The construction industry still leads the world as one of the sectors with the most work-related injuries and worker fatalities. Considering that one of the barriers to improving construction safety is its stressful working environment, which increases risk of inattentiveness among construction workers, safety managers seek practices to measure and enhance worker focus and reduce stress, such as mindfulness. Considering the important role of mindfulness in curbing frequency and severity of incidents, researchers are interested in understanding the relationship between mindfulness and other common, more static human characteristics. As a result, this study examines the relationship between mindfulness and such variables as personality and national culture in the context of construction safety. Collecting data from 155 participants, this study used elastic net regression to examine the influence of independent  variables on the dependent  variable. To validate the results of the regression, 10-fold cross-validation was conducted. The results reveal that certain personality traits  and national cultural dimensions  can be used as predictors of mindfulness for individuals. Since mindfulness has shown to increase safety and work performance, safety managers can utilize these variables to identify at-risk workers so that additional safety training can be provided to enhance work performance and improve safety outcomes. The results of this study will inform future work into translating personal and mindfulness characteristics into factors that predict specific elements of unsafe human behaviors. With more than 1000 fatalities among construction workers every year in the United States alone , the safgoAMRA.org (accessed on 8 March 2021)). Originating in Buddhist philosophy and meditation practice [One technique to lower stress and anxiety, enhance focus, and improve attentional performance is to implement mindfulness practices. In the last decade, an explosion of interest in mindfulness research on the concept and application of mindfulness has taken place, and mindfulness journal publications increased from fewer than 35 articles in the early 2000s to 1203 publications in 2019  , the FivIn order to clarify which mindfulness measure to choose from among the validated mindfulness questionnaires, Qu et al.  evaluateDeveloped by , the MAAPrevious studies have shown that mindfulness can have a positive impact on the safety performance of workers ,39,40,41In a study examining dispositional mindfulness and its relationship with safety practices in the food industry,  found thIn the construction industry, a limited number of studies have investigated the role of mindfulness in incident occurrence or safety behavior ,43,44,45While previous studies have advanced knowledge regarding the role of mindfulness in safety performance, little is known regarding the variables that impact the mindfulness state of construction workers. This study addresses this knowledge gap by investigating the impact of personality, national culture, and attitude on the mindfulness state of construction workers.extraversion , (2) agreeableness , (3) conscientiousness , (4) neuroticism , and (5) culture or openness . These factors provide an effective and quantifiable metric for gauging individuals’ personality traits, which has thereby enabled research on the effects of personality in a breadth of sectors.Though numerous studies have shown that personality traits can be used as a predictor for human behavior, e.g., , contribThe relationship between personality and mindfulness has been studied in more detail by researchers, e.g., ,51. A meThe potential links between personality and mindfulness can be further exploited to examine the work and safety performance of workers. Since individual personality traits do not change much over time, the personality of individuals can be used as a tool to predict the dispositional mindfulness of workers.One variable that impacts attention  and safeCulture has been defined as shared experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, religion, and conception of the world gathered during lifetime of a person that is passed to future generations . ConsideOne of the main criticisms about Hofstede’s cultural model concerns about its limitation in measuring cultural dimensions at the individual level ,71,72. An > 500) comprising immigrant ancestors (no Native Americans) population, [Anthropologists were among the first group of researchers who addressed this knowledge gap by developing frameworks to measure cultural dimensions at the individual level . In a moulation,  applied The role of national culture in dissimilar safety performance has been studied in the construction industry, e.g., ,84,85. OTo empirically measure the impact of individual cultural values on the risk perception of construction workers, Habibnezhad and Esmaeili  measuredAl-Bayati and his colleagues ,58 used In summary, the literature review shows that even though personality traits and mindfulness have shown relations, the effect of national culture of workers in combination with personality on mindfulness is still unknown. To address this knowledge gap, this study investigates the degree of association of mindfulness with relatively static factors including personality traits and national culture to predict the mindfulness of individuals.In order to examine the influence of the independent  variables on the dependent  variable, this study used a regression analysis. In this section, the authors detail the study’s data collection instruments, participants characteristics, data analysis approach, and validation.To measure mindfulness, this study used the Mindfulness Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS). Developed by Brown and Ryan , and regTo assess personality, this study used the Big Five Inventory (BFI) developed by . This 44power distance (five items), individualism vs. collectivism (six items), uncertainty avoidance (five items), masculinity vs. femininity (four items). National culture was also computed based on a Likert scale like personality. The scale ranges from 1 to 5 (strongly disagree to strongly agree) for national culture.To compute the national culture aspect of participants, this study utilized a questionnaire adapted from . NationaA total of 156 participants (30 construction workers and 126 students) aged 18–62 years  were recruited to provide the data; however, one data point was removed from the student sample because it was incomplete. Therefore, a total of 155 participants (30 construction workers and 125 students) were considered for analysis. The student respondents were from the department of civil engineering at George Mason University. Since previous studies have shown that experience plays an important role in determining safety performance of people involved in construction activities ,88, studp-value 0.73 > 0.05). For novice student data, one data point was an outlier (same data point as the outlier) and removed from data in the analysis. By removing the outlier, the distribution of the dependent variable changed from non-normal  to normal . The mindfulness score of students with experience was normally distributed with no outliers .In order to analyze data that contains multiple independent variables, generalized regression approaches are appropriate to select which variables have the most significant effect on the response variable. Before conducting any regression analysis, the assumptions for regression should be tested. Therefore, the research team first tested the distribution of the data and the existence of potential outliers. The assumptions for regression were checked for each dataset separately . Plotting the distribution of the mindfulness score for construction workers, it was found that the data were normally distribution with no outliers (Shapiro–Wilk: p = 0.97) as well as construction workers (Shapiro–Wilk p = 0.17). However, the distribution of the residuals of the dependent variable were not normally distributed for novice students (Shapiro–Wilk p = 0.003). Plotting the distribution of the residual for novice students revealed that one data point was an outlier and removed from the analysis. After removing this data point, the distribution of the residuals of the dependent variable changed from non-normal  to normal .Then, to confirm that the relationship between the independent variables and the response is linear, the research team evaluated the scatter plot of each independent variable with the response variable. There was no pattern to show violation of linearity, such as curvilinear or cubic, on the dataset. To address the assumption regarding the variance of the residuals of the response variable, the authors plotted the residuals versus predicted values and observed no pattern for the datasets. All observations proved to be independent of each other, and finally, the distribution of the residuals of the dependent variable were normally distributed for students with experience , attempts to minimize the sum of error squared. Even though this regression method is key to understanding the nature of the regression model, it usually oversimplifies the analysis and thus important variables may not be selected as they should be. The other disadvantage of linear regression is that it is prone to multicollinearity, which means that if there is high correlation between the predictors, removal of one or more variables from the analysis may be necessary, which is problematic because those variables may be important predictors for the response variable at hand. Hence, a more refined type of approach is needed to better select variables while also simplifying the model by retaining the significant variables and removing the variables that do not contribute to the prediction of the response variable.Traditional regression methods such as stepwise, forward, and backward selection suffer from high variability and low prediction accuracy, especially when there is a correlation between variables or multiple predictors ,90. In rGeneralized regressions with no penalties are based on the least square estimation method, which is an unpenalized fit and provides no simplification (no variable selection) and no shrinkage of parameters. Alternatively, penalized regression selects variables by minimizing the sum of the squared residuals while also adding a penalty proportional to the size of the regression coefficients. If the size of the penalty on a specific parameter is large enough, it causes the regression coefficient to shrink towards zero. Hence, some variables will be removed from the analysis, which will simplify the final model by selecting fewer variables. In the same token, shrinkage is done by continuously shrinking the regression coefficients by introducing some degree of bias, e.g., ,93,94 inIn this study, we utilized a type of generalized penalized regression called elastic net regression, which can select variables by introducing a penalty in the regression model. In many statistical models, the typical technique behind the penalized regression analysis is using an estimation method called maximum likelihood. This estimation method delivers the best fit based on the observed data. By applying a penalized likelihood instead, better prediction on the response variable can be achieved.The purpose of introducing a penalty is to achieve two main purposes. The first purpose is to allow the model to perform variable selection by removing unimportant predictors, and the second purpose is to apply shrinkage of estimation parameters. By optimizing the penalized likelihood, the regression model is simplified (fewer predictors), overfitting (weak prediction performance) can be avoided, and issues that arise from multicollinearity (high correlation between predictors) can be resolved . In othej2)—also written as L2 penalty—such that the ridge coefficients minimize a penalized sum of residual squares. The disadvantage of the ridge regression is that it shrinks the coefficients to non-zero values to prevent overfitting and keeps all the variables. Hence, this approach is not a viable option to reduce variable selection.In ridge regression, the coefficients on the predictors are shrunk by imposing a penalty . This method shrinks the less important variable coefficients to zero and therefore can remove the variables that are deemed not significant predictors for the response variable. Even though Lasso both shrinks and selects by removing variables, studies have shown that Lasso tends to yield a model that is more parsimonious (less complex) than the elastic net approach. The other shortcoming of this method is that in the case of collinearity, the Lasso model selects the variable with the strongest correlation with the response variable and drops the other variables from the model.As with ridge regression, Lasso regression has a shrinkage approach but with a subtle difference: The L1, x2, …. xp) are input variables, In this study, we selected to use the elastic net approach for our data analysis. This method was proposed by  and utilj2) when used in isolation (α = 0), becomes ridge regression. The other advantage of elastic net regression is grouping. If there is a very high correlation among independent variables, then this method performs well in incorporating variables into the model that aids in better prediction accuracy, unlike the Lasso approach, which tends to select only one variable from the highly correlated independent variables. In addition, simulation studies done on real-world data have shown that the elastic net approach often performs better than Lasso [The general mechanics of the elastic net is executed in two steps. First, the algorithm finds the ridge regression coefficient and on the second step uses a Lasso-sort of shrinkage of the coefficients. To eliminate the limitations found in Lasso, the elastic net includes a quadratic section of the penalty, which increases variable selection. It is worth noting that the quadratic section of the penalty , novice students (NS), and for the construction workers’ data (W) appears in 1 penalty via weights generated from the maximum likelihood estimates of the predictors to improve the overall fit of the model. K-fold (10-fold) cross-validation compared the training set with the testing set of the data. As the alpha value can be a value within zero and one ), the model can move between ridge (α = 0) and Lasso regression (α =1). To select an α-alpha value to be used in the elastic net regression, a set of values  were compared using a standard error value and the best alpha value was selected for fine tuning. As described above, the research team applied the adaptive elastic net method of estimation to select the independent variables that are significant predictors of mindfulness score. The adaptive estimation utilizes a modified version of the Lagreeableness scores positively correlate with mindfulness among novice students, and higher neuroticism scores negatively correlate with mindfulness for both student samples. For workers, the significant predictors are uncertainty avoidance and conscientiousness, which all show significant positive correlation with mindfulness score.The results of the adaptive elastic net regression with 10-fold cross-validation appear in p-value is computed. The lower 95% and upper 95% show confidence interval (CI) ranges at 0.05 significance. CIs less than zero signify a negative relationship of predictors with the response variable, and positive relationships appear in CI ranges greater than zero. The corresponding p-values for Wald statistic for the estimates of each variable are used to select the predicator variables if the p-values are found to be significant .The Wald test  is a test that examines whether explanatory variables in a model are significant. For variable estimates that are non-zero, the Wald test is calculated for significance, and the corresponding The variables included in the equation are significant predictors with negative coefficients, showing negative direction with the response variable (mindfulness) and vice versa with positive coefficients. The prediction expression for the dependent variable mindfulness for students with experience, novice students, and workers can be written as Equations (2) to (4), respectively:Our data show that for construction workers, conscientiousness personality trait, and uncertainty avoidance of national culture dimensions all positively correlate with mindfulness. Uncertainty avoidance of the culture dimension  is associated with minimizing taking risks, and individual that have high uncertainty avoidance scores are likely to give importance to have instructions that are detailed and closely follow instructions and procedures for standardized work. This signifies that by avoiding uncertainty, workers are mindful of not taking short cuts that undermine their safety. The higher conscientiousness signifies higher mindfulness score because mindfulness is associated with higher awareness of their surroundings. Therefore, these variables are important indicators of mindfulness among workers, and lower measure of these variables can imply lower mindfulness and consequently lower safety performance.Within the student data, agreeableness positively affects mindfulness for novice students, while neuroticism was found to be negatively associated with mindfulness for both students with experience and novice students. A higher degree of agreeableness shows that individuals can go along with the people around them and are less combative in nature, which is related to non-judgmental attitude of mindfulness. Neuroticism trait of personality is associated with anxiety and stress, which negatively impact mindfulness of individuals. The results confirm the negative association of this personality trait with mindfulness, and higher value of neuroticism scores can be used as a predictor of lower mindfulness. With respect to cultural dimensions, for students with experience, higher individualism was associated with lower mindfulness. This could be because students with experience are much younger and possibly more individualistic than workers; however, in construction sites, workers become more risk averse due to the existence of hazards and care more about their co-worker’s safety.Mindfulness has shown to improve cognitive processes, such as attention, e.g., , which iAnalyzing the data collected from students with experience and novice students here show that neuroticism is significantly negatively related with mindfulness. This result confirms the outcome of previous studies outside of construction safety field that have consistently found that neuroticism is negatively correlated with mindfulness ,19. ThisThe fast paced, demanding, and sometimes dangerous environment of construction sites create stressful conditions for individuals ,105 and The results of this study also show a positive relationship between the agreeable personality trait of novice students with mindfulness. Such a finding coincides with past work that shows agreeable individuals are generally sociable, cooperative, caring, and supportive of others . In addiThe conscientiousness of construction workers in this study was found to be significantly positively associated with mindfulness. These findings are consistent with the positive role of conscientiousness with safety performance of individuals  as this Conscientious individuals are usually careful, reliable, dependable, and goal oriented , and thiThis dimension of national culture was negatively correlated with the mindfulness score for the students with experience sample. Individuals who are characterized with high individualism usually are on their own and have opinions and beliefs independent from the group, whereas low individualism people give opinions as a group, tend to work together, and give high regard to harmonious working relationship . MindfulThe results of this study show that this dimension of culture is a significant predictor of mindfulness for construction workers and the combined data. This dimension was also positively related to mindfulness for students with experience and novice students, even though it was not a significant predictor see . This reHigh-risk organizations that operate in complex, high-hazard domains for extended periods of time have been using mindfulness to increase productivity and record better safety outcomes . A growiThis paper examines ways to predict mindfulness of individual using relatively static factors—namely, by measuring personality traits and national culture. Using elastic net regression, the results show that certain personality traits and national cultural dimensions are associated with individuals’ dispositional mindfulness and the extent of influence of these variables can vary according to the levels of working experience in the construction industry. By detecting workers with lower mindfulness, the results of this study will enable safety managers to develop a more mindful workforce at construction sites by providing targeted training programs for workers with lower mindfulness or assigning those less mindful workers to activities that do not require higher levels of attention.There are some limitations related to this study that are worth mentioning. First, the sample size of the study is limited to participants in the Northern Virginia region. Although the participants in the study came from a diverse background , more data should be collected from diverse population of workers across the United States to generalize the results. Second, as limited number of variables are considered in the model, future studies should be conducted to investigate the role of other personal characteristics on mindfulness of construction workers. Third, potential sources of common method bias such as item characteristics, item context, or measurement context may affect the results of the findings , even th


Reading for meaning is one of the most important activities in school and everyday life. The simple view of reading (SVR) has been used as a framework for studies of reading comprehension in individuals with Down syndrome (DS). These tend to show difficulties in reading comprehension despite better developed reading accuracy. Reading comprehension difficulties are influenced by poor oral language. These difficulties are common in individuals with DS and autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but they have never been compared directly. Moreover, the components of reading for comprehension have rarely been investigated in these populations: a better understanding of the nature of reading comprehension difficulties may inform both theory and practice. The aim of this study was to determine whether reading comprehension in the two populations is accounted for by the same component skills and to what extent the reading profile of the two atypical groups differs from that of typically developing children (TD). Fifteen individuals with DS , 21 with ASD , and 42 TD children  participated and were assessed on measures of receptive vocabulary, text reading and listening comprehension, oral language comprehension, and reading accuracy. The results showed similar levels in word reading accuracy and in receptive vocabulary in all three groups. By contrast, individuals with DS and ASD showed poorer non-word reading and reading accuracy in context than TD children. Both atypical groups showed poorer listening and reading text comprehension compared to TD children. Reading for comprehension, investigated through a homograph reading accuracy task, showed a different pattern for individuals with DS with respect to the other two groups: they were less sensitive to meaning while reading. According to the SVR, the current results confirm that the two atypical groups have similar profiles that overlap with that of poor comprehenders in which poor oral language comprehension constrains reading for comprehension. According to an influential theoretical framework, the simple view of reading ,2, both There is a growing body of research describing the reading profiles of individuals with a range of different neurodevelopmental disorders, and identifying the locus of their reading difficulties, with a particular focus on individuals with DS and ASD ,9,10,11.A growing number of individuals with DS have full access to formal education and acquire a range of literacy skills . The folFor many years there was an assumption that reading skills represent an area of strength for individuals with ASD, at least in the area of word recognition . For exaThe heterogeneity of the reading profiles of individuals with ASD was verified in a comprehensive study of 100 participants . Thus, cTo sum up, the profiles of DS and ASD reading skills show several commonalities, in particular: (a) both show relative strengths in word identification, in spite of a selective disadvantage in non-word reading ,26,27,28Word reading accuracy tasks provide valuable information about the lexicon and retrieval of pronunciations, whilst responses to comprehension questions about a passage tell us about what has been understood. Neither tell us about the process of reading. One way to look at this relationship between what is read and what is understood is to use a task that measures how accurately homographs are read in different contexts. Homographs are word pairs that have the same orthography but differ in both their pronunciation and meaning . The correct pronunciation of a homograph can only be determined by processing the meaning of the surrounding context. If the sentence has been understood correctly then participants should provide the contextually appropriate pronunciation of the homograph. Homograph reading has been investigated in some studies that involved individuals with ASD. These all consistently show that they tend to perform relatively poorly on the test, suggesting a failure of processing for meaning during reading ,35,36,37To the best of our knowledge, homograph reading has not been investigated in individuals with DS, but there is some evidence that they process the meaning of the linguistic context at least to some extent in order to identify the meanings of unknown words , morphosTo date, the examination of the reading profile of individuals with DS and ASD has not directly compared the profiles of the two groups. The purpose of the current study was to describe the reading profiles of individuals with DS and ASD and TD children and to identify the sources of individual differences in reading comprehension in the three groups. The evidence to date suggests that, whereas both atypical groups have reading comprehension difficulties, the source of the difficulty may differ: individuals with DS typically show strong word reading skills relative to listening comprehension; in contrast, individuals with ASD may also show this poor comprehender profile, but a sizeable number will likely show a different reading profile. In addition, we investigated the strategies employed for reading for meaning through an investigation of the accuracy of homograph reading.The following research questions guided the study:RQ1: Are there group differences in decoding, oral language comprehension, and reading comprehension? The three groups  were compared on a large set of tasks measuring single word and non-word reading, receptive vocabulary, listening, and reading text comprehension in order to investigate group differences.RQ2: To what extent is the relationship between reading comprehension and either decoding or language comprehension different across the three groups? Regression analyses examined to what extent each component predicts reading comprehension and whether a similar or different relationship holds for the three groups.RQ3: To what extent do individuals with DS and ASD use context as they read homographs compared to TD children? The strategy of reading for meaning in the three groups was investigated through a homograph accuracy task. Two analyses were conducted to verify whether: (1) there is a facilitating effect of the context preceding the pronunciation of the homograph as an indicator that participants are reading for meaning; (2) there is a relationship between homograph accuracy and the other measures, particularly word and non-word reading accuracy and language comprehension (receptive vocabulary and listening text comprehension).RQ4: To what extent do individuals with DS and ASD show a poor comprehender profile compared to the TD group? The heterogeneity of the poor comprehender profile was investigated in the three groups. The prevalence of a poor comprehender profile was established, and then, for each group, the accuracy with which reading skills, language comprehension, and reading for meaning predicted group membership was analysed.Three groups participated: 15 individuals with Down syndrome , 21 individuals with ASD , and 42 typically developing children . The two atypical groups were selected from a larger sample on the basis of excluding any individual whose reading abilities were limited to letter recognition only. All participants had normal or corrected vision. To the best of our knowledge, there were no cases of comorbidity between DS and ASD among our participants. Participants with ASD were recruited from a school that specialised in the education of children with ASD. Participants with DS, instead, were contacted using a database of previous collaborations with the University of Bristol. Participants were recruited with their full consent  and were paid an honorarium for their participation. Those under 18 received a book voucher, and those 18 and above received an equivalent payment, in thanks of their participation. Participants with TD were recruited in three different mainstream schools in Bristol and Lancaster. The Faculty of Science Human Research Ethics Committee (REC) at the University of Bristol approved the research on ASD (ref 453) and DS (ref 374). At Lancaster University, the Department of Psychology’s Ethics Committee approved the research on TD children in June 2009.All participants completed a range of standardised tests and experimental measures of word reading accuracy, reading comprehension, receptive vocabulary, and listening comprehension. The assessments were completed in a single session lasting 45 to 60 min. Tasks were administered to all participants in the same order.Reading comprehension was assessed with the Neale Analysis of Reading Ability—Revised . In thisThree tasks assessed the accuracy of single word and non-word reading and word reading in context. Single word reading was assessed by presenting individuals with 20 irregular words of one or two syllables. In each case, stimuli were presented singly and sequentially on a computer screen in Times New Roman 80-point font, and the participant was asked to read and pronounce the item. One point was awarded for each correct response (score range: 0–20). Single non-word reading was assessed using the same method, with 20 non-words of one or two syllables: one point was awarded for each correct response (score range: 0–20). The two tasks were presented separately to minimise the likelihood that individuals would make lexicalisation errors for the non-words. These tasks have been used in previous work ,41 and wWord reading in context was measured with the NARA-II , describOral language comprehension. Receptive vocabulary and listening comprehension were assessed with separate tests. Receptive vocabulary knowledge was measured with the British Picture Vocabulary Scale (Third Edition)   to proviListening comprehension was assessed with Form 2 of the NARA-II. These were different passages to those used to assess reading comprehension and were read aloud to participants, with questions to tap comprehension asked after each passage. Testing stopped when the participants did not provide an answer to any of the story questions, following the same procedure as for the reading comprehension assessment. The number of correctly answered questions was transformed into a listening comprehension age. Because participants completed different numbers of stories and, therefore, different numbers of questions, we transformed raw scores into a listening comprehension age to ease comparison amongst participants and between groups. In addition, and for full transparency, we reported raw scores in addition to age-equivalent scores. The parallel form reliability of this test  is 0.89.Homograph reading task. Five homographs were used in the study : the target stimuli were selected from previous studies on homograph reading ,35,36,37Each sentence was presented individually on a computer screen, with the item order randomized. Participants were asked to read aloud each sentence. Reading accuracy for each homograph was scored and any self-corrections were noted; these were anticipated in the neutral context condition if participants were reading for meaning. Thus, there were two scores: correct initial reading and correct reading after self-corrections had been taken into account. Each score had a maximum of 20 points. Internal consistency  for the homograph task was moderate (α = 0.66). Finally, at the end of the task each participant’s knowledge of the meaning of the five homographs (ten meanings) was checked by asking them to point to the picture that best described the word’s meaning from a selection of four alternatives.The data distributions for all measures were checked on the whole group. Except for the measure of vocabulary, which was found to be distributed normally, all the other variables did not match normality. However, for the TD group, all were found to be within a normal distribution, except for word and nonword reading accuracy. Separate between-subject ANOVAs were conducted for each variable using raw scores. Significant main effects were followed up with Tukey’s HSD post hoc test, and significant group differences are indicated in Age-equivalent scores are reported in The three groups performed comparably in receptive vocabulary and single word reading; most of the individuals with DS, however, scored at the ceiling in the accuracy of single word reading. Both atypical groups had significantly poorer non-word reading and reading accuracy in context than the TD children. For reading comprehension and listening comprehension, both atypical groups obtained significantly lower comprehension scores than the typically developing controls. However, the group with ASD showed much greater variability in all measures compared to the DS group.p = 0.02).In order to examine the predictors of reading comprehension according to the SVR in the three groups, a relationship between the reading accuracy of words and non-words and reading comprehension, and between oral language skills (receptive vocabulary and listening comprehension) and reading comprehension, was tested. First, we ran four regressions, one for each component, predicting reading comprehension for the TD children. In other words, in each regression reading comprehension was the dependent variable and one of either word reading, nonword reading, listening comprehension, and vocabulary was the independent variable. Although the sample size of 42 typically developing children was arguably small for a regression analysis, the validity of the approach we adopted was shown by the fact that all of the regressions within this group, in Then, the equation for the relationship between reading comprehension and each predictor in children with typical development was used to calculate expected reading comprehension scores for each individual with DS and each individual with ASD, given their score on the predictor variable in question. The “residual” discrepancy between the observed and the expected reading comprehension for each individual with DS and ASD was then standardised on the basis of the standard error in the estimate from the typically developing individuals’ regression . The adeThis produced a z-score for each participant that indicated whether their reading comprehension score was in line with what one would expect given their performance on the predictor variable in question. Negative z-scores indicate that participants had lower reading comprehension than expected given their performance on the target predictor. All the z-scores, except the scores obtained with listening comprehension as the predictor, were significantly different from 0, that is, different from the performance of TD children. This means that both atypical groups scored less well on reading comprehension than would be expected given their vocabulary and word and non-word reading scores and that these scores are therefore less reliable in predicting their reading comprehension level. On the other hand, the fact that z-scores with listening comprehension as the predictor were not significantly different from zero suggests that a similar relationship between listening and reading comprehension might exist in the three groups, despite the fact that the two atypical groups show lower scores than TD children in both. Notably, the standard deviations and the figures indicate a higher variability among individuals with ASD in all the tasks. These results indicate that, for individuals with DS and ASD, reading comprehension is predicted by listening comprehension as we found for TD. For the atypical groups, both listening and reading comprehension were poor.M = 8.38, SD = 1.13 over 10 words) and did not differ significantly amongst groups: F = 0.596, p = 0.557. The crucial condition in order to investigate the ability to read for meaning is the one in which a less frequent pronunciation is required but the context preceding the homograph provides a clue for the correct pronunciation. Performance in this condition was compared to performance when the context was neutral, e.g., the context did not provide any clue to identifying the correct pronunciation. Only the group with DS did not show a facilitating effect of the context. In contrast, the groups with ASD and with TD were more accurate in the facilitating context than in the neutral one. The homograph reading task provides a window into how children process text as they read: processing the word in relation to the surrounding context is necessary for accurate pronunciation, otherwise the most frequent pronunciation will be retrieved. Knowledge of the two meanings of each homograph was high  = 1.13, p = 0.377): the mean discrepancies were 16 months for the DS group (SD = 7 months), 15 months for the ASD group (SD = 7 months), and 12 months for TD (SD = 6 months).As a next step, the reading profiles of each group were explored, specifically to determine the proportion of individuals with a poor reading comprehender profile in each. We used the definition of poor reading comprehension as a discrepancy higher than 6 months (or 1 SD) between text reading and reading comprehension ages  . Using tFinally, logistic regression was conducted to determine the accuracy with which word reading and listening comprehension scores predicted group membership. All participants with DS were correctly classified on the basis of these scores. This was not the case for the ASD and TD groups. For the ASD group, 8 out of 11 participants (72%) were correctly classified as poor comprehenders, whilst only 5 out of 10 (50%) were correctly classified as good comprehenders. For the TD group, 5 out of 14 participants (35%) were correctly classified as poor comprehenders and 26 out of 28 participants (92.2%) were correctly classified as good comprehenders. The addition of the homograph reading accuracy scores increased the accuracy of the classification of good comprehenders in both groups: the ASD group (70%) and the TD group (42%).The main aim of the current work was to further examine the reading comprehension and related skills of individuals with DS by analysing the ability to read for meaning within the theoretical framework of the SVR. The group of individuals with DS was compared to a group of individuals with ASD and to a group of children without neurodevelopmental disorders with comparable levels of single word reading accuracy and receptive vocabulary.The rationale for comparing the two groups with atypical development is that both present a profile similar to that described in the literature as poor comprehenders but have never been compared directly. Our results provide further evidence for the validity of the SVR model in both typical and atypical populations by replicating the pattern of the results concerning single word and non-word reading, language comprehension, and reading comprehension in all three groups. However, a new important piece of evidence concerning the reading for meaning emerged by using a homograph task: individuals with DS seem less sensitive to meaning while reading compared to both ASD and TD children. Furthermore, almost all individuals with DS fell within the profile of poor comprehenders, whereas individuals with ASD showed a more heterogeneous profile, with only 50% of individuals matching the profile of poor comprehenders. The basic skills included in the SVR were sufficient to predict the reading comprehension profile of the individuals with DS, while the addition of the homograph task increased the accuracy of the prediction of poor vs. good reading comprehension in the groups of ASD and TD children. The results are discussed in the light of recent relevant literature organized in four relevant topics.Group comparisons revealed that the DS and ASD groups obtained comparable scores on measures of word reading but significantly weaker non-word reading than the typically developing controls. This pattern aligns with previous studies reporting poor decoding skills in individuals with DS ,41 and AGroup comparisons further revealed that the DS and ASD groups obtained comparable listening comprehension and reading comprehension scores, again significantly weaker than those obtained by the typically developing controls. The weak text comprehension skills of the DS and ASD groups contrast with the comparable real-word reading performance of the TDs. These findings confirm previous literature on both English- and Italian-speaking individuals with DS ,17,18 anThe current findings provide convergent evidence that the profile shown by both DS and ASD individuals is similar to that of poor comprehenders. This was further investigated by analysing the sources of individual differences in reading comprehension within the theoretical framework of the SVR.Following the SVR, both reading accuracy and language comprehension were analysed as possible predictors of reading comprehension in all three groups. As predicted by the model, both factors, measured through multiple tasks, predicted reading comprehension in the TD group. On the other hand, the two atypical groups showed uneven predictions of reading comprehension. We used the equation for the relationship between each predictor  of children with typical development in order to calculate expected reading comprehension for each individual with DS and with ASD. What emerged for both atypical groups is that only the level reached in listening comprehension predicted the level of reading comprehension, suggesting that listening comprehension is the most reliable predictor of reading comprehension for these groups. The relationships between the other factors and reading comprehension in DS and ASD differed from the relationship found in TD children. The individuals with DS and ASD showed lower reading comprehension than would be expected from their receptive vocabulary, word reading, and non-word reading. These results suggest that the two atypical groups have a profile that overlaps with that of  poor comprehenders in which poor listening comprehension constrains reading comprehension abilities. This result is also consistent with previous work conducted with Italian-speaking individuals with DS and English-speaking participants with DS ,18. The The innovative aspect of the current work is that, for the first time, the two atypical groups were compared directly on the same set of tasks: this showed important commonalities in their reading profile. However, a further examination of the results revealed that the pattern of similarities in the profiles of DS to that of ASD were paralleled by some important differences.One of the most innovative aspects of the current work is related to the analysis of the ability to process meaning while reading, which was investigated through a homograph reading task. This task can be considered an implicit measure of comprehension monitoring since the correct and accurate reading of the homograph depends upon the processing of the meaning of the surrounding context. This task has been used in previous studies with individuals with ASD, but in this study it was adopted for the first time with individuals with DS. Individuals with DS tended to read with a more frequent pronunciation irrespective of the information provided by the context, showing low sensitivity to the information provided by the context. On the other hand, both individuals with ASD and TD tended to be more accurate in reading the homograph when the context provided a clue for its meaning. This finding differs at least in part from previous results. As far as individuals with ASD are concerned, it has been reported that they usually fail to use sentence context in pronouncing homographs and that this reflects weak central coherence ,48. HoweAs far as individuals with DS are concerned, previous work has shown that they, in contrast, tend to show greater sensitivity to the context and are helped by a short context in order to build meanings of unknown words , morphosFinally, for all three groups, an association was found between reading for meaning (the homograph task) and oral language skills, a finding that highlights the importance of oral language skills for the development of reading and reading-related skills. On the other hand, we failed to find any reliable correlation between homograph reading accuracy and the measures of reading accuracy (both word and non-word reading). This further confirms that homograph reading is not related to the recognition of the single word but rather to the search of meaning in context. The analysis of reading for meaning therefore revealed some important differences between individuals with DS and the other two groups. This was further highlighted by the analyses of the poor and good comprehender profiles.Within the group of individuals with DS, the number of participants who showed a relevant discrepancy between text reading accuracy and comprehension levels  and could be defined as “poor comprehenders” was significantly higher than in the other two groups: it was 80% for individuals with DS, 51% for ASD, and 26% for TD. Notably, nobody within the two atypical groups showed a profile characterized by an opposite discrepancy, namely, in which word reading lagged behind text comprehension. In a previous study conducted by Nash and Heath (2011) , a similAll participants with DS were correctly classified as poor comprehenders using word reading and listening comprehension as predictors. These skills are accurate predictors of poor comprehension in ASD and of good comprehension in the TD group. By the addition of the homograph task as a predictor, the accuracy of the prediction of group membership increased significantly. This finding once again suggests that the homograph task, appropriately tested for validity in future studies with a larger number of participants, could be a relevant tool for analysing reading comprehension strategies.Therefore, we conclude that both DS and ASD individuals tend to show a profile similar to  poor comprehenders but that the sources of reading comprehension failure might differ for the two atypical groups. Cain and Oakhill (2006)  found thThe current work provides new evidence regarding the reading profiles of individuals with DS by comparing them both to individuals with ASD and to TD children. This is a small-scale study and represents a starting point for further research investigating reading for meaning in atypical populations. Both individuals with DS and ASD show atypical development of different component skills of reading. These similarities in the profile are paralleled by important differences. The pattern of findings demonstrates that the precise balance of reading skill strength and weakness in children identified as poor comprehenders is heterogeneous such that the identification of poor comprehension is not sufficient for a complete and adequate description of an individual’s difficulties, since the source of the poor comprehension may differ both across and within each population.As far as similarities are concerned, both ASD and DS individuals show relatively well-developed reading skills: this might be due to the intrinsic characteristics of the two conditions but could also be related, at least in part, to the interventions usually delivered to these people. Both in clinical practice and in educational settings, interventions related to literacy skills are commonly focused on reading skills and are less likely to be oriented to comprehension and its components. The current study, in line with various previous studies, provided further evidence for a substantial influence of oral language in determining individual differences in reading comprehension. This reinforces the idea that the target of intervention should be moved from reading to comprehension in general and to oral language skills in particular.Another relevant focus for future studies should be a deeper investigation of the strategies adopted to construct meaning from text, strategies that might vary substantially in different populations having an apparently similar profile. In particular, individuals with DS appear to be more impaired in the ability to engage in simultaneous decoding and reading for meaning.Finally, further effort should be made to define in a more comprehensive way the poor comprehender profile. Convergent findings provide evidence that defining a category of poor comprehenders is reductive and tends to obscure the heterogeneity of individual differences: as in the current study, apparently similar profiles might hide differences in the underlying causes of poor reading comprehension.


Pedestrian detection is a specific application of object detection. Compared with general object detection, it shows similarities and unique characteristics. In addition, it has important application value in the fields of intelligent driving and security monitoring. In recent years, with the rapid development of deep learning, pedestrian detection technology has also made great progress. However, there still exists a huge gap between it and human perception. Meanwhile, there are still a lot of problems, and there remains a lot of room for research. Regarding the application of pedestrian detection in intelligent driving technology, it is of necessity to ensure its real-time performance. Additionally, it is necessary to lighten the model while ensuring detection accuracy. This paper first briefly describes the development process of pedestrian detection and then concentrates on summarizing the research results of pedestrian detection technology in the deep learning stage. Subsequently, by summarizing the pedestrian detection dataset and evaluation criteria, the core issues of the current development of pedestrian detection are analyzed. Finally, the next possible development direction of pedestrian detection technology is explained at the end of the paper. Object detection is a basic problem of machine vision and deep learning, and it lays the basis for the in-depth development of numerous research problems, including instance segmentation –3, objecThe development of object detection tasks has mainly experienced two major stages, respectively, the traditional object detection period and the detection period based on deep learning. As early as 2001, P. Viola and M. Jones proposed the famous VJ detector . It combThe implementation process of the traditional object detection method is similar to the VJ detector. It mainly extracts object features through artificial design  and new feature extraction methods , 39 and The rest of the work is arranged as follows. In the second part, the current mainstream pedestrian detection algorithms are summarized. In the third part, the commonly used datasets and evaluation methods in the pedestrian detection field are presented. In the fourth part, the occlusion problem and the multiscale problem that affect the pedestrian detection effect are analyzed in detail. The full text is summarized and prospected in the fifth part.Since Girshick et al. proposed RCNN in 2014, the task of pedestrian detection has officially entered the deep learning stage. In general, detection methods based on deep learning mainly consist of two categories. One is a two-stage processing method. Firstly, regional suggestion boxes for possible object are generated, and then further predictions are made on these suggestion boxes. The other is a one-stage processing method, which directly returns the object area on the feature map and gives the final prediction result. The following part summarizes the specific applications of these two detection frameworks in pedestrian detection.The two-stage detection framework is mainly divided into two stages: region suggestion and object detection. First, a series of region suggestion boxes are proposed on the image to be inspected. Then, object detection is further conducted. The RCNN detection framework proposed by R. Girshick in 2014 first uses selective search  to generIn 2015, Cai et al. deduced that the Comp ACT algorithm  not onlyIn 2017, Lin et al. proposed FPN  based onIn 2018, Li et al. proposed SAF RCNN based on the perception theory , which eAmong the two-stage detection methods based on deep learning mentioned above, the RCNN series methods . Generally, the performance of the model is dynamically evaluated by drawing a P-R curve, where the horizontal coordinate is the recall rate and the vertical coordinate is the accuracy rate. In order to compare the performance of all object categories in multiclass detection, the mean Average Precision (mAP) of all object categories is usually used as the final metric of performance. In order to measure the accuracy of object positioning, Intersection over Union (IoU) is used to check whether the overlap ratio between the prediction box and the ground truth box is greater than a predefined threshold, which is generally defined as 0.5. If it is greater than this value, the object will be recognized as successfully detected; otherwise, it will be defined as missed. After 2014, due to the widespread use of COCO datasets, researchers began to pay more attention to accuracy. In COCO, a fixed IoU threshold is not used. Instead, take the average of multiple IoU thresholds between 0.5 (coarse positioning) and 0.95 (perfect positioning). This metric change promotes more accurate object positioning.In addition, some scholars found in their research that only using the precision-recall curve cannot accurately express the effectiveness. Piotr proposed the MR-FPPI curve in 2012, where MR represents the missed detection rate and FPPI represents the number of false detections per image. This evaluation method is commonly used in the field of pedestrian detection.In the Caltech dataset, the detection results of some of the most advanced algorithms for pedestrian detection in overall data, far scale data, and heavy occlusion data are shown in Tables 4At present, the detection ability of mainstream detectors for general images has been developed by leaps and bounds, especially the images of short distances and large objects for which very good detection results can be obtained. Currently, the main restriction of the further development of pedestrian detection lies in the detection ability for low-quality images, including the key issues such as multiscale and occlusion. This section will analyze these issues.Crowding and occlusion between objects are the common difficulties in pedestrian detection , as showCompared with general object detection, occlusion is more likely to happen in pedestrian detection because group movement behaviors are prone to occur in pedestrians, which is also a major obstacle limiting the application of pedestrian detection in autonomous driving tasks. In the CityPersons dataset, the proportion of pedestrian occlusion is shown in Due to the lack of information for pedestrians under occlusion, researchers used variable part models to solve the related problems at the beginning. Although the detection results have been improved to a certain extent, the amount of model calculations has increased sharply –101. To Similar to the part model method that uses a series of component detectors to merge with each other, another solution takes the advantages of the attention mechanism  to focusIn addition to the above-mentioned methods used to solve the occlusion problem in pedestrian detection, some scholars focused on postprocessing. Liu et al. proposed an Adaptive NMS  method tAt present, the processing of pedestrian detection and occlusion problems has gradually shifted to the CNN itself and from the improvement of the overall network architecture to the improvement of each processing stage.Among the algorithms introduced above, the algorithms –101 are The traditional convolutional neural network adopts a single-line structure, and the shallow feature map has a larger area and contains more detailed information, making it suitable for detecting small objects. The deep feature map, which has a small area and only contains semantic information, is suitable for the detection of large objects. Generally, convolutional neural networks present the problem of multiscale detection of large and small objects, which has not been well solved . The mulWith the purpose of improving the multiscale detection capability, several different image input scales can be set in the training phase. During training, one is randomly selected from multiple scales, and the picture is scaled to this scale and input into the network, contributing to an increase in the robustness of the network without raising the amount of calculation. Song et al. proposed the TLL method , which iWith the increase in the number of layers, the traditional convolutional network will enlarge the receptive field and enrich the semantic information while causing severe loss of the information of the small object at the output of the network. Its small object detection ability is very poor. The idea of feature fusion –120 is tThe researcher proposing the TridentNet network  changed In pedestrian detection, the current effective methods for solving multiscale problems include reducing the downsampling rate and convolution of holes, multiscale training MST, feature fusion, and TridentNet. The core idea is to obtain more general detection capabilities at different scales by fully excavating the feature information of different scale features.Among the algorithms introduced above, the algorithms –112 are Object detection is one of the four basic tasks of computer vision, and it is a current research hotspot. The main purpose of this task is to detect specific object instances  from a given image. As a typical object detection task, pedestrian detection is consistent with the general object detection task, which is to detect pedestrians in a given image. In recent years, with the continuous development of deep learning , 123, obBased on the general analysis of general object detection, this paper makes an in-depth discussion on pedestrian detection problems. The main contributions of this paper are as follows: (1) The pedestrian detection algorithm based on deep learning proposed in recent years is introduced in detail, and its advantages and disadvantages are analyzed. (2) It introduces the common use datasets and evaluation metrics for pedestrian detection. (3) The main issues that limit the performance of pedestrian detection in areas such as intelligent driving are discussed in detail. (4) It explains the future development direction of pedestrian detection. However, this paper does not involve the introduction of pedestrian detection in special scenarios , which is also the direction of future work.The pedestrian detection technology described in this review is mainly solved by visual methods based on machine learning technology, which is also the current mainstream solution. However, this solution has certain constraints. Although vision-based image processing technology has made great progress, this method has a higher demand for the external environment . On this basis, some people have paid attention to the research of infrared images and made some progress. However, the lack of infrared image datasets limits its development to a certain extent, and it is still sensitive to factors such as occlusion. Vision-based detection technology has its inherent constraints. How to use multisensor fusion technology to improve the effect of pedestrian detection technology in practical applications such as intelligent driving is a major development direction at present. In addition, although the traditional machine learning technology has fast detection speed and low hardware platform requirements, it can no longer meet the current application requirements due to its low detection accuracy. Although the deep learning technology in machine learning technology has made great progress in recent years, the computing model is often large and has high requirements on the hardware platform. It is more difficult to deploy on the mobile terminal with less computing resources such as smart cars. This is also a major factor affecting the development of deep learning technology.The above-mentioned multiscale issues and occlusion issues are the core issues affecting pedestrian detection. Among them, the multiscale issue requires that pedestrians of different sizes can be accurately detected at the same time, which puts higher requirements on the feature extraction network. The occlusion issue requires accurate detection of pedestrian parts and puts forward higher requirements on the recognition algorithm. The improvement of these issues can directly improve the effect of pedestrian detection in complex scenes, which is an important way to improve the ability of pedestrian detectors.Although the current detection network has made great progress, the hardware requirements are often high. Therefore, how to lightweight the network while maintaining the detection performance is an important issue in practical applications. This is also an important direction for future development.At present, the general pedestrian detection still uses a single pedestrian as the object and does not consider the relationship with other objects in the environment. Considering the relationship between objects is beneficial to enhance the understanding of the scene, thereby enhancing the semantics of detection, and bringing it closer to the way of human thinking, it is an important development direction in the future.Pedestrian detection is a core technical problem in the intelligent driving. The current main solution is to use image information for detection. How to use other sensors such as lidar in intelligent driving to enhance the effect of pedestrian detection is an important research direction in the future.Pedestrian detection is an important problem of computer vision. Compared with general object detection, it has important research value in the field of intelligent driving. It has similarities and differences with general object detection. This review first introduces the content of general object detection, then analyzes the development of pedestrian detection, and elaborates on the common datasets and main problems faced by pedestrian detection. Although the pedestrian detection technology has made great progress from the original traditional machine learning to the current neural network, there is still a huge gap with human vision. In addition, lightweight network is also a research core. How to deploy it to the mobile terminal without affecting performance directly affects its application in intelligent driving. This review believes that the future development direction of pedestrian detection technology is as follows:


Although penile cancer is a global health problem, especially in underdeveloped countries, with high annual expenses for care of patients affected by the disease, few healthcare policy efforts have been taken by authorities to mitigate this devastating disease. The psychological and physical burden that arises from the treatment, as well as the demoralizing demise that comes with advanced illness, has been widely neglected by the urology scientific community in favor of other urological malignancies. In this scenario, rare investigators, without adequate research funds and governmental support, have been responsible for the few advances in the field of investigation and treatment of penile cancer in recent decades.In the current edition of the International Brazilian Journal of Urology, the authors analyze thorough a cross-sectional study, the risk factors for inguinal lymph node metastasis in patients with penile cancer . It is wIn order to determine the best candidates to perform inguinal lymphadenectomy, the authors present in the current study an attempt to stratify patients at high risk for developing inguinal metastases by analyzing independent risk factors. The results demonstrate that patients with low to moderate tumor differentiation (p=0.009), lymphovascular invasion p=0.025) and T-stage 2 (p=0.010) or higher are more likely to develop inguinal lymph node metastasis. These results are not surprising. Indeed, they are in line with data from previous published studies and the current guidelines on penile carcinoma, advocating the performance of prophylactic radical inguinal lymphadenectomy for patients considered at intermediate and high risk of inguinal lymphatic spread –8. An in5 and T-sDespite the advances in the treatment of penile carcinoma, efforts to fight the development of this malignancy are still far from desirable. The engagement of the international urological community in association with local authorities, adequate funding for research and improvement of the human development index, especially in underdeveloped countries, seem to be the best ways to mitigate the disease.


The extent to which familism, dysfunctional thoughts, and coping variables contribute to explaining feelings of loneliness in caregivers, controlling for kinship, is analyzed. Participants were 273 family caregivers of people with dementia. Sociodemographic variables, familism, dysfunctional thoughts, coping strategies for requesting and receiving help, perceived social support, and leisure activities were assessed. The fit of a theoretical model for explaining the effect of cultural and psychological variables on feelings of loneliness in each kinship group was tested. No significant differences in the distribution of loneliness by kinship were found. Higher levels of familism are associated with more dysfunctional thoughts, that are linked to more maladaptive strategies for coping with caring . This in turn is associated with higher scores in the feeling of loneliness. The model bore particular relevance to the group of daughters, husbands, and sons, yet not in the case of wives. Sociocultural and coping factors associated with the caring process seem to play an important role in explaining feelings of loneliness in caregivers. Sociocultural factors associated with the care process seem to play an important role in explaining feelings of loneliness in caregivers. The progressive aging of the population due to increasing life expectancy is associated with a significant increase in the risk of dementia in Western countries  and in tDifferent theoretical models have explained the presence of emotional distress in caregivers, with the stress and coping model proposed by Lazarus and Folkman  salient The effect of cultural variables in caregiving seems to be greater on women due to the traditional attitudes associating care with the female role, so that this activity continues to fall more heavily on them . This diThese considerations are in line with those posited by the cognitive model adapted to caregiving . This moTaking into account all of the above, and based on the sociocultural  and cognAlong these lines, we expected (1) to find a significant percentage of caregivers, especially women and in particular daughters, reporting feelings of loneliness; (2) that a greater presence of the cultural value of familism would be associated with more dysfunctional thoughts about caregiving, which would be linked to the existence of more maladaptive coping strategies for caregiving, that is, requesting and receiving less help, which would in turn lead to a lower predisposition to social support and a lower frequency of leisure activities; and (3) that a greater implementation of such maladaptive coping strategies would be reflected in higher scores in the feeling of loneliness among caregivers. Given the influence of gender roles, the aforementioned consequences were expected to be especially significant in caregiver daughters as they are subject to greater role conflict.The study sample comprised 273 people (women = 68.9%) aged between 28 and 88, all of them caregivers of relatives with dementia residing in the Community of Madrid (Spain). Participants were divided into four kinship-based groups: husbands , wives , daughters , and sons . The sociodemographic characteristics of participants by kinship are shown in Participants were recruited through health and social services centers, which facilitated initial contact to confirm criteria for inclusion in the study were met . All subjects participated voluntarily and were individually interviewed face-to-face. The study was approved by the Ethics Committee of the Rey Juan Carlos University, and prior to the assessment, informed consent, guaranteeing data confidentiality among other issues, was obtained from each individual.Drawing upon the sociocultural stress and coping model, the following variables were measured.Sociodemographic variables: age, gender, kinship to the person being cared for, daily hours caring, paid work outside the home, living with children at home, and caring for other relatives.Care-recipient functional capacity. This was measured through the Barthel Index , which sFrequency of behavioral problems associated with dementia. This was measured through the Revised Memory and Behavior Problems Checklist (RMBPC) . It inclFamilism: family obligations. This was assessed through the family obligations subscale of the Revised Familism Scale (RFS) . It consDysfunctional thoughts. The Dysfunctional Thoughts Questionnaire (CPD)  was usedRequesting and receiving help. These were assessed by administering two items developed ad hoc for this study (“Do you ask your relatives for help with caring for your sick relative?” and “Do you receive help?”). Both items have a 4-option Likert-type response format ranging from 1 (“Never”) to 4 (“Always”).Social support. The Psychosocial Support Questionnaire (PSQ)  was usedFrequency of leisure activities. This was measured using the adapted Leisure Time Satisfaction scale (LTS) . Its 6 iFeeling of loneliness. Item 14 (“I felt lonely”) of the CES-D scale  with a rp < 0.10 were highlighted for this group. A p value of 0.05 is considered for the rest of the results. First, descriptive analyses, comparison of means, and independence tests were carried out between the sociodemographic variables assessed and the perception of loneliness. Second, correlation analyses were performed between the different variables for each kinship group   and AMOS 6.0 software  were used to carry out the analyses for this study. Considering the small sample size of the group of sons, the associations that are significant at The data show that more daughters and sons work outside the home than husbands and wives. Daughters and sons also report a smaller number of daily hours devoted to caregiving compared to wives and husbands. Daughters as a group are those who most report living with children and who seem to be caring the most for other family members. Finally, daughters report caring for people with more problem behaviors than the other kinship groups, and they also care for more people with lower functional capacity than wives and husbands.In turn, it is also daughters who present differences in family obligations compared to the other groups, where significantly lower scores in this variable are found. Regarding dysfunctional thoughts, results show that husbands and wives present more dysfunctional thoughts about caregiving than sons and daughters. In relation to asking for help, the data suggest that sons as a group ask for the most, while wives are the least likely to implement this caregiving coping strategy. However, in terms of social support, significant differences are seen in this variable between sons and the other groups, with sons in this case scoring lower on social support received. The associations between the assessed variables (correlations) are presented in the 2 = 67.31; p = 0.075; χ2/df = 1.29; IFI = 0.956; CFI = 0.946; RMSEA = 0.033). The overall model fitted the data very well (χAs can be seen in p < 0.10) and dysfunctional thoughts and less leisure. However, contrary to our hypotheses, no significant relationship was found in wives between social support and leisure, and feelings of loneliness , with the exception of the relationship between social support and loneliness, which seems to be mediated by leisure. The model explains 16% of the feeling of loneliness in husbands.Regarding husbands, practically all the associations observed in daughters and stated in the model are also present , the results obtained are generally similar to those observed in daughters, although some differences were noted. In both husbands and sons, for example, the level of perceived social support does not appear to be of particular relevance in explaining their perception of loneliness. The results suggest that in male groups (husbands and sons) the relationship between social support and loneliness could be indirectly mediated through leisure. Different studies suggest that men, despite requesting help in a similar way to women, receive more social support . In theThe most unexpected results were found in caregiver wives, for whom the proposed model explains only 3% of their perceived feeling of loneliness. Although the data obtained suggest that a significant percentage of caregiving wives report loneliness, the variables measured do not seem to contribute to an explanation of this issue in the group in the same way they do in the other kinship groups. It is possible that variables which were not assessed in this study may play a fundamental role in the explanation of loneliness among wives, such as, for example, the loss of a relationship of intimacy and trust with their partner, as well as maladaptive strategies for the regulation of emotions or coping, such as rumination or escape-avoidance coping strategies. Thus, for example, Vikström, Josephsson, Stigsdotter-Neely, and Nygard  reportedTherefore, although loneliness seems to be a pervasive problem among caregivers, there appear to be different explanations for it depending on the kinship of the caregiver with the person in their care. In terms of the influence of familism and the dimension of family obligations in particular, the data indicate a lower presence of familism (family obligations) in the group of daughters and less perceived social support in the group of sons. In relation to familism in daughters, the reduced presence of this variable may be explained by the conflict that this value can trigger in them with respect to the situation in which they find themselves. Daughters may be aware of how the sense of family obligation falls mainly upon them and, therefore, they question it more than other groups since the consequences are much greater for them . MontgomThe present investigation has a series of limitations. First, the design was cross-sectional in nature, and longitudinal studies are necessary to confirm or rule out the relationships found. Second, participation in the study was voluntary, so the general population of caregivers may not be properly represented. Furthermore, as noted above, variables which may be of particular relevance to understanding the feeling of loneliness in caregivers were not included in the study. Future research with larger samples may allow a more detailed inquiry into the relationships studied.Despite such limitations, the present study provides interesting information on an area that generates significant distress among caregivers: loneliness. First, the data confirm that a significant percentage of caregivers perceives loneliness. Second, data from the present study provide additional support to theoretical models of stress and coping adapted to caregiving which highlight the importance of sociocultural aspects in the explanation of caregiver distress ,12, in tFinally, the data from this study confirm that loneliness is a pervasive problem in caregiving and suggest an approach to understanding the issue which can be useful in developing interventions. Such interventions could help caregivers towards a more flexible view of the cultural impositions associated with family obligations in caregiving and maladaptive thinking styles, perhaps through culturally sensitive interventions .


In team sports, load management has become one of the most common areas of investigation, given that effective control over load is the key to being able to optimize performance and avoid injuries. Despite the constant evolution and innovation in the latest theories, we can see a clear tendency in load management that focuses on physiological and mechanical aspects and neglects its cognitive character, which generates the variability inherent in the performance of athletes in a changing environment. Indicators of response that inform methods of control over cognitive load can include cognitive, physiological and behavioral indicators. However, limited investigations exist to support the reliability of each indicator regarding cognitive load. For this reason, the objective of this literature review is to present strategies used to manage cognitive load in team sports, as well as the indicators utilized for such a proposition and their relationships in specific contexts. Team sports have a dynamic and complex nature . The plaTraditionally, planning for training and competition has centered on the management of physiological and mechanical aspects, defined as internal load (IL) and external load (EL), respectively. IL and EL are related, the first being defined as the individual psychophysiological response and the second as the external physical stimulus applied to the athlete during training or competition . This prTherefore, we consider that the cognitive load will be the relative amount of available mental resources that are invested in the resolution of a task. Cognitive load can be varied by changing the complexity of the assigned task but increasing its complexity will not involve a real increase of the individual’s load if they do not employ enough effort to solve it . For thiTeam athletes perform in a high-entropy environment that causes them to constantly expend mental resources to respond to the demands of the tasks, which requires significant mental effort . FurtherCognitive load, together with its emotional dimension , requireIncluding this parameter in training plans will be key to balancing the readiness of the athletes, achieving optimal performance and preventing injuries. The team sports environment requires intense and constant cognitive activity , employiA search of the literature between 1970 and 2020 was performed using the following online databases: Medline (PubMed), SPORTDiscus, PsycINFO and Google Scholar system. The following keywords were used: team sports, cognitive load, mental load, psychological load, workload, mental fatigue, cognitive fatigue, psychological fatigue, together with Boolean operators such as “AND” and “OR”. Furthermore, this literature review was performed in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses .The titles and abstracts of all the articles were analyzed to determine the relevance of the publications for inclusion. Selection criteria for the articles were followed. The complete text of the publication was obtained to determine if it met the criteria for inclusion. In addition, the bibliographies of the selected articles were analyzed to find other relevant articles. Finally, for the current review, only those studies that are centered on the management of cognitive, mental or psychological load (in relation to the workload) and/or the ones that analyzed cognitive, mental or psychological fatigue (the effect on work and performance) in the specific context of team sports, were included. Therefore, those articles that try to quantify the individual cost of mental resources, given some capabilities, while achieving a given level of performance in a task with specific demands were included.Individual sports and studies in situations far from sports reality were excluded, as well as analyses in laboratory situations. Duplicate articles were eliminated and summaries, non-peer reviewed works, book chapters and opinion articles were also excluded. As a first step, the titles, abstracts and key words screening of the literature was carried out by the authors. In the second step, full-text articles of the relevant studies were screened while in the third step, the reference lists of the suitable articles and the review articles on the management of cognitive, mental or psychological load and/or fatigue were searched for additional articles. Any disagreement was discussed until consensus was reached.The initial literature search found 28,851 articles related to cognitive load, but only 1,947 were selected based on their title and abstract. After determining the content of the complete text, 1,926 articles were excluded for being unrelated or incompatible with the inclusion criteria, or both . A totalThe authors use different methods to manage cognitive load, analyze specific and applicable information, exercise better control over training and optimize performance. To do so, they try to quantify, through indicators, the individual cost of mental resources, given certain capacities, while reaching a certain level of performance in a task with specific demands. Cognitive load management methods can be used before, during or after task performance. These cognitive load management methods are based on the analysis of these response indicators, usually classified as cognitive, physiological and behavioral indicators , so thisThe NASA-TLX questionnaire has proven sensitive to the mental load in a variety of cognitively demanding tasks, such as piloting an aircraft or laboratory tasks . This scIn all studies analysed, the NASA-TLX questionnaire was significantly sensitive to changes in the cognitive load in different team sports situations. In tasks that involve mental fatigue, significant differences are shown between the control and experimental groups . In the Measurement Period: After the session/competition.The VAS scale  offers specific information about a characteristic or attitude which is identified along a continuum of values and cannot easily be directly measured . It has This tool has been used frequently in the bibliography to describe the fatigue and lack of energy caused by a cognitively demanding activity  and/or the degree of effort employed to perform a cognitively demanding activity . It has been proved that the scale is a valid, reliable method to measure both MF and ME .The first investigations demonstrated that the increase of perceived indicator VAS MF damaged specific technical performance . In BadiMeasurement Period: After the session/competition.CSAI-2 (Competitive State Anxiety Inventory 2) is a test that aims to estimate the cognitive and somatic anxiety levels of the players, as well as their levels of self-confidence. Cognitive anxiety refers to the negative feelings that the subject has about his or her performance and the consequences of the outcome. Somatic anxiety, on the other hand, refers to the perception of physiological indicators of anxiety such as muscle tension, increased heart rate, sweating and stomach discomfort. It has a questionnaire format consisting of 27 items, with nine items for each subscale. Each of them is classified on a four-point Likert-type scale, which yields scores from nine to 36 in each subscale. A higher score related to cognitive and somatic anxiety indicates a higher level of anxiety .Measurement Period: After the session/competition.The POMS (Profile of Mood States) questionnaire was proposed by It has been proved that POMS is a reliable and valid questionnaire to measure affective features, mood state and emotions . That isMeasurement Period: After the session/competition.The RPE (rating of perceived exertion) is a valid method for quantification of the effort expended in an athletic training activity during a wide variety of exercise types . DependiIn Measurement Period: After the session (recommended 15–30′ later).Sistema Integral de Analisis de Tareas de Entrenamiento, from its Spanish initials) and VSC  are ecologic systems for quantifying the load of a basketball training session  is responsible for the regulation of the HRV through parasympathetic and sympathetic modulation , the balEven though the literature in control situations suggests that HRV is very sensitive to demands on the cognitive load , no signMeasurement period: Before the session.Reaction time is calculated as the time from the beginning of the stimulus until the corresponding response of the participant . This inIn Measurement period: During a task previous to training/competition.Making a successful decision depends on the ability of the player to identify, select and then execute the correct action in response to the postural signs of opponents or teammates, recognizing significant patterns in the game and determining the situational probabilities . DecisioIn Measurement period: During the task.Cognitive factors interact with physiological and mechanical factors which are present during training and competition. For this reason, distinguishing their connections can be a significant element in the research of load management in sport . In thisThe IL measured through RPE is significantly connected to variations in cognitive load imposed by the training exercises, as evaluated by cognitive indicators such as the NASA-TLX questionnaire  or the VMoreover, the EL recorded through tracking systems shows that players under high cognitive load conditions (VAS MF) register higher values for total distance, average speed and run time at a moderate speed, demonstrating higher intensity efforts . This coThe models of training load control that take into account cognitive load such as the CSE or VSC can offer the same information as more difficult methods . HoweverTo optimize performance and exert more control over training processes and/or competition in team sports, it is necessary to have load control strategies which include cognitive load in the monitoring cycles of the athlete. However, there is limited literature related to this concept.NASA-TLX, VAS MF or Cognitive-RPE analysis strategies are considered valid to measure the impact of the cognitive load in team sports. Other control methods like VFC, reaction time or decision-making time need scientific evidence. In this sense, there is a clear lack of studies which use objective tools to measure the cognitive load.The evaluation of external, internal and cognitive demands in an isolated way would be potentially problematic, because we would only obtain information on the provided stimulus, the processed stimulus or the players responses without examining the inherent connections. Even though it is accepted that external, internal and cognitive demands are separate constructs, they must be analyzed and interpreted in the same context, and they must be considered as a whole in order to optimize performance and prevent injuries. Processing systems will produce an alteration in the stimulus that generates physiological responses, so the manipulation of one of these three constructs will provoke changes in the others. With this objective, future studies that delve into this paradigm will be justified.