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Over the last decade, researchers have increasingly demonstrated that ideal affect-the affective states that people value and ideally want to feel-shapes different aspects of daily life. Here I briefly review Affect Valuation Theory (AVT), which integrates ideal affect into existing models of affect and emotion by identifying the causes and consequences of variation in ideal affect. I then describe recent research that applies AVT to the valuation of negative states as well as more complex states, examines how ideal affect shapes momentary affective experience, suggests that ideal affect has both direct and indirect effects on health, and illustrates that people's ideal affect shapes how they judge and respond to others. Finally, I discuss the implications of cultural and individual differences in ideal affect for clinical, educational, work, and leisure settings., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Background and Objectives: Numerous studies have supported attentional biases toward social threats in socially anxious individuals. The aim of the present study was to investigate the time-course of sustained attention for multiple emotional stimuli using a free-viewing paradigm in social anxiety., Methods: Thirty-two socially anxious (SA) and 30 non-anxious (NA) participants completed the free-viewing task. Participants were presented with a face array composed of angry, sad, happy and neutral faces for 10 s in each trial. Eye movements were recorded throughout the trial to assess the time-course of attentional processing., Results: Although SA participants did not exhibit initial orienting bias, they had higher fixation probability for angry faces during the 250-1000 ms time intervals, relative to NA participants. SA participants also maintained their attention longer than NA participants did when angry faces were initially fixated upon. Moreover, NA participants showed higher fixation probability for happy faces during the 6-8 s after stimulus onset. We failed to observe attentional avoidance of threat in SA participants., Limitations: First, this study used a non-clinical sample. Second, the stimuli used in this study were static., Conclusions: The present findings suggest that, relative to non-anxious individuals, socially anxious individuals are characterized by enhanced engagement with social threat at an early stage of processing and difficulty in disengaging from social threat once their initial attention is located on it. Conversely, non-anxious individuals are characterized by enhanced engagement with positive stimuli at a later stage of processing., (Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Background: The aim of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of a refined theory-based Interactive Postpartum Sexual Health Education Program to enhance postpartum women's effective contraceptive behavior., Study Design: Participants (N=250) were randomized to three groups. Experimental Group A received our intervention program via strategies that matched participants' learning preparedness, as determined by the transtheoretical model. Experimental Group B received only a pamphlet. The control group received routine education. Only Group A received health education. Data were collected at baseline, 3 days, 2 months and 3 months postpartum., Results: Women who received theory-based postpartum sexual health education program had significantly greater contraceptive self-efficacy and were more likely to choose more effective contraceptive methods at 2 months postpartum than women in the routine teaching and interactive pamphlet-only groups., Conclusion: Our theory-based Interactive Postpartum Sexual Health Education Program enhanced postpartum women's contraceptive self-efficacy and effective contraceptive behavior., (Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

For Chinese compounds, neighbors can share either both orthographic forms and meanings, or orthographic forms only. In this study, central presentation and visual half-field (VF) presentation methods were used in conjunction with ERP measures to investigate how readers solve the sublexical semantic ambiguity of the first constituent character in reading a disyllabic compound. The sublexical ambiguity of the first character was manipulated while the orthographic neighborhood sizes of the first and second character (NS1, NS2) were controlled. Subjective rating of number of meanings corresponding to a character was used as an index of sublexical ambiguity. Results showed that low sublexical ambiguity words elicited a more negative N400 than high sublexical ambiguity words when words were centrally presented. Similar patterns were found when words were presented to the left VF. Interestingly, different patterns were observed for pseudowords. With left VF presentation, high sublexical ambiguity psudowords showed a more negative N400 than low sublexical ambiguity pseudowords. In contrast, with right VF presentation, low sublexical ambiguity pseudowords showed a more negative N400 than high sublexical ambiguity pseudowords. These findings indicate that a level of morphological representation between form and meaning needs to be established and refined in Chinese. In addition, hemispheric asymmetries in the use of word information in ambiguity resolution should be taken into account, even at sublexical level., (2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

In this study, event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to trace the temporal dynamics of phonological consistency and phonetic combinability in the reading of Chinese phonograms. The data showed a significant consistency-by-combinability interaction at N170. High phonetic combinability characters elicited greater negativity at N170 than did low phonetic combinability characters, and the combinability effect was only found in the reading of high consistency characters. The results support the phonological mapping hypothesis of the reading-related N170 effect and suggest that the earlier stages of visual word recognition are shaped by the mapping of orthography to phonology even in Chinese. Moreover, our data revealed both consistency and combinability effects at P200 and N400, accounted for by the two-stage framework for visual word recognition. That is, characters with high combinability or high consistency facilitated the earlier stages of orthographic or phonological processing which were due to increased activation at the perceptual level; consequently, less positive P200 was demonstrated. In the later stages, high combinability or high consistency characters were associated with a larger semantic neighborhood, which increased semantic competition and exaggerated the N400 effect. These data support the assumption of radical-based inputs proposed by the lexical constituent model. However, the phonetic consistency effects found at N170 and P200 cannot be reconciled with the current framework of the lexical constituent model. A possible revision will be discussed.

Background: Growing misuse of ketamine necessitates the development of high throughput testing approaches. Two commercial enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISA) for ketamine have recently become available and were adapted for this development., Method: The newly available ketamine ELISA reagents were examined to better understand their cross-reacting, calibration and other performance characteristics. ELISA apparent analyte concentrations were also correlated against ketamine concentrations as determined by GC-MS to examine the relationship between these 2 parameters., Result: Both adapting ketamine as the targeted analyte, reagent from International Diagnostic Systems (IDS) also responded very significantly to the metabolites of ketamine (norketamine and dehydronorketamine), while the NEOGEN reagent responded very specifically to ketamine., Conclusion: NEOGEN ELISA test data exhibit better correlation with the ketamine concentration as determined by GC-MS. It can be more reliably used as the preliminary test method in the 2-step approach now routinely adapted in workplace drug testing programs. Using 100 ng/ml ketamine as the GC-MS cutoff, the corresponding ELISA cutoff value is approximately 110-120 ng/ml. With significantly higher responses to ketamine metabolites, IDS reagent can detect specimens with much lower ketamine/metabolites concentrations and can better meet other testing requirements.

How to reduce the occurrence of food-borne illness has always been one issue of great importance in Taiwan's disease prevention and control efforts, and it is important to determine, from survey results, whether the pathogens in Taiwan are the same or different from those in other countries. Accordingly, data on 1171 food-borne illness outbreaks were collected from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) of the Department of Health in Taiwan. The patients and the cases were numbered according to the guidelines and definition of food poisoning given by the Department of Health in Taiwan. All rectal swabs for culture were collected from the CDC. During 1995 to 2001, 1171 outbreaks of food-borne illness, including 109,884 cases, were reported in northern Taiwan, of which 735 (62.8%) were caused by bacterial infection. Bacterial pathogens, particularly Vibrio parahaemolyticus (86.0%), Staphylococcus aureus (7.6%), and Salmonella spp. (4.9%) were the main etiologic agents. The responsible pathogens in Taiwan appeared to be quite different from those in Europe and the United States. It is important to establish a unique surveillance net of our own to prevent and control our situation of food-borne disease outbreaks effectively.

The current study addresses the debate between so-called 'structural' and 'processing limitation' accounts of aphasia, i.e., whether language impairments reflect the 'loss' of linguistic knowledge or its representations, or instead reflect a limitation in processing resources. Confrontation-naming task and category-judgment tasks were used to examine and compare the performance of non-fluent and fluent aphasics on different compound types of nouns and verbs. We demonstrate that aphasic patients' performance is modulated by the canonicity of the particular compound type, a result that holds true even for the category in which patients show a 'selective category deficit.' These findings weigh against the 'loss' of linguistic representations as the underlying cause of noun-verb deficits, instead supporting a 'processing limitations' approach.

The role of phonological coding for character identification was examined with the benefit of processing parafoveal characters in eye fixations while reading Chinese sentences. In Experiment 1, the orthogonal manipulation of phonological and orthographic similarity can separate two types of phonological benefits for homophonic previews, according to whether these previews share the same phonetic radical with the targets or not. The significant phonological benefits indicate that phonological coding is activated early when the character is in the parafovea. Experiment 2 manipulated the character's consistency value and found that the phonological preview benefits are reliable only when the targets are high consistency characters. The results of two experiments suggest that phonological computation is rapid and early at both character and radical levels for Chinese character identification.

Over the past 20 years lead has been proven to exert an influence on the intelligence of children. Especially for children exposed to environmental lead, average blood lead was often lower than the officially recognized intoxication level. Because Kaohsiung is an industrial area in Taiwan and lead exposure is an important environmental issue, we attempted to ascertain the extent to which environmental lead influences the achievement of primary school children. We randomly selected 934 children from 32 primary schools in 11 districts of Kaohsiung City. Blood lead levels of the children were checked, and they were administered a questionnaire about their family information. Scores of several courses were used in this study on the relationship between a child's blood lead and his or her academic performance (Ranking with his or her classmates), including Chinese (reading and writing short Chinese articles), Mathematics, History and Society, and Natural Science. Multiple regression models were done with adjustments for the confounding effects of their parents' socioeconomic levels. The mean (SD) of 934 blood lead level was 5.50 (1.86) microg/dL. Spearman's coefficient showed that class rankings in Chinese, Mathematics, Natural Science, and History and Society were all strongly associated with blood lead levels (P<0.01). The multiple regression models revealed that blood lead level exerts a stronger influence on children's language ability (Chinese) than on their ability to calculate (Mathematics). Our results suggest that environmental lead exposure adversely affects a child's academic achievement, making a direct link between exposure to lead and academic attainment., (2002 Elsevier Science (USA))

The determination of toxic metals in urine is an important clinical screening procedure. In this study, the aim of our investigation was to determine the concentrations of Pb, Cd, and Ni in urine samples under routine clinical laboratory conditions. To assess the reliability of these methods, critical factors such as detection limit(s), calibration range(s), cost, accuracy and precision were studied. The method was employed for the quantitative determination of lead, cadmium and nickel in urine samples from steel production and quality control (QC) workers and healthy unexposed controls. After pre-treatment with acids, the samples were digested via a microwave oven and the samples were determined by a graphite furnace atomic absorption spectrometry (GFAAS). Quality control for these procedures was established with the concurrent analysis of Standard Trace Metals 7879 Level II and NIST SRM 2670 (Toxic Elements in Freeze Dried Urine). The results indicate that urinary lead, cadmium and nickel levels of the exposed workers are significantly higher those of the controls. The possible connection of these elements with the etiology of disease is discussed. The results also show the need for immediate improvements in workplace ventilation and industrial hygiene practices.

A side-chain liquid crystalline polysiloxane polymer (PS3DBDE1) with high purity and high isotropic transition temperature served as a stationary phase in an attempt to chromatographize the dioxin/furan compounds. The polymer was coated on the inner surface of a 0.25 mm I.D. capillary column by using the static coating method, forming a film with a thickness of df approximately 0.25 microm. A commercial standard solution (US EPA 1613 standard solution 1613CS4) containing polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins (PCDDs) and polychlorinated dibenzofurans (PCDFs) was used to test the chromatographic behavior of the laboratory-made capillary column. Two commercial capillary columns HP-5MS (Hewlett-Packard) and RTX-5MS (RTX) were chosen to compare their chromatographic behavior. The results show that by the use of PS3DBDE1 the isomeric pair compounds 1,2,3,4-TeCDD vs. 2,3,7,8-TeCDD and 1,2,3,4,7,8-HxCDD vs. 1,2,3,6,7,8-HxCDD and the same substituted-chlorine number compounds 1,2,3,4,6,7,8-HpCDF vs. 1,2.3,4,6,7,8-HpCDD and 1,2,3,4,6,7,8,9-OCDD vs. 1,2,3,4,6,7,8,9-OCDF had higher resolution than HP-5MS and RTX-5MS as suggested by the column makers.