Thesis (M.S.)--Case Western Reserve University, 2008. / [School of Medicine] Department of Clinical Research. Includes bibliographical references.

Temporal perspective is a multi-dimensional term for how individuals focus attention toward the past, present, and future. There have been few investigations into the relationship between temporal perspective and well-being. Temporal perspective has predominantly been measured with single-occasion measurement designs, which ignore the potential for within-person variations that may be important in accounting for fluctuations in well-being. The current study examined the dimensions of temporal perspective (temporal focus, temporal attitude, and temporal distance) and their dynamic relationships with well-being. A 14-day daily diary design was employed to examine whether people fluctuate in their temporal perspective, and if these fluctuations systematically covary with daily well-being. The results from multilevel analyses supported the following conclusions: (a) there is evidence of within-person variability in daily temporal perspective, and (b) this within-person variability in temporal perspective fluctuates systematically with fluctuations in daily well-being. Each temporal perspective dimension was useful in predicting daily well-being. / Graduate / 0621

As everything in the real world changes over time, the ability to model thistemporal dimension of the real world is essential to many computerapplications. Almost every database application involves the management oftemporal data. This applies not only to relational data but also to any datathat models the real world including XML data. Expressing queries ontime-varying (relational or XML) data by using standard query language (SQLor XQuery) is more difficult than writing queries on nontemporal data.In this dissertation, we present minimal valid-time extensions to XQueryand SQL/PSM, focusing on the procedural aspect of the two query languagesand efficient evaluation of sequenced queries.For XQuery, we add valid time support to it by minimally extendingthe syntax and semantics of XQuery. We adopt a stratum approach which maps a&tauXQuery query to a conventional XQuery. The first part of the dissertationfocuses on how to performthis mapping, in particular, on mapping sequenced queries, which are byfar the most challenging. The critical issue of supporting sequenced queries(in any query language) is time-slicing the input data while retaining periodtimestamping. Timestamps are distributed throughout anXML document, rather than uniformly in tuples, complicating the temporalslicing while also providing opportunities for optimization. We propose fiveoptimizations of our initial maximally-fragmented time-slicing approach:selected node slicing, copy-based per-expression slicing, in-placeper-expression slicing, and idiomatic slicing, each of which reducesthe number of constant periods over which the query is evaluated.We also extend a conventional XML query benchmark to effect a temporal XMLquery benchmark. Experiments on this benchmark show that in-place slicingis the best. We then apply the approaches used in &tauXQuery to temporal SQL/PSM.The stratum architecture and most of the time-slicing techniques work fortemporal SQL/PSM. Empirical comparison is performed by running a variety of temporalqueries.

The ability to capture the temporal dimension of a natural language text is essential to many natural language processing applications, such as Question Answering, Automatic Summarisation, and Information Retrieval. Temporal processing is a ¯eld of Computational Linguistics which aims to access this dimension and derive a precise temporal representation of a natural language text by extracting time expressions, events and temporal relations, and then representing them according to a chosen knowledge framework. This thesis focuses on the investigation and understanding of the di®erent ways time is expressed in natural language, on the implementation of a temporal processing system in accordance with the results of this investigation, on the evaluation of the system, and on the extensive analysis of the errors and challenges that appear during system development. The ultimate goal of this research is to develop the ability to automatically annotate temporal expressions, verbal events and temporal relations in a natural language text. Temporal expression annotation involves two stages: temporal expression identi¯cation concerned with determining the textual extent of a temporal expression, and temporal expression normalisation which ¯nds the value that the temporal expression designates and represents it using an annotation standard. The research presented in this thesis approaches these tasks with a knowledge-based methodology that tackles temporal expressions according to their semantic classi¯cation. Several knowledge sources and normalisation models are experimented with to allow an analysis of their impact on system performance. The annotation of events expressed using either ¯nite or non-¯nite verbs is addressed with a method that overcomes the drawback of existing methods v which associate an event with the class that is most frequently assigned to it in a corpus and are limited in coverage by the small number of events present in the corpus. This limitation is overcome in this research by annotating each WordNet verb with an event class that best characterises that verb. This thesis also describes an original methodology for the identi¯cation of temporal relations that hold among events and temporal expressions. The method relies on sentence-level syntactic trees and a propagation of temporal relations between syntactic constituents, by analysing syntactic and lexical properties of the constituents and of the relations between them. The detailed evaluation and error analysis of the methods proposed for solving di®erent temporal processing tasks form an important part of this research. Various corpora widely used by researchers studying di®erent temporal phenomena are employed in the evaluation, thus enabling comparison with state of the art in the ¯eld. The detailed error analysis targeting each temporal processing task helps identify not only problems of the implemented methods, but also reliability problems of the annotated resources, and encourages potential reexaminations of some temporal processing tasks.

Past research has indicated that Chinese culture is more past oriented; whereas North American culture is more future oriented. Such cultural differences in temporal orientation may affect how people value future and past events. I predicted that the typical temporal asymmetry effect among European North Americans - placing more value on future events than on past ones - would be reversed among Chinese due to the cultural differences in temporal orientation. I conducted four studies to examine how culture affects the values people attached to past and future events. Overall, the results supported my predictions. Across all four studies, I found that European Canadians attached more monetary value to an event in the future than to an identical event in the past with similar temporal distance; whereas Chinese people placed more monetary value on a past event than on an identical future event. In Study 3, I also investigated the underlying mechanisms that would account for such cultural differences. Among the three mediators believed to be affected by the past and future orientations, I found two that mediated the cultural influences on the temporal value asymmetry effect: (1) emotions associated with future and past events, and (2) mental simulations of future and past events. Specifically, European Canadians predicted stronger emotions for future events than what they recalled for past events, whereas Chinese showed an opposite trend. Emotions associated with future or past events, in turn, predicted the monetary values attached to the events. In addition, relative to Chinese Canadians, who showed clearer mental simulations for past than for future events, European Canadians had clearer mental simulations for future than for past events. Mental simulations, in turn, showed a positive association with the monetary value assigned to the events. / Thesis (Ph.D, Psychology) -- Queen's University, 2008-09-26 16:18:09.371

Orientadores: Fernando Cendes, Elba Cristina Sa de Camargo Etchebehere / Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Ciencias Medicas / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-08T16:14:13Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Amorim_BarbaraJuarez_D.pdf: 19998647 bytes, checksum: 077344d8015d725dd9cde43d2987f38d (MD5) Previous issue date: 2007 / Resumo: O statistical parametric mapping (SPM) é uma ferramenta de quantificação que tem sido usada no SPECT de perfusão cerebral (SPECT), mas apenas poucos trabalhos na literatura comparam a sua sensibilidade com a da análise visual em pacientes com epilepsia de lobo temporal (ELT) OBJETIVO: Avaliar a capacidade da análise com SPM no SPECT em detectar o foco epileptogênico e alterações perfusionais em regiões extra-temporais em pacientes com epilepsia de lobo temporal mesial (ELTM), comparando os seus achados com os da análise visual MÉTODOS: Foram realizados SPECTs ictal e interictal em 22 pacientes com ELTM refratários ao tratamento clínico. O lado do foco epileptogênico foi definido com base na história clínica, ressonância magnética, eletroencefaiogramas seriados e telemetria. Os SPECTs foram submetidos à análise visual sendo que os SPECTs interictal e ictal foram analisados em conjunto pelos observadores (SPECT-visual-inter e SPECT-visual-ictal). Foi aplicado o SPM2 que comparou os pacientes com um grupo controle de 50 indivíduos normais. No SPM foram realizadas as seguintes comparações: grupo de SPECT interictal com o grupo controle (SPM-grupo-inter); SPECT interictal de cada paciente com o grupo controle (SPM-indiv-inter); grupo de SPECT ictal com o grupo controle (SPM-grupo-ictal); SPECT ictal de cada paciente com o grupo controle (SPM-indiv-ictal). Foram também comparadas as intensidades das alterações perfusionais nos lobos temporais procurando-se por um aumento da perfusão no SPECT ictal em relação ao interictal (SPM-indiv-ictal/inter). RESULTADOS: Não foi observada nenhuma alteração perfusional significativa no SPM-grupo-inter Já no SPM-grupo-ictal o foco epileptogênico foi a região de hiperperfusão mais significativa No SPM-indiv-inter a sensibilidade na localização do foco foi de 45% e no SPM-indiv-ictal a sensibilidade foi de 64%. O SPM-indiv-ictal/inter apresentou a maior sensibilidade para detectar o foco dentre as análises realizadas no SPM (77%) A sensibilidade do SPECT-visual-inter foi de 68% e para o SPECT-visuai-ictal foi de 100%. Por outro lado, diversas áreas de hiperperfusão e hipoperfusão à distância no SPECT ictal foram detectadas principalmente com o SPM CONCLUSÃO: O SPM é uma ferramenta que não depende do operador e é capaz de demonstrar mais áreas de alteração perfusional à distância do foco epileptogênico do que a análise visual. Ele pode ajudar a entender melhor a patofisiologia das crises epilépticas em pacientes com ELTM estudando a relação das diferentes regiões corticais e subcorticais na gênese e na propagação das crises parciais. Entretanto, essa ferramenta não acrescentou um aumento na sensibilidade na localização do foco epileptogênico em relação á análise visual, tanto do SPECT interictal quanto do SPECT ictal / Abstract: Statistical parametric mapping (SPM) is a quantitative tool which has been used in the brain perfusion SPECT (SPECT) However, few works in literature compare its sensitivity with the visual analysis in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). PURPOSE: To investigate the capability of SPM analysis in SPECT to detect the epileptogenic focus and distant perfusion abnormalities in patients with mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (MTLE) and to compare these findings to the visual analysis. METHODS: Interictal and ictal SPECTs of 22 patients with refractory MTLE were performed. Epileptic foci were determined based on clinical history, magnetic resonance, electroencephalograms (EEG) and ictal video-EEG. SPECTs were submitted to visual analysis. Ictal and interictal SPECTs were analyzed together by the nuclear physicians (SPECT-visual-inter and SPECT-visual-ictal). It was also performed the SPM2 analysis which used a control group composed of 50 volunteers. The following comparisons were performed in SPM: interictal SPECT group with control group (SPM-group-inter); interictal SPECT from each patient with control group (SPM-indiv-inter); ictal SPECT group with control group (SPM-group-ictal), ictal SPECT from each patient with control group (SPM-indiv-ictal). It was also compared the perfusion intensity in temporal lobes looking for an increase in perfusion on ictal SPECT in relation to interictal SPECT (SPM-indiv-ictal/inter). RESULTS: No significant perfusion alterations were observed on SPM-group-inter. On the other hand, the epileptogenic temporal lobe was the region with most significant hypoperfusion on SPM-group-ictal. The sensitivity to localize the focus on SPM-indiv-inter was 45% and on SPM-indiv-ictal was 64%. The SPM-indiv ictal/inter revealed the highest sensitivity among the SPM analysis to detect the focus (77%). The sensitivity of SPECT-visual-inter was 68% and to SPECT-visual-ictal was 100%. On the other hand, several areas of distant hypoperfusion and hypoperfusion were detected mainly with SPM. CONCLUSION: SPM is a tool which does not depend on the operator and can detect more distant perfusion abnormalities than the visual analysis. It can improve the understanding of pathophysiology in seizures of patients with MTLE by studying the relation among different cortical and subcortical areas in the genesis and propagation of partial seizures. However, this tool did not increase the visual analysis sensitivity to localize the epileptogenic focus in interictal SPECT as well as in ictal SPECT / Doutorado / Neurologia / Doutor em Ciências Médicas

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