This new edition of Ann Bowling's well-known and highly respected text has been thoroughly revised and updated to reflect key methodological developments in health research. It is a comprehensive, easy to read, guide to the range of methods used to study and evaluate health and health services. It describes the concepts and methods used by the main disciplines involved in health research, including: demography, epidemiology, health economics, psychology and sociology.The research methods described cover the assessment of health needs, morbidity and mortality trends and rates, costing health services, sampling for survey research, cross-sectional and longitudinal survey design, experimental methods and techniques of group assignment, questionnaire design, interviewing techniques, coding and analysis of quantitative data, methods and analysis of qualitative observational studies, and types of unstructured interviewing. With new material on topics such as cluster randomization, utility analyses, patients' preferences, and perception of risk, the text is aimed at students and researchers of health and health services. It has also been designed for health professionals and policy makers who have responsibility for applying research findings in practice, and who need to know how to judge the value of that research.

Research Methods in Health. Investigating health and health services

인공고관절의 세라믹 볼 헤드의 기계적 안정성 평가를 위한 3 차원 유한요소 해석

Child psychiatrists, pediatricians, and other child clinicians need to have a solid understanding of child language development. There are at least four important reasons that make this necessary. First, slowing, arrest, and deviation of language development are highly associated with, and complicate the course of, child psychopathology. Second, language competence plays a crucial role in emotional and mood regulation, evaluation, and therapy. Third, language deficits are the most frequent underpinning of the learning disorders, ubiquitous in our clinical populations. Fourth, clinicians should not confuse the rich linguistic and dialectal diversity of our clinical populations with abnormalities in child language development. The challenge for the clinician becomes, then, how to get immersed in the captivating field of child language acquisition without getting overwhelmed by its conceptual and empirical complexity. In the past 50 years and since the seminal works of Roger Brown, Jerome Bruner, and Catherine Snow, child language researchers (often known as developmental psycholinguists) have produced a remarkable body of knowledge. Linguists such as Chomsky and philosophers such as Grice have strongly influenced the science of child language. One of the major tenets of Chomskian linguistics (known as generative grammar) is that children’s capacity to acquire language is “hardwired” with “universal grammar”—an innate language acquisition device (LAD), a language “instinct”—at its core. This view is in part supported by the assertion that the linguistic input that children receive is relatively dismal and of poor quality relative to the high quantity and quality of output that they manage to produce after age 2 and that only an advanced, innate capacity to decode and organize linguistic input can enable them to “get from here (prelinguistic infant) to there (linguistic child).” In “Constructing a Language,” Tomasello presents a contrasting theory of how the child acquires language: It is not a universal grammar that allows for language development. Rather, human cognition universals of communicative needs and vocal-auditory processing result in some language universals, such as nouns and verbs as expressions of reference and predication (p. 19). The author proposes that two sets of cognitive skills resulting from biological/phylogenetic adaptations are fundamental to the ontogenetic origins of language. These sets of inherited cognitive skills are intentionreading on the one hand and pattern-finding, on the other. Intention-reading skills encompass the prelinguistic infant’s capacities to share attention to outside events with other persons, establishing joint attentional frames, to understand other people’s communicative intentions, and to imitate the adult’s communicative intentions (an intersubjective form of imitation that requires symbolic understanding and perspective-taking). Pattern-finding skills include the ability of infants as young as 7 months old to analyze concepts and percepts (most relevant here, auditory or speech percepts) and create concrete or abstract categories that contain analogous items. Tomasello, a most prominent developmental scientist with research foci on child language acquisition and on social cognition and social learning in children and primates, succinctly and clearly introduces the major points of his theory and his views on the origins of language in the initial chapters. In subsequent chapters, he delves into the details by covering most language acquisition domains, namely, word (lexical) learning, syntax, and morphology and conversation, narrative, and extended discourse. Although one of the remaining domains (pragmatics) is at the core of his theory and permeates the text throughout, the relative paucity of passages explicitly devoted to discussing acquisition and proBOOK REVIEWS

Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition

problems in addition to the signs of the Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome. Many of the patients were closely examined over long periods and the authors make the point that repeated examinations for as long as ten years in some instances allowed them to describe the natural history of the syndrome. and this they do in their third chapter. Again the description of the pathological findings is precise and comprehensive and the authors stress the periventricular distribution of the lesions and their bilateral symmetry. The authors consider specifically the neuropathological substrate on which are based the defective memory, ocular motor signs, the ataxia, the global confusional state and the occasional disturbance of olfactory and gustatory function. They argue a unity between Wernicke's disease and Korsakoff's psychosis and discuss the relationship between these two and alcoholic cerebellar degeneration, central pontine myelinolysis and other myelinolytic syndromes and interestingly discuss the problem of \"alcoholic dementia\" concluding that the nosological status ofalcoholic dementia is by

https://jnnp.bmj.com/content/jnnp/52/10/1218.2.full.pdf

Neuropsychology Mental Structure

Impulsivity as a vulnerability marker for substance-use disorders: Review of findings from high-risk research, problem gamblers and genetic association studies

Aims To investigate whether adolescent heavy drinkers exhibit biased cognitive processing of alcohol-related cues and impulsive decision making.

Design  A between-subjects design was employed.

Setting  Classrooms in a single sixth-form college in Merseyside, UK.

Participants  Ninety adolescent students (mean age 16.83 years), of whom 38% were identified as heavy drinkers and 36% were identified as light drinkers, based on a tertile split of their weekly alcohol consumption.

Measurements  Participants provided information about alcohol consumption before completing measures of alcohol craving, delay discounting and an ‘alcohol Stroop’ in which they were required to name the colour in which alcohol-related and matched control words were printed.

Findings  Compared to light drinkers, heavy drinkers showed more pronounced discounting of delayed hypothetical monetary and alcohol rewards, which is indicative of a more short-term focus in decision making in heavy drinkers. Heavy drinkers were also slower to colour-name alcohol-related words, which indicates an attentional bias for alcohol-related cues. In all participants, measures of delay discounting and attentional bias were correlated moderately with each other, and also with the level of alcohol consumption and with alcohol craving.

Conclusions  In adolescents, heavy alcohol use is associated with biased attentional processing of alcohol-related cues and a shorter-term focus in decision making.

Delay discounting and the alcohol Stroop in heavy drinking adolescents.

In the UK, mephedrone and other so-called ‘legal high’ derivatives have recently been classified as Class B, Schedule I under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. Since then, alternative products have been advertised on a number of websites. In order to obtain an immediate snapshot of the situation, 24 products were purchased online from 18 UK-based websites over a period of 6 weeks following the ban in April 2010. Qualitative analyses were carried out by gas chromatography ion trap mass spectrometry using electron- and chemical ionization modes, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, and comparison with reference standards. Overall, the purchased products consisted of single cathinones or cathinone mixtures including mephedrone, butylone, 4-methyl-N-ethylcathinone, flephedrone (4-fluoromethcathinone) and MDPV (3,4-methylenedioxypyrovalerone), respectively. Benzocaine, caffeine, lidocaine, and procaine were also detected. The emphasis was placed on ‘Energy 1’ (NRG1), a product advertised as a legal replacement for mephedrone-type derivatives usually claiming to contain naphyrone (naphthylpyrovalerone, O-2482). It was found that 70% of NRG-1 and NRG-2 products appeared to contain a mixture of cathinones banned in April 2010 and rebranded as ‘new’ legal highs, rather than legal chemicals such as naphyrone as claimed by the retailers. Only one out of 13 NRG-1 samples appeared to show analytical data consistent with naphyrone. These findings also suggest that both consumers and online sellers (unlike manufacturers and wholesalers) are, most likely unknowingly, confronted with the risk of criminalization and potential harm. Copyright c � 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Analyses of second-generation 'legal highs' in the UK: initial findings.

In smokers, nicotine deprivation may increase impulsive decision-making and the demand for cigarettes. To investigate the effects of acute nicotine deprivation on (a) the delay discounting of monetary and cigarette rewards, and (b) the behavioural economics of hypothetical cigarette purchases. A repeated measures design was employed, with participants (daily cigarette smokers, N=30) repeating experimental tasks in two different sessions, once after at least 13 h of abstinence from smoking and once after ad lib smoking. Participants completed measures of cigarette craving, impulsivity, delay discounting and a behavioural economic simulation in which participants made hypothetical purchases of cigarettes and other commodities as the price of cigarettes was systematically varied. Participants showed more pronounced delay discounting of both cigarette and monetary rewards after abstinence compared to after ad lib smoking. In the behavioural economic simulation, nicotine deprivation had no influence on hypothetical cigarette purchases. However, spending on some commodities (alcohol, clothing, household goods, leisure activities and long-distance travel) was reduced as the price of cigarettes increased in order to fund increased spending on cigarettes, although the number of packs of cigarettes purchased actually decreased. Nicotine deprivation increases impulsive choices for both cigarette and monetary rewards in a delay-discounting task. Results from a behavioural economic simulation suggest that increases in the price of cigarettes may increase smokers’ spending on cigarettes, while also reducing the number of cigarettes purchased.

Delay discounting and the behavioural economics of cigarette purchases in smokers: the effects of nicotine deprivation.

Risk-taking but not response inhibition or delay discounting predict alcohol consumption in social drinkers

AIMS: We investigated reciprocal prospective relationships between multiple behavioural impulsivity tasks (assessing delay discounting, risk-taking, and disinhibition) and alcohol involvement (consumption, drunkenness, and problems) among adolescents. We hypothesised that performance on the tasks would predict subsequent alcohol involvement, and that alcohol involvement would lead to increases in behavioural impulsivity over time. DESIGN: Cross-lagged prospective design in which impulsivity and alcohol involvement were assessed five times over two years (once every six months, on average). SETTING: Classrooms in secondary schools in North West England. PARTICIPANTS: Two hundred and eighty seven adolescents (51% Male) who were aged 12 or 13 at study enrolment. METHODS: Participants reported their alcohol involvement and completed computerized tasks of disinhibition, delay discounting, and risk-taking at each assessment. Cross-sectional and prospective relationships between the variables of interest were investigated using cross-lagged analyses. RESULTS: All behavioural impulsivity tasks predicted a composite index of alcohol involvement six months later (all ps Language: en

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/add.12283

Jon C. Cole

Papers

Delay discounting and the alcohol Stroop in heavy drinking adolescents.

Analyses of second-generation 'legal highs' in the UK: initial findings.

Delay discounting and the behavioural economics of cigarette purchases in smokers: the effects of nicotine deprivation.

Risk-taking but not response inhibition or delay discounting predict alcohol consumption in social drinkers

Multiple behavioural impulsivity tasks predict prospective alcohol involvement in adolescents.