UC Office of the President

Aims: Auditory Verbal Hallucinations (AVH) are a hallmark of psychosis, but affect many other clinical populations. Patients’ understanding and self-management of AVH may differ between diagnostic groups, change over time, and influence clinical outcomes. We aimed to explore patients’ understanding and self-management of AVH in a young adult clinical population. Method: 35 participants reporting frequent AVH were purposively sampled from a youth mental health service, to capture experiences across psychosis and non-psychosis diagnoses. Diary and photo-elicitation methodologies were used – participants were asked to complete diaries documenting experiences of AVH, and to take photographs representing these experiences. In-depth, unstructured interviews were held, using participant-produced materials as a topic guide. Conventional content analysis was conducted, deriving results from the data in the form of themes. Result: Three themes emerged: (1)Searching for answers, forming identities – voice-hearers sought to explain their experiences, resulting in the construction of identities for voices, and descriptions of relationships with them. These identities were drawn from participants’ life-stories (e.g., reflecting trauma), and belief-systems (e.g., reflecting supernatural beliefs, or mental illness). Some described this process as active / volitional. Participants described re-defining their own identities in relation to those constructed for AVH (e.g. as diseased, 'chosen', or persecuted), others considered AVH explicitly as aspects of, or changes in, their personality. (2)Coping strategies and goals – patients’ self-management strategies were diverse, reflecting the diverse negative experiences of AVH. Strategies were related to a smaller number of goals, e.g. distraction, soothing overwhelming emotions, 'reality-checking', and retaining agency. (3)Outlook – participants formed an overall outlook reflecting their self-efficacy in managing AVH. Resignation and hopelessness in connection with disabling AVH are contrasted with outlooks of “acceptance” or integration, which were described as positive, ideal, or mature. Conclusion: Trans-diagnostic commonalities in understanding and self-management of AVH are highlighted - answer-seeking and identity-formation processes; a diversity of coping strategies and goals; and striving to accept the symptom. Descriptions of “voices-as-self”, and dysfunctional relationships with AVH, could represent specific features of voice-hearing in personality disorder, whereas certain supernatural/paranormal identities and explanations were clearly delusional. However, no aspect of identity-formation was completely unique to psychosis or non-psychosis diagnostic groups. The identity-formation process, coping strategies, and outlooks can be seen as a framework both for individual therapies and further research.

The Western Regional Storage Trust (WEST), is a distributed shared print journal repository program serving research libraries, college and university libraries, and library consortia in the Western Region of the United States. WEST solicits serial bibliographic records and related holdings biennially, which are evaluated and identified as candidates for shared print archiving using a complex collection analysis process. California Digital Library’s Discovery & Delivery WEST operations team (WEST-Ops) supports the functionality behind this collection analysis process used by WEST program staff (WEST-Staff) and members.For WEST, proposals for shared print archiving have been historically predicated on what is known as an Ulrich’s journal family, which pulls together related serial titles, for example, succeeding and preceding serial titles, their supplements, and foreign language parallel titles. Ulrich’s, while it has been invaluable, proves problematic in several ways, resulting in the approximate omission of half of the journal titles submitted for collection analysis.Part of WEST’s effectiveness in archiving hinges upon its ability to analyze local serials data across its membership as holistically as possible. The process that enables this analysis, and subsequent archiving proposals, is dependent on Ulrich’s journal family, for which ISSN has been traditionally used to match and cluster all related titles within a particular family. As such, the process is limited in that many journals have never been assigned ISSNs, especially older publications, or member bibliographic records may lack an ISSN(s), though the ISSN may exist in an OCLC primary record.Building a mechanism for matching on ISSNs that goes beyond the base set of primary, former, and succeeding titles, expands the number of eligible ISSNs that facilitate Ulrich’s journal family matching. Furthermore, when no matches in Ulrich’s can be made based on ISSN, other types of control numbers within a bibliographic record may be used to match with records that have already matched with an Ulrich’s journal family via ISSN, resulting in a significant increase in the number of titles eligible for collection analysis.This paper will discuss problems in Ulrich’s journal family matching, improved functional methodologies developed to address those problems, and potential strategies to improve in serial title clustering in the future.

With the rapid growth of the electronic cigarette (e-cig) market, there is an increasing number of vape shops that exclusively sell e-cigs. The use of e-cigs in the vape shop is a primary source of indoor particles, which might transport to its nearby indoor spaces in the multiunit setting. In this study, six pairs of vape shops and neighboring businesses in Southern California were recruited for real-time measurements of particulate pollutants between February 2017 and October 2019. The mean (SD) particle number concentration (PNC) and PM_2.5 concentration in the studied vape shops were 2.8 × 10⁴ (2.3 × 10⁴) particles/cm³ and 276 (546) μg/m³, which were substantially higher than those in neighboring businesses and outdoor areas. In addition, 24-h time-weighted average (TWA) nicotine sampling was conducted in the six pairs and three additional pairs. Nicotine was detected in the air of all the studied vape shops and neighboring businesses, in which the mean (SD) concentration was 2.59 (1.02) and 0.17 (0.13) μg/m³, respectively. Inside vape shops, the dilution-corrected vaping density (puffs/h/100 m³) is a strong predictor of the particle concentration, and nicotine concentration highly depends on the air exchange rate (AER). Out of the six studied pairs, PNCs in five vape shops and PM_2.5 in two vape shops were significantly correlated with those in their neighboring businesses. This correlation was stronger when the door of the vape shop was closed. When the door was open, environmental electronic vaping (EEV) aerosols, especially smaller particles, could transport from the vape shop to the outdoor environment. Overall, e-cig usage in the vape shop impacts both its own and nearby air quality, raising concerns regarding the risk of exposure to EEV aerosols in the surrounding environments.

With the rapid increase in electronic cigarette (e-cig) users worldwide, secondhand exposure to e-cig aerosols has become a serious public health concern. We summarize the evidence on the effects of e-cigs on indoor air quality, chemical compositions of mainstream and secondhand e-cig aerosols, and associated respiratory and cardiovascular effects. The use of e-cigs in indoor environments leads to high levels of fine and ultrafine particles similar to tobacco cigarettes (t-cigs). Concentrations of chemical compounds in e-cig aerosols are generally lower than those in t-cig smoke, but a substantial amount of vaporized propylene glycol, vegetable glycerin, nicotine, and toxic substances, such as aldehydes and heavy metals, has been reported. Exposures to mainstream e-cig aerosols have biologic effects but only limited evidence shows adverse respiratory and cardiovascular effects in humans. Long-term studies are needed to better understand the dosimetry and health effects of exposures to secondhand e-cig aerosols.

An electronic cigarette (e-cig) generates aerosols by vaporizing the e-liquid, which mainly consists of propylene glycol (PG), vegetable glycerin (VG), and nicotine. Understanding the effects of e-liquid main compositions on e-cig aerosols is important for exposure assessment. This study investigated how the PG/VG ratio and nicotine content affect e-cig aerosol emissions and dynamics. A tank-based e-cig device with 10 different flavorless e-liquid mixtures (e.g., PG/VG ratios of 0/100, 10/90, 30/70, 50/50, and 100/0 with 0.0% or 2.4% nicotine) was used to puff aerosols into a 0.46 m³ stainless steel chamber for 0.5 h. Real-time measurements of particle number concentration (PNC), fine particulate matter (PM_2.5), and particle size distributions were conducted continuously throughout the puffing and the following 2-h decay period. During the decay period, particle loss rates were determined by a first-order log-linear regression and used to calculate the emission factor. The addition of nicotine in the e-liquid significantly decreased the particle number emission factor by 33%. The PM_2.5 emission factor significantly decreased with greater PG content in the e-liquid. For nicotine-free e-liquids, increasing the PG/VG ratio resulted in increased particle loss rates measured by PNC and PM_2.5. This pattern was not observed with nicotine in the e-liquids. The particle loss rates, however, were significantly different with and without nicotine especially when the PG/VG ratios were greater than 30/70. Compared with nonvolatile diethyl-hexyl subacute (DEHS) aerosols, e-cig particle concentration decayed faster inside the chamber, presumably due to evaporation. These results have potential implications for assessing human exposure to e-cig aerosols.