3,334 research outputs found

    Researching animal research: What the humanities and social sciences can contribute to laboratory animal science and welfare

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    Every year around 80 million scientific procedures are carried out on animals globally. These experiments have the potential to generate new understandings of biology and clinical treatments. They also give rise to ongoing societal debate.This book demonstrates how the humanities and social sciences can contribute to understanding what is created through animal procedures - including constitutional forms of research governance, different institutional cultures of care, the professional careers of scientists and veterinarians, collaborations with patients and publics, and research animals, specially bred for experiments or surplus to requirements.Developing the idea of the animal research nexus, this book explores how connections and disconnections are made between these different elements, how these have reshaped each other historically, and how they configure the current practice and policy of UK animal research

    An examination of the verbal behaviour of intergroup discrimination

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    This thesis examined relationships between psychological flexibility, psychological inflexibility, prejudicial attitudes, and dehumanization across three cross-sectional studies with an additional proposed experimental study. Psychological flexibility refers to mindful attention to the present moment, willing acceptance of private experiences, and engaging in behaviours congruent with one’s freely chosen values. Inflexibility, on the other hand, indicates a tendency to suppress unwanted thoughts and emotions, entanglement with one’s thoughts, and rigid behavioural patterns. Study 1 found limited correlations between inflexibility and sexism, racism, homonegativity, and dehumanization. Study 2 demonstrated more consistent positive associations between inflexibility and prejudice. And Study 3 controlled for right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation, finding inflexibility predicted hostile sexism and racism beyond these factors. While showing some relationships, particularly with sexism and racism, psychological inflexibility did not consistently correlate with varied prejudices across studies. The proposed randomized controlled trial aims to evaluate an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy intervention to reduce sexism through enhanced psychological flexibility. Overall, findings provide mixed support for the utility of flexibility-based skills in addressing complex societal prejudices. Research should continue examining flexibility integrated with socio-cultural approaches to promote equity

    Southern Adventist University Undergraduate Catalog 2023-2024

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    Southern Adventist University\u27s undergraduate catalog for the academic year 2023-2024.https://knowledge.e.southern.edu/undergrad_catalog/1123/thumbnail.jp

    A Trust Management Framework for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

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    The inception of Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) provides an opportunity for road users and public infrastructure to share information that improves the operation of roads and the driver experience. However, such systems can be vulnerable to malicious external entities and legitimate users. Trust management is used to address attacks from legitimate users in accordance with a user’s trust score. Trust models evaluate messages to assign rewards or punishments. This can be used to influence a driver’s future behaviour or, in extremis, block the driver. With receiver-side schemes, various methods are used to evaluate trust including, reputation computation, neighbour recommendations, and storing historical information. However, they incur overhead and add a delay when deciding whether to accept or reject messages. In this thesis, we propose a novel Tamper-Proof Device (TPD) based trust framework for managing trust of multiple drivers at the sender side vehicle that updates trust, stores, and protects information from malicious tampering. The TPD also regulates, rewards, and punishes each specific driver, as required. Furthermore, the trust score determines the classes of message that a driver can access. Dissemination of feedback is only required when there is an attack (conflicting information). A Road-Side Unit (RSU) rules on a dispute, using either the sum of products of trust and feedback or official vehicle data if available. These “untrue attacks” are resolved by an RSU using collaboration, and then providing a fixed amount of reward and punishment, as appropriate. Repeated attacks are addressed by incremental punishments and potentially driver access-blocking when conditions are met. The lack of sophistication in this fixed RSU assessment scheme is then addressed by a novel fuzzy logic-based RSU approach. This determines a fairer level of reward and punishment based on the severity of incident, driver past behaviour, and RSU confidence. The fuzzy RSU controller assesses judgements in such a way as to encourage drivers to improve their behaviour. Although any driver can lie in any situation, we believe that trustworthy drivers are more likely to remain so, and vice versa. We capture this behaviour in a Markov chain model for the sender and reporter driver behaviours where a driver’s truthfulness is influenced by their trust score and trust state. For each trust state, the driver’s likelihood of lying or honesty is set by a probability distribution which is different for each state. This framework is analysed in Veins using various classes of vehicles under different traffic conditions. Results confirm that the framework operates effectively in the presence of untrue and inconsistent attacks. The correct functioning is confirmed with the system appropriately classifying incidents when clarifier vehicles send truthful feedback. The framework is also evaluated against a centralized reputation scheme and the results demonstrate that it outperforms the reputation approach in terms of reduced communication overhead and shorter response time. Next, we perform a set of experiments to evaluate the performance of the fuzzy assessment in Veins. The fuzzy and fixed RSU assessment schemes are compared, and the results show that the fuzzy scheme provides better overall driver behaviour. The Markov chain driver behaviour model is also examined when changing the initial trust score of all drivers

    An embodied approach to informational interventions: using conceptual metaphors to promote sustainable healthy diets

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    Poor diet quality and environmental degradation are two major challenges of our times. Unhealthy and unsustainable dietary practices, such as the overconsumption of meat and consumer food waste behaviour, contribute greatly to both issues. Across seventeen online and field experiments, in two different cultures (US and China), this thesis investigates if the embodied cognition approach, and more specifically, research on conceptual metaphors, can be used to develop interventions to promote sustainable healthy diets. Interventions relying on conceptual metaphors have been shown to stimulate attitudinal and behavioural changes in other fields (e.g., marketing and political communications), but are rarely adopted to encourage sustainable healthy diets. To fill in this gap in the literature, I conducted five sets of experimental studies examining the effects of different metaphors on specific sustainable healthy dietary practices, each of which forms an independent empirical paper (Chapters 2-6 of the thesis). After introducing the current perspectives on embodied cognition and conceptual metaphors in the context of this research (Chapter 1), Chapter 2 looks into the conceptual metaphor “Healthy is Up”, demonstrating that US people implicitly associate healthiness with verticality, and offering recommendations for healthy eating guidelines. Chapter 3 extends this research to Chinese samples and partially replicates the results. Chapter 4 shows that the anthropomorphic metaphor “Animals are Friends” discourages meat consumption by inducing anticipatory guilt among US omnivores, whereas Chapter 5 reveals that Chinese omnivores are more responsive to another anthropomorphic metaphor, namely, “Animals are Family”. Bringing lab insights 6 to the real world, Chapter 6 demonstrates with a longitudinal field experiment that anthropomorphic metaphors together with environmental feedback result in a higher reduction in food waste as compared to other feedback interventions. The strengths, limitations and implications of those empirical papers are discussed in the conclusive part of the thesis

    The role of heterosocial perception in men's likelihood to sexually harass

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    Sexual harassment against women represents sexually aggressive and coercive behaviour that violates women’s dignity and creates an offensive environment, which threatens women’s well-being and ability to prosper in day to day life (Pina, Gannon & Saunders, 2009). Understanding the perceptual characteristics of men with inclinations to sexually harass, through how they perceive women is important in delineating the reasons why some men may engage in the sexual harassment of women. Heterosocial perception is a concept of how an individual perceives another person interacting with the opposite sex. It is typically measured using the Test of Reading Affective Cues (TRAC), a tool encompassing an array of video clips showing a woman interacting with a man, whereby the woman displays a range of affective cues. The perceiver is assessed on their perceptual accuracy when judging the affective cues. Perceptual accuracies of male rapists and male child molesters have been well researched (Lipton, McDonel & McFall, 1987; Stahl & Sacco, 1995), yet male sexual harassment as a singular category has been neglected. The current thesis explores the potential heterosocial perception characteristics of a distinct group of men who are relatively high in the likelihood to engage in sexual harassment of women from scores on Pryor’s (1987) Likelihood to Sexually Harass (LSH) scale focusing on their differences in performance on the TRAC in comparison to those men who are lower in the likelihood to engage in sexual harassment of women. Five empirical studies are reported in this thesis. Study 1 presents a modernized version of the TRAC and incorporates an analysis to develop it as a research tool, enabling judgements on five affective cues displayed by a woman; friendly, romantic, neutral, bored and rejecting. The tool provides this range of affective cues that were used in later studies to measure differences in heterosocial perception. Study 2 addressed theoretical explanations taken from previous perception research with sexually aggressive men (Malamuth & Brown, xiv 1994) to explain differences in heterosocial perception for men high in LSH. Explanations are given for potential biases evidenced by men high in LSH focusing on Error Management Theory (Haselton & Buss, 2000) arguing that an overperception bias will increase the frequency of falsely inferring a woman’s sexual intent towards sexual pursuit, but considerably reduce the costs of losing a sexual opportunity by falsely inferring that a woman lacked sexual intent. Altogether, study 2 provided support for the misidentification of negative affective cues (negativeness blindness), the overperception of negative affective cues and the romantic overperception bias of friendly affective cues in the perception of men high in LSH. Study 3 tested the established theoretical link that internal concepts of social power have within men who report sexual aggression and sexual coercion and the subsequent impact on perception. Unexpectedly, power did not exacerbate perceptual inaccuracy for negative affective cues and the romantic overperception bias of friendly affective cues. In study 4, objectification was assessed in its relationship to perception in high LSH men. Instrumental and both specific and general sexual objectification were significantly higher for men high in LSH. Specific sexual objectification was found to negatively mediate romantic categorizations of romantic affective cues, but general sexual objectification was found to positively mediate romantic categorizations of friendly affective cues for men high in LSH. Results also showed that men high in LSH showed poorest perceptual accuracy on bored and rejecting affective cues, and evidenced a greater romantic judgement of friendly affective cues overperception bias. In study 5, the impact of different mental states on perception was assessed, via the use of a cooling system to facilitate self-regulation. A cooling system is a psychological framework proposed for understanding self-control (Metcalfe & Mischel, 1999), and in this study it incorporated techniques of distraction, distancing and empathy enhancement. Results showed that the cooling system was not beneficial in making high LSH xv men’s perceptual judgements more accurate and in making their judgements accurate to the level of low and medium LSH men for negative affective cues. However, cooling did improve perceptual accuracy of friendly affective cues removing the overperception bias to romantic judgements in comparison to the neutral condition. The cooling system was not found to reduce instrumental and sexual objectification for high LSH men. There were differences found on empathy between men high and low and medium on LSH. Differences were found such that men high in LSH showed more state empathy, but less trait empathy than men low and medium in LSH

    LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volume

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    LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volum

    UMSL Bulletin 2022-2023

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    The 2022-2023 Bulletin and Course Catalog for the University of Missouri St. Louis.https://irl.umsl.edu/bulletin/1087/thumbnail.jp

    Price formation in Local Electricity Markets

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    The big five personalities traits and job performance of employees in the FMCG sector in Selangor

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    In order for a business to successfully survive and compete with other competitors in today's fragile economic environment, proactive and committed personnel must perform greater standards of job performance. One of the key components that provide both objectives and strategies to fulfill the corporate mission is the performance of employees on the job. Hence, the purpose of this research was to examine how the Big Five Personality traits of employees on the job performance in the FMCG sector in Selangor. The study sampled 276 people from the FMCG sector in Selangor using convenience sampling method and the study's subjects were the employees. The tool for gathering data was a questionnaire. According to the study, Agreeableness, Openness to experience and Conscientiousness positively and significantly impacted job performance. Extraversion and Neuroticism/Emotional Stability, on the other hand, had a weak and insignificant relationship with job performance. According to the study's findings, people that exhibit high levels of Agreeableness, Openness to experience, and Conscientiousness are more likely to succeed in their job performances. The findings were then discussed, and recommendations were made. Finally, the researcher presented the conclusions in order to conclude the entire study
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