The Spirituality of Addictions: A Christian Patristic Model and Procedure for Assessment

Addiction theory has focused on the debilitating effects that drug addicts and alcoholics face. However, addiction can permeate much further into our lives than just through drugs and alcohol. Evagrius of Ponticus presented eight tempting thoughts that comprised all the beliefs, behaviors, items, and emotions that an individual can be disorderly attached to. These disordered attachments can have enslaving effects on an individual that constrains the person’s will and desire for freedom from these preoccupations. We also include a measure that assesses spiritual involvement and locus of control. The purpose of this study is to compile a psychological measurement that will assess the many domains of disordered attachment an individual can encounter and the degree to which it constrains their lives. This measure will consist of approximately 75 Likert scale items that include questions pertaining to pride, emotions, relations, sexuality, avarice, power/control, and problems of desire. The factors we have derived through factor analysis allow for each participant to be scored on various subscales. These scores will indicate the specific nature of the addictive tendencies. Lastly, individuals who are found to be more spiritually involved are presumed to be less attached to the constructs mentioned above

The Structure of Addictions: A Confirmatory Factor Analysis Approach Using Structural Equations Modeling

Addiction is one of the most important mental health problems in contemporary society, but relatively little is known about how various kinds of addictive behaviors relate to each other. In this study, we take a complex structural model of addictions developed from Christian theological sources and our own previous research and test it against a large (N = 300) dataset of individuals who have rated their relationship to various objects of addiction. The analysis largely confirmed our theoretical model with some interesting modifications. We discuss implications of this research for addictions assessment and treatment

Assessing Addictions in a Spiritual World: Using Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Structural Equations Modeling to Develop the Life Interests Questionnaire

This study uses the thoughts and writings of Evagrius of Ponticus to provide a measure useful in assessing addictions in relation to spirituality. Evagrius (1972) theorizes that there are eight tempting thoughts that can form the basis of disordered attachments, and that these deadly thoughts could lead one to a life of addictions. These thoughts formed the foundation of the Life Interests Questionnaire (LIQ). This self-report survey consists of 170 items, all of which are scored on a Likert scale (1 = strongly agree and 5 = strongly disagree). The LIQ was paired with an interest survey containing 43 items taken from previously tested measures. These questions asked about one’s religious identification, locus of control, and beliefs about the world. In a pilot study, each attachment item group was examined through confirmatory factor analysis which allowed the substructure of the questionnaire to be examined and the overall fit of the model was found to be marginally adequate (GFI 0.8889). Reliability and validity of this measure were attained primarily through construct validity and it found both a valid and reliable measure of Evagrius’s underlying theory. Future plans include correlational studies between religious identification/practices and level of disordered attachments

TDP-43 induces p53-mediated cell death of cortical progenitors and immature neurons

TAR DNA-binding protein 43 (TDP-43) is a key player in neurodegenerative diseases including frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Accumulation of TDP-43 is associated with neuronal death in the brain. How increased and disease-causing mutant forms of TDP-43 induce cell death remains unclear. Here we addressed the role of TDP-43 during neural development and show that reduced TDP-43 causes defects in neural stem/progenitor cell proliferation but not cell death. However, overexpression of wild type and TDP-43A315T proteins induce p53-dependent apoptosis of neural stem/progenitors and human induced pluripotent cell (iPS)-derived immature cortical neurons. We show that TDP-43 induces expression of the proapoptotic BH3-only genes Bbc3 and Bax, and that p53 inhibition rescues TDP-43 induced cell death of embryonic mouse, and human cortical neurons, including those derived from TDP-43G298S ALS patient iPS cells. Hence, an increase in wild type and mutant TDP-43 induces p53-dependent cell death in neural progenitors developing neurons and this can be rescued. These findings may have important implications for accumulated or mutant TDP-43 induced neurodegenerative diseases

Efficient conditional and promoter-specific in vivo expression of cDNAs of choice by taking advantage of recombinase-mediated cassette exchange using FlEx gene traps

Recombinase-mediated cassette exchange (RMCE) exploits the possibility to unidirectionally exchange any genetic material flanked by heterotypic recombinase recognition sites (RRS) with target sites in the genome. Due to a limited number of available pre-fabricated target sites, RMCE in mouse embryonic stem (ES) cells has not been tapped to its full potential to date. Here, we introduce a universal system, which allows the targeted insertion of any given transcriptional unit into 85 742 previously annotated retroviral conditional gene trap insertions, representing 7013 independent genes in mouse ES cells, by RMCE. This system can be used to express any given cDNA under the control of endogenous trapped promoters in vivo, as well as for the generation of transposon ‘launch pads’ for chromosomal region-specific ‘Sleeping Beauty’ insertional mutagenesis. Moreover, transcription of the gene-of-interest is only activated upon Cre-recombinase activity, a feature that adds conditionality to this expression system, which is demonstrated in vivo. The use of the RMCE system presented in this work requires one single-cloning step followed by one overnight gateway clonase reaction and subsequent cassette exchange in ES cells with efficiencies of 40% in average

Direct neutrino-mass measurement based on 259 days of KATRIN data

The fact that neutrinos carry a non-vanishing rest mass is evidence of physics beyond the Standard Model of elementary particles. Their absolute mass bears important relevance from particle physics to cosmology. In this work, we report on the search for the effective electron antineutrino mass with the KATRIN experiment. KATRIN performs precision spectroscopy of the tritium $\beta$-decay close to the kinematic endpoint. Based on the first five neutrino-mass measurement campaigns, we derive a best-fit value of $m_\nu^{2} = {-0.14^{+0.13}_{-0.15}}~\mathrm{eV^2}$, resulting in an upper limit of $m_\nu < {0.45}~\mathrm{eV}$ at 90 % confidence level. With six times the statistics of previous data sets, amounting to 36 million electrons collected in 259 measurement days, a substantial reduction of the background level and improved systematic uncertainties, this result tightens KATRIN's previous bound by a factor of almost two.Comment: 61 pages, 20 figures, 2 table

Effekte einer humanen ALS auslösenden Punktmutation in einem Mausmodell - Herstellung und Analyse

To gain new knowledge about the neurodegenerative diseases amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) as well as the role of mutant TDP-43, a mouse model has been generated expressing human TDP-43 cDNA with the ALS causative mutation A315T under control of the endogenous promoter. This new TDP-43 mouse model shows several characteristic features of ALS and FTLD and provides new hints into the underlying mechanisms involved in the development of the diseases.Um neue Einblicke in die neurodegenerativen Erkrankungen amyotrophe Lateralsklerose (ALS) und frontotemporale Lobärdegeneration (FTLD) sowie die genaue Rolle von TDP-43 zu bekommen wurde ein Mausmodell generiert welches eine humane TDP-43 cDNA mit der ALS auslösenden Mutation A315T unter Kontrolle des endogenen Promotors exprimiert. Das TDP-43 Mausmodell zeigt einige charakteristische Eigenschaften der neurodegenerativen Erkrankungen auf und liefert neue Einblicke in die zugrundeliegenden Mechanismen