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Learn about autobiographical writing: including different forms of personal writing; preparation and planning; writing the first draft; revising and editing; and sharing you work.

Mandatory fortification of bread flour with folic acid has helped to reduce the incidence of neural tube defects in several countries. However, it has been suggested that folic acid may have potential adenoma-promoting effects, and reports from some countries have suggested that mandatory folic acid food fortification programmes have increased the incidence of colorectal cancer. The objective of this study was to evaluate colorectal cancer incidence patterns before and after introduction of mandatory folic acid fortification of bread flour in Australia in 2009. Data from the Australian Cancer Database were used to plot age-standardised incidence of colorectal cancer. We calculated age-adjusted rate ratios with 95 % CIs. Australia. We used population-level aggregate data obtained from cancer registries. Age-standardised colorectal cancer incidence generally decreased between 1999 and 2016. Although there was a slight increase in rates in 2010 compared with 2009 (62·8 v. 61·6 cases per 100 000, age-adjusted rate ratio 1·02 (95 % CI 0·99, 1·04), joinpoint regression indicated decreases of -0·4 % (95 % CI -0·7, 0·0) per year from 1999 to 2010 and -2·2 % (95 % CI -3·1, -1·3) per year from 2010 to 2016. While causation cannot be assessed from these population-level data, our observations indicate that there is no evidence that introduction of mandatory folic acid fortification of bread flour has influenced colorectal cancer incidence in Australia.

Step-by-step instructions on informative writing: includes researching and getting organized, writing the first draft, making revisions, editing the writing, and sharing your work.

Perceptual deficits related to phonology in children with speech delay (SD) and children with dyslexia have been identified in separate lines of research. However, there has only been a small number of studies that have investigated the perceptual deficits of children with SD and/or dyslexia in the same study to better understand the overlap of their speech perception abilities. Children with SD have previously shown deficits perceiving speech stimuli that is acoustically sparse, particularly when stimuli contain speech sounds they do not produce correctly. Yet in contrast to children with dyslexia, children with SD are better able to recover linguistic structure from speech stimuli that preserves global acoustic structure in the absence of spectral detail. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to further investigate how children with SD, dyslexia, SD + dyslexia, and typically developing (TD) peers perceive different types of speech. To do this, we used both vocoded speech and sine-wave speech recognition tasks. In this study, 40 children (ages 7-10 years) with SD, dyslexia, SD + dyslexia, and/or typically developing were presented with both sine-wave and vocoded speech recognition tasks to investigate their speech perception.Findings revealed no differences between groups for both the sine-wave and vocoded speech perception tasks, regardless of SD and/or dyslexia status. Increasing the number of participants or utilizing more sensitive speech perception tasks may provide clinically applicable resources for assessment or intervention. We discuss these findings in the context of previous research literature and also discuss limitations of the current study and future directions for follow-up investigations.

Although people believe that socially sharing negative emotional events is helpful because it vents negative emotion, past research has not supported this belief. More recent research on social sharing suggests that the responses sharers get from their listener can help explain when and how social sharing should be beneficial; not only for the sharer’s affect, but also in terms of increasing their sense of closeness to the listener. According to the two-mode theory of social sharing, negative emotion arises because an event threatens one’s goals. Thus, listener responses that help the sharer feel less threatened by the event should improve affect. Listeners might do this by encouraging the sharer to think about the event differently (reframing), giving advice (advice/planning), or diverting the sharer’s attention away from the threat (distraction). These are referred to as cognitive responses. Cognitive responses should improve affect, but might not be perceived as caring and supportive. Consequently, they should not increase feelings of closeness between the sharer and the listener. In contrast, socio-affective responses involve listening as the sharer vents and validating them (validation), helping them analyze and try to find meaning in the event (sense-making), and comforting and supporting the sharer (comfort). Socio-affective responses focus on and affirm the sharer’s current thinking about the event and the threat it poses to their goals, and therefore should not improve affect. They do, however, convey that the listener cares about and supports the sharer, which should make the sharer feel closer to the listener. To date, research on the two-mode theory of social sharing has yet to examine how all these responses might operate in conjunction with one another. This step is critical, in that listeners can respond using a multitude of these strategies. In this work, I sought to examine a variety of listener responses to determine which ones were most likely to result in benefits to the sharer. In Studies 1 and 2, I examined seven responses that emerged in extant research on sharing responses, motives, and coping strategies. Based on two-mode theory, I hypothesized that three cognitive responses (i.e., reframing, distraction, and advice/planning) would be associated with improvements in affect but not closeness. I also hypothesized that three socio-affective responses (i.e., validation, sense-making, and comfort) would be associated with improvements in closeness but not affect. Lastly, I looked at the role of negative responses, which should not improve either affect or closeness. Participants recalled sharing a negative event and reported their pre- and post-sharing affect and closeness as well as the responses they received. In terms of affective improvements, the cognitive response of advice/planning was associated with increased positive affect in Study 1, and reframing was associated with improvements in both negative and positive affect in Study 2. The socio-affective response of comfort was associated with increases in closeness in both studies. No other responses were associated with improvements in either affect or closeness. Study 3 employed an experimental design to compare the most promising responses for improving affect (reframing) and closeness (comfort) to each other and a control condition (no response). All three conditions decreased negative affect, but reframing and comfort responses did so more than no response. Reframing, however, maintained positive affect whereas comfort and no response decreased it. Thus, as predicted, reframing emerged as the most promising response for improving affect overall. In terms of closeness, both reframing and comfort responses increased closeness relative to no response and did not differ from each other. Together, these studies indicate that listeners can best help sharers improve their affect by encouraging them to positively reframe the event, and promote interpersonal closeness by providing comfort and support. These results reinforce and add to the findings of other work testing two-mode theory and suggest that listener responses can indeed determine how helpful social sharing will be. Overall, this work advances social sharing theory and can be used to help people maximize the benefits of social sharing.

In this freewheeling comedy, medical transport driver Vic risks his job to shuttle a group of rowdy seniors and a Russian boxer to a funeral, dragging clients like Tracy, a young woman with ALS, along for the ride.

Car accidents are the fourth highest cause of deaths in the U.S. (Insurance Information Institute [iii], 2017). Teens often engage in risky behavior while driving, increasing the chances of accidents and death. Programs designed to decrease risky driving behaviors generally have limited success. Interventions and learning programs such as driver’s education, DARE, Victim Impact Panels, etc. have a short-term impact, but the healthy attitudes are not maintained over time. The current study aimed to determine whether the original FVG/texting intervention with 8th-grade students had long-term effects on attitudes towards drinking and driving (D&D) and texting while driving (TWD). Participants in the current study included original participants (treatment group), who were seniors, as well as additional seniors who did not previously participate (control group). Twenty students completed the measurements to evaluate attitudes towards drinking and driving and texting and driving were administered. Results indicated that participants who were in the original study in middle school had significantly lower than average rationalizing for D&D than the control group.

Car accidents are the fourth highest cause of deaths in the U.S. (Insurance Information Institute [iii], 2017). Teens often engage in risky behavior while driving, increasing the chances of accidents and death. Programs designed to decrease risky driving behaviors generally have limited success. Interventions and learning programs such as driver’s education, DARE, Victim Impact Panels, etc. have a short-term impact, but the healthy attitudes are not maintained over time. The current study aimed to determine whether the original FVG/texting intervention with 8th-grade students had long-term effects on attitudes towards drinking and driving (D&D) and texting while driving (TWD). Participants in the current study included original participants (treatment group), who were seniors, as well as additional seniors who did not previously participate (control group). Twenty students completed the measurements to evaluate attitudes towards drinking and driving and texting and driving were administered. Results indicated that participants who were in the original study in middle school had significantly lower than average rationalizing for D&D than the control group.

Car accidents are the fourth highest cause of deaths in the U.S. (Insurance Information Institute [iii], 2017). Teens often engage in risky behavior while driving, increasing the chances of accidents and death. Programs designed to decrease risky driving behaviors generally have limited success. Interventions and learning programs such as driver’s education, DARE, Victim Impact Panels, etc. have a short-term impact, but the healthy attitudes are not maintained over time. The current study aimed to determine whether the original FVG/texting intervention with 8th-grade students had long-term effects on attitudes towards drinking and driving (D&D) and texting while driving (TWD). Participants in the current study included original participants (treatment group), who were seniors, as well as additional seniors who did not previously participate (control group). Twenty students completed the measurements to evaluate attitudes towards drinking and driving and texting and driving were administered. Results indicated that participants who were in the original study in middle school had significantly lower than average rationalizing for D&D than the control group.