Virtual Reality Reduces Pediatric Anxiety During Food Allergy Clinical Trials: A Pilot Randomized, Pragmatic Study

Phlebotomy procedures required in food allergy (FA) diagnosis and clinical trials often induce fear and anxiety for pediatric patients. The primary aim of this study was to determine whether virtual reality (VR) applications were effective in reducing anxiety for pediatric FA patients undergoing phlebotomy during FA clinical trials. Secondary aims assessed fear, pain, procedural compliance, and adverse events. Participants undergoing phlebotomy were enrolled and randomized to a VR group or standard of care (SOC) group for this prospective pilot randomized, pragmatic study. Participants in the VR group played interactive applications on a customized Samsung Gear VR headset and those in the SOC group received the standard of care. Participants' anxiety, fear, and pain were assessed with the Children's Anxiety Meter, Children's Fear Scale, and FACES pain scale pre, during, and post phlebotomy procedure. Compliance was assessed using the modified Induction Compliance Checklist during the procedure and compared between two groups. Forty-nine participants were randomized to VR (n = 26) and SOC (n = 23) groups. Although both the VR and SOC groups experienced a decrease in anxiety and fear from pre- to post-procedure, those in the VR group experienced less anxiety and fear during the procedure than SOC participants. Similarly, both groups experienced an increase in pain from pre- to post-procedure; however, the VR group reported less pain during the procedure than SOC. Fewer symptoms of procedural non-compliance were reported in the VR group. Interactive VR applications may be an effective tool for reducing fear, anxiety, and pain during phlebotomy for FA clinical trials.

DEIXIS USE IN “AL-QALB AL-JARȊH” SHORT STORY BY NAJIB KAILANI (A PRAGMATIC STUDY)

<p>This study describe the types of deixis and their functions contained in the short story <em>al-Qalb al-Jarȋh </em>by Najib Kailani. Through deixis, readers or listeners will be helped to know who, when, and where an utterance is carried out based on its context. In this study, the method used is descriptive-qualitative with a pragmatic approach. The object of the research is the short story al-Qalb al-Jarȋh, while the research data in the form of words, phrases, and sentences identified contain elements of deixis. The results of the study prove that the short story of al-Qalb al-Jarȋh by Najib Kailani contains various elements of deixis, including: person deixis, time deixis, place deixis, discourse deixis, and social deixis.</p>

“Please Don’t Come Back”: A Pragmatic Study of Chinese Netizens’ Complaints Under Pandemic of COVID-19

This article aims to analyze Chinese netizens’ speech act of complaints under pandemic of COVID-19 by Searl’s felicity condition of speech act (1969) and discuss with politeness theories. Researchers collected data from the comment area of a short video on Douyin in September 2021. The result shows that there are 11 strategies employed to complain about the returnees, namely Suggestion, Statement, Order, Irony, Expectation, Expressing negative emotions, Request, Criticism, Asking for reasons, Calling for empathy, and Exclaiming strategies according to the order of most to least. In uneasy situations, Chinese speakers still try to employ polite strategies to express their dissatisfaction, however, they may threaten listeners’ “face” inevitably.

HEDGING IN TED TALKS: A CORPUS-BASED PRAGMATIC STUDY

Hedging is a communicative strategy and a form of pragmatic competence which plays a central role in delivering the intended message of the speaker. Commonly observed in two-way conversations, hedges as hedging devices are also present in monologues. This study investigates the most common hedges used in popular monologues TED Talks as well as observes the various communicative strategies they denote. 130 transcripts of the talks, taped from 2002-2019 taken from the official website of TED (ted.com), are collected to build a corpus of 337,302 tokens. Through corpus-based analysis using concordance software AntConc 3.5.0, 48 most common hedges are inserted for frequency search. The search hits show that the most frequently-used hedges in the corpus are ‘just,’ ‘could,’ ‘you know,’ ‘actually,’ ‘I think,’ and ‘kind of’ with the numbers of occurrence 1107, 554, 541, 530, 390, and 309 respectively. From the analyses of the functions of the most frequent hedges, it can be concluded that each of the hedges serves distinctive pragmatic strategy which contributes in the communicative processes of the talks.

Epileptic Seizures in Alzheimer’s Disease: What Are the Implications of SANAD II?

Epileptic seizures are increasingly recognized as part of the clinical phenotype of patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). However, the evidence based on which to make treatment decisions for such patients is slim, there being no clear recommendation based on systematic review of the few existing studies of anti-seizure drugs in AD patients. Here the authors examine the potential implications for the treatment of seizures in AD of the results of the recently published SANAD II pragmatic study, which examined the effectiveness of levetiracetam, zonisamide, or lamotrigine in newly diagnosed focal epilepsy, and of valproate and levetiracetam in generalized and unclassifiable epilepsy.

Insulting in English and Iraqi-Arabic: A Pragmatic Study

Crimes are committed by uttering words or expressions, writing or signifying in a public way like insulting which is one of the crimes against public welfare. This crime has been dealt with and compared legally but its linguistic aspect has not been given much attention. This study tries to emphasize this crime pragmatically and contrastively in English and Arabic. No study has shed light on such aspects concerning the study under investigation. The researcher has not found any previous related study to get a benefit from about this topic. The aim of this study is to shed light on the points of similarity and difference in strategies of insulting in terms of speech act, implicature and impoliteness theories between English and Arabic. The present study hypothesizes the following: In terms of the three theories mentioned above, English and Arabic have points of similarities in strategies of insulting. To support or refute the hypothesis of the study, data consisting of 20 complaints in English and Arabic were collected from Courts of Appeal in Iraq, Britain and the United States. They are analyzed in terms of an eclectic model. The results arrived at are: English and Arabic are different in insulting in terms of the locutionary acts and illocutionary acts. Concerning impoliteness, the same strategies are applied to insulting in both languages. As far as implicature is concerned, the two languages are different in insulting.

Is it time to re-evaluate the inevitability of ulcers at the end of life?

Background: The prevention of pressure injuries/ulcers (PI/PUs) in patients at the end of life is achievable, albeit challenging. Objective diagnostic tools, such as sub-epidermal moisture (SEM) scanning, support healthcare practitioners' clinical judgment in preventing PI/PUs. Aim: A pragmatic study was conducted to assess the feasibility of preventing PI/PUs using SEM technology as an adjunct to routine care in a 22-bed inpatient hospice. Methods: Daily SEM scanning was introduced to support the device-trained practitioners' clinical judgment in detecting developing, non-visible PI/PUs. Preventive interventions were initiated by clinical judgment informed by Waterlow scores, visible, tactile skin and tissue assessments and scanner readings. Results: Prior to the study, the incidence of PI/PUs was 9%. The 6 month study period reported a 4.8% PI/PU incidence, 7/146 consenting patients developed a PI/PU, resulting in a 47% reduction in incidence rates. Conclusion: Preventing the development of PI/PUs is possible with clinical judgment aided by SEM data.

A Pragmatic Study of Humor in Iraqi Facebook Comments

The main goal of this study is to determine how comments are made by Iraqis on Facebook (a social media platform) to express humor and to discover whether these comments follow specific linguistic principles or not. There are millions of humorous comments on different types of posts, but only political posts were chosen in this research because of the importance of these posts. In the writer’s view, the politics of Iraq is greatly important as it dictates much of the situation that people currently live in. This means that there is also a lot of engagement by a lot of persons in Iraq with politics using humor, and there are therefore a large number of political posts using humor. This study relied on a specific method in analyzing data (namely comments selected from Facebook). 28 comments were selected for analysis by determining whether they follow the maxims of cooperative principles on the one hand and whether they follow any form of breaking of cooperative principles from another aspect. The arguments of Attardo were proven where he said that a person cannot be considered uncooperative in the conversation just because he said something funny or tried to be funny (Attardo, 2001). Moreover, the results showed that two forms of maxims of cooperative principle are followed several times, which are the maxims of relation and manner. It also showed that the least principle that is followed is the maxim of quality. There were also instances where maxims were not observed. It was found that the question of whether there would be flouting and violation of rules in the comments is most dependent on the commenter.