Search

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate interrelations between enhanced emotional intelligence, leadership self-efficacy and task-oriented leadership behaviour following participation in leadership coaching.Design/methodology/approachOrganisational leaders (coachees) (N = 70) and their subordinates (N = 175) completed online questionnaires pre- and post-coaching. To account for pre-coaching scores, construct latent change scores were assessed using partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM).FindingsResults indicate a positive association between enhanced emotional intelligence and leadership self-efficacy, however, little support was found for leadership self-efficacy as a mediator explaining an association between enhanced emotional intelligence and task-oriented leadership behaviour.Practical implicationsOrganisations aiming to improve leader performance through enhancing emotional intelligence and leadership self-efficacy may find value in leadership coaching due to the intervention's positive effect on these constructs, and the positive association observed between developmental changes in these constructs.Originality/valueResearch on the interrelation between emotional intelligence and leadership self-efficacy is scarce. This study extends the literature by investigating the interrelation between developmental changes between these constructs brought about by leadership coaching using latent change scores and PLS-SEM. The study also assesses whether enhanced leadership self-efficacy mediates an association between enhanced emotional intelligence and task-oriented leadership behaviour building on the literature explaining coaching's effect mechanisms.

PurposeThe authors incorporated leadership and gender theories with research on trust to propose a model relating interpersonal emotion management (IEM, a type of relational leadership) and task-oriented (T-O) leadership to follower adaptive performance. The authors also examine the indirect effect of IEM and T-O on adaptive performance via trust and the possible moderating role of gender on these relationships.Design/methodology/approachThe authors tested this model using a sample of 314 workers who rated their direct leaders (supervisors).FindingsOverall, results supported the model for IEM as it was directly and indirectly related (via trust) to adaptive job performance (even after controlling for transformational leadership) and these relationships were more positive for women leaders. T-O leadership was related to adaptive job performance as expected but was unrelated to trust or, via trust, to adaptive performance. Findings also suggest that women direct leaders may garner more trust and adaptive performance from followers by engaging in higher levels of IEM, while also not experiencing backlash for engaging in the more agentic T-O behaviors during a crisis.Practical implicationsDespite an emphasis on women's relational leadership during a crisis, the authors findings show organizations are best served by ambidextrous leaders who can manage the emotions and tasks of their followers and that both women and men can engage in these leadership styles without penalty.Originality/valueMuch research regarding women's leadership advantage during a crisis is based on political leaders or has been conducted in lab settings. Further, it has focused on attitudes toward the women leaders rather than their performance. Research has also not considered both IEM along with the possible backlash women may experience for engaging in T-O leadership.

Background and Objectives: Stroke is a clinical syndrome consisting of rapidly developing clinical signs of focal disturbance of cerebral function lasting more than 24 hours or leading to death with no apparent cause other than a vascular origin.” Some evidence-based studies proved that bilateral task-oriented exercise and Mirror therapy are effective in improving the hand function in hemiparetic stroke patient. But there is no comparative study of these two protocols. Hence the purpose of this study is to compare the effectiveness of bilateral task-oriented exercises and Mirror therapy in improving hand function in hemiparetic stroke patient. Methods: A total of 67 subjects met selection criteria for the study among them 7 members are dropouts from group A and B and were divided into 2 groups, 30 members in group A (bilateral task-oriented exercises), 30 members in group B (Mirror therapy). Both groups performed intervention for 5 days per week, for 4 weeks. The outcomes were Fugl Meyer and Motor Activity Log for measuring functional disabilities. Results: Paired “T” test was used to access the statistical significance within the groups. Statistical analysis between two groups using independent “t” test revealed that there is no significant difference between Bilateral task-oriented exercises and Mirror therapy groups. Conclusion: In this study, 4 weeks of bilateral task-oriented exercises and Mirror therapy showed that both approaches are equally effective in improving hand function in hemi paretic stroke. Keywords: Hemiparetic stroke, Bilateral task-oriented exercises, Mirror therapy, Motor activity log, Fugl Meyer.

Background: Tetraplegia that results from cervical injury is the most frequent neurologic category after spinal cord injury (SCI) and causes substantial disability. Traumatic Brain injury (TBI) is a shock or a penetrating injury to the head that disrupts the brain function leading to various impairments including upper limb dysfunction. Improving arm and hand function after these injuries is a major priority of rehabilitation due to its reflect on mobility, independency and quality of life. Advances of treatment approaches and technology have been introduced in research work; one of these approaches is task-oriented training (TOT). Aim of Study: This systematic review aims to find out the evidence on the effectiveness of TOT to improve the upper limb functions among patients with SCI and TBI. Material and Methods: This systematic review performed using the PubMed, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, Physiotherapy Evidence Database (PEDro) and the Egyptian Knowledge Bank (EKB) search engines and the associated keywords. The methodological quality assessment was done by two reviewers using PEDro scale. Random effect model and standardized mean differences were used for meta-analyses. Results: The search identified 8,424 records, of which only two trials were selected as eligible. Quality appraisal revealed the trials were of good or fair quality. Conclusion: This systematic review suggests moderate level of evidence for non-significant effect of Task-oriented training in improving upper limb function and hand dexterity in patients with spinal cord injuries and further primary research is recommended for both SCI and TBI.

Many learners of English as a foreign language often feel that learning spoken English is frustrating and quite difficult, especially when they have to talk to English-speaking foreigners. In gener...

Cross-lingual dialogue systems are increasingly important in e-commerce and customer service due to the rapid progress of globalization. In real-world system deployment, machine translation (MT) services are often used before and after the dialogue system to bridge different languages. However, noises and errors introduced in the MT process will result in the dialogue system's low robustness, making the system's performance far from satisfactory. In this article, we propose a novel MT-oriented noise enhanced framework that exploits multi-granularity MT noises and injects such noises into the dialogue system to improve the dialogue system's robustness. Specifically, we first design a method to automatically construct multi-granularity MT-oriented noises and multi-granularity adversarial examples, which contain abundant noise knowledge oriented to MT. Then, we propose two strategies to incorporate the noise knowledge: (i) Utterance-level adversarial learning and (ii) Knowledge-level guided method. The former adopts adversarial learning to learn a perturbation-invariant encoder, guiding the dialogue system to learn noise-independent hidden representations. The latter explicitly incorporates the multi-granularity noises, which contain the noise tokens and their possible correct forms, into the training and inference process, thus improving the dialogue system's robustness. Experimental results on three dialogue models, two dialogue datasets, and two language pairs have shown that the proposed framework significantly improves the performance of the cross-lingual dialogue system.

Background Task-oriented training with upper extremity (UE) skilled movements has been established as a method to regain function post stroke. Although improved UE function has been shown after this type of therapy, there is minimal evidence that brain plasticity is associated with this training. The accelerated skill acquisition program (ASAP) is an example of an approach for promoting UE function using targeting movements. Objective To investigate the effects of a single 2-hour session of ASAP in individuals with stroke on measures of brain plasticity as represented by corticospinal excitability (CE) and determine associations with reach-to-grasp (RTG) performance. Methods Eighteen post-acute stroke patients were randomized to two groups. Experimental group (n = 9) underwent ASAP for 2 hours, while the control group (n = 9) received dose equivalent usual and customary care. Both groups were evaluated for CE and RTG performance prior to the session and then four times after training: immediately, 1 day, 6 days, and 12 days. Results Significant alterations in CE were found in the peak-to-peak of Motor Evoked Potential amplitude of elbow and wrist extensor muscles in the lesioned hemisphere. The experimental group also demonstrated improved execution (shortened total movement time, TMT), feed-forward mechanism (deceleration time, DT) and planning (lengthened relative time to maximum hand aperture, RTApmax) compared to the control group. Conclusion Alterations in brain plasticity occur concurrently with improvements in RTG performance in post-acute stroke patients with mild impairment after a single 2-hour session of task-oriented training and persist for at least 12 days.

Introduction and Aim:One of the most significant and common clinical finding in a majority of children with (CP)is difficulty in walking and exhibiting poor balance control which results in poor gait and reaching movements as maintenance of stability is critical. There are numerous approaches, protocols and treatment strategies to improve balance and gait control. The aim of this study was to compare the effects of task- oriented training and proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation exercises (PNF)on mobility and balance in spastic cerebral palsy. Methodology: This was a comparative study design with pre-post type 20 samples were selected based on the inclusion criteria and were divided into two groups. Group A received task-oriented training and group B proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation and Pre & post measurements were done using paediatric balance scale and timed up and go test. Results:On comparing the post-test values of group A and group B both the group showed significant difference with the pre-test, on comparing the post-test values of group A and group B, group A showed better significance than group B. Conclusion: The present study concluded that there seems to be evidence that task-oriented training is more beneficial in training program for increasing the mobility and balance in spastic cerebral palsy comparing to proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation.

Recovery of upper limb motor function remains a major challenge to stroke rehabilitation experts and stroke survivors alike. Stimulation of the motor cortex by noninvasive brain stimulators and the...

Smoothing the workloads among the stations of an already installed assembly line is one of the major objectives in assembly line (re-)balancing. In order to find a feasible task-station assignment ...

Undergraduates report a variety of reasons for not reading assigned text(s), including confusion regarding instructors’ expectations, while faculty report using reading as a major instructional too...

Objective This study investigated the influence of game features and practice type on human kinematic and muscular performance in a virtual reality exercise (VRE). Participants demonstrated changes in shoulder flexion angle and muscle activation under different virtual scenarios. Background Conventional VRE studies often compared the outcomes between an experimental group that underwent exercise in VR and a real-world exercise control group, whereas comparisons between VRE programs are lacking. Besides, the attributes of VREs received little attention. Method Thirteen able-bodied participants performed upper extremity exercise movements in immersive VR using a head-mounted display. Participants performed task-oriented and imitation-oriented movements with different game features. Shoulder muscle activity (the deltoid, supraspinatus, and infraspinatus) and shoulder motion were collected. Results Practice type (task-oriented, imitation-oriented) significantly influenced the flexion angle of the shoulder complex ( F(1,11) = 9.53, p = .01), and the muscle activity of the supraspinatus ( F(1,9) = 12.61, p = .006) and the infraspinatus ( F(1,9) = 12.71, p = .006). Game features did not have a statistically significant effect on shoulder flexion angle or shoulder muscles’ activations. Conclusions Compared to imitation-oriented practice, task-oriented practice elicited more intensive shoulder movements and muscular efforts but also induced greater movement variations. Substantial differences across game features levels should be further investigated to have significant effects. Applications This research may help guide the design of future VREs. For strength training or rehabilitation where intensive practice is required, task-oriented practice should be considered; for movement learning where movement consistency is required, imitation oriented practice should be adopted.

The research works justify negative impact of carbon dioxide (CO2), released into the atmosphere due to the burning of natural methane (CH4) used as a fuel in some large industrial enterprises of Azerbaijan and the ways of its task-oriented and cost-effective usage, particularly, in methanol, carbamide fertilisers production, which is top priority for Azerbaijan and in oil recovery increase of depleted reservoirs as well. The sources of large carbon dioxide emissions into the air in Azerbaijan have been revealed, the volume of burnt hydrocarbons and waste amount calculated as well. As a major investigation object, the methods of centralized gathering, transportation and utilization of wastes from the sources on the territory have been studied.

BACKGROUND- A 70 year old unknown male patient was found unconscious on road and was brought to tertiary care hospital. On investigations and clinical correlation, patient was diagnosed as a case of left hemiparesis secondary to acute middle cerebral artery infarct. Patient regained consciousness on next day and was in state of complete dependence for bed mobility and daily living activities. He was managed conservatively and was referred to occupational therapy department for further management. METHOD- Patient was evaluated by using uniform terminology. Modied Barthel index, Modied Rankin Scale, Basic MOCA scale and Stroke Specic QOL scales were administered. Patient was given intervention for 5 weeks. Enabling activities with self-care functional activities were practised. Accident prevention, activity promotion, Compensatory strategies and environmental modications were done. Scales were administered post intervention and comparative data was obtained. RESULT- Change of pre-intervention and post- intervention score indicates improvements in performing activities of daily living, reduced disability, improved cognition and quality of living. There were signicant improvement in activities like eating, drinking milk, in bed mobility dressing and coming to sit. Minimum to moderate improvement was seen in activities like toileting, walking, stair climbing and use of wheelchair. Despite his age and lack of family support, signicant functional improvements were documented in this elderly stroke patient, and he was discharged to old age home. CONCLUSION- Supplementing enabling activities with task oriented functional training is feasible and effective in improving independence for activity of daily living in elderly stroke

We describe an approach to task-oriented dialogue in which dialogue state is represented as a dataflow graph. A dialogue agent maps each user utterance to a program that extends this graph. Programs include metacomputation operators for reference and revision that reuse dataflow fragments from previous turns. Our graph-based state enables the expression and manipulation of complex user intents, and explicit metacomputation makes these intents easier for learned models to predict. We introduce a new dataset, SMCalFlow, featuring complex dialogues about events, weather, places, and people. Experiments show that dataflow graphs and metacomputation substantially improve representability and predictability in these natural dialogues. Additional experiments on the MultiWOZ dataset show that our dataflow representation enables an otherwise off-the-shelf sequence-to-sequence model to match the best existing task-specific state tracking model. The SMCalFlow dataset, code for replicating experiments, and a public leaderboard are available at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/dataflow-based-dialogue-semantic-machines .

Self-care is an often-cited obligation of professional counselors in order to prevent compassion fatigue, vicarious traumatization, and burnout. Nearly all examples of counselor self-care in the pe...

Although research has so far consistently revealed that using suppression to regulate emotions has adverse personal and social effects, it has been argued that suppression may be less detrimental within non-close relationships. In the present work, we examined the effects of experimentally induced suppression on expressive behavior, emotional experience, and social outcomes within task-oriented interactions between individuals randomly assigned to high/low vs. equal power positions. Eighty-eight participants were randomly paired with a partner of the same gender (forty-four dyads). After being randomly assigned to one of four experimental conditions created to manipulate suppression use and power, each dyad was asked to complete two problem-solving tasks. The results showed that the participants who were assigned to the subordinate (low-power) role and who used suppression to regulate their emotions reported more negative emotional experience than did individuals assigned to equal-power roles, as well as more inauthenticity and diminished feelings of rapport compared to subordinates who freely expressed their feelings. Moreover, we found that the use of suppression also influenced participants assigned to the manager (high-power) role, as they exhibited less positive behavior, reported less positive experience and lower feelings of rapport when interacting with a partner asked to suppress. When individuals were assigned to equal power roles, the participants instructed to use suppression reported lower levels of positive emotions than did their partners as well as higher feelings of inauthenticity compared to uninstructed participants. Overall, these findings seem to suggest that suppression may impair task-oriented interactions between high/low power individuals more than interactions between individuals sharing equal power.

The aim of the present study was to quantify a large number of analytes including opioids, stimulants, benzodiazepines, z-drugs, antidepressants and neuroleptics within a single sample workup followed by a single analytical measurement. Expected drug concentrations in hair are strongly substance dependent. Therefore, three different calibration ranges were implemented: 0.5 to 600 pg/mg (group 1), 10 to 12,000 pg/mg (group 2) and 50 to 60,000 pg/mg (group 3). In order to avoid saturation effects, different strategies were applied for selected transitions including the use of parent mass ions containing one or two 13C-isotopes and detuning of the declustering potential and/or collision energy. Drugs were extracted from pulverized hair by a two-step extraction protocol and measured by liquid chromatrography--tandem mass spectrometry (LC--MS-MS) using Scheduled MRM™ Algorithm Pro. In total, 275 MRM transitions including 43 deuterated standards were measured. The method has been fully validated according to international guidelines. A MultiQuant™ software based tool for task-oriented data evaluation was established, which allows extracting selected information from the measured data sets. The matrix effects and recoveries were within the allowed ranges for the majority of the analytes. The lower limits of quantification (LLOQs) were for ∼72% of the analytes in the low-pg/mg range (0.5–5 pg/mg) and for ∼24% of the analytes between 10 and 50 pg/mg. These LLOQs considered cut-offs by the Society of Hair Testing (SoHT), if recommended. The herein established multi-analyte approach meets the specific requirements of forensic hair testing and can be used for the rapid and robust measurement of a wide range of psychoactive substances. The analyte-specific wide concentration ranges open up a wide field of applications.

To evaluate the effects of task-oriented training and to compare it with virtual reality training on the mobility, physical performance and balance in stroke patients.The randomised controlled trial was conducted from January 2016 to March 2017 at the Physical Rehabilitation Department of Pakistan Railways General Hospital, Rawalpindi, Pakistan, and comprised patients 40-70 years with stroke history of at least 3 months who had the ability to stand unaided. The subjects were randomised into virtual reality training group A and task-oriented training group B. Task oriented training was provided for 3 days per week over 8 weeks to both groups with each session lasting 40-45 minutes, while additional 15-20 minutes of exer-gaming was provided only to group A. Fugl-Meyer Assessment-Lower Extremity, Berg Balance Test, Timed Up and Go Test and Dynamic Gait Index were used for assessment which was done at baseline, and at 2, 4, 6 and 8 weeks of training. Data was analysed using SPSS 21.Of the 52 subjects, there were 26(50%) in each of the two groups. The overall sample had 36(69.2%) males and 16(30.7%) females. Group A showed significant difference in Fugl-Meyer Assessment-Lower Extremity and Berg Balance Test scores at 04 weeks of training compared to group B (p0.05). Timed Up and Go Test significantly improved in group A at 6 weeks (p0.05). Both groups showed significant improvement in Dynamic Gait Index after 8 weeks of training (p0.05).Virtual reality combined with task-oriented training improved the physical performance, mobility and balance outcome in stroke patients. However, virtual reality and task-oriented trainings had similar effect on gait performance of the patients.

Background: Stroke patients exhibit arm global synkinesis (GS), involuntary movement due to muscle weakness and irregular muscle tension. But currently there are few studies examined the effects of GS on activates of daily living in stroke patients. Objectives: To investigate the effects the effects of task-oriented bilateral movements, which promote brain plasticity and are based on neurological theory, using the unaffected arm and the affected arm. Design: Quasi-randomized trial. Methods: Twenty stroke patients were randomly assigned to experimental group I (n=10) and experimental group II (n=10). Before the intervention, arm GS was measured using surface electromyography, and the Motor Activity Log evaluated the quantitative and qualitative uses of the affected arm in daily life. The same items were measured four weeks later. Results: The changes in the GS of the arm of experimental group I showed statistically significant differences only in bending motions (P

Due to the significance and value in human-computer interaction and natural language processing, task-oriented dialog systems are attracting more and more attention in both academic and industrial communities. In this paper, we survey recent advances and challenges in task-oriented dialog systems. We also discuss three critical topics for task-oriented dialog systems: (1) improving data efficiency to facilitate dialog modeling in low-resource settings, (2) modeling multi-turn dynamics for dialog policy learning to achieve better task-completion performance, and (3) integrating domain ontology knowledge into the dialog model. Besides, we review the recent progresses in dialog evaluation and some widely-used corpora. We believe that this survey, though incomplete, can shed a light on future research in task-oriented dialog systems.

Steerable catheters, as one type of continuum robot, has been popularly used to reach targets to treat atrial fibrillation. Its tip orientation relative to the surface normal of anatomy affects the ablation efficiency and lesion volume. Traditional catheters with a constant deflection have to rely on the reaction force from the tissue to reach targets, and their tip orientation capability is always limited. To overcome this challenge, we propose a miniaturized tendon actuated continuum robot with asymmetric contact-aided compliant mechanisms (CCMs) to generate asymmetric bends. It can adapt to the confined space and improve the tip orientation capability. The general configuration with the customized contact-aided segments and spatial arrangements is investigated. A mechanical model considering self-contacts and tendon interactions is built to describe free bends and constrained bends. A task-oriented optimization based on the mechanical model is implemented to find the best asymmetric configuration with unevenly distributed CCMs. Experiments are carried out to validate the proposed design, model, and optimization. Comparisons of continuum robots with and without CCMs by experiments and simulation demonstrate its potential advantages to improve the deflection and tip orientation in the confined space.

Building conversational task-oriented bots requires large and diverse sets of annotated user utterances to learn mappings between natural language utterances and user intents. Given the complexity of human language as well as the recent advances on intent recognition (especially deep-learning-based approaches), bot developers now have faced a new challenge: efficiently and effectively collecting a large number of quality (e.g., diverse and unbiased) training samples. This article studies training user utterance acquisition along several important dimensions including cost and quality. We discuss state of the art techniques, identify open issues, and inform an outlook on future research directions.

We propose to leverage a real-world, human activity RGB dataset to teach a robot Task-Oriented Grasping (TOG). We develop a model that takes as input an RGB image and outputs a hand pose and configuration as well as an object pose and a shape. We follow the insight that jointly estimating hand and object poses increases accuracy compared to estimating these quantities independently of each other. Given the trained model, we process an RGB dataset to automatically obtain the data to train a TOG model. This model takes as input an object point cloud and outputs a suitable region for task-specific grasping. Our ablation study shows that training an object pose predictor with the hand pose information (and vice versa) is better than training without this information. Furthermore, our results on a real-world dataset show the applicability and competitiveness of our method over state-of-the-art. Experiments with a robot demonstrate that our method can allow a robot to preform TOG on novel objects.

International audience; The effective and computationally efficient task-oriented synthesis of wide reflectarray antennas (RAs) comprising arbitrarily complex unit cells (UCs) is addressed. A multiscale formulation of the reflectarray synthesis problem is proposed where:1) the degrees-of-freedom (DoFs) of the architecture are defined at the microscale in terms of the UC descriptors, while 2) the design objectives are stated at the macroscale as user-defined constraints on the RA radiation features. The arising task-oriented multiscale reflectarray design problem is then dealt with a customized instance of the system-by-design paradigm. A set of numerical examples is shown to illustrate the features of the proposed design approach and to assess, also comparatively, its effectiveness/computational efficiency.