Implementation and Preliminary Outcomes of an Exposure-Based Summer Camp for Pediatric OCD and Anxiety.

Despite the high prevalence of anxiety disorders in children and adolescents and the existence of effective evidence-based treatments for them, access to psychological care remains a major public health concern. Summer camps may provide an effective treatment avenue for youth who might not otherwise have access to care. This study describes the design and implementation of Fear Facers, a semistructured, 5-day, daytime exposure-therapy-based summer camp designed for youth with a primary diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), social anxiety, separation anxiety, or a specific phobia.

Expectations and perspectives of cognitive behavioural therapy for childhood anxiety and related disorders.

Background: Anxiety disorders are the most frequently diagnosed psychiatric conditions in children and adolescents. Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is a well-established and effective treatment for anxiety and related disorders across the lifespan. Expectations of psychotherapy have been demonstrated to affect outcomes, yet there is sparse existing literature on adolescent patient and parent perspectives of CBT prior to engagement with treatment.

Approach and Avoidance Coping Dynamics during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Approach-avoidance conflicts were one of the earliest applications of catastrophe theory. Empirical studies evaluating the cusp catastrophe model for approach-avoidance dynamics have only started to appear recently, however. The present study reviews the extant research and expands the concept to approach and avoidance coping styles.

Assessing the predictors of adaptive and maladaptive Covid-19 preventive behaviours: an application of protection motivation theory.

Despite the high death toll of the COVID-19 pandemic, reported rates of adherence to adaptive preventive health behaviours during the early wave of the pandemic were suboptimal for reducing the risk of disease spread. Additionally, some have adopted practices with the intention of preventing infection that have harmful consequences. Protection Motivation Theory (PMT), consisting of perceived vulnerability, severity, response efficacy, and self-efficacy, has been used to predict intentions to engage in behaviours in past pandemics, and can be extended to the COVID-19 outbreak.

An examination of obsessive-compulsive symptom domains, depression, and quality of life within an online survey sample.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a heterogeneous and highly impairing disorder that is frequently comorbid with other conditions. Participants in this study were 212 individuals recruited through Mechanical Turk who filled out validated measures of obsessive-compulsive symptoms, quality of life (QoL), generalized anxiety, and depressive symptoms. Analyses examined the influences of each symptom variable on QoL and the mediating role of depression as an indirect link between unacceptable thoughts (UT) and QoL.

Relationships between stress appraisals and intolerance of uncertainty with psychological health during early COVID-19 in the USA.

Background And Objectives: The COVID-19 pandemic has caused increased psychological distress and decreased quality of life (QoL), but limited research has evaluated cognitive appraisals of COVID-19. This study aimed to examine the role of three stress appraisals of the COVID-19 pandemic - threat appraisal, harm/loss appraisal, and challenge appraisal - and the interaction between these appraisals and intolerance of uncertainty (IU) on psychological distress and QoL.

Design: This was a cross-sectional survey study using Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

KS-pies: Kohn-Sham inversion toolkit.

A Kohn-Sham (KS) inversion determines a KS potential and orbitals corresponding to a given electron density, a procedure that has applications in developing and evaluating functionals used in density functional theory. Despite the utility of KS inversions, application of these methods among the research community is disproportionately small. We implement the KS inversion methods of Zhao-Morrison-Parr and Wu-Yang in a framework that simplifies analysis and conversion of the resulting potential in real-space.

Learning to Approximate Density Functionals.

Density functional theory (DFT) calculations are used in over 40,000 scientific papers each year, in chemistry, materials science, and far beyond. DFT is extremely useful because it is computationally much less expensive than electronic structure methods and allows systems of considerably larger size to be treated. However, the accuracy of any Kohn-Sham DFT calculation is limited by the approximation chosen for the exchange-correlation (XC) energy.

Bypassing the Energy Functional in Density Functional Theory: Direct Calculation of Electronic Energies from Conditional Probability Densities.

Density functional calculations can fail for want of an accurate exchange-correlation approximation. The energy can instead be extracted from a sequence of density functional calculations of conditional probabilities (CP DFT). Simple CP approximations yield usefully accurate results for two-electron ions, the hydrogen dimer, and the uniform gas at all temperatures.

Cleanup and Complexity: Nuclear and Industrial Contamination at The Santa Susana Field Laboratory, California.

Environmental contamination, a legacy of industrial activity borne by numerous sites around the world, poses health risks for surrounding communities and presents serious cleanup challenges. One such site, the Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL), served as an aerospace and nuclear energy research facility for over 50 years, during which time radioactive and other hazardous materials were unintentionally and intentionally released into the surrounding environment. These releases, including the partial meltdown of a sodium reactor, were hidden from the public for three decades.

Exposure therapy for youth with anxiety: Utilization rates and predictors of implementation in a sample of practicing clinicians from across the United States.

Exposure therapy is a highly effective, evidence-based treatment technique for children and adolescents with anxiety disorders. Regardless, therapists in the community are reported to use exposure relatively rarely compared with other approaches. The goal of the present study was to identify how practicing clinicians treat youth with anxiety disorders across the United States and what factors contribute to their use of exposure therapy.

Solid-state NMR and short-range order in crystalline oxides and silicates: a new tool in paramagnetic resonances.

Most applications of high-resolution NMR to questions of short-range order/disorder in inorganic materials have been made in systems where ions with unpaired electron spins are of negligible concentration, with structural information extracted primarily from chemical shifts, quadrupolar coupling parameters, and nuclear dipolar couplings. In some cases, however, the often-large additional resonance shifts caused by interactions between unpaired electron and nuclear spins can provide unique new structural information in materials with contents of paramagnetic cations ranging from hundreds of ppm to several per cent and even higher. In this brief review we focus on recent work on silicate, phosphate, and oxide materials with relatively low concentrations of paramagnetic ions, where spectral resolution can remain high enough to distinguish interactions between NMR-observed nuclides and one or more magnetic neighbors in different bonding configurations in the first, second, and even farther cation shells.

Investigating lanthanide dopant distributions in Yttrium Aluminum Garnet (YAG) using solid state paramagnetic NMR.

This paper demonstrates the approach of using paramagnetic effects observed in NMR spectra to investigate the distribution of lanthanide dopant cations in YAG (yttrium aluminum garnet, YAlO) optical materials, as a complimentary technique to optical spectroscopy and other standard methods of characterization. We investigate the effects of Ce, Nd, Yb, Tm, and Tm-Cr on Al and Y NMR spectra. We note shifted resonances for both AlO and AlO sites.

ABCB1 transporter and Toll-like receptor 4 in trabecular meshwork cells.

Purpose: The aqueous humor nourishes the avascular tissues of the anterior segment, and the trabecular meshwork (TM) plays a role in the efflux of endogenous substances and xenobiotics from the aqueous humor. ATP (ATP)-binding cassette (ABC) transporter superfamily members respond to stressors such as hypoxia, cytokine signaling, and aging. The innate immune system within the TM, particularly Toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4) and its ligands, e.

sCD44 overexpression increases intraocular pressure and aqueous outflow resistance.

Purpose: CD44 plays major roles in multiple physiologic processes. The ectodomain concentration of the CD44 receptor, soluble CD44 (sCD44), is significantly increased in the aqueous humor of primary open-angle glaucoma (POAG). The purpose of this study was to determine if adenoviral constructs of CD44 and isolated 32-kDa sCD44 change intraocular pressure (IOP) in vivo and aqueous outflow resistance in vitro.

sCD44 internalization in human trabecular meshwork cells.

Purpose: To determine whether soluble CD44 (sCD44), a likely biomarker of primary open-angle glaucoma (POAG), is internalized in cultured human trabecular meshwork (TM) cells and trafficked to mitochondria.

Methods: In vitro, 32-kD sCD44 was isolated from human sera, biotinylated, and dephosphorylated. TM cells were incubated for 1 hour at 4°C with biotinylated albumin (b-albumin), biotin-labeled sCD44 (b-sCD44), or hypophosphorylated biotin-labeled sCD44 (-p b-sCD44) in the presence or absence of unlabeled sCD44, hyaluronic acid (HA), and a selected 10-mer HA binding peptide.