Personality attributes of Iranian people who stutter.

Two recent studies from Australia and Germany have both shown that people who stutter (PWS) have elevated Neuroticism scores on the widely used NEO Five Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) compared to individuals in a control sample. The two studies showed opposite results, however, for the personality traits Agreeableness and Conscientiousness. One reason for these opposing findings could be that the two studies were conducted in different cultural settings. Given that the effect of different cultural background on the relationship between the NEO-FFI and stuttering remains an open question, we investigated the NEO-FFI scores from 98 PWS and an age- and sex-matched control-group from a less widely studied cultural background (Iran). Overall, the present study showed, in line with a study from Germany, higher Agreeableness, but not Neuroticism, in PWS compared to normally fluent controls. To get further insights into these findings, we also contrasted both samples from Iran with a healthy matched sample from Germany. The resulting cross-cultural differences from these analyses are also discussed in the present paper. Although the present study is limited by a cross-sectional design, and so no causal conclusions can be drawn, the authors discuss whether the replicated elevated Agreeableness scores in PWS might represent a self-defense mechanism to cope with one's own speech handicap.

Engineering evaluation of permanent ground deformations due to seismically-induced liquefaction

A study is presented on the engineering evaluation of permanent lateral ground deformation associated with liquefaction and lateral spreading during earthquakes. Newmark's rigid sliding block model is used as main analytical technique, based on the reasonable assumption that generally the deformation occurs during shaking in the downhill direction of the ground surface slope. The study involves laboratory tests, analitical work, and comparisons with case histories and field observations. It culminates with a simplified method to predict lateral deformation using regional attenuation relations for peak ground acceleration and velocity. The laboratory work includes two series of tests. In the first series, drained and undrained cyclic triaxial experiments at different frecuencies on clean, medium dense Ottawa sand were used test a basic assumption of Newmak's method. It is concluded that the method can be applied to dry sand but not to saturated medium dense sand, due to their dilative character and to the shape of their dense stress-strain curves, which do not exhibit the strenght plateau required by the method(AU)