Voice rehabilitation and quality of life in laryngectomized patients.

BACKGROUND: Total laryngectomy represents the surgical procedure necessary for the treatment of some advanced neoplasms of the hypopharyngeal-laryngeal district and involves strong functional, physical and emotional repercussions. This research investigated the way in which the rehabilitation methods, used to improve the communicative needs of laryngectomized patients, influence their perceived quality of life. METHOD: The questionnaires "V-RQoL" and "SECEL" were administered to 45 patients divided into four groups on the basis of the type of vicarious voice: group TE (27 patients), group E (7 patients), group EL (2 patients), group NV (9 patients). RESULTS: Patients using electrical or tracheo-esophageal prostheses reported a better quality of life than patients with an erythromophonic voice. Regarding postoperative satisfaction, the group with esophageal voice was the most satisfied. CONCLUSIONS: The results lead us to emphasize the importance of preoperative counseling to make the patient as aware as possible of his future condition. KEY WORDS: Cancer, Laryngectomy, Vicarious Voice, Voice Rehabilitation, Quality of Life.

A new tool to assess the occurrence of personality traits: the Phenomenological Personality Factor questionnaire.

BACKGROUND: Personality traits are patterns of thoughts, feelings and actions that are usually assessed by means of psychometric questionnaires. In the present study we described the Phenomenological Personality Factor (PPF), a short questionnaire assessing the personality traits, taking into account the different interpretative models of personality. METHODS: A sample of 554 healthy subjects (357 female; 197 males) aged 18-60 years were enrolled. Each participant was required to complete PPF, by indicating the presence/absence of the individual personality trait, and the Italian version of the Affective Neuroscience Personality Scale (ANPS). RESULTS: The principal component analysis showed that seven factors explained the 35.07% of the total variance. Moreover, the correlation analysis revealed that the PPF components were significantly and positively associated with the ANPS scales. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings suggest that the PPF is a useful questionnaire to assess the personality traits, and the adaptive functioning, in healthy individuals.

Toward a Machine Learning Predictive-Oriented Approach to Complement Explanatory Modeling. An Application for Evaluating Psychopathological Traits Based on Affective Neurosciences and Phenomenology.

This paper presents a procedure that aims to combine explanatory and predictive modeling for the construction of new psychometric questionnaires based on psychological and neuroscientific theoretical grounding. It presents the methodology and the results of a procedure for items selection that considers both the explanatory power of the theory and the predictive power of modern computational techniques, namely exploratory data analysis for investigating the dimensional structure and artificial neural networks (ANNs) for predicting the psychopathological diagnosis of clinical subjects. Such blending allows deriving theoretical insights on the characteristics of the items selected and their conformity with the theoretical framework of reference. At the same time, it permits the selection of those items that have the most relevance in terms of prediction by therefore considering the relationship of the items with the actual psychopathological diagnosis. Such approach helps to construct a diagnostic tool that both conforms with the theory and with the individual characteristics of the population at hand, by providing insights on the power of the scale in precisely identifying out-of-sample pathological subjects. The proposed procedure is based on a sequence of steps that allows the construction of an ANN capable of predicting the diagnosis of a group of subjects based on their item responses to a questionnaire and subsequently automatically selects the most predictive items by preserving the factorial structure of the scale. Results show that the machine learning procedure selected a set of items that drastically improved the prediction accuracy of the model (167 items reached a prediction accuracy of 88.5%, that is 25.6% of incorrectly classified), compared to the predictions obtained using all the original items (260 items with a prediction accuracy of 74.4%). At the same time, it reduced the redundancy of the items and eliminated those with less consistency.

[Dissociative phenomena in a sample of outpatients]. / Fenomeni dissociativi in un campione di pazienti ambulatoriali.

AIM: The study describes the frequency and the quality of dissociative phenomena and their relationship with axis I disorders and the psychopathological severity in outpatients. METHODS: The sample (N=383) was subjected to MINI diagnostic interview and self-assessment scales DES and SCL-90. The data were analysed using SPSS. RESULTS: The 11,0% of subjects has a score ≥20 on DES. The 5,2% has no dissociative symptoms. The absorption images is the most frequent dissociative phenomenon, the less common is the dissociation amnesia. A relationship between dissociative phenomena and conditions unemployment, marital separation and single parties and an inverse relationship with age founded. Dissociative phenomena are more frequent in participants who have been diagnosed at least one axis I disorder and their severity is positively correlated with the number of diagnosed diseases and scores to the General Symptomatic Index. DISCUSSION: Our results point towards the existence of three types of dissociative experiences. The first type, represented by the factor absorption/imaginative involvement, is expressed along a continuum from normal to pathological; a second type, represented by the factor depersonalization/derealization, occurs in a significantly more intense and specific among subjects with axis I disorders; the latest manifestation dissociative, described by the dissociation amnesia, seems to have a predominantly typological feature that qualifies it as an experience not commonly distributed in the general population. The identifying of dissociative symptoms is necessary for the psychopathologic evaluation and to improve the effectiveness of treatment programs.