Vurdering av effekter på det biologiske mangfoldet, dyrevelferd og dyrehelse ved innførsel, oppdrett og utsetting av fasan og rapphøns i Norge

English: The Department of Forestry and Wildlife Management at Inland University of Applied Sciences was commissioned by Fuglehundklubbenes Forbund (FKF) and their Lavlandskomite (LK) to scientifically review and assess the practice of releasing common pheasants (Phasianus colchicus, pheasant) and grey partridges (Perdix perdix, partridge), and specifically evaluate ecosystem effects, effects on biodiversity, animal welfare during rearing, breeding, transport and release, and animal health and disease risks when importing, breeding, rearing and releasing these birds into Norwegian nature. Ecosystem effects of artificially augmenting populations may be positive, negative or negligible from a conservation standpoint. Negative effects include altering of species interactions via resource consumption, agonistic behaviour or predation. These forms of species interactions are amplified with increasing number of released birds. Under extreme circumstances, vegetation and invertebrate abundance have been negatively affected inside and around pheasant release pens in the UK and in the UK, released birds are also likely sustaining high populations of generalist predators. Positive effects of releases include supporting management actions that target factors limiting survival and population growth like predator control, supplementary feeding and habitat improvement. These factors are prerequisites for successful release programs, and they can benefit the conservation status of several other species. Because of low survival and unrealized reproductive potential, population simulations suggest that partridge and pheasant releases in Norway need supporting management efforts to avoid population extinctions. The goal when breeding partridges and pheasants is to select for wild behaviours and this require different rearing conditions compared to domesticated species. Yet, the knowledge base on rearing conditions that meet the need of pheasants and partridges is low. Increasing space and enriching habitats in rearing systems, however, will reduce stress-related behaviours. Rearing conditions should approximate natural conditions with regards to diet, unrestrained sociality between individuals and the possibility of exposure to natural stressors. Various pathogens have been recorded among pheasants in Scandinavia and imports from abroad can expose native galliformes to species-specific disease they would normally not encounter. Several measures can be adopted to minimize risks of spreading pathogens. They include hygiene at rearing farms, veterinary inspections of birds before import and secure pens that prevents contact with outside wildlife. When assessing unintentional effects on ecosystems following the release of captive-bred birds, it is important to consider the scale and extent of the release. Studies focusing on impacts of releases on fauna and flora have to our knowledge only been conducted in the UK where 47 million pheasants are released on an annual basis. The Norwegian release program is dwarfed by comparison and there is currently no information that supports the hypothesis that partridges and pheasants released in Norway the last decade have had negative effects on Norwegian ecosystems or biodiversity. With our current understanding of animal welfare, it is possible to tailor rearing and release programs which minimize risk of the spreading of pathogens and that produce healthy and viable individuals that are well adapted to a life outside of the release pen.Norsk: Institutt for Skog- og Utmarksfag ved Høgskolen i Innlandet fikk i oppdrag av Fuglehundklubbenes Forbund (FKF) og deres Lavlandskomite (LK) om å gjennomgå og vurdere praksisen med utsetting av fasaner og rapphøns, og spesielt evaluere økosystemeffekter, effekter på biodiversitet, dyrevelferd under oppdrett, avl, transport og utsetting, og risiko for dyrehelse og sykdommer ved import, avl, oppdrett og utsetting av disse fuglene i norsk natur. Økosystemeffektene av å øke populasjoner kunstig kan være positive, negative eller ubetydelige fra et bevaringsperspektiv. Negative effekter inkluderer endringer i artenes samhandling via ressursforbruk, agonistisk adferd eller predasjon. Disse formene for interaksjoner mellom arter forsterkes med økende antall fugler satt ut. Under ekstreme forhold har utsetting av fasan hatt negative effekter på vegetasjonsdekke og virvelløse dyr inne i og på utsiden av akklimatiseringshegn i Storbritannia, og i Storbritannia opprettholder utsatt fugl sannsynligvis også høye bestander av generalistpredatorer. Positive effekter av utsetting inkluderer støttende forvaltningstiltak som tar sikte på å begrense faktorer som reduserer overlevelse og populasjonsvekst som rovdyrkontroll, tilleggsfôring og habitatforbedring. Disse faktorene er forutsetninger for vellykkede utsettingsprogrammer, og de kan bedre bevaringsstatusen til flere andre arter. På grunn av lav overlevelse og uforløst reproduktivt potensial, antyder populasjonssimuleringer at utsatt rapphøns og fasan i Norge trenger støttende forvaltningstiltak for å unngå utdøing. Målet når man avler rapphøns og fasaner er å selektere for vill adferd, og dette krever ulike oppdrettsforhold sammenlignet med domestiserte arter. Kunnskapsgrunnlaget om oppdrettsforhold som oppfyller behovene til fasaner og rapphøns er imidlertid lavt. Å øke plassen og berike habitatene i oppdrettssystemene vil imidlertid redusere stressrelatert adferd. Oppdrettsforholdene bør tilnærme seg naturlige forhold når det gjelder kosthold, uregulert sosialitet mellom individer og muligheten for eksponering for naturlige stressorer. Forskjellige patogener er registrert blant fasaner i Skandinavia, og import fra utlandet kan eksponere norsk hønsefugl for artsspesifikke sykdommer de vanligvis ikke ville påtruffet. Flere tiltak kan iverksettes for å minimere risikoen for spredning av patogener. Disse inkluderer hygiene på oppdrettsanlegg, veterinærundersøkelser av fuglene før import, og sikre oppdrettsanlegg som hindrer kontakt med dyreliv utenfor. Når man vurderer utilsiktede effekter på økosystemer etter utsetting av oppdrettede fugler, er det viktig å ta hensyn til omfanget og skalaen på utsettingen. Studier som fokuserer fauna- og floraeffekter har hva vi kjenner til kun blitt utført i Storbritannia, der 47 millioner fasaner slippes ut årlig. Det norske utsettingsprogrammet er forsvinnende lite i forhold, og det finnes for øyeblikket ingen informasjon som støtter hypotesen om at rapphøns og fasaner som er satt ut i Norge de siste ti årene, har hatt negative effekter på norske økosystemer eller det biologiske mangfoldet. Med nåværende forståelse av dyrevelferd, er det også mulig å tilpasse oppdretts- og utsettingsprogrammer som minimerer risikoen for spredning av patogener og som produserer sunne og levedyktige individer som er godt tilpasset livet utenfor oppdrettsanlegget.Oppdragsgiver/Financed by: Fuglehundklubbenes Forbund v/Lavlandskomitee

Voice, Accountability and Human Development: The Emergence of a New Agenda

human development, democracy

The Role of Emotional Labor in Services: How Employee Emotional Labor Influences Organizational Outcomes

Emotional labor concerns the intrapsychic experience of managing feelings and displays in order to produce appropriate emotional displays for the purposes of work. Most of the emotional labor literature concerns how its performance affects employee outcomes, such as strain and burnout. However, the commonly held assumption that emotional labor is performed for the benefit of the organization has received less attention, with largely inconsistent findings. In this thesis, I present three disparate studies that examine the relationship between employee emotional labor and customer service outcomes more closely. In the first study, I test whether the inconsistent findings regarding the effects of surface acting on customer outcomes can be, in part, attributed to the conceptualization of surface acting and the moderating role of the service context. In the second study, I examine whether the commonly assumed, but rarely tested, concept of nonconscious emotional labor can be triggered by standard priming procedures and compare the effects of nonconscious emotional labor strategies with their conscious counterparts across a variety of social, cognitive, and affective service outcomes. Finally, in the third study, I consider the role of customer judgment processes and emotional intelligence in determining the extent to which employee’s surface acting is detrimental to customer service outcomes. Results suggest that suppressing negative emotions, but not faking positive emotions, has a negative impact on customer service outcomes, but only in service contexts that are highly personalized and when the customer and employee do not have an established relationship. Nonconscious reappraisal is associated with largely beneficial outcomes across a range of service outcomes, compared to their conscious counterparts, but nonconscious suppression is associated with poorer outcomes. Processes that enable more automatic and heuristic judgments predicts more accurate inferences regarding the affective performance of employees, but only when emotional intelligence is also high. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed

The Effects of Fidgets on Attention and Learning of College Students

Fidget “tools”, or objects to facilitate fidgeting, are gaining in popularity and controversy within the educational setting. Advertisers market fidget objects as evidence-based methods to improve attention, alleviate anxiety, and otherwise improve academic performance for their users. Thus, many individuals are investing in these objects to aid them in their academic studies, jobs, and other attention/focus orientated pursuits. These claims of evidence basis are made in the absence of sufficient scientific research and with conflicting theoretical basis regarding their mechanism of effect. The present study looked at the effect of facilitated fidgeting through different devices (stress ball and fidget spinner) compared to a no fidget device control condition on college student performance on a series of attention and cognitive tasks that occur during different learning processes. Data were analyzed using a 3x6 MANOVA. There were no significant differences on outcome measures, including digit span tasks, Stroop tasks, listening comprehension tasks, and reading maze task, between no fidget tool (n=22), fidget spinner (n=22), or stress ball conditions (n=22). The study also evaluated how self-reported attention difficulties may alter this relationship between facilitated fidgeting and academic performance. Self-reported attention difficulties did not significantly affect the relationship between facilitated fidgeting and academic performance, nor were there significant differences across task performance between ADHD indicated participants iv and non-ADHD indicated participants. This study, along with developing research and literature in the field suggests that fidgets have little to no effect on improving attention and learning outcomes with college students or across development and may, in some cases, lead to negative learning and behavioral outcomes. Recommendations for schools on fidget use are provided based on the findings of this study and extant literature

A test of the ideal free distribution in panhandling humans

The Ideal Free Distribution (Fretwell and Lucas, 1970), an optimization model from behavioral ecology, predicts that a group of animals will distribute themselves across habitats with unequal resources such that all animals have equal success rates. The six experiments of this dissertation demonstrated that humans conform to the IFD with about the same sensitivity as animals and respond similarly when assumptions of the model are violated. The present study also revealed that cooperation, and its effect on the functional size of the foraging unit, may be an important factor in understanding the distribution of social foragers. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that the IFD could be applied to groups of humans foraging in spatially separated habitats. The distribution of a group was examined in a simulated panhandling situation, where foragers could obtain nickels by asking for them on two streets with varying ratios of resources. The distributions of panhandlers in Experiments 1 and 2 were comparable to those found with animal subjects. Experiments 3, 4, and 5 varied the degree to which the model\u27s assumptions (perfect knowledge, equal competitive weight, and lack of interference from other competitors) were met in the panhandling situation. As predicted by findings with non-human animals, violations of these assumptions disrupted the IFD. Experiment 6 examined the effect of cooperation on the distribution of panhandlers. When a high density of panhandlers foraged cooperatively, they distributed according to the IFD. The same number, working individually, did not. This manipulation showed that consideration of the size of the foraging unit may be important in determining whether a distribution fits the IFD. Additional data analyses from all six experiments revealed strategies that may provide the mechanism by which a group of animals achieves the IFD. Two effective strategies were identified, although no strong evidence was found for the primacy of one strategy over the other, or for a particular combination of strategies needed to produce the IFD. An examination of the characteristics of individual panhandlers ruled out a number of individual differences as the basis for changes in the distribution of the group

Liar liar neurons fire: how executive control processes contribute to the ability to deceive

This thesis presents a series of empirical investigations into the executive demands of deception. The first two experiments investigated whether the executive demands of deception are sufficient to influence receiver perceptions of credibility. Participant-senders in Study 1 (n = 52) and Study 2 (n = 97) completed a false opinion task and a battery of cognitive tasks. Deception performance was operationalized via participant-receiver judgements of veracity (Study 1, n = 624; Study 2, n = 1140). While the results from Study 1 showed a small positive relationship between executive abilities and deception performance, the results from Study 2 were stronger. They indicated that while working memory skill had a moderate positive relationship with deception performance, set shifting and inhibitory control skills were unrelated to deception performance once working memory skill had been taken into account. The third study used a resource depletion framework to experimentally manipulate executive abilities. Participant-senders (n = 114) completed two false opinion tasks; one before the administration of a cognitive task (either an executive task designed to deplete the availability of executive resources or one of two control tasks) and the other immediately after. Once again deception performance was operationalized via participant-receiver judgements of veracity (n = 798). The results indicated that while deception performance was impaired by the executive task, it was relatively unaffected by either of the control tasks. The fourth study presents a theoretical analysis assessing the appropriateness of standard by-judge and by-sender aggregating procedures commonly used in deception detection research. A series of Monte Carlo simulations demonstrated that the aggregation of deception data can cause inflated Type 1 error rates and poor statistical power and that Generalized Linear Mixed Models (GLMMs) may overcome these problems. Consequently, a series of GLMMs were used to re-analyze the data from Study 3. The results were consistent with previous analyses. Overall, the evidence reported in this thesis demonstrates that the demands of deceiving in false opinion tasks are sufficient to influence a person’s behaviours such that those with poor executive abilities tend to be worse liars than those with good executive abilities

An Investigation of the Effects of Free Writing on the Scope and Control of Attention

The possibility that writing can provide relief from endogenous sources of distraction and improve attention performance was examined. Participants completed attention scope and control tasks prior to and after completing a five-minute writing exercise. The writing exercise instructed participants to either copy text or write down tasks they intended to complete in the near future. Writing did not elicit effects in attention performance, but methodological limitations make it difficult to interpret this outcome. Individual differences in stress, cognitive control and flexibility under stress, and ruminative tendencies did not relate to attention performance. Stress was associated with poorer cognitive control and flexibility as well as a tendency to ruminate. Future research should verify writing-related performance improvements in other cognitive tasks before administering scope and control tasks to determine whether writing benefits attention and to disambiguate benefits related to liberated capacity from those related to renewed attention control

Investigating the Role of Executive Processes in Young Children's Prospective Memory

Prospective memory (PM) is the ability to remember to carry out one's intentions. This is a critical ability for children to develop in order to function independently in their daily activities. This dissertation examines the role of executive functioning in preschoolers' PM in two studies that vary the executive demand at different stages of the PM task. Study 1 investigated the role of task difficulty during the retention interval prior to the PM task. A difficult working memory task during the delay period resulted in worse PM performance in 4- and 5-year-olds compared to an easy working memory task. In addition, children's working memory, planning ability, and theory of mind correlated with PM but only in the difficult filler task condition. Study 2 examined age differences between 4- and 5-year-olds in PM task performance when the task: (1) was embedded in an easy or difficult ongoing task, (2) had an instruction to focus on the intention versus an instruction to focus on the distractor activity during the retention interval, and (3) varied in the salience of prospective targets. Overall, 5-year-olds performed better on the PM task than 4-year-olds. Children also had superior PM when targets were salient compared to non-salient and marginally superior PM when they received an instruction to monitor their intention compared to when they received an instruction to focus on the distractor activity. In addition, positive relations between executive functioning and PM were documented. Taken together, these studies suggest that disrupting or encouraging monitoring has a direct impact on PM performance in certain conditions. The implications of these results for theories that suggest differing roles for controlled processes in PM are discussed

Intellectual Property Today: Of Myths and Paradoxes

It is often claimed or assumed that intellectual property laws are necessary to encourage individual creativity and inventiveness and that society would be worse off without such laws. This article suggests that, in the field of copyrights and patents at least, such claims rest on myth and paradox rather than proof, and should be viewed sceptically. With its minimal standards for eligibility, copyright today seems less concerned with authors, art and literature than with protecting the distributors of standardized industrial products, and sometimes is even used to prevent the dissemination of knowledge by becoming a tool of censorship. Patent law too requires major rethinking if its promise of bettering mankind by encouraging socially useful discoveries and inventions and the dissemination of knowledge is to be realized. The article concludes that intellectual property laws should no longer be analyzed in terms of outmoded notions of property: more particularistic inquiries are needed to ensure that these laws adequately serve valid social ends