Emotive imagery is a variant of systematic desensitization that has been developed for use in the treatment of children’s excessive fears. We outline clinical guidelines for the use of emotive imagery and present several case examples. Although emotive imagery appears to be useful and cost efŽ cient, controlled studies are needed to establish the efŽ cacy of emotive imagery and explore the acti...

Driver hypovigilance, often caused by fatigue and/or drowsiness, receives increasing attention in the last years; especially after it became evident that hypovigilance is a one of the major factor causing traffic accidents. Monitoring and detecting driver hypovigilance could contribute significantly to improve road traffic safety. This paper proposes fast methods to identify drowsiness and fati...

BACKGROUND Eye movements have been used in control interfaces and as indicators of somnolence, workload and concentration. Different techniques can be used to detect them: we focus on the electrooculogram (EOG) in which two kinds of interference occur: blinks and overshoots. While they both draw bell-shaped waveforms, blinks are caused by the eyelid, whereas overshoots occur due to target local...

STUDY OBJECTIVE To compare the hypnotic effects of a bedtime dose of zolpidem, triazolam, and placebo. DESIGN "Double-blind, randomized, placebo- and active-controlled, parallel-group" trial. SETTING Six Canadian hospitals. PATIENTS 357 patients (aged 19 to 71 years) hospitalized the night before a surgical procedure. INTERVENTIONS At bedtime, each patient received either zolpidem 10 mg...

CONTEXT Prior research has faulted the US News and World Report hospital specialty rankings for excessive reliance on reputation, a subjective measure of a hospital's performance. OBJECTIVE To determine whether and to what extent reputation correlates with objective measures of research productivity among cancer hospitals. DESIGN A retrospective observational study. SETTING Automated sear...

While children are increasingly being driven to and from schools, it is important to identify the factors that have contributed to this trend. Such information will be helpful for reducing the negative effects of excessive automobile use on the environment, local traffic and public health. This study has collected primary data from three Vermont school districts and used the data to identify th...

The aetiology of Crohn's disease--a chronic intestinal disorder that involves an immune response against the commensal bacterial flora--remains fiercely debated. Two hypotheses exist: (i) those who think that the disease is caused by genetic defects that produce exaggerated innate responses to the flora, leading to excessive inflammation; and (ii) those who think that the genetic defects cause ...

This paper proposes to visualize acoustic comfort along tourist routes. Route-based tourism is crucial to the sustainability of tourism development in historic areas. Applying the concept of route-based tourism to guide tourists rambling along cultural and heritage routes can relieve overcrowded condition at hot scenic spots and increase the overall carrying capacity of the city. However, acous...

Roskilde University (Denmark) hosted a November 2015 workshop, Environmental Risk-Assessing and Managing Multiple Risks in a Changing World. This Focus article presents the consensus recommendations of 30 attendees from 9 countries regarding implementation of a common currency (ecosystem services) for holistic environmental risk assessment and management; improvements to risk assessment and man...

It is often unclear what specific adaptive trial design features lead to an efficient design which is also feasible to implement. This article describes the preparatory simulation study for a Bayesian response-adaptive dose-finding trial design. Dexamethasone for Excessive Menstruation aims to assess the efficacy of Dexamethasone in reducing excessive menstrual bleeding and to determine the bes...