504,147 research outputs found
Emotional (in)Authenticity: The Psychological Impact of Emotional Labour on the Police Officers of England and Wales
Taking a critical action research approach this thesis examines the psychological
outcomes of emotional labour for police officers in England and Wales. Using a
sequential qualitative mixed method design this research is broken down into four
phases:
Phase One takes a Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse analysis of
selected media items that include police representation.
Phase Two conducts narrative analysis of 137 audio diary entries of serving
officers.
Phase Three examines the interviews of 4 serving officers and 6 ex-officers
using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis.
Phase Four engages serving officers in two workshops using role play,
underpinned by Psychodrama, to encourage problem solving and to identify
realistic operational options for improving officers’ psychological wellbeing.
Findings show that that emotional labour for police officers begins in the public arena
and feeling and display rules operate in every aspect of an officers’ life, including with
friends and family. The most expressed feeling and display rule is that emotional
display is a sign of weakness and an inability to carry out the role of the police officer.
Rules are enforced by penalising measures and are described as career limiting or
ending. This results in a significant amount of emotional suppression, burnout and
dissociative behaviour. Moving away from the traditional quantitative measures for
emotional labour has allowed this study to capture the depth and complexity of
officers’ lived experience of emotional labour. Audio diaries have captured the
thinking and motivation behind officers’ emotional regulation and has identified how
officers depersonalise prior to burnout as compliance with feeling and display rules.
Interviews of ex-officers has enabled an association to be made between feeling and
display rules and psychological outcomes. Contributing to theory, alongside stress
and burnout, emotional labour can now be associated with dissociative behaviour as
a psychological outcome
Assessing the impact of representational and contextual problem features on student use of right-hand rules
Students in introductory physics struggle with vector algebra and these
challenges are often associated with contextual and representational features
of the problems. Performance on problems about cross product direction is
particularly poor and some research suggests that this may be primarily due to
misapplied right-hand rules. However, few studies have had the resolution to
explore student use of right-hand rules in detail. This study reviews
literature in several disciplines, including spatial cognition, to identify ten
contextual and representational problem features that are most likely to
influence performance on problems requiring a right-hand rule. Two quantitative
measures of performance (correctness and response time) and two qualitative
measures (methods used and type of errors made) were used to explore the impact
of these problem features on student performance. Quantitative results are
consistent with expectations from the literature, but reveal that some features
(such as the type of reasoning required and the physical awkwardness of using a
right-hand rule) have a greater impact than others (such as whether the vectors
are placed together or separate). Additional insight is gained by the
qualitative analysis, including identifying sources of difficulty not
previously discussed in the literature and revealing that the use of
supplemental methods, such as physically rotating the paper, can mitigate
errors associated with certain features
Integrating heterogeneous knowledges for understanding biological behaviors: a probabilistic approach
Despite recent molecular technique improvements, biological knowledge remains
incomplete. Reasoning on living systems hence implies to integrate
heterogeneous and partial informations. Although current investigations
successfully focus on qualitative behaviors of macromolecular networks, others
approaches show partial quantitative informations like protein concentration
variations over times. We consider that both informations, qualitative and
quantitative, have to be combined into a modeling method to provide a better
understanding of the biological system. We propose here such a method using a
probabilistic-like approach. After its exhaustive description, we illustrate
its advantages by modeling the carbon starvation response in Escherichia coli.
In this purpose, we build an original qualitative model based on available
observations. After the formal verification of its qualitative properties, the
probabilistic model shows quantitative results corresponding to biological
expectations which confirm the interest of our probabilistic approach.Comment: 10 page
Outcomes in language and social skills as seen in children with autism and developmental disabilities participating in equine assisted activities
Individuals with developmental disabilities commonly present characteristics that include deficits in social and communicative abilities. A number of intervention strategies have been implemented, but none have proven to be most effective. A somewhat novel approach known as equine assisted activities and therapies (EAAT) involves the utilization of horses during intervention and has shown to be effective in areas concerning quality of life, social functioning, self-regulation, adaptive behaviors, motor control, and motivation.
The purpose of the current study is to examine the effects of EAA on social skills and expressive language in 2-4 children diagnosed with developmental disability. Participants engaged in 6 weeks of EAA at Equestrian Bridges, a local not-for-profit organization. Sessions were one hour and occurred once a week. Prior to the first session, participants’ guardians completed the Social Skills Improvement System (SSIS) and the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function (BRIEF) questionnaires. A conversational language sample was elicited from each of the participants. Each session consisted of time spent learning a new vocabulary word, greeting and brushing miniature horses, leading the horses while engaging in activities, and reviewing the vocabulary word of the day. The final 3 sessions also included horseback riding. Following the last session, participants’ guardians completed the SSIS and BRIEF questionnaires again, and a second conversational language sample was elicited. Results suggested EAA may contribute to increased social skills, fewer problem behaviors, and improved executive function. Gains in expressive language were also noted, such as increased length and ease of conversation
21st century trade agreements: implications for long-run development policy
This repository item contains a single issue of The Pardee Papers, a series papers that began publishing in 2008 by the Boston University Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future. The Pardee Papers series features working papers by Pardee Center Fellows and other invited authors. Papers in this series explore current and future challenges by anticipating the pathways to human progress, human development, and human well-being. This series includes papers on a wide range of topics, with a special emphasis on interdisciplinary perspectives and a development orientation.This paper examines the extent to which the emerging world trading regime leaves nations the “policy space” to deploy effective policy for long-run diversification and development and the extent to which there is a convergence of such policy space under global and regional trade regimes. We examine the economic theory of trade and long-run growth and underscore the fact that traditional theories lose luster in the presence of the need for long-run dynamic comparative advantages and when market failures are rife. We then review a “toolbox” of policies that have been deployed by developed and developing countries past and present to kick-start diversity and development with the hope of achieving longrun growth. Next, we examine the extent to which rules under the World Trade Organization (WTO), trade agreements between the European Union (EU) and developing countries, trade agreements between the United States (US) and developing countries, and those among developing countries (South-South, or S-S, agreements) allow for the use of such policies. We demonstrate that there is a great divergence among trade regimes over this question. While S-S agreements provide ample policy space for industrial development, the WTO and EU agreements largely represent the middle of the spectrum in terms of constraining policy space choices. On the far end, opposite S-S agreements, US agreements place considerably more constraints by binding parties both broadly and deeply in their trade commitments.
Rachel Denae Thrasher holds a master’s degree in International Relations and a law degree, both from Boston University, and she is a Research Fellow at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future. Her recent research has focused on policy issues related to regional trade agreements, multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) and on global forests governance.
Kevin P. Gallagher is an Assistant Professor in the Department of International Relations and Research Fellow at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, both at Boston University. He is also a fellow at the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University. He has written extensively on trade and global development.
Also see related publication The Future of the WTO, by Kevin Gallagher
About the nature of Kansei information
Kansei studies refer to the more and more holistic consideration of the cognitive and affective processes which occur during user experience. In addition, few studies deal with the experience of the designers during the design process, and its influence on the final design outputs. Historically kansei engineering has been firstly focused on the semantic differential approach. Afterwards emotions were integrated into kansei approaches. The semantic differential approach enabled to evaluate products and then to generate automatically design solutions with semantic input data. Thereafter, evaluations have been completed by physiological measurements in order to reduce the subjectivity involved in those evaluations and also to capture some unconscious reactions. This implementation is still in process. Today kansei studies have been much enriched from the three disciplines of design science, psychology and artificial intelligence. The cross influence between these disciplines brought new dimensions into kansei approaches (multisensory design information, personality, values, and culture, new formalisms and algorithms) which lead progressively towards the consideration of a whole enriched kansei experience. We propose in this paper a description of the nature of kansei information. Then we present some major orientations for kansei evaluation. Finally we propose an overall table gathering information about kansei dimensions and formats.AN
A framework for the local information dynamics of distributed computation in complex systems
The nature of distributed computation has often been described in terms of
the component operations of universal computation: information storage,
transfer and modification. We review the first complete framework that
quantifies each of these individual information dynamics on a local scale
within a system, and describes the manner in which they interact to create
non-trivial computation where "the whole is greater than the sum of the parts".
We describe the application of the framework to cellular automata, a simple yet
powerful model of distributed computation. This is an important application,
because the framework is the first to provide quantitative evidence for several
important conjectures about distributed computation in cellular automata: that
blinkers embody information storage, particles are information transfer agents,
and particle collisions are information modification events. The framework is
also shown to contrast the computations conducted by several well-known
cellular automata, highlighting the importance of information coherence in
complex computation. The results reviewed here provide important quantitative
insights into the fundamental nature of distributed computation and the
dynamics of complex systems, as well as impetus for the framework to be applied
to the analysis and design of other systems.Comment: 44 pages, 8 figure
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