Interventions utilising contact with people with disabilities to improve children's attitudes towards disability: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

This is the author accepted manuscript.The final version is available from Elsevier via the DOI in this record.BACKGROUND: Children with disabilities are often the target of prejudice from their peers. The effects of prejudice include harmful health consequences. The Contact Hypothesis has previously shown to promote positive attitudes towards a range of social groups. OBJECTIVE: To conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis on the effectiveness of school-based interventions for improving children's attitudes towards disability through contact with people with disabilities. METHODS: A comprehensive search was conducted across multiple databases. Studies were included if it evaluated an intervention that aimed to improve children's attitudes towards disability and involved either direct (in-person) or indirect (e.g., extended) contact with people with disabilities. Data were synthesised in a meta-analysis. RESULTS: Twelve studies met the inclusion criteria. Of these, 11 found significant effects: six used direct contact, two used extended contact, two used parasocial (media-based) contact and one used guided imagined contact. One parasocial contact intervention found no significant effects. Three meta-analyses showed direct contact (d = 0.55, 95% CI 0.20 to 0.90) and extended contact (d = 0.61, 95% CI 0.15 to 1.07) improved children's attitudes; there was no evidence for parasocial contact (d = 0.20, 95% CI -0.01 to 1.40). CONCLUSIONS: Direct, extended, and guided imagined contact interventions are effective in improving children's attitudes towards disability; there was no evidence for parasocial contact.We acknowledge funding from the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care of the South West Peninsula (PenCLAHRC), and the charity Cerebra

Children’s contact with people with disabilities and their attitudes towards disability: a cross-sectional study

PublishedArticleThis is a pre-print of an article subsequently published in Disability and Rehabilitation, 2015.Purpose: To explore the association between children’s self-reported contact with people with disabilities and attitudes towards them, as well the potential mediating influence of anxiety about interacting with people with disabilities and empathy for them. Method: 1,881 children, aged 7-16 years, from 20 schools in South West England completed a survey assessing their contact with people with disabilities and their attitudes towards them. Anxiety about interacting with people with disabilities and empathy towards them were examined as potential mediators. Gender, school year, perceived similarity between people with and without disabilities, proportion of children with additional needs at the school and socioeconomic status were assessed as moderators. A random effects (‘multilevel’) regression model was used to test the contact-attitude association and moderation, and path analysis was used to test for mediation. Results: Participants with more self-reported contact reported more positive attitudes towards disability (p<0.001). Less anticipated anxiety and greater empathy together mediated around a third of this association. Only school year moderated the contact-attitude association (affective attitudes), with stronger contact-attitude associations in primary school children than secondary school children. Conclusions: Self-reported contact was observed to be associated with more positive attitudes towards disability, which was partially mediated by empathy and anxiety. Providing opportunities for contact with people with disabilities that reduces anxiety and increases empathy may improve attitudes to disability and merits evaluation in interventions.CerebraNational Institute for Health Research (NIHR)Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care of the South West Peninsula (PenCLAHRC

Probing Red Giant Atmospheres with Gravitational Microlensing

Gravitational microlensing provides a new technique for studying the surfaces of distant stars. Microlensing events are detected in real time and can be followed up with precision photometry and spectroscopy. This method is particularly adequate for studying red giants in the Galactic bulge. Recently we developed an efficient method capable of computing the lensing effect for thousands of frequencies in a high-resolution stellar spectrum. Here we demonstrate the effects of microlensing on synthesized optical spectra of red giant model atmospheres. We show that different properties of the stellar surface can be recovered from time-dependent photometry and spectroscopy of a point-mass microlensing event with a small impact parameter. In this study we concentrate on center-to-limb variation of spectral features. Measuring such variations can reveal the depth structure of the atmosphere of the source star.Comment: 23 pages with 11 Postscript figures, submitted to ApJ; Section 2 expanded, references added, text revise

Mapping our Universe in 3D with MITEoR

Mapping our universe in 3D by imaging the redshifted 21 cm line from neutral hydrogen has the potential to overtake the cosmic microwave background as our most powerful cosmological probe, because it can map a much larger volume of our Universe, shedding new light on the epoch of reionization, inflation, dark matter, dark energy, and neutrino masses. We report on MITEoR, a pathfinder low-frequency radio interferometer whose goal is to test technologies that greatly reduce the cost of such 3D mapping for a given sensitivity. MITEoR accomplishes this by using massive baseline redundancy both to enable automated precision calibration and to cut the correlator cost scaling from N^2 to NlogN, where N is the number of antennas. The success of MITEoR with its 64 dual-polarization elements bodes well for the more ambitious HERA project, which would incorporate many identical or similar technologies using an order of magnitude more antennas, each with dramatically larger collecting area.Comment: To be published in proceedings of 2013 IEEE International Symposium on Phased Array Systems & Technolog

Group interventions to improve health outcomes : a framework for their design and delivery

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Measurement of the cross-section and charge asymmetry of WW bosons produced in proton-proton collisions at s=8\sqrt{s}=8 TeV with the ATLAS detector

This paper presents measurements of the $W^+ \rightarrow \mu^+\nu$ and $W^- \rightarrow \mu^-\nu$ cross-sections and the associated charge asymmetry as a function of the absolute pseudorapidity of the decay muon. The data were collected in proton--proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV with the ATLAS experiment at the LHC and correspond to a total integrated luminosity of 20.2~\mbox{fb^{-1}}. The precision of the cross-section measurements varies between 0.8% to 1.5% as a function of the pseudorapidity, excluding the 1.9% uncertainty on the integrated luminosity. The charge asymmetry is measured with an uncertainty between 0.002 and 0.003. The results are compared with predictions based on next-to-next-to-leading-order calculations with various parton distribution functions and have the sensitivity to discriminate between them.Comment: 38 pages in total, author list starting page 22, 5 figures, 4 tables, submitted to EPJC. All figures including auxiliary figures are available at https://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/GROUPS/PHYSICS/PAPERS/STDM-2017-13

Search for chargino-neutralino production with mass splittings near the electroweak scale in three-lepton final states in √s=13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for supersymmetry through the pair production of electroweakinos with mass splittings near the electroweak scale and decaying via on-shell W and Z bosons is presented for a three-lepton final state. The analyzed proton-proton collision data taken at a center-of-mass energy of √s=13  TeV were collected between 2015 and 2018 by the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 139  fb−1. A search, emulating the recursive jigsaw reconstruction technique with easily reproducible laboratory-frame variables, is performed. The two excesses observed in the 2015–2016 data recursive jigsaw analysis in the low-mass three-lepton phase space are reproduced. Results with the full data set are in agreement with the Standard Model expectations. They are interpreted to set exclusion limits at the 95% confidence level on simplified models of chargino-neutralino pair production for masses up to 345 GeV