using knowledge graphs and leveraging existing large datasets. This has multiple implications: generalizability to other health domains as well as reducing the need for experts and optimizing their input while keeping health care professionals in the loop. The researchers' work also shows how health and computer science domains need to collaborate to achieve the granularity needed to make chatbots truly useful and impactful.
Topics: Humans; Neurodevelopmental Disorders; Internet; Software
PubMed: 38888947
DOI: 10.2196/50182 -
Campbell Systematic Reviews Jun 2024High-income countries offer social assistance (welfare) programs to help alleviate poverty for people with little or no income. These programs have become increasingly... (Review)
Review
BACKGROUND
High-income countries offer social assistance (welfare) programs to help alleviate poverty for people with little or no income. These programs have become increasingly conditional and stringent in recent decades based on the premise that transitioning people from government support to paid work will improve their circumstances. However, many people end up with low-paying and precarious jobs that may cause more poverty because they lose benefits such as housing subsidies and health and dental insurance, while incurring job-related expenses. Conditional assistance programs are also expensive to administer and cause stigma. A guaranteed basic income (GBI) has been proposed as a more effective approach for alleviating poverty, and several experiments have been conducted in high-income countries to investigate whether GBI leads to improved outcomes compared to existing social programs.
OBJECTIVES
The aim of this review was to conduct a synthesis of quantitative evidence on GBI interventions in high-income countries, to compare the effectiveness of various types of GBI versus "usual care" (including existing social assistance programs) in improving poverty-related outcomes.
SEARCH METHODS
Searches of 16 academic databases were conducted in May 2022, using both keywords and database-specific controlled vocabulary, without limits or restrictions on language or date. Sources of gray literature (conference, governmental, and institutional websites) were searched in September 2022. We also searched reference lists of review articles, citations of included articles, and tables of contents of relevant journals in September 2022. Hand searching for recent publications was conducted until December 2022.
SELECTION CRITERIA
We included all quantitative study designs except cross-sectional (at one timepoint), with or without control groups. We included studies in high income countries with any population and with interventions meeting our criteria for GBI: unconditional, with regular payments in cash (not in-kind) that were fixed or predictable in amount. Although two primary outcomes of interest were selected a priori (food insecurity, and poverty level assessed using official, national, or international measures), we did not screen studies on the basis of reported outcomes because it was not possible to define all potentially relevant poverty-related outcomes in advance.
DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS
We followed the Campbell Collaboration conduct and reporting guidelines to ensure a rigorous methodology. The risk of bias was assessed across seven domains: confounding, selection, attrition, motivation, implementation, measurement, and analysis/reporting. We conducted meta-analyses where results could be combined; otherwise, we presented the results in tables. We reported effect estimates as standard mean differences (SMDs) if the included studies reported them or provided sufficient data for us to calculate them. To compare the effects of different types of interventions, we developed a GBI typology based on the characteristics of experimental interventions as well as theoretical conceptualizations of GBI. Eligible poverty-related outcomes were classified into categories and sub-categories, to facilitate the synthesis of the individual findings. Because most of the included studies analyzed experiments conducted by other researchers, it was necessary to divide our analysis according to the "experiment" stage (i.e., design, recruitment, intervention, data collection) and the "study" stage (data analysis and reporting of results).
MAIN RESULTS
Our searches yielded 24,476 records from databases and 80 from other sources. After screening by title and abstract, the full texts of 294 potentially eligible articles were retrieved and screened, resulting in 27 included studies on 10 experiments. Eight of the experiments were RCTs, one included both an RCT site and a "saturation" site, and one used a repeated cross-sectional design. The duration ranged from one to 5 years. The control groups in all 10 experiments received "usual care" (i.e., no GBI intervention). The total number of participants was unknown because some of the studies did not report exact sample sizes. Of the studies that did, the smallest had 138 participants and the largest had 8019. The risk of bias assessments found "some concerns" for at least one domain in all 27 studies and "high risk" for at least one domain in 25 studies. The risk of bias was assessed as high in 21 studies due to attrition and in 22 studies due to analysis and reporting bias. To compare the interventions, we developed a classification framework of five GBI types, four of which were implemented in the experiments, and one that is used in new experiments now underway. The included studies reported 176 poverty-related outcomes, including one pre-defined primary outcome: food insecurity. The second primary outcome (poverty level assessed using official, national, or international measures) was not reported in any of the included studies. We classified the reported outcomes into seven categories: food insecurity (as a category), economic/material, physical health, psychological/mental health, social, educational, and individual choice/agency. Food insecurity was reported in two studies, both showing improvements (SMD = -0.57, 95% CI: -0.65 to -0.49, and SMD = -0.41, 95% CI: -0.57 to -0.26) which were not pooled because of different study designs. We conducted meta-analyses on four secondary outcomes that were reported in more than one study: subjective financial well-being, self-rated overall physical health, self-rated life satisfaction, and self-rated mental distress. Improvements were reported, except for overall physical health or if the intervention was similar to existing social assistance. The results for the remaining 170 outcomes, each reported in only one study, were summarized in tables by category and subcategory. Adverse effects were reported in some studies, but only for specific subgroups of participants, and not consistently, so these results may have been due to chance.
AUTHORS' CONCLUSIONS
The results of the included studies were difficult to synthesize because of the heterogeneity in the reported outcomes. This was due in part to poverty being multidimensional, so outcomes covered various aspects of life (economic, social, psychological, educational, agency, mental and physical health). Evidence from future studies would be easier to assess if outcomes were measured using more common, validated instruments. Based on our analysis of the included studies, a supplemental type of GBI (provided along with existing programs) may be effective in alleviating poverty-related outcomes. This approach may also be safer than a wholesale reform of existing social assistance approaches, which could have unintended consequences.
PubMed: 38887375
DOI: 10.1002/cl2.1414 -
Cortex; a Journal Devoted To the Study... May 2024Hebb repetition learning (HRL) refers to neurodevelopmental processes characterised by repeated stimulus exposure without feedback, which result in changes in behaviour...
Hebb repetition learning (HRL) refers to neurodevelopmental processes characterised by repeated stimulus exposure without feedback, which result in changes in behaviour and/or responses, e.g., long-term learning of serial order. Here, we investigate effects of HRL on serial order memory. The present research aimed to assess the reliability of new HRL measures and investigate their relationships with language and reading skills (vocabulary, grammar, word reading) in adolescents with intellectual disability (ID). A comparison group of children of similar mental age with typical development (TD) was also assessed. ID and TD groups were tested on HRL tasks, evaluating test-retest and split-half reliability. The relationship between HRL and language and reading was analysed after accounting for the influence of mental age and verbal short-term memory. The HRL tasks displayed moderate test-retest (and split-half) reliability, HRL tasks with different stimuli (verbal, visual) were related, and we identified issues with one method of HRL scoring. The planned regression analyses failed to show relationships between HRL and language/reading skills in both groups when mental age, a very strong predictor, was included. However, further exploratory regression analyses without mental age revealed HRL's predictive capabilities for vocabulary in the ID group and reading in the TD group, results which need further investigation and replication. HRL displays promise as a moderately reliable metric and exhibits varied and interpretable predictive capabilities for language and reading skills across groups.
PubMed: 38878338
DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2024.05.012 -
Aging Jun 2024Prior studies showed increased age acceleration (AgeAccel) is associated with worse cognitive function among old adults. We examine the associations of childhood,...
Prior studies showed increased age acceleration (AgeAccel) is associated with worse cognitive function among old adults. We examine the associations of childhood, adolescence and midlife cognition with AgeAccel based on DNA methylation (DNAm) in midlife. Data are from 359 participants who had cognition measured in childhood and adolescence in the Child Health and Development study, and had cognition, blood based DNAm measured during midlife in the Disparities study. Childhood cognition was measured by Raven's Progressive Matrices and Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT). Adolescent cognition was measured only by PPVT. Midlife cognition included Wechsler Test of Adult Reading (WTAR), Verbal Fluency (VF), Digit Symbol (DS). AgeAccel measures including Horvath, Hannum, PhenoAge, GrimAge and DunedinPACE were calculated from DNAm. Linear regressions adjusted for potential confounders were utilized to examine the association between each cognitive measure in relation to each AgeAccel. There are no significant associations between childhood cognition and midlife AgeAccel. A 1-unit increase in adolescent PPVT, which measures crystalized intelligence, is associated with 0.048-year decrease of aging measured by GrimAge and this association is attenuated after adjustment for adult socioeconomic status. Midlife crystalized intelligence measure WTAR is negatively associated with PhenoAge and DunedinPACE, and midlife fluid intelligence measure (DS) is negatively associated with GrimAge, PhenoAge and DunedinPACE. AgeAccel is not associated with VF in midlife. In conclusion, our study showed the potential role of cognitive functions at younger ages in the process of biological aging. We also showed a potential relationship of both crystalized and fluid intelligence with aging acceleration.
Topics: Humans; DNA Methylation; Female; Male; Adolescent; Middle Aged; Cognition; Child; Aging; Adult; Intelligence; Cognitive Aging
PubMed: 38874516
DOI: 10.18632/aging.205943 -
Acta Psychologica Jun 2024The use of glosses to aid vocabulary learning in second languages has been one of the most actively studied areas in computer-assisted language learning (CALL)...
The use of glosses to aid vocabulary learning in second languages has been one of the most actively studied areas in computer-assisted language learning (CALL) literature. To compile research articles that examine the effect of utilizing glosses on second language (L2) vocabulary learning, the present study employed a second-order meta-analysis technique. The second-order meta-analysis is a study that synthesizes and analyzes the findings of multiple meta-analyses rather than individual primary studies, providing a higher level of abstraction and overview of existing evidence. The study synthesizes the results from seven primary meta-analyses conducted between 2008 and 2023, which included 136 original studies. Results showed that the overall mean effect size for using glosses was medium (g = 0.63 for the fixed-effect size model and 0.76 for the random-effect size model). The results showed that moderators had a significantly mitigated the effects of multimedia glosses. In particular, beginner-level students benefited greatly from being exposed to multimedia glosses, resulting in a large effect size. Additionally, the recognition test tended to produce a higher effect size compared to other types of vocabulary tests. Furthermore, glossing was found to be more effective in improving vocabulary acquisition in expository texts rather than narrative texts. Moreover, single-mode glosses were reported to be more effective than multi-mode glosses. The findings indicated that in-text glosses, out-text glosses, and bottom glosses exhibited a small effect size, whereas pop-up and margin glosses demonstrated a medium effect size. Implications for language learning and suggestions for future meta-analytic research are provided.
PubMed: 38870686
DOI: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2024.104341 -
Trauma, Violence & Abuse Jun 2024It is well-known that interpersonal traumatic events can impact the physical and mental health of those indirectly exposed to the events. Less studied are populations of... (Review)
Review
It is well-known that interpersonal traumatic events can impact the physical and mental health of those indirectly exposed to the events. Less studied are populations of loved ones who have been indirectly exposed to interpersonal trauma. We conducted a scoping review to synthesize literature related to potential consequences of indirect interpersonal trauma exposure, specifically vicarious traumatization (VT) and vicarious posttraumatic growth (VPTG). We used the Joanna Briggs Institute methodology. Inclusion criteria included: (1) participants were indirectly exposed to the interpersonal trauma of a loved one in adulthood, (2) discussion of VT, VPTG, or related terms, (3) published peer-reviewed empirical journal articles, and (4) available in English. We used a three-step search strategy to find relevant articles. Keywords found from the first two steps were entered into PsycINFO, PsycArticles, PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science databases. Reference lists of the included articles were also examined. The identified articles were then screened using the inclusion and exclusion criteria. Twenty-eight articles met inclusion and exclusion criteria. Twenty-six articles referenced VT or related terms, one referenced VPTG, and one referenced vicarious trauma keywords. Results of this scoping review are summarized by definitions, measures, key findings, and knowledge gaps. Future research should focus on vocabulary management, diverse samples, and VPTG in this population, including the identification or creation of appropriate measures.
PubMed: 38868909
DOI: 10.1177/15248380241255736 -
Public Understanding of Science... Jun 2024Today, the dominant climate change discourses affirm its anthropogenic nature and the urgency for policies. However, minority discourses remain active in the worldwide...
Today, the dominant climate change discourses affirm its anthropogenic nature and the urgency for policies. However, minority discourses remain active in the worldwide debate, refining arguments beyond simple denial-as shown regarding formal/official discourses of the United States and European far-right parties. This makes it necessary to examine the public understanding of climate change in everyday, informal minority discourses, looking at how they work for broadening societal space for "quarantining" the transformative potential of climate change meanings/policies. For this, we analyze readers' comments on climate change articles from two Portuguese newspapers, drawing from the frameworks of neutralization techniques and meaning barriers. Findings show that although denial of anthropogenic climate change remains, discursive efforts concentrate on person-stigmatizing depictions of climate change actors, delegitimized as "elites" in populist vocabularies, reflecting a consistent alignment between everyday discourses and those of the United States and European official far-right. We discuss the functions this pattern may have for the growth of climate change minority positions.
PubMed: 38863437
DOI: 10.1177/09636625241254505 -
PloS One 2024The Urdu language is spoken and written on different social media platforms like Twitter, WhatsApp, Facebook, and YouTube. However, due to the lack of Urdu Language...
The Urdu language is spoken and written on different social media platforms like Twitter, WhatsApp, Facebook, and YouTube. However, due to the lack of Urdu Language Processing (ULP) libraries, it is quite challenging to identify threats from textual and sequential data on the social media provided in Urdu. Therefore, it is required to preprocess the Urdu data as efficiently as English by creating different stemming and data cleaning libraries for Urdu data. Different lexical and machine learning-based techniques are introduced in the literature, but all of these are limited to the unavailability of online Urdu vocabulary. This research has introduced Urdu language vocabulary, including a stop words list and a stemming dictionary to preprocess Urdu data as efficiently as English. This reduced the input size of the Urdu language sentences and removed redundant and noisy information. Finally, a deep sequential model based on Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) units is trained on the efficiently preprocessed, evaluated, and tested. Our proposed methodology resulted in good prediction performance, i.e., an accuracy of 82%, which is greater than the existing methods.
Topics: Language; Natural Language Processing; Humans; Social Media; Deep Learning; Internet; Machine Learning
PubMed: 38843283
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0290915