Mapping psychosocial interventions in familial colorectal cancer: a rapid systematic review

Background Approximately 5% of colorectal cancer (CRC) cases are part of a well-defined inherited genetic syndrome and up to approximately 30% of these cases have a clinically defined familial basis. Psychosocial interventions in familial colorectal cancer address aspects mainly focused on affective, cognitive and behavioural outcomes. The present review aims to systematically map out the available psychosocial interventions for individuals with a family history of CRC and describe the current state of the research. Methods An extensive electronic search was conducted to investigate the literature published until June 2020. Inclusion criteria consisted of quantitative studies published in English that explored the impact of psychosocial interventions for familial CRC, clearly defined the psychosocial intervention offered and included participants with a family history of CRC. Results The analysis included 52 articles. Genetic counselling, educational interventions, psychological interventions and multimodal interventions were identified across the studies. In terms of diagnoses, Lynch Syndrome, Familial Adenomatous Polyposis, Familial Colorectal Cancer were the main conditions included in the studies. Affective, cognitive, behavioural aspects and quality of life emerged as the most frequently explored outcomes. The studies included individuals with both personal and familial history of CRC or family history alone. Conclusions Our rapid review provides an overview of the literature exploring the impact of psychosocial interventions for familial CRC. The psychosocial interventions identified had an overwhelmingly positive impact across all types of outcomes measured. Genetic counselling appeared to be most beneficial, and this is expected as it is purposively designed to address genetic conditions. Further quantitative analysis of primary empirical research is needed to determine the efficacy and effectiveness of psychosocial interventions as well as the mechanisms through which they exert their effect.

An empirical study on entrepreneurial traits and their impact on enterprise success

Purpose Enterprise success is driven by enterprise actions, which, in turn, is influenced by entrepreneurial behaviours. Behaviours are guided by traits. Hence, it is highly likely that personality traits of entrepreneur are critical to enterprise success. This paper aims at finding the relationship between entrepreneurial traits and enterprise success, identify underlying construct and examine how successful and unsuccessful entrepreneurs differ across traits. It also attempts enterprise profiling based on these traits and test predictive validity of entrepreneurial traits on enterprise success. Design/methodology/approach In this study, 396 micro, small and medium enterprises comprising both successful and unsuccessful ones are studied together across 11 personality traits. Data was analysed using various statistical techniques like co-relation, t-test, factor analysis, cluster analysis and regression to test hypothesis and arrive at given findings. Findings This study finds there is strong positive co-relations between traits and enterprise success. It establishes that successful and unsuccessful enterprises display distinct traits and significantly differ from each other. Entrepreneurial traits affect enterprise success, and the former has significant predictive value on the later (R-squared = 0.866). Practical implications The findings have implications to entrepreneurs in relation to enriching the existing traits and inculcating new ones. Financial institutions like banks can peruse the findings and include traits and behavioural aspects in borrower selection, credit appraisal, evaluation and credit decisioning, to make it more holistic. It also generates scope for further academic research. Originality/value This study contributes to existing literature and validates existing findings. It also finds that traits are contagious in nature, together of which can be grouped to build an entrepreneurs’ traits index which exerts strong influence on enterprise success.

Low Malaria Transmission in Rosso, an Irrigated Rice-Growing Area in Mauritania

The construction of dams along the Senegal River resulted in an increase in irrigated land areas and changes in the epidemiology and transmission of water-related diseases. The objective of this study was to update epidemiological data on malaria in Rosso, one of the major Mauritanian cities along the Senegal River. Febrile patients (n = 318) were screened for malaria using a rapid diagnostic test (RDT) for malaria and microscopic examination of blood smears. Diagnosis was later confirmed by polymerase chain reaction (PCR). The mean age of 318 febrile patients was 25.1 (range 1–80 years). Only 7 (2.2%) and 2 (0.6%) had a positive RDT and thick smear, respectively. PCR confirmed the diagnosis in two Plasmodium vivax-infected patients. Most participants (198/318, 62.3%) had no recent travel history outside Rosso. The majority of the febrile patients (90%, 284/311) owned at least one insecticide-treated net (ITN). The frequency of the use of ITNs was not significantly associated with season (rainy vs. dry seasons; p = 0.9) or with the number of ITNs per household (rs = 0.07; n = 285; p = 0.19). Of 285 individuals with ITNs, only two (0.7%) with no travel history were PCR-positive for malaria. Despite the presence of mosquito breeding sites related to rice irrigation, malaria transmission in Rosso remained very low, possibly due to the high coverage and frequent use of bed nets. Regular entomological surveillance for possible changes in the prevalence of Anopheles mosquito species and their behavioural aspects should be implemented.

Behavioural Aspects of Financial Decision-Making Process of Managers in Wood-Processing Enterprises

The study is focused on behavioural aspects in the financial decision-making process of wood-processing enterprises. The main aim was to map this topic and determine the key behavioural factors that lead management to make mistakes. Primary data on this issue were obtained from an empirical survey. The empirical survey was conducted through a questionnaire that contains questions focused on behavioural decision-making aspects. Using statistical methods, three key behavioural factors were determined. By selecting the given behavioural factors, it was established that love, hate, and sadness are the key factors that influence management behaviour and decision-making. In the real business environment, two managers working in a wood processing enterprise were chosen; they were willing to provide us with a review and opinion on the results of the survey. By analysing all the data, it has been concluded that, even though managers are trying to direct their behaviour and activities, they often do not notice the influence of these factors, and sometimes they are unable to make decisions. The managers should be able to direct their behaviour and activities, to provide self-control and take into consideration the fact that these factors are always present. Results determine the key and systematically occurring errors in the financial decision-making process, caused by the influence of the human factor. We have developed a model for activating the three key behavioural factors applied in the financial decision-making process as a tool that can help company managers not to make the wrong decisions.

The Influence of External Stimuli on Impulsive Buying Behaviour

The aim of current study is to critically examine impulse buying behaviour of customers through the lens of external stimuli. The current study provides a plethora of evidences to extend our knowledge about the behavioural aspects of consumers and key factors of buying decision. The current study looked into External Stimuli through sub factors such as Store Environment, Income Level, Window Display, Credit Card and Visual merchandising to examine their significance on impulse buying. For finding the correlation and interconnectedness of impulsive buying with the above-mentioned factors, we collected primary data through questionnaire survey, which was then analysed using quantitative analysis method. The findings of our study suggest that Store Environment and Income level are highly influential on impulsive buying behaviour whereas the use of credit card has the least impact on impulsive buying behaviour.

On the dynamics and feasibility of transferred inference for diagnosis of invasive ductal carcinoma: A perspective

It is generally noticed that increasing the number of convolutional layers in generic image classification procedures proves to be detrimental to model performance in terms of validation accuracy and loss. Apart from vanilla CNNs, we have state-of-the-art (SOTA) architectures such as ResNet50 (and its variants) which show that through the use of skip-connections, higher performance metrics are attainable through deeper architectures. However, most evaluative metrics converge on a log scale as we go deeper with diminishing gradient of the metrics' curves. Given these two contrasting speculations, in this paper, we implement various vanilla and SOTA CNNs for the diagnosis of one of the most common forms of breast cancer - invasive ductal carcinoma (IDC) - to examine and understand the feasibility of implementation of SOTA CNNs through transferred weights when juxtaposed with vanilla CNNs (and LeNet-5) of varying configurations in terms of their performance metrics and other parameters. In this paper, we solve the dual-objective of studying behavioural aspects of avant-garde CNN models (more specifically, VGG16, VGG19, ResNet50, ResNet50V2, MobileNetV2, and DenseNet121) and proper diagnosis of IDC through intermediate neural activations to critically evaluate and theorize the performance of different models. We notice that among all the models, only VGG16, VGG19, LeNet-5 and a selected vanilla CNN through an optimization procedure were the ones to attain the best metrics, shared amongst them.

Academics’ Perceptions on the Factors Affecting Strategic Changes: The Case of an Australian University

Over three decades, a number of external and internal factors that are linked to the political and economic environment have influenced Australian universities to adopt strategies and management styles similar to any other business organisation. The shifts in the strategic focus of the universities have been reflected through their policies and governance at different levels of the organisations. However, there is a need for understanding from different levels’ staff perceptions on whether they equally perceive the changes as legitimate. Based on a social constructionist approach, utilising the intellectual merits of Institutional Theory, this paper draws on the in-depth interview of three levels of staff of an Australian university to understand their perceptions on the impact of major influential factor(s) responsible for strategic changes in their operating environment. The study finds that academics at different levels carry a mix of attitudes towards identifying the major influential factors, not by its merit but rather the way the top managements have implemented the changes within the organisation. The study also finds that the strategy implementation that is based on the new business model and adopted by the University has not been positively accepted by the operational level academics as it conflicts with their traditional values. The perception gaps at different levels identified in the study would help management in future strategy development and the implementation process with a stronger focus on the behavioural aspects of change.

Social phobia and addictive behaviours in adolescents

Adolescence is the age of discordance: abandonment of ideas and feelings, perpetual becoming, eternal change, everything presupposes contradiction. It is the age of speeds and disappointments. Pessimism alternates with enthusiasm for a new idea or for a noble cause, hence the affective ambivalence. This paper aims to identify some behavioural aspects and personality traits of adolescents of two categories, adolescents from two-parent families and those from single-parent families. To verify the work hypothesis, we applied the Scale for assessing adolescent disorders - short form, the sample population includes 90 adolescents who are part of single-parent and two-parent families, 45 male subjects and 45 female subjects. Based on the results there is a significant difference between adolescents from biparental families and adolescents from monoparental families, in terms of generalized anxiety, substance addiction and eating disorder. People with high levels of anxiety are often convinced that they will act in the wrong way or that someone else will judge them. Keywords: social phobia, addictive behaviors, adolescents, abandonment, feelings

Behavioural Aspects of Office Space Structures in the City: The Case of Warsaw’s Business Districts

Agglomeration and urbanisation externalities accelerate the concentration of commercial activities in the urban space and the creation of business districts. As a result, besides the usual central business district (CBD), large cities also have more recent, peripheral, and specialised secondary business districts (SBDs). There is little substantial research on the formation of SBDs in rapidly globalising, semi-peripheral locations, especially in post-socialist metropolises of Central and Eastern Europe. This includes Warsaw, Poland, which is being transformed into an emerging global metropolis. The article aims to determine the differences between the CBD and the SBD in Warsaw in terms of their attractiveness to companies and employees and the spatial behaviours of employees, especially in terms of transport and shopping. The research hypotheses indicate the differences between the two districts in terms of the type of agglomeration economies, transport accessibility, and components of the competitive advantage, as well as the characteristics of companies in those districts. The data are from a survey conducted in 2017–2018 among companies and their employees in both business districts, and they are analysed using basic statistical techniques and discriminatory analysis. The results confirmed there are significant differences between the two Warsaw business areas, mainly in terms of their transport accessibility and urbanisation externalities. In terms of transport, there is a greater role for public transport and rail in the CBD and for motorway and airport proximity in the SBD. Urbanisation externalities are significantly diminished by the traffic congestion in the SBD. The study also revealed that the development of commercial areas in Warsaw—a post-socialist city with a neoliberal model of spatial planning—follows only in some aspects the spatial patterns of business areas in other Western European metropolises.

Ectoedemia argyropeza (Zeller, 1839) sur Peuplier Tremble : traits de comportement inférés à partir de la distribution des traces d’activités subsistant sur les feuilles-hôtes (Lepidoptera, Nepticulidae)

Ectoedemia argyropeza on Aspen leaves: deciphering retrospectively some behavioural traits from the distribution of traces of the insect activities subsisting on host-leaves (Lepidoptera, Nepticulidae). Despite their usually small size, endotrophic insects —especially those whose larvae are mining into their host-leaves— exhibit patterns of behaviour that are often more elaborate than what is usually seen in many ectotrophic herbivorous insects. However, since it is generally difficult to capture properly these behaviours in the field, precisely due to the small size of these insects, it turns out to be more convenient attempting to uncover retrospectively some of these behaviours on the basis of their resulting traces which subsist on the host-leaves. In order to be able to infer reliable information from this retrospective approach, the examination of a substantial number of host leaves and the support of appropriate statistical tests are required. The present study concerns a species of microlepidoptera, Ectoedemia argyropeza, whose caterpillars are exclusively mining the leaves of Aspen (Populus tremula) and which is still further distinguished, in a remarkable manner, by the induction of a preliminary galling (“cecidian”) development stage. This unusual combination of life traits contributes to enrich the insect’s behavioural repertoire and therefore offers a more promising field of investigation. For this species, I more particularly focus on the way the artefacts resulting from the insect activities are distributed spatially, on (or in) the host leaf, namely: (i) the spatial distribution of eggs deposited on the host-leaf petiole, (ii) the hierarchy of preferential positioning of the caterpillar corridor in the section of the petiole, hypertrophied by the cecidogenic reaction, (iii) the hierarchy of preferential locations of mines in the host-leaf blade. Were also tested, on the one hand, the existence (or not) of paired relationships between each of the three categories of distributions mentioned above and, on the other hand, the degree of conformation of each of these different distributions to the bilateral symmetry of the leaf support. The behavioural aspects that can be tentatively inferred from the above information are subsequently discussed.