A Typology of Familicide Perpetrators in Australia

The murder of family members is one of the most difficult crimes to understand. This study uses Shye's action systems framework combined with multivariate data analysis to test the hypothesis that different forms of familicide will reflect the four states an action system can take, namely: Integrative, Expressive, Conservative and Adaptive. A multidimensional scaling analysis (MDS) was performed on 54 crime scene variables describing 104 cases of intra-familial homicide. The analysis revealed four distinct modes of functioning, which provided tentative support for Shye's action system. Each of the four modes had distinct associations with perpetrator characteristics. The Expressive and Integrative modes were associated with Cluster B personality traits, and criminal and substance use histories. The Adaptive mode was associated with trauma histories, mood disorders, and personality disorder traits. The Conservative theme was associated with trauma histories and psychotic disorders. Implications of findings for risk assessment and intervention are discussed.

What Is Meditation? Proposing an Empirically Derived Classification System

Meditation is an umbrella term, which subsumes a huge number of diverse practices. It is still unclear how these practices can be classified in a reasonable way. Earlier proposals have struggled to do justice to the diversity of meditation techniques. To help in solving this issue, we used a novel bottom-up procedure to develop a comprehensive classification system for meditation techniques. In previous studies, we reduced 309 initially identified techniques to the 20 most popular ones. In the present study, 100 experienced meditators were asked to rate the similarity of the selected 20 techniques. Using multidimensional scaling, we found two orthogonal dimensions along which meditation techniques could be classified: activation and amount of body orientation. These dimensions emphasize the role of embodied cognition in meditation. Within these two dimensions, seven main clusters emerged: mindful observation, body-centered meditation, visual concentration, contemplation, affect-centered meditation, mantra meditation, and meditation with movement. We conclude there is no "meditation" as such, but there are rather different groups of techniques that might exert diverse effects. These groups call into question the common division into "focused attention" and "open-monitoring" practices. We propose a new embodied classification system and encourage researchers to evaluate this classification system through comparative studies.

Evolutionary networks from RADseq loci point to hybrid origins of Medicago carstiensis and Medicago cretacea

PREMISE

Although hybridization has played an important role in the evolution of many plant species, phylogenetic reconstructions that include hybridizing lineages have been historically constrained by the available models and data. Restriction-site-associated DNA sequencing (RADseq) has been a popular sequencing technique for the reconstruction of hybridization in the next-generation sequencing era. However, the utility of RADseq for the reconstruction of complex evolutionary networks has not been thoroughly investigated. Conflicting phylogenetic relationships in the genus Medicago have been mainly attributed to hybridization, but the specific hybrid origins of taxa have not been yet clarified.

METHODS

We obtained new molecular data from diploid species of Medicago section Medicago using single-digest RADseq to reconstruct evolutionary networks from gene trees, an approach that is computationally tractable with data sets that include several species and complex hybridization patterns.

RESULTS

Our analyses revealed that assembly filters to exclusively select a small set of loci with high phylogenetic information led to the most-divergent network topologies. Conversely, alternative clustering thresholds or filters on the number of samples per locus had a lower impact on networks. A strong hybridization signal was detected for M. carstiensis and M. cretacea, while signals were less clear for M. rugosa, M. rhodopea, M. suffruticosa, M. marina, M. scutellata, and M. sativa.

CONCLUSIONS

Complex network reconstructions from RADseq gene trees were not robust under variations of the assembly parameters and filters. But when the most-divergent networks were discarded, all remaining analyses consistently supported a hybrid origin for M. carstiensis and M. cretacea.

On the Complexity Analysis and Visualization of Musical Information

This paper considers several distinct mathematical and computational tools, namely complexity, dimensionality-reduction, clustering, and visualization techniques, for characterizing music. Digital representations of musical works of four artists are analyzed by means of distinct indices and visualized using the multidimensional scaling technique. The results are then correlated with the artists' musical production. The patterns found in the data demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach for assessing the complexity of musical information.

DISSEQT-DIStribution-based modeling of SEQuence space Time dynamics

Rapidly evolving microbes are a challenge to model because of the volatile, complex, and dynamic nature of their populations. We developed the DISSEQT pipeline (DIStribution-based SEQuence space Time dynamics) for analyzing, visualizing, and predicting the evolution of heterogeneous biological populations in multidimensional genetic space, suited for population-based modeling of deep sequencing and high-throughput data. The pipeline is openly available on GitHub (https://github.com/rasmushenningsson/DISSEQT.jl, accessed 23 June 2019) and Synapse (https://www.synapse.org/#!Synapse: syn11425758, accessed 23 June 2019), covering the entire workflow from read alignment to visualization of results. Our pipeline is centered around robust dimension and model reduction algorithms for analysis of genotypic data with additional capabilities for including phenotypic features to explore dynamic genotype-phenotype maps. We illustrate its utility and capacity with examples from evolving RNA virus populations, which present one of the highest degrees of genetic heterogeneity within a given population found in nature. Using our pipeline, we empirically reconstruct the evolutionary trajectories of evolving populations in sequence space and genotype-phenotype fitness landscapes. We show that while sequence space is vastly multidimensional, the relevant genetic space of evolving microbial populations is of intrinsically low dimension. In addition, evolutionary trajectories of these populations can be faithfully monitored to identify the key minority genotypes contributing most to evolution. Finally, we show that empirical fitness landscapes, when reconstructed to include minority variants, can predict phenotype from genotype with high accuracy.

A New Approach for Functional Connectivity via Alignment of Blood Oxygen Level-Dependent Signals

Due to technological advances, spatially indexed objects, such as blood oxygen level-dependent time series or electroencephalography data, are commonly observed across different scientific disciplines. Such object data are typically high dimensional and therefore challenging to handle. We propose a new approach for spatially indexed object data by mapping their spatial locations to a targeted one-dimensional interval so objects that are similar are placed near each other on the new target space. The proposed alignment not only provides a visualization tool for such complex object data but also facilitates a new way to study brain functional connectivity. Specifically, we introduce a new concept of path length to quantify the functional connectivity and a new community detection method. The advantages of the proposed methods are illustrated by simulations and in a study of functional connectivity for Alzheimer's disease.

Complexity Analysis of Escher's Art

Art is the output of a complex system based on the human spirit and driven by several inputs that embed social, cultural, economic and technological aspects of a given epoch. A solid quantitative analysis of art poses considerable difficulties and reaching assertive conclusions is a formidable challenge. In this paper, we adopt complexity indices, dimensionality-reduction and visualization techniques for studying the evolution of Escher's art. Grayscale versions of 457 artworks are analyzed by means of complexity indices and represented using the multidimensional scaling technique. The results are correlated with the distinct periods of Escher's artistic production. The time evolution of the complexity and the emergent patterns demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach for a quantitative characterization of art.

Emotional Tears Communicate Sadness but Not Excessive Emotions Without Other Contextual Knowledge

Contexts of face perception are diverse. They range from the social environment to body postures, from the expresser’s gaze direction to the tone of voice. In extending the research on contexts of face perception, we investigated people’s perception of tears on a face. The act of shedding tears is often perceived as an expression of sad feelings aroused by experiencing loss, disappointment, or helplessness. Alternatively, tears may also represent the excessive intensity of any emotion, such as extreme fear during an unexpected encounter with a giant bear and extreme happiness when you win a competition. Investigating these competing interpretations of tears, we found that the addition of tears to different facial expressions made the expressions conceptually closer to sad expressions. In particular, the results of the similarity analysis showed that, after the addition of tears, patterns of ratings for anger, fear, disgust, and neutral facial expressions became more similar to those for sadness expressions. The effect of tears on the ratings of basic emotions and their patterns in facial expressions are discussed.

Perceptual Differences Between Low-Frequency Analog and Pulsatile Stimulation as Shown by Single- and Multidimensional Scaling

Cochlear-implant users who have experienced both analog and pulsatile sound coding strategies often have strong preferences for the sound quality of one over the other. This suggests that analog and pulsatile stimulation may provide different information or sound quality to an implant listener. It has been well documented that many implant listeners both prefer and perform better with multichannel analog than multichannel pulsatile strategies, although the reasons for these differences remain unknown. Here, we examine the perceptual differences between analog and pulsatile stimulation on a single electrode. A multidimensional scaling task, analyzed across two dimensions, suggested that pulsatile stimulation was perceived to be considerably different from analog stimulation. Two associated tasks using single-dimensional scaling showed that analog stimulation was perceived to be less Clean on average than pulsatile stimulation and that the perceptual differences were not related to pitch. In a follow-up experiment, it was determined that the perceptual differences between analog and pulsatile stimulation were not dependent on the interpulse gap present in pulsatile stimulation. Although the results suggest that there is a large perceptual difference between analog and pulsatile stimulation, further work is needed to determine the nature of these differences.

Examining item content validity using property fitting analysis via multidimensional scaling

OBJECTIVES

Multiple-item measuring instruments are frequently used in a wide range of disciplines for the purpose of research in substantive areas. The quality of items in these instruments determine to a large extent whether the results are trustworthy. In this paper, we suggested to use property fitting analysis to evaluate the appropriateness of items content validity based on explicit item property criteria.

METHODS

Using Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression scale as an example, item property fitting analyses via multidimensional scaling model was used to quantitatively evaluate the properties of items based on rating data from 12 counselors.

RESULTS

The results of the analyses indicated that using explicit item property criteria to select items for subsequent psychometric analyses improved the item quality in terms of reliability and factor structure.

CONCLUSIONS

Item property fitting analysis seemed to provide the researcher a viable quantitative method when evaluating item content validity.

Entropy Analysis of Soccer Dynamics

This paper adopts the information and fractional calculus tools for studying the dynamics of a national soccer league. A soccer league season is treated as a complex system (CS) with a state observable at discrete time instants, that is, at the time of rounds. The CS state, consisting of the goals scored by the teams, is processed by means of different tools, namely entropy, mutual information and Jensen–Shannon divergence. The CS behavior is visualized in 3-D maps generated by multidimensional scaling. The points on the maps represent rounds and their relative positioning allows for a direct interpretation of the results.

A comparative analysis of mathematical methods for homogeneity estimation of the Lithuanian population

Background

Population genetic structure is one of the most important population genetic parameters revealing its demographic features. The aim of this study was to evaluate the homogeneity of the  Lithuanian population on the  basis of the  genome-wide genotyping data. The comparative analysis of three methods - multidimensional scaling, principal components, and principal coordinates analysis - to visualize multidimensional genetics data was performed. The results of visualization (mapping images) are also presented.

Materials and methods

The  data set consisted of 425 samples from six ethnolinguistic groups of the Lithuanian population. Genomic DNA was extracted from whole venous blood using either the phenol-chloroform extraction method or the automated DNA extraction platform TECAN Freedom EVO. Genotyping was performed at the Department of Human and Medical Genetics, Institute of Biomedical Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, Vilnius University, Lithuania, with the Illumina HumanOmniExpress-12 v1.1 and the Infinium OmniExpress-24. For the estimation of homogeneity of the Lithuanian population, PLINK data file was obtained using PLINK v1.07 program. The  Past3 software was used to visualize the genotype data with multidimensional scaling and principal coordinates methods. The  SmartPCA from EIGENSOFT 7.2.1 program was used in the principal component analysis to determine the population structure.

Conclusions

Methods of multidimensional scaling, principal coordinate, and principal component for the genetic structure of the  Lithuanian population were investigated and compared. The principal coordinate and principal component methods can be used for genotyping data visualization, since any essential differences in the results obtained were not observed and compared to multidimensional scaling. The  Lithuanian population is homogenous whereas the points are strongly close when we use the principal coordinates or principal component methods.

The first Arabic version of the Actual Scope of Nursing Practice Scale: Psychometric evaluation

AIM

We examined the validity and reliability of nursing activity levels of complexity in the first Arabic version of the Actual Scope of Nursing Practice Questionnaire.

BACKGROUND

Nurse executives need valid and reliable data on the scope and complexity of nursing practice to make decisions about cost-effective and safe deployment of the nursing workforce. We translated the English version of the Actual Scope of Nursing Practice Questionnaire into Arabic for use in Lebanon and the eastern Mediterranean region.

METHODS

Data were collected from a national sample of bedside nurses in Lebanon in which 3,157 questionnaires were returned for analysis. We used multidimensional scaling, hierarchical cluster analysis, and confirmatory factor analysis to examine the Arabic Actual Scope of Nursing Practice Questionnaire levels of nursing complexity.

RESULTS

Multidimensional scaling analysis and hierarchical cluster analysis confirmed the unidimensionality of the Arabic Actual Scope of Nursing Practice Questionnaire. Confirmatory factor analysis produced essentially the same fit statistics for the unidimensional model and three-dimensional models of item complexity.

CONCLUSION

The Arabic Actual Scope of Nursing Practice Questionnaire is a valid and reliable unidimensional measure of nursing complexity.

IMPLICATION FOR NURSING MANAGEMENT

Nurse executives and hospital managers in Lebanon and the eastern Mediterranean region can use total and mean Arabic Actual Scope of Nursing Practice Questionnaire scores as aids when making decisions about nursing workforce deployment.

Visualizing Psychological Networks: A Tutorial in R

Networks have emerged as a popular method for studying mental disorders. Psychopathology networks consist of aspects (e.g., symptoms) of mental disorders (nodes) and the connections between those aspects (edges). Unfortunately, the visual presentation of networks can occasionally be misleading. For instance, researchers may be tempted to conclude that nodes that appear close together are highly related, and that nodes that are far apart are less related. Yet this is not always the case. In networks plotted with force-directed algorithms, the most popular approach, the spatial arrangement of nodes is not easily interpretable. However, other plotting approaches can render node positioning interpretable. We provide a brief tutorial on several methods including multidimensional scaling, principal components plotting, and eigenmodel networks. We compare the strengths and weaknesses of each method, noting how to properly interpret each type of plotting approach.

A Cosine Similarity-Based Method to Infer Variability of Chromatin Accessibility at the Single-Cell Level

Cellular identity between generations of developing cells is propagated through the epigenome particularly via the accessible parts of the chromatin. It is now possible to measure chromatin accessibility at single-cell resolution using single-cell assay for transposase accessible chromatin (scATAC-seq), which can reveal the regulatory variation behind the phenotypic variation. However, single-cell chromatin accessibility data are sparse, binary, and high dimensional, leading to unique computational challenges. To overcome these difficulties, we developed PRISM, a computational workflow that quantifies cell-to-cell chromatin accessibility variation while controlling for technical biases. PRISM is a novel multidimensional scaling-based method using angular cosine distance metrics coupled with distance from the spatial centroid. PRISM takes differences in accessibility at each genomic region between single cells into account. Using data generated in our lab and publicly available, we showed that PRISM outperforms an existing algorithm, which relies on the aggregate of signal across a set of genomic regions. PRISM showed robustness to noise in cells with low coverage for measuring chromatin accessibility. Our approach revealed the previously undetected accessibility variation where accessible sites differ between cells but the total number of accessible sites is constant. We also showed that PRISM, but not an existing algorithm, can find suppressed heterogeneity of accessibility at CTCF binding sites. Our updated approach uncovers new biological results with profound implications on the cellular heterogeneity of chromatin architecture.

The structure of the MHC-SF in a large American sample: contributions of multidimensional scaling

Background: Multidimensional scaling (MDS) is a data reduction tool that produces a visual representation of the association between variables to facilitate the identification of underlying concepts and structures. This technique has been underused in well-being research.Aim: This study used MDS to unravel the underlying concepts and structures in the 14 items of the Mental Health Continuum-Short Form (MHC-SF).Methods: A sample of 22 606 American students was used. Two-dimensional MDS plots were generated for the entire sample, and separately for each gender group.Results: MDS yielded three non-overlapping clusters of the items that correspond to the three hypothesized well-being concepts measured by the MHC-SF. The results also showed that the items vary along the two underlying dimensions of personal vs. social, and hedonic vs. eudaimonic. The same general structure was found in both females and males.Conclusion: These results supplement and extend the findings of prior factor analytic studies on the MHC-SF by showing that the items of the scale can be distinguished along two separate continua. The results also support the tripartite model of mental well-being.

Profiling children's emotion regulation behaviours

Callear, Harvey, and Bimler (2016, International Journal of Behavioral Development, 41, 456) organized children's emotion regulation behaviours into a coherent structure. However, further investigation is needed to identify core patterns of these emotion regulation behaviours. To identify clusters and prototypal constellations of emotion regulation behaviours, the 85 behavioural items comprising the Children's Emotion Regulation Inventory (ChERI) were ranked by 151 parents in order of applicability, using an ordinal sorting procedure (Method of Successive Sorts). Responses were aggregated in empirical scales, for classification of the cases using hierarchical and k-means clustering. The scales were based on nine key 'hotspots' of children's emotion regulation behaviours, interpreted as Outward Engagement, Inward or Somatic Focus, Disengagement, Disruptive, Impulsive/Labile, Social Connectedness/Compliance, Generating Closeness/Intimacy, Establishing Order and Generating Disorder. Five summary styles of children's emotion regulation emerged and are characterized on those scales. These hotspots and styles provide guidance to clinicians, parents, teachers, and other invested adults to assess and support children's emotional development. Statement of contribution What is already known on this subject? Measurements of children's emotion regulation predominantly focus on internal processes and/or isolated expressions of emotion regulation behaviours. Research detailing anger and anxiety emotion regulation styles exists (e.g., Carthy, Horesh, Apter, & Gross, 2010, Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment, 32, 23; Zalewski, Lengua, Wilson, Trancik, & Bazinet, 2011, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 110, 141). Callear, Harvey, and Bimler (2016, International Journal of Behavioral Development, 41, 456) developed the Children's Emotion Regulation Inventory to identify children's observable emotion regulation strategies. What does this study add? Research does not investigate which clusters of children's emotion regulation behaviours are most commonly exhibited and nor does it investigate emotion regulation behavioural styles. Examines how children's emotion regulation behaviours co-occur. Identifies nine core clusters (groupings) of emotion regulation behaviours most commonly observed to be exhibited in children. Identifies five emotion regulation behavioural styles (common co-occurring patterns of emotion regulation behaviour clusters) in children.

Whose Preferences Matter? A Patient-Centered Approach for Eliciting Treatment Goals

BACKGROUND

Patients facing a high-stakes clinical decision are often confronted with an overwhelming array of options. High-quality decisions about treatment should reflect patients' preferences as well as their clinical characteristics. Preference-assessment instruments typically focus on pre-selected clinical outcomes and attributes chosen by the investigator.

OBJECTIVE

We sought to develop a patient-centered approach to elicit and compare the treatment goals of patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) and healthcare providers (HCPs).

METHODS

We conducted five nominal group technique (NGT) meetings to elicit and prioritize treatment goals from patients and HCPs. Five to nine participants in each group responded silently to one question about their treatment goals. Responses were shared, consolidated, and ranked to develop a prioritized list for each group. The ranked lists were combined. Goals were rated and sorted into categories. Multidimensional scaling and hierarchical cluster analysis were used to derive a visual representation, or cognitive map, of the data and to identify conceptual clusters, reflecting how frequently items were sorted into the same category.

RESULTS

Five NGT groups yielded 34 unique patient-generated treatment goals and 31 unique HCP-generated goals. There were differences between patients and HCPs in the goals generated and how they were clustered. Patients' goals tended to focus on the impact of specific symptoms on their day-to-day lives, whereas providers' goals focused on slowing down the course of disease progression.

CONCLUSIONS

Differences between the treatment goals of patients and HCPs underscore the limitations of using HCP- or investigator-identified goals. This new adaptation of cognitive mapping is a patient-centered approach that can be used to generate and organize the outcomes and attributes for values clarification exercises while minimizing investigator bias and maximizing relevance to patients.

Increasing verbal knowledge mediates development of multidimensional emotion representations

How do people represent their own and others' emotional experiences? Contemporary emotion theories and growing evidence suggest that the conceptual representation of emotion plays a central role in how people understand the emotions both they and other people feel.1-6 Although decades of research indicate that adults typically represent emotion concepts as multidimensional, with valence (positive-negative) and arousal (activating-deactivating) as two primary dimensions,7-10 little is known about how this bidimensional (or circumplex) representation arises.11 Here we show that emotion representations develop from a monodimensional focus on valence to a bidimensional focus on both valence and arousal from age 6 to age 25. We investigated potential mechanisms underlying this effect and found that increasing verbal knowledge mediated emotion representation development over and above three other potential mediators: (i) fluid reasoning, (ii) the general ability to represent non-emotional stimuli bidimensionally, and (iii) task-related behaviors (e.g., using extreme ends of rating scales). These results suggest that verbal development facilitates the expansion of emotion concept representations (and potentially emotional experiences) from a "positive or negative" dichotomy in childhood to a multidimensional organization in adulthood.

Beyond the subjective experience of colour: An experimental case study of grapheme-texture synesthesia

This study was a case investigation of grapheme-texture synestheste TH, a female who subjectively reported experiencing a visual association between grapheme and colour/texture. First, we validated the existence of a synesthetic association in an objective manner. Involuntarily elicited experience is a major hallmark that is common to different types of synesthetes. Our results indicated interference between physical and synesthetic texture, suggesting the involuntary occurrence of synesthetic textural experience. We analysed the behavioural measures using the EZ diffusion model. The result suggested that TH's synesthetic experience was dissociable from that of briefly trained associative processing of non-synesthetes. Second, we investigated how the synesthetic experience of colour and texture dimensions was bound in the visual representation. We found that the interference effects of colour and texture were not independent. This suggested that in the elicited experience, the colour and texture features construct an integrated representation.

Defining a Conceptual Topography of Word Concreteness: Clustering Properties of Emotion, Sensation, and Magnitude among 750 English Words

Cognitive science has a longstanding interest in the ways that people acquire and use abstract vs. concrete words (e.g., truth vs. piano). One dominant theory holds that abstract and concrete words are subserved by two parallel semantic systems. We recently proposed an alternative account of abstract-concrete word representation premised upon a unitary, high dimensional semantic space wherein word meaning is nested. We hypothesize that a range of cognitive and perceptual dimensions (e.g., emotion, time, space, color, size, visual form) bound this space, forming a conceptual topography. Here we report a normative study where we examined the clustering properties of a sample of English words (N = 750) spanning a spectrum of concreteness in a continuous manner from highly abstract to highly concrete. Participants (N = 328) rated each target word on a range of 14 cognitive dimensions (e.g., color, emotion, valence, polarity, motion, space). The dimensions reduced to three factors: Endogenous factor, Exogenous factor, and Magnitude factor. Concepts were plotted in a unified, multimodal space with concrete and abstract concepts along a continuous continuum. We discuss theoretical implications and practical applications of this dataset. These word norms are freely available for download and use at http://www.reilly-coglab.com/data/.

Ordination with any dissimilarity measure: a weighted Euclidean solution

The classical approach to ordination is to use variants of the Euclidean distance to measure differences between samples (e.g., sites in a community study) based on their observation vectors (e.g., abundance counts for a set of species). Examples include Euclidean distance on standardized or log-transformed data, on which principal component analysis and redundancy analysis are based; chi-square distance, on which (canonical) correspondence analysis is based; and Hellinger distance, using square roots of relative values in each multivariate vector. Advantages of the Euclidean approach include the neat decomposition of variance and the ordination's optimal biplot display. To extend this approach to any non-Euclidean or nonmetric dissimilarity, a simple solution is proposed, consisting of the estimation of a weighted Euclidean distance that optimally approximates the dissimilarities. This preliminary step preserves the good properties of the classical approach while giving two additional benefits as by-products. Firstly, the estimated species weights, quantifying each species' contribution to the dissimilarities, can be interpreted, and weights equal or close to zero can assist in variable selection. Secondly, the dimensionality remains that of the number of species, not the dimensionality inherent in the dissimilarities, which depends on the number of samples and can be considerably higher.

Evaluating the Dimensionality of Self-Determination Theory's Relative Autonomy Continuum

We conducted a theoretical and psychometric evaluation of self-determination theory's "relative autonomy continuum" (RAC), an important aspect of the theory whose validity has recently been questioned. We first derived a Comprehensive Relative Autonomy Index (C-RAI) containing six subscales and 24 items, by conducting a paired paraphrase content analysis of existing RAI measures. We administered the C-RAI to multiple U.S. and Russian samples, assessing motivation to attend class, study a major, and take responsibility. Item-level and scale-level multidimensional scaling analyses, confirmatory factor analyses, and simplex/circumplex modeling analyses reaffirmed the validity of the RAC, across multiple samples, stems, and studies. Validation analyses predicting subjective well-being and trait autonomy from the six separate subscales, in combination with various higher order composites (weighted and unweighted), showed that an aggregate unweighted RAI score provides the most unbiased and efficient indicator of the overall quality of motivation within the behavioral domain being assessed.

Understanding advocacy practice in mental health: a multidimensional scalogram analysis of case records

BACKGROUND

Few studies have examined mental health consumers' motives for seeking advocacy assistance.

AIMS

This study aimed to identify factors that influenced mental health consumers' use of advocacy services.

METHODS

The analysis was based on 60 case records that were sourced from a community advocacy service. Each record was dichotomously coded across 11 variables to generate a series of categorical data profiles. The data set was then analysed using multidimensional scalogram analysis to reveal key relationships between subsets of variables.

RESULTS

The results indicated that mental health consumers commonly reported a sense of fear, which motivated them to contact the advocacy service in the hope that advocates could intervene on their behalf through effective communication with health professionals. Advocates often undertook such intervention either through attending meetings between the consumer and health professionals or contacting health professionals outside of meetings, which was typically successful in terms of achieving mental health consumers' desired outcome. The resolution of most concerns suggests that they were often legitimate and not the result of a lack of insight or illness symptoms.

CONCLUSION

Health professionals might consider exploring how they respond when consumers or carers raise concerns about the delivery of mental health care.

Streptococcus tigurinus is frequent among gtfR-negative Streptococcus oralis isolates and in the human oral cavity, but highly virulent strains are uncommon

Streptococcus tigurinus is a new member of the Mitis group and is associated with infective endocarditis. Low and high virulent variants have been described. A search was made in the national reference collection of endocarditis isolates for S. tigurinus–like strains by sequencing housekeeping genes (16S rRNA-gene, gdh, groEL, sodA). The strains were further profiled by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) targeting a choice of virulence genes (rib-like, cshA-like, gtfR, int, pitA, hylA). To study the prevalence and abundance of S. tigurinus in the saliva and on the mucosal membranes of 35 healthy adults, PCRs detecting two variants of the 16S operon and virulence genes were applied. Among the endocarditis isolates, eight strains (all gtfR-negative and former S. oralis) holding the specific S. tigurinus 16S motif were found, but the pattern of genes related to high virulence found in the S. tigurinus type strain could not be detected in any of these strains. A close phylogenetic proximity between S. tigurinus and S. oralis was observed, with intersectional hybrid strains formed. This was supported by concatenated housekeeping sequences, in silico DNA–DNA hybridization, pathogenomic profiling, and multidimensional scaling. In the oral samples, S. tigurinus could be detected frequently, especially in the most common operon variant, but none of the type strain–related virulence factors were found. Low virulent S. tigurinus–like strains can be found frequently and in high prevalence (66%) and abundance (12.5%) in the oral cavity of healthy adults. In strain collections, they are among the formerly known gtfR-negative S. oralis. Highly virulent strains seem to be uncommon. Though closely related, S. oralis and S. tigurinus can be separated by the presence or absence of gtfR and dextran production. Hybrids of both species can be found. The variable arsenal of virulence genes found in this study emphasizes the genetic plasticity of Mitis group streptococci.