Why don't older adults with subjective memory complaints seek help?

Subjective memory complaints (SMCs) are common among older adults, often causing significant distress and showing strong relationships to future cognitive decline. However, low rates of help-seeking for memory complaints are well documented. Little is known about the reasons behind the decision to seek or not to seek help with memory problems. The common-sense model of illness perception proposes that the beliefs people hold about their health underlie help-seeking behaviour. The present study investigated factors underlying the decision to seek help in people with SMCs within the framework of the common-sense model of illness perception

Parental Resources in Parents of Children with Special Needs (SNs) at the Time of COVID-19

Background. The limitations imposed by governments for containing the spread of COVID-19 have affected familial relationships, especially those of families dealing with children with special needs or chronic illness conditions. The current study aims to better understand what pathological/disability condition has impacted parental resources, sense of competence, and perception of children's executive functioning the most. Methods. A sample of 648 parents was asked to answer a survey assessing children's condition (typical development, specific learning disorder, autism spectrum syndrome, chronic illness), parental resources, parenting sense of competence (distinguished into parental satisfaction and self-efficacy), and parents' perception of their children's executive functioning. A MANOVA model was performed to assess differences in parental resources, sense of competence, and perception of the children's executive functions according to their condition. A path analysis model was performed to examine the impact of sense of competence and children's condition on parental resources and children's executive functions. Results. Parents with children with specific learning disorder reported lower scores of parental resources in terms of total scores, common antecedents, and specific antecedents compared to parents with typically developed children (total scores: MD = 56.45, p < 0.001; common antecedents: MD = 22.28, p < 0.00; specific antecedents: MD = 34.17, p < 0.001), parents with autistic children (total scores: MD = 62.79, p = 0.01; common antecedents: MD = 24.03, p = 0.01; specific antecedents: MD = 38.76, p = 0.02) and parents of children with chronic illness (total scores: MD = 37.42, p = 0.04; common antecedents: MD = 16.59, p = 0.01). The path analysis model shows a direct effect of parental satisfaction (beta = 0.26) and pathology/disability (beta = -0.10) on parental resources that, in turn, influence parents' perception of their children's executive functioning (beta = 0.24). Conclusion. Although no data about the prepandemic situation is available, the current study highlights that parental stress influence children's cognition. Moreover, parents of children with special needs seemed to be challenged during COVID-19, especially parents of children with specific learning disorders, that are already stressed out by their children's condition. Therefore, academic services should undertake preventive measures to preserve parental well-being and to provide a supportive environment for children, especially for those with atypical development

The Acquisition Of Lexical Knowledge From The Web For Aspects Of Semantic Interpretation

This work investigates the effective acquisition of lexical knowledge from the Web to perform semantic interpretation. The Web provides an unprecedented amount of natural language from which to gain knowledge useful for semantic interpretation. The knowledge acquired is described as common sense knowledge, information one uses in his or her daily life to understand language and perception. Novel approaches are presented for both the acquisition of this knowledge and use of the knowledge in semantic interpretation algorithms. The goal is to increase accuracy over other automatic semantic interpretation systems, and in turn enable stronger real world applications such as machine translation, advanced Web search, sentiment analysis, and question answering. The major contributions of this dissertation consist of two methods of acquiring lexical knowledge from the Web, namely a database of common sense knowledge and Web selectors. The first method is a framework for acquiring a database of concept relationships. To acquire this knowledge, relationships between nouns are found on the Web and analyzed over WordNet using information-theory, producing information about concepts rather than ambiguous words. For the second contribution, words called Web selectors are retrieved which take the place of an instance of a target word in its local context. The selectors serve for the system to learn the types of concepts that the sense of a target word should be similar. Web selectors are acquired dynamically as part of a semantic interpretation algorithm, while the relationships in the database are useful to iii stand-alone programs. A final contribution of this dissertation concerns a novel semantic similarity measure and an evaluation of similarity and relatedness measures on tasks of concept similarity. Such tasks are useful when applying acquired knowledge to semantic interpretation. Applications to word sense disambiguation, an aspect of semantic interpretation, are used to evaluate the contributions. Disambiguation systems which utilize semantically annotated training data are considered supervised. The algorithms of this dissertation are considered minimallysupervised; they do not require training data created by humans, though they may use humancreated data sources. In the case of evaluating a database of common sense knowledge, integrating the knowledge into an existing minimally-supervised disambiguation system significantly improved results – a 20.5% error reduction. Similarly, the Web selectors disambiguation system, which acquires knowledge directly as part of the algorithm, achieved results comparable with top minimally-supervised systems, an F-score of 80.2% on a standard noun disambiguation task. This work enables the study of many subsequent related tasks for improving semantic interpretation and its application to real-world technologies. Other aspects of semantic interpretation, such as semantic role labeling could utilize the same methods presented here for word sense disambiguation. As the Web continues to grow, the capabilities of the systems in this dissertation are expected to increase. Although the Web selectors system achieves great results, a study in this dissertation shows likely improvements from acquiring more data. Furthermore, the methods for acquiring a database of common sense knowledge could be applied in a more exhaustive fashion for other types of common sense knowledge. Finally, perhaps the greatest benefits from this work will come from the enabling of real world technologies that utilize semantic interpretation

Place and city: merging our affective and social spatial dimension in the (smart) platial city

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Information Management, specialization in Geographic Information SystemsWe are living in (smart) cities that hold social-oriented promises but currently, most of these cities disregard the humans. Although some alternatives are appearing such as smart citizen-centric approaches, there is a lack of how promoting truly appealing perspectives toward a common good or better social synergies. Thereby, smart cities, with their associated Information and Communication Technology tools, are offering new possibilities, but, unfortunately, citizens are not fully exploiting the opportunities to empower themselves because, among other reasons, they are not aware of their common spatialities. Currently, we are not able to operationalize the spatial humanurban interactions regarding citizens’ cognitions, feelings and behaviors towards city places (i.e., sense of place) and meaningful geographic human relationships (i.e., social capital). Both concepts are significant as resources for an alternative landscape based on human perception and organization of social interactions fostered through the geographic place(s). In this research, we highlight the need to understand and operationalize social concepts spatial dimension for a better understanding of a smart citizen-centric approach which is mainly dependent on our capability to understand platial urban dynamics. We conceptualized a (spatial) conceptual framework for sense of place and social capital at the individual level to study their spatial relationship in the urban context. We developed a web map-based survey based on the literature to spatialize, characterize and measure sense of place, social capital and civic engagement. Using the spatial data collected, we validated our framework and demonstrated the importance to encompass the spatial dimension of social concepts (i.e., sense of place and social capital) as pivotal aspect (1) to understand the platial urban dynamics; (2) to provide useful social-spatial data to city processes (e.g. civic engagement); and (3) to reveal the potential to include them in social theory and structural equation models. Furthermore, we highlighted the crucial role of Geographic Information Science (GISc) techniques to gather the spatial dimension of those social concepts. Although in this research we focus on the spatial relationship between sense of place and social capital on civic engagement, the possibilities to relate our framework and methodology to other city based-notions can bring to light new platial urban dynamics. This research wants to open up the agenda for further research into exploratory place-based geography studies and, simultaneously, sets up a common social ground to build other socially-oriented conceptualizations or applications on top of it

The role of beliefs about infertility on psychological adjustment: a systematic review

Aims Beliefs about an illness can influence psychological adjustment. This relationship has been studied using the Common Sense Model (CSM). This systematic review explores the association between perceptions of infertility, measured by the Illness Perception Questionnaire (IPQ), and psychological adjustment among patients with difficulty conceiving. Methods Six electronic databases were searched between 1996 and 2012. Results Three papers were selected. Results indicate significant relationships between perceptions of infertility and psychological adjustment. Perceptions of more severe consequences, longer timeline and lower controllability contributed to greater distress and lower well-being. Individuals’ perceptions influenced partner’s psychological adjustment. Gender differences were also observed. Conclusions The review suggests that the CSM is an appropriate framework to study infertility. Thus, interventions based on modifying perceptions of infertility may improve psychological well-being. Given the limited number of studies available and methodological limitations, further research is needed to ascertain the IPQ’s contribution to research on infertility

"Hope springs eternal": a study of company and community in the former mining town of Buchans, Newfoundland

Mining communities face a host of issues, including economic volatility, uncertainty, and closure. Thus, the common perception of mining towns revolves around a notion of impermanence - that the town follows the ore and when the ore is depleted, so is the community. However, this image is inherently problematic as it fails to recognize the fact that people put down roots, become attached to place, and create homes on the same ground from which ore is extracted. This thesis examines the various ways in which place identity is constructed in affiliation with the mining industry in Buchans, Newfoundland, and explores how identity and sense of community have contributed to community development and resilience post-closure. In doing so, it relies on qualitative methods and oral histories to provide insight into the sense of place that can develop in a former mining company town, how these relationships to place develop, and potential implications for community well-being and survival

Spatial order and sense of community in high-rise apartment developments in Bundang, the metropolitan area of Seoul, Korea

This thesis aims to investigate the relationship between the provision of spatial order and perceived sense of community in high-rise housing developments in Korea from a socio-spatial and architectural perspective. It also considers relationships between the perception of neighbourhood, provision of facilities, design aspects, and socio-economic characteristics and sense of community. The study uses a questionnaire survey as the main research instrument conducted across four case studies in Bundang new town, in metropolitan Seoul, Korea. Two of the cases were selected as having a high provision of spatial order and the other two low provision according to the concepts of Altman (1975) and Newman (1972, 1975). Quantitative analysis is carried out using the Kruskal-Wallis/Mann-Whitney test and Spearman s rank correlation to identify differences and correlations between cases. The results indicate that there is no clear evidence that a sense of community has a direct relationship with the provision of spatial order in the selected cases. However, in the high provision cases outdoor common spaces appear to have a role in contributing to social interaction. Among Buckner s (1988) three sub-variables of his concept of neighbourhood cohesion, neighbouring appears to be more associated with the provision of spatial order rather than attraction-to-neighbourhood or psychological sense of community. A greater number of opportunities for social interactions occur in an intermediate space located between private dwelling units and public open space in cases with a high provision of spatial order. However, this is likely to be due to the location of shared facilities and their frequency of use. In terms of the relationship between design and a sense of community, landscaping was found to be the most important variable, followed by the design of streets/footpath and facilities for children , parking , and recreational activities . Despite the lack of a clear relationship between design and a sense of community, a strong demand was found for improved outdoor amenity and greater provision of facilities. Socio-economic status appears not to be a significant factor directly influencing the sense of community however, age and the existence of children are associated with the perception of neighbourhood

Business ethics: international analysis of codes of ethics and conduct

Codes of ethics and code of conduct formalize an ideal of expected behavior patterns to managers and employees of organizations, providing standards and orientation that states companies interactions with the community, through products /services, sales force, marketing communications, investments, and relationships with other stakeholders, influencing company reputation and overall Marketing performance. The objective of this study is to analyze the differences in codes of ethics of the largest companies based in Brazil and in Portugal, given their cultural and linguistic similarities. Findings show that the use of codes of ethics are more common in Brazil than in Portugal and that codes of ethics are substantially more extensive and cover a larger number of categories in Brazilian companies, reflecting the organizations’ mission and perception of stakeholders concerns and priorities. We conclude that ethical issues severely impact company reputation and, in a comprehensive sense, overall Marketing performance. Marketing professionals should be systematically aware of how company core values are transmitted to different audiences, including the use of code of ethics to communicate both with internal and external publics.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio