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BackgroundDeprivation indices have been widely used in healthcare research and planning in the United Kingdom. Existing indices, however, are dominated by characteristics of urban populations that may be less relevant in capturing the nature of rural deprivation. We explore if deprivation indices can be modified to make them more sensitive to displaying rural disadvantage in England.MethodsThe analysis focussed on the 2011 Carstairs Index (Carstairs2011) and the 2010 English Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD2010). We removed all urban areas as identified by the Office for National Statistics Rural–Urban Area Classifications and mapped the Carstairs2011 and IMD2010 across the remaining rural areas using rural-specific quintiles.ResultsOur method was effective in displaying much greater heterogeneity in rural areas than was apparent in the original indices. We received positive feedback from Directors of Public Health who confirmed that the observed patterns mirror their experiences and first-hand knowledge on the ground.ConclusionsOur maps of Carstairs2011 and IMD2010 for rural areas might strengthen the evidence base for rural planning and service provision. The modified deprivation indices, however, were not specifically formulated for rural populations and further work is needed to explore alternative input variables to produce a more rural-specific measure of deprivation.

BackgroundThere is limited evidence on how diet changes over the transition from primary to secondary school. In this study we investigated changes in diet from age 10 (2007) to age 14 years (2011) and the contribution of school-time consumption and school lunch choice to such changes.MethodsThe 351 participants with dietary data (4 day food record) available at baseline (age 10 years) and follow-up (age 14 years) were included. Multi-level regression models were fitted for absolute or change in food and nutrient intake, cross-classified by primary and secondary school attended as appropriate, with adjustment for covariates and mis-reporting.ResultsFrom age 10 to age 14 years, children decreased energy intake from sugars (−2.6% energy (%E)) (standard error (SE) 0.44) and from saturated fats (−0.54%E (SE 0.18)), decreased fruit (−3.13 g/MJ (SE 1.04)) and vegetables (−1.55 g/MJ (SE 0.46)) consumption and increased sugar sweetened beverage (SSB) (4.66  g/MJ (SE 1.87)) and fries (1.31  g/MJ (SE 0.39)) consumption. Intake of snack foods, SSBs, and fries, but also fruits and vegetables was higher outside school hours. Prospective change from non-school lunch to school lunch, compared to maintaining non-school lunch consumption, was associated with decreased consumption of savoury snacks (−8.32 g/day (SE 2.03)), increased consumption of fries (12.8 g/day (SE 4.01)) and decreased consumption of fruit (−25.16 g/day (SE 11.02)) during school hours.ConclusionsChanges in diet from age 10 to age 14 years differed within and outside of school hours. Consumption of a school lunch, compared to lunch obtained elsewhere, was associated with negative as well as positive changes in diet, suggesting that any efforts to encourage school lunch take-up need to be accompanied by further efforts to improve school lunch provision to meet nutritional guidelines.

Both voice gender perception and speech perception rely on neuronal populations located in the peri-sylvian areas. However, whilst functional imaging studies suggest a left vs. right hemisphere and anterior vs. posterior dissociation between voice and speech categorization, psycholinguistic studies on talker variability suggest that these two processes share common mechanisms. In this study, we investigated the categorical perception of voice gender (male vs. female) and phonemes (/pa/ vs. /ta/) using the same stimulus continua generated by morphing. This allowed the investigation of behavioral differences while controlling acoustic characteristics, since the same stimuli were used in both tasks. Despite a higher acoustic dissimilarity between items during the phoneme categorization task (a male and female voice producing the same phonemes) than the gender task (the same person producing 2 phonemes), results showed that speech information is being processed much faster than voice information. In addition, f0 or timbre equalization did not affect RT, which disagrees with the classical psycholinguistic models in which voice information is stripped away or normalized to access phonetic content. Also, despite similar average response (percentages) and perceptual (d') curves, a reverse correlation analysis on acoustic features revealed that only the vowel formant frequencies distinguish stimuli in the gender task, whilst, as expected, the formant frequencies of the consonant distinguished stimuli in the phoneme task. The 2nd set of results thus also disagrees with models postulating that the same acoustic information is used for voice and speech. Altogether these results suggest that voice gender categorization and phoneme categorization are dissociated at an early stage on the basis of different enhanced acoustic features that are diagnostic to the task at hand.