Increasing the Utility of the Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality–Lexical Rating Scale (CAPP-LRS): Instrument Adaptation and Simplification

The Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality–Lexical Rating Scale (CAPP-LRS) is a self-report instrument designed to index psychopathy according to the CAPP psychopathy framework. Developed with the expressed goal of advancing the state of knowledge regarding the specific features of psychopathy, the CAPP model and associated instruments have garnered increasing attention and support in the field. Despite the conceptual strength of the CAPP model, the advanced lexical structure of its primary research tool (the CAPP-LRS) has led researchers to question the utility of the instrument for use with some populations of interest (e.g., forensic/correctional and adolescent/young adult samples). The aim of the present work was to address this issue by creating a lexically simplified, though functionally equivalent, version of the CAPP-LRS to increase accessibility to critically relevant populations. A set of two studies ( N = 602) describes the adaptation protocol and the initial validation of the modified instrument.

A Morita Cancellation Problem

We study a Morita-equivalent version of the Zariski cancellation problem.

A parsimonious model for an analysis of parent-of-origin effects on beef traits in dual-purpose Simmental

Genomic imprinting is a term applied to an epigenetic phenomenon where alleles are fully or partially inactivated depending on their parental origin. The relevance of this kind of parent-of-origin effects (POEs) for agriculturally important traits is widely known. A model (imprinting model) with a transmitting ability (TA) as sire and a TA as dam has been proposed that provides an estimate of the imprinting variance, whether the allelic inactivation is maternal, paternal, full or partial. Although the model can be used in a reduced version, large data sets still prevent the imprinting variance from being estimated. To further reduce the size of the equation system, we developed a parsimonious imprinting model with genetic effects for male ancestors only, as the TA as dam is replaced by her father’s TA. This parsimonious model was applied to 1 366 160 Simmental fattening bulls with slaughter data available on killing out percentage, net BW gain, EUROP class and fat score in a linear and generalised linear version. The pedigrees contained up to 2 637 761 ancestors. Proportion of the total genetic variance attributed to POEs ranged between 8.6% and 17.0%. On average, the maternal gamete accounted for the greater proportion of the imprinting variance. An equivalent version of the parsimonious model facilitated the estimation of POEs with reliabilities ranging between zero and 0.97.

Cross-cultural validation of the Prosthesis Evaluation Questionnaire in vascular amputees fitted with prostheses in Spain

Background:The lack of specific prosthetic-related outcome instruments for Spanish amputees must be addressed.Objective:To elaborate a culturally equivalent version of the Prosthesis Evaluation Questionnaire in the Spanish language.Study design:Cross-cultural questionnaire validation.Methods:Two-step process for cultural adaptation: forward and backward translations of English original and Spanish translated versions; assessment of both construct and criterion validity and reliability in a group of vascular amputees.Results:A total of 61 patients were recruited, 44 men (72.1%) and 17 women (27.9%), with a median age of 71.1 years (standard deviation: 7.7 years; range: 51–87 years). In the Prosthesis Evaluation Questionnaire–Spanish, the lowest scores were for gait and frustration, and the highest scores were for noise and stump health. Internal consistency of the questionnaire was acceptable (>0.70) for four of the scales used in the Prosthesis Evaluation Questionnaire but poor (<0.50) for the scales relating to appearance and stump health. Correlations with the quality-of-life levels as measured by the Short Form–36 were positive and mostly significant.Conclusion:Prosthesis Evaluation Questionnaire–Spanish could assess the quality of life in patients who have undergone vascular amputations and then been fitted with a prosthetic limb. The questionnaire shows adequate criteria validity when compared with other instruments for measuring quality of life.Clinical relevanceThe Prosthesis Evaluation Questionnaire–Spanish could be a valid and reliable instrument for assessing adaptation to prostheses in vascular amputees. The questionnaire adds information relevant to the patient and the physician and may identify cases with poor expected adaptation to the prosthesis.

Translation of the WHO CIDI into Bahasa Melayu

The Singapore Mental Health Survey was undertaken to establish the prevalence of mental disorders in Singapore. This necessitated translation of several modules of the WHO's Composite International Diagnostic Interview (CIDI) into Bahasa Melayu. The aim in translation was to achieve a conceptually equivalent version to the original instrument. The translation procedure was a four-step process: 1) forward translation, 2) expert panel review, 3) pre-test and cognitive interview and 4) development of the final version. The translation procedure was effective in identifying and resolving translation problems, and adapting the language of the instrument to suit the local Malay-speaking population. We recommend this four-step process for future studies to attain a fair representation of minority groups in nation-wide studies.

Building Language Resources for Emotion Analysis in Bengali

Rapidly growing Web users from multilingual communities focus the attention to improve the multilingual search engines on the basis of sentiment or emotion and provide the opportunities to build resources for languages other than English. At present, there is no such corpus or lexicon available for emotion analysis in Indian languages, especially for Bengali, the sixth most popular language in the world, second in India, and the national language of Bangladesh. Thus, in the chapter, the authors describe the preparation of an emotion corpus and lexicon in Bengali. The emotion lexicon, termed Bengali WordNet Affect has been developed from its equivalent version in English by traversing the steps of expansion, translation, and sense disambiguation. In addition to emotion lexicon, a Bengali blog corpus for emotion analysis has also been developed by manual annotators with detailed linguistic expressions such as emotional phrases, intensities, emotion holder, emotion topic and target span, and sentential emotion tags.

Biomimetic surfaces with controlled direction-dependent adhesion

We propose a novel design of a biomimetic micro-structured surface, which exhibits controlled strongly direction-dependent adhesion properties. The micro-system consists of parallel elastic wall-like structures covered by a thin layer. Numerical calculations have been carried out to study the adhesive properties of the proposed system and to provide design criteria with the aim of obtaining optimized geometries. A numerically equivalent version of the double cantilever beam fracture experiment is, then, simulated by means of finite element analysis to investigate the anisotropic adhesion of the structure. We find that, because of inherent crack trapping properties of these types of structures, the wall-like geometry allows us to strongly enhance adhesion when the detachment direction is perpendicular to the walls. On the other hand, when the detachment occurs parallel to the walls, the system shows low adhesion. This controlled direction-dependent adhesive property of the proposed structure solves one of the key problems of biomimetic adhesive surfaces, which usually show very strong adhesion, even larger than biological systems, but are not suitable for object manipulation and locomotion, as detachment always occurs at high loads and cannot be controlled.