Imagery Rehearsal Based Art Therapy: Treatment of Post-traumatic Nightmares in Art Therapy

Imagery Rehearsal Therapy (IRT) is effective for trauma-related nightmares and is also a challenge to patients in finding access to their traumatic memories, because these are saved in non-verbal, visual, or audiovisual language. Art therapy (AT) is an experiential treatment that addresses images rather than words. This study investigates the possibility of an IRT-AT combination. Systematic literature review and field research was conducted, and the integration of theoretical and practice-based knowledge resulted in a framework for Imagery Rehearsal-based Art Therapy (IR-AT). The added value of AT in IRT appears to be more readily gaining access to traumatic experiences, living through feelings, and breaking through avoidance. Exposure and re-scripting take place more indirectly, experientially and sometimes in a playlike manner using art assignments and materials. In the artwork, imagination, play and fantasy offer creative space to stop the vicious circle of nightmares by changing theme, story line, ending, or any part of the dream into a more positive and acceptable one. IR-AT emerges as a promising method for treatment, and could be especially useful for patients who benefit least from verbal exposure techniques. This description of IR-AT offers a base for further research.

The Long Perplexing Mīmiyya of Ḥumayd B. Thawr Al-Hilālī: Which Version Is More Convincing?

This article analyses the structure of four different versions of the long love poem by Ḥumayd b. Thawr al-Hilālī. The shortest of the four runs to 119 verses, and the longest is 185, each line ending with m as a rhyming letter. This structural analysis addresses two main questions: First, what is the story told in each version? Second, in light of this, which version is the most convincing? Answering these questions enabled a restructuring of the poem, which appears in Arabic below, followed by a full English translation, with footnotes to clarify lexicon and content. The study's main conclusion is that the most convincing version of the poem comprises the verses of al-Bayṭār (editor of its longest and most recent variant), structured to fit the narrative of al-Maymanī's edition.

A new multidisciplinary observatory in the Eastern Ligurian Sea (NW Mediterranean Sea): a combination of deep-sea and coastal measurements

<p>Climate change investigation, protection of marine ecosystems and mitigation of natural risks are the main research objectives of the Levante Canyon Mooring (LCM), a deep submarine multidisciplinary observatory, installed in September 2019 in the Eastern Ligurian Sea (Lat 44°05.443'N, Long 009°29.900'E at 608 m depth), inside the Pelagos Sanctuary. The observatory consists of a stand-alone station, with an instrumented mooring line ending with a submerged buoy. It operates in delayed-mode and is equipped with sensors that measure physical and biogeochemical parameters continuously and it is expected to provide data in the long-term. Temperature and salinity monitoring is carried out at three depth levels (about 80, 335 and 580 m depth), while turbidity is recorded at 580 m depth. LCM is also equipped with a sediment trap and two acoustic current profilers, able to measure direction and speed of currents in nearly the entire water column.</p><p>Data will be used to measure flux of sediments, nutrients and organic matter and to better understand the hydrodynamic and physical conditions of the Levante Canyon, which hosts valuable and vulnerable ecosystems, such as the deep-living cold-water corals, identified by IIM and ENEA in 2014, near the LCM mooring site. The LCM site is also located in an area where surface currents are monitored in near-real time by the CNR’s High Frequency Radar network, allowing data integration from multiplatform observations.</p><p>The project, co-financed by the Liguria Region, is coordinated by the DLTM in strict collaboration, in terms of human resources, infrastructures and instruments with the associated public research bodies (CNR, ENEA, INGV) and with the IIM. The project also includes the next deployment of a cabled station in the Gulf of La Spezia (10 m depth, less than 100 m far from the coast) that will monitor the gravimetric field, temperature and marine current. The main objective of the coastal station is to provide a test site for new instruments and sensors.</p>

‘The Inmost Spirit of Light’

Turner, Hazlitt wrote in The Examiner, is ‘the ablest landscape-painter now living’, but his paintings are ‘too much abstractions of aerial perspective, and representations not properly of the objects of nature as of the medium through which they were seen’. It is likely that Shelley would have known Hazlitt’s review, which foreshadows Hazlitt’s later criticism of similar traits of ‘abstraction’ in Shelley’s Posthumous Poems. Regardless of mutual influence or awareness, Turner and Shelley exhibit at times a startling similarity, both in thematic terms and in terms of their angles of vision and affective impact on viewer or reader. If in some moods they welcomed the resmelting of an old world in the furnace of words and paint, they were conscious, too, that such a burning away might induce regret as well as rhapsody. Through a range of comparisons between poems and paintings, the chapter shows how Turner and Shelley hymn change and lament evanescence in a blink of a line-ending or swish of a brushstroke; to try to pin them down to either praise or lament is nearly always to simplify.

Helpful, albeit hazardous! Esophageal stem-cell injection in systemic sclerosis

Background: Over 90% of patients with systemic sclerosis suffer from gastroesophageal reflux. Esophageal motility disturbances are associated with a reduced life quality and may force interstitial lung disease progression. We wanted to determine whether we can improve gastroesophageal reflux in these patients by esophageal stem-cell injection. Methods: We performed a pilot study including eights patients with systemic sclerosis and symptomatic gastroesophageal reflux. Sampling of adipose tissue was performed by an experienced plastic surgeon under local anesthesia. The collected fat was injected into the submucosa of the distal esophagus, each time 1 ml in all four quadrants starting 2, 4 and 6 cm proximal to the Z line (ending up to a total volume of 12 ml). Before the intervention, 3, 6 and finally 12 months after the procedure, patients answered the Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease Health-Related Quality of Life Questionnaire (GERD HRQL) and a high-resolution manometry was performed to quantify changes in motility function. Results: All patients showed an improvement in the GERD HRQL score after the stem-cell injection and a lower dosage of proton-pump inhibitors. The manometric findings showed no change throughout the time. A serious adverse event occurred, as one patient developed multiple cerebellar embolic infarcts. Conclusion: Because of the favorable effect in all patients, a safe route for esophageal fat injection needs to be developed.

Schistura madhavai, a new species of hill-stream loach from Sri Lanka, with redescription of S. notostigma (Teleostei: Nemacheilidae)

Schistura madhavai, new species, is described from Suriyakanda, Sri Lanka. It is distinguished from all other species of Schistura in the peninsula of India and Sri Lanka by the combination of the following characters: 8–9 wide, brown postdorsal bars separated by narrow, white interspaces; width of interspaces ¼–⅓ times width of bars; black bar at caudal-fin base wider than interspaces on the body; incomplete lateral line, ending beneath dorsal-fin base; absence of an axillary pelvic lobe; adpressed pelvic fin just reaching anus; origin of the pelvic fin on a vertical through the last unbranched dorsal-fin ray. Schistura notostigma, the only other Sri Lankan species of Schistura, is redescribed. It can be distinguished from all other species of Schistura in the peninsula of India and Sri Lanka by the combination of the following characters: 6–7 wide, brown postdorsal bars; width of interspaces ½–1 times width of bars; complete, black bar at caudal-fin base narrower than width of interspaces between bars on body; emarginate caudal fin; incomplete lateral line ending beneath dorsal-fin base; adpressed pelvic fin surpassing anus; and origin of pelvic fin beneath first branched dorsal-fin ray. Schistura madhavai is separated from S. notostigma by an uncorrected pairwise distance of 3.0–3.8% for the 16S rRNA gene fragment.

Opistognathus ensiferus, a new species of jawfish (Opistognathidae) from the Gulf of Mannar, India, with redescription of O. solorensis Bleeker

A new species of jawfish, Opistognathus ensiferus n. sp., is described based on a single specimen from Manauli Reef in the Gulf of Mannar, India. It is a member of a species group that also includes Opistognathus solorensis Bleeker (Indonesia, Philippines, Taiwan and Palau) and O. verecundus Smith-Vaniz (northwestern Australia). From these two species O. ensiferus n. sp. differs in lacking dark oral pigmentation, except inner lining of upper jaw and adjacent membranes with a single dark stripe (vs. two stripes) and in having a lateral line ending below the 6th or 7th segmented dorsal-fin ray (vs. below the 1st to 4th ray). Opistognathus solorensis is redescribed and in the absence of extant type specimens a neotype is designated. Two strikingly different color morphs are documented for O. solorensis, including the less common one which is almost entirely yellow.

Accelerator and detector physics at the Bern medical cyclotron and its beam transport line

The cyclotron laboratory for radioisotope production and multi-disciplinary research at the Bern University Hospital (Inselspital) is based on an 18-MeV proton accelerator, equipped with a specifically conceived 6-m long external beam line, ending in a separate bunker. This facility allows performing daily positron emission tomography (PET) radioisotope production and research activities running in parallel. Some of the latest developments on accelerator and detector physics are reported. They encompass novel detectors for beam monitoring and studies of low current beams.

Issues in the Instrumental Study of Poetry Reading

This paper presents in a nutshell aspects of the author’s research in poetry reading (rhythmical performance and voice quality). At the beginning it states the impossibility of straightforward instrumental research in poetic rhythm, and suggests a work-around within a comprehensive theory (the Perception-Oriented Theory of Metre). All rules for metrical vs unmetrical are violated by the greatest masters of musicality in English poetry (Milton and Shelley, for instance); instead, the theory places the constraints in the performer’s ability or willingness to perform the verse line rhythmically, a rhythmical performance being one in which conflicting patterns of language and versification are simultaneously perceptible. At a pre-instrumental stage the author applied hypotheses derived from the empirical research of others (stress perception, nonlinguistic tick-tack perception and performance of nonsense lines) to account for the peculiar nature of the trochaic metre; as well as hypotheses derived from the limited-channel-capacity hypothesis and gestalt theory to account for the mental processes that govern the vocal devices used in a rhythmical performance. He put to a non-instrumental test this theory in an experiment with the rhythmical performance of stress maxima in the seventh position in the iambic pentameter. Finally, he presents six case studies illustrating six theoretical issues, through computer analysis of recorded readings and electronic manipulations thereof in order to compare minimal pairs of alternative solutions. These case studies explore enjambment, convergent and divergent delivery style, triple-encodedness, listener response, voice quality and issues of interpretation.Such variety of effects is achieved by a homogeneous set of vocal manipulations: grouping and overarticulation which, in the final resort, boil down to conflicting phonetic cues for continuity and discontinuity at the same time. At the end of an utterance in ordinary speech there is, usually, redundancy of cues. We cue discontinuity by a pause, falling intonation contour, prolongation of the last syllable or speech sounds of the utterance, overarticulation of word-final stop releases, if any, overarticulation of the last word boundary, and so forth. In enjambment, for instance, where a syntactic unit overrides the line ending, the performer may have recourse to conflicting cues, indicating at the same time syntactic continuity and discontinuity of the versification unit. When a stressed syllable occurs in a weak position, overarticulation of the phonemes and of the syllable boundaries may save mental processing space, allowing to perceive the conflicting patterns of language and versification. At the same time, continuity must be indicated, to preserve syntactic coherence. A stress maximum (that is, a stressed syllable between two unstressed ones in mid-phrase or mid-word) in the seventh (weak) position of an iambic pentameter line renders it, according to Halle and Keyser, unmetrical. Experienced performers, however, seem to be able to perform such verse lines rhythmically, and tend to have recourse to similar vocal strategies. They are surprised to discover that they over- rather than under-emphasize the deviant stress, isolating the last four syllables as a perceptual unit, and generating a perceptual drive toward the last (tenth) position, where the two patterns have a coinciding downbeat, emphatically closing the verse line. After the sixth position cues for discontinuity are required to perceptually isolate the last four metric positions, but also cues for syntactic continuity (in mid-phrase). As to triple-encodedness, the same phonetic cues, e. g., overarticulated word-final voiceless plosives may indicate, at the same time, sentence ending, line ending and, e. g., a dominant, determined personality. As to convergent and divergent delivery styles, the distinction refers to the performer’s tendency to have recourse where possible to redundant or conflicting phonetic cues to effect a rhythmical performance, within the constraints of the conflicting linguistic and versification patterns of the text.