Transdiagnostic clinical staging for childhood mental health: An adjunctive tool for classifying internalizing and externalizing syndromes that emerge in children aged 5-11 years

Clinical staging is now recognized as a key tool for facilitating innovation in personalized and preventative mental health care. It places a strong emphasis on the salience of indicated prevention, early intervention, and secondary prevention of major mental disorders. By contrast to established models for major mood and psychotic syndromes that emerge after puberty, developments in clinical staging for childhood-onset disorders lags significantly behind. In this article, criteria for a transdiagnostic staging model for those internalizing and externalizing disorders that emerge in childhood is presented. This sits alongside three putative pathophysiological profiles (developmental, circadian, and anxious-arousal) that may underpin these common illness trajectories. Given available evidence, we argue that it is now timely to develop a transdiagnostic staging model for childhood-onset syndromes. It is further argued that a transdiagnostic staging model has the potential to capture more precisely the dimensional, fluctuating developmental patterns of illness progression of childhood psychopathology. Given potential improvements in modelling etiological processes, and delivering more personalized interventions, transdiagnostic clinical staging for childhood holds much promise for assisting to improve outcomes. We finish by presenting an agenda for research in developments of transdiagnostic clinical staging for childhood mental health.

Personal Values & Decision-Making Biases

Decision-making is understood to be influenced by genetic and environmental factors related to need, as are personal values. Personal values are a component of personality known to influence decision-making in agreement with the circular structure of the Schwartz (1992) system. We set out to explore whether personal values also exert complementary linear patterns of influence on heuristics and performance in fluid intelligence and creativity tests. Such patterns are predicted by an evolutionary theory that proposes the influence of values described by Schwartz (1992) evolve sequentially and incrementally in living systems, internalising the schema of a pre-existing system of universal equivalents. Testing N=1317 individuals with challenges derived from Kahneman and Tversky and others, we found values exerted both circular and linear influences on intuitive and rational decision-making. These were apparent in overall value/response correlation patterns, and in the performance of individuals allocated to linear, values-based, quasi-Maslowian (1943) motivational types. Performance in fluid intelligence and creativity tests most strongly betrayed linear, developmental patterns of influence. In relation to a Bayesian inference challenge, tentative support was also forthcoming for the hypothesis that those most likely to be subject to values-related conflicts would be most likely to avoid giving erroneous intuitive responses by engaging rational system 2 thinking (Stanovich & West, 2000). This suggests values may also play a role in mediating between rational and irrational systems of thinking. These findings extend our understanding of the role values play in individual decision-making, and by extension, their importance in organizational and societal decision-making.

Crowds, Police and Provocations: Temporal Patterns of Rioting in Britain, 1800–1939

This essay develops an original, temporal approach to the study of rioting. It uses a catalogue of 414 riots from 19th- and early 20th-century Britain to identify several common developmental patterns: (1) riots often begin with provocation, intervention by the police or routines that license violence; (2) while often short-lived, riots can also be linked by cycles of revenge and the feedback loop between action and identity; (3) the state’s monopoly of organised violence was often decisive in bringing riots to an end. These findings reveal significant limits to the explanatory power of two widely used concepts in this area: triggers and identity. More interestingly, they show that this power varies meaningfully over time. I therefore argue for a properly historicised theory of rioting, drawing attention to two key sites of historical change: the norms and traditions which govern public violence, and the state’s monopoly of force.

Fluency development in an EFL setting: A one-semester study

Language learning activities involving time-pressured repetition of similar content have been shown to facilitate improvements in fluency. However, concerns have been voiced about whether these gains might be offset by reduced levels of grammatical accuracy. This descriptive study tracked the oral proficiency of 32 Japanese university students enrolled in English as a foreign language (EFL) classes over one academic semester during which they regularly completed 3/2/1 fluency development activities. Measures of complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) were analysed to investigate whether any developmental patterns could be identified. The results indicated that over the semester, the students made small, but significant gains in two fluency measures, the mean length of pause and the phonation/time ratio. Despite the relatively small size of the gains, expert ratings of perceived fluency suggested that these fluency improvements were detectable to the human ear. Furthermore, a significant relationship emerged between three of the four CAF measures over the semester. These results suggest that the activities moderately impacted students’ speaking fluency without negatively affecting accuracy or complexity levels; however, further longitudinal research is needed to determine which factors might influence this development, as class performance measures did not account for any of the variation detected.

Development of algorithm simulating spatial fold change of cell signaling for pattern formation in zebrafish

Embryos develop robust spatiotemporal patterns by encoding and interpreting biological signals in real time. Developmental patterns often scale with body or tissue size even when total cell number, cell size or growth rate are changed. A striking example of patterning is the segmentation of somites — the precursors of vertebral column. Despite decade-long efforts, how positional information for segmentation is encoded by cell signaling remained elusive. To address this fundamental question, we studied a novel zebrafish tail explant model that recapitulated the scaling of somite sizes with the length of unsegmented tissue in growing intact embryos. This paper provides an algorithm written in MATLAB as well as Python and finally finding a way to write an efficient algorithm to be able to answer the question described above. Information encoding by spatial fold-change of cell signaling is a remarkable strategy that could be utilized for engineering precisely patterned tissues or organs. We also discuss the limitations of simulations performed using MATLAB with performance decreasing with the large data sets. So, we tried to analyze the factors that impacted the performance of the algorithm. Finally, we tried to answer questions regarding the language selection in which a simulation method can be written efficiently.