Despite considerable research activity and application in treatment, the construct of craving remains poorly understood. We propose that cravings and urges are cognitive-emotional events in time, characterised by frequency, duration, intensity and salience. Commonly used measures of alcohol craving are reviewed, and their strengths and weaknesses identified. Most measures confound craving with ...

The Visual Analogue Scale (VAS), Numerical Rating Scale (NRS), Verbal Rating Scale (VRS), and the Faces Pain Scale-Revised (FPS-R) are among the most commonly used measures of pain intensity in clinical and research settings. Although evidence supports their validity as measures of pain intensity, few studies have compared them with respect to the critical validity criteria of responsivity, and...

We study the valuation and hedging of unit-linked life insurance contracts in a setting where mortality intensity is governed by a stochastic process. We focus on model risk arising from different specifications for the mortality intensity. To do so we assume that the mortality intensity is almost surely bounded under the statistical measure. Further, we restrict the equivalent martingale measu...

background and objectives: continuous low back pain is obviously related to the symptoms of the pregnancy period. in spite of the spontaneous improvement of the pain in less than 6 months after the delivery, some women experience chronic problems. thus, the present study aimed to investigate the effect of dry cupping therapy at the bl23 point on the intensity of low back pain in the primiparous...

BACKGROUND There are five common, independent measures used to characterize taste function in humans: detection and recognition thresholds (DT and RT), suprathreshold intensity ratings of prototypical tastants, propylthiouracil (PROP) bitterness intensity, and fungiform papillae (FP) number. METHODS We employed all five methods to assess taste function of 65 women (21.5 ± 4 years, BMI 22.3 ± ...

BACKGROUND Built environment studies provide broad evidence that urban characteristics influence physical activity (PA). However, findings are still difficult to compare, due to inconsistent measures assessing urban point characteristics and varying definitions of spatial scale. Both were found to influence the strength of the association between the built environment and PA. METHODS We simul...

Whereas terminological recommendations require authors to use mean intensity or mean abundance to quantify parasites in a sample of hosts, awkward statistical limitations also force them to use either the median or the geometric mean of these measures when making comparisons across different samples. Here, we propose to reconsider this inconsistent practice by giving priority to biological real...

Objective: To investigate the relationship between cortisol levels, pain intensity and negative mood in chronic pain patients participating in a multidisciplinary pain management programme. Patients: Eighteen chronic pain patients collected saliva samples over several days both directly before and after attending a four-week multidisciplinary pain management programme. Outcome measures: Saliva ...

Loudness growth prediction using normal templates of loudness derived with ABR and DPOAE measures was investigated in 20 children 4 to 12 years and 20 adults with normal hearing. An ABR click latency-intensity function (LIF), ABR 2 kHz tone LIF, and DPOAE 2 kHz amplitude-intensity function (AIF) were recorded from each listener. A loudness-intensity function was also measured for each electroph...

The ultimate goal of the reported work is to develop a focus detector for Swedish integrating several sources of information. To that end we have examined the extent to which different measures of overall intensity and high frequency emphasis can be used to detect focus in read Swedish. It is shown that focused words can be detected with a rate approximating 70% under favorable conditions. Furt...