Food and Mood: Exploring the determinants of food choices and the effects of food consumption on mood among women in Inner London.

Introduction: The aim of this study was to explore the relationship between food and mood against the backdrop of increased mental health and nutrition cognizance within public health and scientific discourses. Mood was defined as encompassing positive or negative affect. Methodology: A constructionist qualitative approach underpinned this study. Convenience sampling in two faith-based settings was utilised for recruiting participants, who were aged 19-80 (median,48) years. In total 22 Christian women were included in the research, eighteen were in focus groups and four were in individual semi structured interviews. All were church-attending women in inner London. A thematic analysis was carried out, resulting in four central themes relating to food choice and food-induced mood states. Findings: Women identified a number of internal and external factors as influencing their food choices and the effect of food intake on their moods. Food choice was influenced by mood; mood was influenced by food choice. Low mood was associated with unhealthy food consumption, apparent addiction to certain foods and overeating. Improved mood was associated with more healthy eating and eating in social and familial settings. Discussion: Findings indicate food and mood are interconnected through a complex web of factors, as women respond to individual, environmental, cultural and social cues. Targeting socio-cultural and environmental influences and developing supportive public health services, via faith-based or community-based institutions could help to support more women in their struggle to manage the food and mood continuum. Successful implementation of health policies that recognise the psychological and social determinants of food choice and the effect of food consumption on mood, is essential, as is as more research into life-cycle causal factors linking food choice to moo

Discriminação baseada no peso: representações sociais de internautas sobre a gordofobia

The concept of fat phobia has been usually used to define ways of discrimination towards overweight bodies. The present work aimed to know the social representations of fat phobia elaborated by internet users. A documental research was conducted based on internet comments on an article about fat phobia published by the Superinteressante magazine. Selected opinions comprised a textual corpus which was submitted to a lexical analysis through IRAMUTEQ, revealing five thematic classes: (i) "Health as discourse to justify discrimination", (ii) "Fat versus Slim: instituting differences", (iii) "Weight loss: reinforcement versus deconstruction of the standard", (iv) "Fat phobia: invention or reality?" and (v) "Fat phobia and the (in)appropriateness of affirmative actions". Anchored on the technical and scientific argument which affirms that obesity is an epidemic disease, the representations of internet users legitimized discrimination and prejudice processes against overweight people. Moreover, ironic propositions against quota policy for overweight people showed a dissatisfaction about the existence of affirmative actions that promote equality among social groups, ratifying the idea that the privileges cannot be granted to “inferior groups” or depreciated groups, and these groups, in order to be respected by society, should try to fit their bodies into the refined standard. In this context, aiming to make fat phobia an irrelevant topic, disqualifying the magazine’s approach on this topic, representational strategies directed to deny its existence by comparing suffering between groups or setting differences (fats x thins) was observed. Considering the lack of researches about discrimination against overweight in Brazil, other studies on this topic are suggested

The Construction of Verification Models for Embedded Systems

The usefulness of verification hinges on the quality of the verification model. Verification is useful if it increases our confidence that an artefact bahaves as expected. As modelling inherently contains non-formal elements, the qualityof models cannot be captured by purely formal means. Still, we argue that modelling is not an act of irrationalism and unpredictable geniality, but follows rational arguments, that often remain implicit. In this paper we try to identify the tacit rationalism in the model construction as performed by most people doing modelling for verification. By explicating the different phases, arguments, and design decisions in the model construction, we try to develop guidelines that help to improve the process of model construction and the quality of models

Information Outlook, September 2005

Volume 9, Issue 9https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_io_2005/1008/thumbnail.jp

Place effects on environmental views

How people respond to questions involving the environment depends partly on individual characteristics. Characteristics such as age, gender, education, and ideology constitute the well-studied social bases of environmental concern, which have been explained in terms of cohort effects or of cognitive and cultural factors related to social position. It seems likely that people\u27s environmental views depend not only on personal characteristics but also on their social and physical environments. This hypothesis has been more difficult to test, however. Using data from surveys in 19 rural U.S. counties, we apply mixed-effects modeling to investigate simple place effects with respect to locally focused environmental views. We find evidence for two kinds of place effects. Net of individual characteristics, specific place characteristics have the expected effect on related environmental views. Local changes are related to attitudes about regulation and growth. For example, respondents more often perceive rapid development as a problem, and favor environmental rules that restrict development, in rural counties with growing populations. Moreover, they favor conserving resources for the future rather than using them now to create jobs in counties that have low unemployment. After we controlled for county growth, unemployment and jobs in resource based industries, and individual social-position and ideological factors, there remains significant place-to-place variation in mean levels of environmental concern. Even with both kinds of place effects in the models, the individual level predictors of environmental concern follow patterns expected from previous research. Concern increases with education among Democrats, whereas among Republicans, the relationship is attenuated or reversed. The interaction marks reframing of environmental questions as political wedge issues, through nominally scientific counterarguments aimed at educated, ideologically receptive audiences. © 2010, by the Rural Sociological Society

Management and its public: imagining management practices

This paper suggests that there is value in a conversation between science technology studies and management philosophy. In particular, the paper illustrates how a cocktail of two powerful forces in STS, actor network theory and public understanding of science, can serve to foreground aspects of management hitherto hidden. Actor network theorists persuasively demonstrate that contemporary experience involves human and non-human agents in material and heterogeneous practices. This position leads to a claim that we must increasingly learn to live in tension, as aspects of social life present themselves as full of open ended options that are come to rest either no-where or elsewhere. This paper examines such actor net work concerns through a discussion of agency and raises questions regarding relationships between managerial agency, epistemology of management and public understanding of management. In this context, publics are considered as a legitimate and powerful location through which notions of science and management are coproduced. A case is made for the value of fiction in actor net work studies of organisational behaviour by reference to literature of public understanding of science (PUS). PUS is rendered comparatively relevant here by reference to contextual parallels between science and management such as contemporary challenges to the singular naturalistic narrative, changing social status of disciplinary knowledge and contemporary governance and responsibility debates that impact on day to day practices. In making this comparison it is suggested that whilst it is not uncommon to find a mix of character traits in representations of the contingent and vulnerable human-scientist there is little space for either the vulnerable or heroic manager in popular culture. To close this discussion and offer a point of departure for further discussion this study playfully examines a particular popular fiction Eric (Faust) [Terry Pratchett 1990]. Using material from this fiction, management is reframed in terms of resonance, public understanding of business management and coproduction processes. Finally, this study stops and turns to its readers to continue imaging management and its public

PRESUPPOSITION ANALYSIS OF THE QUESTION IN MATA NAJWA “POLITIK SELEBRITI” EPISODE

Television program has been the media not only for giving new information but also molding up the society’s perception. Moreover in the talk show program, the sharing information is not only done among the conversant but also the audience or the society who watch it. In communication, every stakeholder, whether they are the interviewer, interviewee or the hearer, takes some facts for granted for the efficiency of the communication. This is what is known as the presupposed information. This paper aims to figure out the presuppositions raised in the question in Mata Najwa “Politik Selebriti” episode and see how the responses of the hearer by understanding the presupposition in the given question. I downloaded the source of the data through www.youtube.com and scripted the conversation into the text. The result shows that there are three kinds of presupposition in the question given; existential, structural and factive. It also shows that the hearers understand the presupposition indicated by their responses toward the question. The hearers’ responses are not merely giving the answer of the explicit question but also recognizing the implicit question

WOMEN, LANGUAGE AND CULTURAL CHANGE

The paper attempts to make a critical analysis on the language used by women. Many sociolinguists who observe the language of men and women found that there are the differences of the way men and women using language. Gender seems to affect the variation of lexical choices, the syntactic preferences, the way women and men perceive conversation, and the way women and men behave in conversation. A lot of studies have categorized the characteristics of women, such as: using polite language, indirect speech, personal pronoun, and hedging. Those characteristics pertain to women may give some negative image on women. The usage of hedging and indirect speech may be considered as incompetency by men, especially for women who become a leader in an organization. However, assertive women may also be seen as negative. Although nowadays women have a lot of opportunity to get a higher education and work in public sphere, the stereotype of women’s characteristic in using language has changed yet. I undertake the research based on two goals. First, it examines the social construction that affects women using language. Second, it tries to analyze the shift of the way of women use language in contemporary era. The changes make an incongruent situation between the persisted cultural values on women and the new value gained by women. The data will be taken from novels to describe clearly the situation of Indonesian women in facing their problems