Search Results (1,406)

Aim of the study: Anxiety about dental treatment is one of the main barriers to accessing dental services and, at the same time, a well-known problem for dentists. The main objective of this observational pilot study was to assess the prevalence and determinants of dental anxiety and severe forms compatible with dental phobia among adult dental patients and to explore their association with psychological distress, as well as patients’ preferences for methods to reduce pain and anxiety during dental treatment. Materials and Methods: We carried out a pilot observational study using two well-established questionnaires, namely the BSI-18 (Brief Symptom Inventory-18), which assesses the psychological distress of patients visiting the dentist, and the DAS (Dental Anxiety Scale), which evaluates dental anxiety toward dental treatment. The questionnaires were administered in independent dental practices in Timisoara, and the study was conducted between August 2024 and January 2025 on a sample of 231 persons. Results: The results of our study revealed a clear link between sources of oral health information, the high prevalence of anxiety as a personality trait, anxiety towards the dentist, and referral to dental services. Conclusions: The intensity of dental anxiety is higher before the therapeutic manoeuvre. It has been found, however, that people who are more educated experience lower levels of anxiety in specific situations. Full article

Music therapy is a non-pharmacological psychosocial intervention that is increasingly recognised for its role in supporting older adults in acute hospital settings. Engagement with music, whether through passive listening, preferred recorded music, live music, or creative music therapy, has been linked to improvements in behavioural, cognitive, and emotional outcomes during episodes of delirium. Although there are reviews on non-pharmacological approaches to delirium, few have focused specifically on music therapy within acute hospital environments. This scoping review examined the evidence relating to music-based interventions for older adults who are experiencing delirium or who are at risk of delirium in acute care settings. The review followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA ScR). Four electronic databases were searched systematically, namely, CINAHL, Medline, PsycINFO and Embase. Seven primary research studies published between 2004 and 2024 met the inclusion criteria. A narrative synthesis approach was used to summarise the data. Three themes were identified. The first relates to the extent to which music therapy may reduce the incidence or severity of delirium or other related behaviours in acute hospital settings. The second relates to the potential for music-based interventions to support clinical practice by improving interaction between patients and staff and reducing distress during recovery and enhancing physical recovery. The third relates to the impact of music therapy on emotional regulation, engagement, cooperation with care, and overall patient experience. Music therapy shows promise as a person-centred, safe, and low-cost intervention that may enhance wellbeing and support delirium care for older adults in acute hospital settings. Further high-quality studies are needed to strengthen the evidence base and guide practice. Full article

Recommendation systems are popular information systems that help consumers manage information overload. Whilst personality has been recognised as an important factor influencing consumers’ choice, it has not yet been fully exploited in recommendation systems. This study proposes a restaurant recommendation approach that integrates customer personality traits, opinions and preferences, extracted either directly from online review platforms or derived from electronic word of mouth (eWOM) text using information extraction techniques. The proposed method leverages the concept of venue personality grounded in personality–brand congruence theory, which posits that customers are more satisfied with brands whose personalities align with their own. A novel model is introduced that combines fine-tuned BERT embeddings with linguistic features to infer users’ personality traits from the text of their reviews. Customers’ preferences are identified using a custom named-entity recogniser, while their opinions are extracted through structural topic modelling. The overall framework integrates neural collaborative filtering (NCF) features with both directly observed and derived information from eWOM to train an extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) regression model. The proposed approach is compared to baseline collaborative filtering methods and state-of-the-art neural network techniques commonly used in industry. Results across multiple performance metrics demonstrate that incorporating personality, preferences and opinions significantly improves recommendation performance. Full article

The paper explores how the diasporic Igbo community portrays its cultural identity through personal names and naming practices in a globalised context. The study employs a qualitative approach, involving computer-assisted semi-structured interviews with 26 diasporic Igbo individuals residing in the United States of America (USA), to examine how names are constructed to reflect cultural identity, community ties, and connections to the Igbo society. The paper adopts the sociocultural linguistic theory of identity to examine how culture and society shape language use, analysing names as social acts that establish connections to the Igbo community and cultural heritage. The paper examines how Igbo migrants negotiate traditional naming practices in the diaspora and communicate their cultural identity and worldviews through naming. The findings reveal that the diaspora Igbo community conveys its cultural identity, migration history, and emotional connection to its homeland while maintaining social relationships in its host country. The study will provide insight into the role of names in preserving cultural identity and fostering a sense of belonging among the diasporic Igbo community. Full article

Background: An increasing number of university students report feeling lonely, a negative experience arising from a mismatch between perceived and actual social relationships. Loneliness has been linked to poorer mental health. However, the relationship between qualitative (sources of loneliness) and quantitative (high or low) differences in loneliness and mental health is under researched. The aims of this research were to (a) identify profiles of loneliness among university students across three indicators of loneliness, namely, social, family, and romantic indicators, using latent profile analysis (LPA); (b) examine the differences among identified profiles based on dimensions of mental health indicators (depression, anxiety, and stress), social support, and life satisfaction; and (c) assess profile membership based on demographic variables (gender, social isolation, relationship status, and education characteristics) and the Big Five personality traits (extraversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism). Method: A cross-sectional survey was conducted on 912 university students from five cities in Uttar Pradesh, India. Participants completed questionnaires covering demographic details and validated measures assessing loneliness, depression, stress, anxiety, social support, life satisfaction, and the Big Five personality traits. Data were analyzed using the latent profile module in Jamovi and fit indices, namely, BIC, AIC, and BLRT, and entropy was used to select the best profile. Results: The latent profile analysis identified four profiles for university student loneliness, including Social and emotional lonely (31.4%), Moderate romantic lonely (23.8%), Moderate social lonely (8.2%), and Severe romantic lonely (36.6%). Moreover, the Social and emotional lonely profile scored the highest on depression, anxiety, and stress. The Moderate romantic lonely profile scored the highest on life satisfaction and social support. Being in a relationship decreased the likelihood of being categorized as Severe romantic lonely. In terms of personality, neuroticism was the strongest predictor of profile membership. This study is a step towards identifying at-risk lonely individuals with varying sources of loneliness. Identifying different profiles of lonely individuals will have direct implications for designing interventions that cater to a particular group rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. Full article

Community Question-Answering (cQA) sites have an urgent need to be increasingly efficient at (a) offering contextualized/personalized content and (b) linking open questions to people willing to answer. Most recent ideas with respect to attaining this goal combine demographic factors (i.e., gender) with deep neural networks. In essence, recent studies have shown that high gender classification rates are perfectly viable by independently modeling profile images or textual interactions. This paper advances this body of knowledge by leveraging bimodal transformers that fuse gender signals from text and images. Qualitative results suggest that (a) profile avatars reinforce one of the genders manifested across textual inputs, (b) their positive contribution grows in tandem with the number of community fellows that provide this picture, and (c) their use might be detrimental if the goal is distinguishing throwaway/fake profiles. From a quantitative standpoint, ViLT proved to be a better alternative when coping with sparse datasets such as Stack Exchange, whereas CLIP and FLAVA excel with a large-scale collection—namely, Yahoo! answers and Reddit. Full article

Background/Objectives: Bias-based bullying is widely recognised as having a detrimental impact on child and adolescent health. One form of bias-based bullying that is directed at transgender and non-binary students more specifically is misnaming, whereby someone is referred to by their birth name rather than their chosen name. While there have been some studies exploring the experiences of young LGBTQ+ people’s experiences of bias-based bullying, and a number looking at misnaming more specifically, there has been very little research on the issue in the Swedish school context. The aim of this study is to address this lacuna in knowledge by focusing on LGBTQ+ students’ experiences of misnaming in Swedish schools. Methods: The findings are based on 21 semi-structured interviews with LGBTQ+ young people aged 15–25 from around Sweden. The interviews were analysed with reflexive thematic analysis and in relation to the concepts of orientations and affect. Results: The findings highlight how misnaming negatively impacts the health of those who are subjected to it through disorientation and by triggering negative emotions such as anger, sadness, anxiety, and hurt. The findings also illustrate how the affects of misnaming extend beyond individuals and accumulate as collective emotional experiences that negatively transform schools into sites of personal and social tension. Conclusions: The article demonstrates not only the importance of recognising misnaming as a pernicious form of bias-based bullying that negatively impacts the health of students, but also the need for schools to actively review their administrative systems to ensure that misnaming is not institutionalised and perpetuated within schools. Full article

Demographic trends over the last decades and future projections clearly indicate a steady increase in the proportion of older adults (65+) relative to both the working-age (15–64) and child populations (0–15) across Europe. This demographic shift—driven by rising life expectancy and declining fertility—raises pressing challenges for intergenerational equity and questions the sustainability of the implicit formal and informal “social contract” that links generations through the distribution of rights, responsibilities, and resources. In particular, the two fundamental pillars of European post-industrial societies, namely an extensive welfare state and a liberal–democratic institutional framework, appear to be at risk. To address this issue, the notion of “intergenerational fairness”, recently adopted by social policies in both USA and Europe, appears flexible and fundamentally ambiguous. As a substantial variant of neoliberal austerity policies, it is simply used as a justification for further austerity measures, the withdrawal of entitlements to social and economic rights by citizens and the dismantling of welfare states. A second meaning of “intergenerational fairness” is possible starting from the concept of ambivalence used to describe the mix of conflict and solidarity that characterizes intergenerational relations in contemporary post-industrial societies. In this respect, the two concepts of “successful ageing” and “active ageing”, often considered as overlapping, actually involve very different perspectives: successful ageing adopts a substantially reductionist, individualistic, and static approach to the process of ageing, whereas active ageing is a more comprehensive and dynamic strategy that seeks to overcome all these limitations by a life-course perspective. This recognizes that a person’s path to old age is not predetermined but depends primarily on earlier life experiences and their influence: the ageing process affects people of all ages, not just the elderly. And since the subjectivization of ageing in contemporary societies has challenged the conventional notion of “natural life stages”, the new theoretical concept advanced in the article of “ageing styles” becomes central to understanding the ageing process today. Ageing styles are the outcome of the interplay between the objective and subjective dimensions of the life course, represented, respectively, by life chances (social structure) and life choices (agency). A theoretical framework is proposed for analyzing ageing styles that can be used from a life-course perspective to highlight their complex and dynamic nature. An evidence-based European political strategy aimed at promoting active ageing from a perspective of intergenerational fairness, based on the eight principles indicated, can be flexible enough to ensure that everyone can adopt their preferred ageing style without top-down imposition and contribute to the maintenance of the intergenerational social contract. Full article

Emotional Footprint Identification refers to the process of recognizing or understanding the emotional impact that a person, experience, or interaction leaves on others. Emotion Recognition plays an important role in human–computer interaction for identifying emotions such as fear, sadness, anger, happiness, and surprise on the human face during the conversation. However, accurate emotional footprint identification plays a crucial role due to the dynamic changes. Conventional deep learning techniques integrate advanced technologies for emotional footprint identification, but challenges in accurately detecting emotions in minimal time. To address these challenges, a novel Divergence Shepherd Feature Optimization-based Stochastic-Tuned Deep Multilayer Perceptron (DSFO-STDMP) is proposed. The proposed DSFO-STDMP model consists of three distinct processes namely data acquisition, feature selection or reduction, and classification. First, the data acquisition phase collects a number of conversation data samples from a dataset to train the model. These conversation samples are given to the Sokal–Sneath Divergence shuffling shepherd optimization to select more important features and remove the others. This optimization process accurately performs the feature reduction process to minimize the emotional footprint identification time. Once the features are selected, classification is carried out using the Rosenthal correlative stochastic-tuned deep multilayer perceptron classifier, which analyzes the correlation score between data samples. Based on this analysis, the system successfully classifies different emotions footprints during the conversations. In the fine-tuning phase, the stochastic gradient method is applied to adjust the weights between layers of deep learning architecture for minimizing errors and improving the model’s accuracy. Experimental evaluations are conducted using various performance metrics, including accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score, and emotional footprint identification time. The quantitative results reveal enhancement in the 95% accuracy, 93% precision, 97% recall and 97% F1 score. Additionally, the DSFO-STDMP minimized the in training time by 35% when compared to traditional techniques. Full article

Additive manufacturing has increasingly become a transformative approach in the design and fabrication of personalized medical devices, offering improved adaptability, reduced production time, and enhanced patient-specific functionality. Within this framework, simulation-driven design plays a critical role in ensuring the structural reliability and performance of orthopedic supports before fabrication. This research study delineates the novel development of a wrist hybrid splint (WHS) which has a simulation-based design and was additively manufactured using fused deposition modeling (FDM). The primary material selected for this purpose was polylactic acid (PLA), recognized for its biocompatibility and structural integrity in medical applications. Prior to the commencement of the actual FDM process, an extensive pre-analysis was imperative, involving the application of nonlinear numerical models aiming at replicating the mechanical response of the WHS in respect to different deposition configurations. The methodology encompassed the evaluation of a sophisticated material model incorporating a damage mechanism which was grounded in experimental data derived from meticulous tensile and three-point bending testing of samples with varying FDM process parameters, namely nozzle diameter, layer thickness, and deposition orientation. The integration of custom subroutines with utility routines was coded with a particular emphasis on maximum stress thresholds to ensure the fidelity and reliability of the simulation outputs on small scale samples in terms of their elasticity and strength. After the formulation and validation of these computational models, a comprehensive simulation of a full-scale, finite element (FE) model of two WHS design variations was conducted, the results of which were aligned with the stringent requirements set forth by the product specifications, ensuring comfortable and safe usage. Based on the results of this study, the final force comparison between the numerical simulation and experimental measurements demonstrated a discrepancy of less than 2%. This high level of agreement highlights the accuracy of the employed methodologies and validates the effectiveness of the WHS simulation and fabrication approach. The research also concludes with a strong affirmation of the material model with a damage mechanism, substantiating its applicability and effectiveness in future manufacturing of the WHS, as well as other orthopedic support devices through an appropriate selection of FDM parameters. Full article

In recent years, a growing number of interpreters propose that the audience in Romans is purely gentile. Problematic for this position is that Jewish persons are greeted by Paul towards the end of the letter in Romans 16:3–16. Respondents appeal to an ancient epistolary convention suggesting that second-person greetings to a third party identify those who are not among the letter’s recipients. Also, the encoded reader is said to be a gentile. This study, however, presents from ancient epistolary conventions most relevant to Rom. 16 that second-person plural greetings assume the third parties are among the same community as the letter recipients. Internal evidence from Rom. 16:6 and 16:16 also confirms this viewpoint. As well, beyond the encoded reader, a reading that affirms the historical recipients of the letter suggests that these recipients include the persons who are named in Rom. 16. Full article

As large language models (LLMs) improve in understanding and reasoning, they are increasingly used in privacy protection tasks such as de-identification, privacy-sensitive text generation, and entity obfuscation. However, these applications depend on an essential requirement: the accurate identification of personally identifiable information (PII). Compared with template-based PII that follows clear structural patterns, name-related PII depends much more on cultural and pragmatic context, which makes it harder for models to detect and raises higher privacy risks. Although recent studies begin to address this issue, existing work remains limited in language coverage, evaluation granularity, and the depth of error analysis. To address these gaps, this study proposes an error-driven framework that integrates diagnosis and intervention. Specifically, the framework introduces a method called Error-Driven Prompt (EDP), which transforms common failure patterns into executable prompting strategies. It further explores the integration of EDP with general advanced prompting techniques such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT), few-shot learning, and role-playing. In addition, the study constructed K-NameDiag, the first fine-grained evaluation benchmark for Korean name-related PII, which includes twelve culturally sensitive subtypes designed to examine model weaknesses in real-world contexts. The experimental results showed that EDP improved F1-scores in the range of 6 to 9 points across three widely used commercial LLMs, namely Claude Sonnet 4.5, GPT-5, and Gemini 2.5 Pro, while the Combined Enhanced Prompt (CEP), which integrates EDP with advanced prompting strategies, resulted in different shifts in precision and recall rather than consistent improvements. Further subtype-level analysis suggests that subtypes reliant on implicit cultural context remain resistant to correction, which shows the limitations of prompt engineering in addressing a model’s lack of internalized cultural knowledge. Full article

Sweet bags were small, embroidered textile pouches used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to carry fragrant substances, money, books, sewing tools, mirrors, or other personal items. They were often exchanged as gifts, used to preserve clothing in wardrobes, or used to protect against contaminated air. Beyond their material function, both their name and some of their uses suggest an olfactory dimension, as they were typically filled with aromatic herbs—combinations frequently recorded in recipe books, medical, and household manuals, including Countrey Contentments, or The English Husvvife, Praxis Medicinæ, or The Physitian’s Practise, and Exenterata, among others. Through close reading and literary analysis of such primary sources combined with a sensory approach, this article traces the possible ingredients of these pouches in Early Modern recipes and argues that their olfactory content positions them as objects of the “olfactory gaze” (Verbeek), thereby transforming them into elements of olfactory heritage. Ultimately, the article seeks to recreate the olfactory component of sweet bags within recipe-related practices, and broader domestic traditions of Early Modern England. Full article

The primary goal of my paper is to elaborate a methodology for literary interpretation that points out how a literary narrative prose text interprets its own characters, plots, and existential problems. In this context, one of the main premises of my remarks is that interpretation, is not the privilege of the act of reading. Misreading, or the “sins” of ideological interpretation can only be avoided if it is recognized that reading and interpretation are problems of the text itself. Beyond the formalist, structuralist, and poststructuralist methodologies of literary analysis, I found in Paul Ricœur’s Biblical hermeneutics the interpretive process and conceptual system that are able to reveal the self-interpretive functions of literary narrative works. According to him, there is a special type of text: the interpretive narrative. The interpretive narrative as a special genre designation refers to the Gospels’ narrative presentation of the passion. In a nutshell: the essence of interpretive narrative is that there is a text interpreting process, which is achieved by the narrative discourse itself (“before” any act of reading). In accordance with the results of Biblical hermeneutics but focusing on literary interpretation, I would like to elaborate on the notion of narrative parallelism in order to reveal those poetic conditions of literary narrative by which misreading or the “sins” of ideological reading can be eliminated. Narrative parallelism is a special type of metaphorical process in which a personal story is interpreted by the story of an object. Literary narrative prose has a specific and unique “virtue” compared to other literary genres or non-literary narratives: using descriptive discourse prose language recognizes, reveals, and narrativizes the significance of details. The second premise of my remarks is that the seemingly secondary narrativized details, or the seemingly insignificant stories of the objects, serve as the interpretation of the literary narrative’s central aspects, namely characters, plots, and existential problems. The interpretation of the presentation of the main character’s story is prefigured in a semantic way by the text itself. I would like to explore the main processes of narrative parallelism as an interpretive narrative by the explanation of a short story’s (A. Moravia: Friendship) twofold emplotment. Full article

Customized foot orthoses are widely used to manage plantar pressure and improve structural support in children with hereditary spastic paraparesis. However, the combined biomechanical effects of insole design parameters remain insufficiently quantified. This study employed a patient-specific three-dimensional finite element model to evaluate the influence of four design factors (arch height, heel cup depth, insole thickness, and material type, namely ethylene-vinyl acetate [EVA], thermoplastic polyurethane [TPU], and rubber) on four biomechanical metrics: plantar pressure distribution, von Mises stress, strain, and total deformation. Nine orthotic configurations, defined by a Taguchi L9 orthogonal array, were simulated under a vertical ground reaction force equal to 1.1× body weight. The configuration with an arch height of 42 mm, heel cup depth of 20 mm, thickness of 10 mm, and EVA material achieved the lowest peak plantar pressure (0.087 MPa). Arch height was the dominant factor for plantar pressure (79.4% of variance), deformation (68.1%), and strain (48.2%), while heel cup depth was most influential for stress (40.2%). Material type contributed minimally to plantar pressure and deformation but had a greater effect on stress (11.6%) and strain (15.0%). Thickness played a secondary role, particularly in deformation (19.9%) and strain (22.3%). These findings demonstrate the feasibility of using finite element modeling combined with the Taguchi method to systematically evaluate and optimize orthotic design parameters. Specifically, the study demonstrates that optimized personalized insoles can substantially reduce peak plantar pressure and improve load distribution in a pediatric patient with HSP, pes planovalgus, and flexed-knee gait, providing a potentially effective noninvasive intervention to prevent secondary complications and improve gait mechanics. Full article