OBJECTIVE To investigate how anti-discrimination legislation in the form of the UK Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) affected socioeconomic disparities in the employment rates of people with a limiting long-term illness (LLTI) or disability. DESIGN National cross-sectional data on employment rates for people with and without an LLTI or disability were obtained from the General Household Sur...

A brightness discrimination experiment was performed to examine how subjects decide whether a patch of pixels is "bright" or "dark," and stimulus duration, brightness, and speed versus accuracy instructions were manipulated. The diffusion model (Ratcliff, 1978) was fit to the data, and it accounted for all the dependent variables: mean correct and error response times, the shapes of response ti...

Musical priming research has reported that sensory consonance/dissonance judgements for a target chord were faster when targets were musically related to a musical prime context. The present study extended this context effect to a timbre discrimination task. This new task allowed us to investigate whether musical priming results from congruency effects similar to those reported in other domains...

A significant fraction of newly implanted cochlear implant recipients use a hearing aid in their non-implanted ear. SCORE bimodal is a sound processing strategy developed for this configuration, aimed at normalising loudness perception and improving binaural loudness balance. Speech perception performance in quiet and noise and sound localisation ability of six bimodal listeners were measured w...

The effect of task duration on odor discrimination in aging was studied. Twenty-seven young male adults and 24 young female adults between 18 and 30 years of age, and 17 older male adults between 45 and 65 years of age completed an odor discrimination task. The odor discrimination task consisted of two parts of 16 trials each in which, from three bottles consisting of two identical and one aber...

BACKGROUND This study aimed to evaluate whether social capital could alleviate health inequality against racial discrimination and identify the critical nature of social capital that generates health inequality differences within the social context of South Korea. METHODS Using the data of the 2009 National Survey of Multicultural Families, a nationally representative sample in which 40,430 f...

Age-related hearing impairment (ARHI), one of the most common sensory disorders, can be mitigated, but not cured or eliminated. To identify genetic influences underlying ARHI, we conducted a genome-wide association study of ARHI in 6,527 cases and 45,882 controls among the non-Hispanic whites from the Genetic Epidemiology Research on Adult Health and Aging (GERA) cohort. We identified two novel...

INTRODUCTION Sudden sensorineural hearing loss (SSNHL) is a true emergency that must be diagnosed and treated immediately. The purpose of this study is to compare the efficacy of treatment with intratympanic dexamethasone plus oral prednisolone daily or every other day with that of treatment with oral prednisolone alone. MATERIALS AND METHODS Sixty-three patients with SSNHL that had been pres...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the validity of cochlear implantation (CI) on prelingually deafened adults who have been trained by auditory-verbal/oral communication since childhood. METHODS Preoperative and postoperative data was investigated regarding the rehabilitation, hearing level, and educational experience of eight prelingually deafened adults. All eight patients were diagnosed with severe to ...