Preschool children\u27s information processing and emotional behavior in social conflict situations

This study investigated various aspects of the Social Information Processing Model, in particular, young children’s emotional behavior regulation and negative emotionality, in Hong Kong. The sample was N=628 from 12 schools. Using Rasch measurement, linear unidimensional scales were constructed for Emotion and Behaviour Regulation (10 items) and for Negative Emotionality (10 items). The well-known Short Temperament Scale was Rasch analyzed too, but a linear scale could not be created – it had initially been designed under the True Score Test theory paradigm. The children were divided into Type A (high on negative emotionality and low on emotion and behavior regulation, N=27 and Type B (low on negative emotionality and high on emotion and behavior regulation, N=31). The children’s teachers were given conflict situations and asked to state what strategies the Type A and Type B children would adopt in each conflict situation. The first conflict situation was about the child who was being accidentally pushed by a peer. The second conflict situation was about the child who is being excluded from a game that has enough participants. The third conflict situation was about the child being called “a baby” because he/she was playing with baby toys. The fourth conflict situation was about a peer criticizing and putting marks on a child’s picture. The fifth situation was about a peer pushing ahead and taking a toy that a child has been waiting for a long time. The Type A and Type B children were also asked to state what strategies they would adopt in each conflict situation. When the teachers’ views were compared to the children’s views, it was clear that the teachers did not know their children’s thought processes very well. For both Type A and Type B children, Rasch analysis was used to create a calm/angry scale and a sad/happy scale. Conflict situation two (being excluded from a game) is very hard on the calm/angry scale and both Type A and Type B children need to have a very high angry measure to answer this item positively. Conflict situation two is moderately easy on the sad/happy scale and both Type A and Type B children need only a low sad measure to answer conflict situation two positively. In contrast, conflict situation three (being called a “baby”) is very hard on the sad/happy scale and both Type A and Type B children need to have a very high happy measure to answer this item positively. Conflict situation three is moderately easy on the calm/angry scale and both Type A and Type B children need only a low calm measure to answer conflict situation three positively. The present study gave strong support for the Social Information Processing Model and for the inclusion of emotion and behavior regulation and negative emotionality in the revised model. The study rejected the Short Temperament Scale as it did not produce a linear, unidimensional scale, and it showed that teachers do not know their children, in terms of strategies selection in common social conflict situations, as well as they think that they do. Children are much more conscious of the variety of strategies that can be used in common conflict situations than teachers would normally give them credit. Results indicate that levels of anger aroused in Type A children are associated with differences in the quality of strategies that they are able to generate for solving social problems. Type A and Type B children differ significantly in their choice of best strategy under different emotional conditions for the different conflict situations

Does theory of quantum correction to conductivity agree with experimental data in 2D systems?

The quantum correction to the conductivity have been studied in two types of 2D heterostructures: with doped quantum well and doped barriers. The consistent analysis shows that in the structures where electrons occupy the states in quantum well only, all the temperature and magnetic field dependencies of the components of resistivity tensor are well described by the theories of quantum corrections. The contribution of electron-electron interaction to the conductivity have been determined reliably in the structures with different electron density. A possible reason of large scatter in experimental data concerning the contribution of electron-electron interaction, obtained in previous papers, and the role of the carriers, occupied the states of the doped layers, is discussed.Comment: 10 pages with 9 figure

Electron Dephasing in Mesoscopic Metal Wires

The low-temperature behavior of the electron phase coherence time, $\tau_{\phi}$, in mesoscopic metal wires has been a subject of controversy recently. Whereas theory predicts that $\tau_{\phi}(T)$ in narrow wires should increase as $T^{-2/3}$ as the temperature $T$ is lowered, many samples exhibit a saturation of $\tau_{\phi}$ below about 1 K. We review here the experiments we have performed recently to address this issue. In particular we emphasize that in sufficiently pure Ag and Au samples we observe no saturation of $\tau_{\phi}$ down to our base temperature of 40 mK. In addition, the measured magnitude of $\tau_{\phi}$ is in excellent quantitative agreement with the prediction of the perturbative theory of Altshuler, Aronov and Khmelnitskii. We discuss possible explanations why saturation of $\tau_{\phi}$ is observed in many other samples measured in our laboratory and elsewhere, and answer the criticisms raised recently by Mohanty and Webb regarding our work.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures; to appear in proceedings of conference "Fundamental Problems of Mesoscopic Physics", Granada, Spain, 6-11 September, 200

New Insights into Uniformly Accelerated Detector in a Quantum Field

We obtained an exact solution for a uniformly accelerated Unruh-DeWitt detector interacting with a massless scalar field in (3+1) dimensions which enables us to study the entire evolution of the total system, from the initial transient to late-time steady state. We find that the Unruh effect as derived from time-dependent perturbation theory is valid only in the transient stage and is totally invalid for cases with proper acceleration smaller than the damping constant. We also found that, unlike in (1+1)D results, the (3+1)D uniformly accelerated Unruh-DeWitt detector in a steady state does emit a positive radiated power of quantum nature at late-times, but it is not connected to the thermal radiance experienced by the detector in the Unruh effect proper.Comment: 6 pages, invited talk given by SYL at the conference of International Association for Relativistic Dynamics (IARD), June 2006, Storrs, Connecticut, US

Topological Gauge Theory Of General Weitzenbock Manifolds Of Dislocations In Crystals

General Weitzenbock material manifolds of dislocations in crystals Are proposed, the reference, idealized and deformation states of the bodies in general case are generally described by the general manifolds, the topological gauge field theory of dislocations is given in general case,true distributions and evolution of dislocations in crystals are given by the formulas describing dislocations in terms of the general manifolds,furthermore, their properties are discussed.Comment: 10pages, Revte

The generalized Robinson-Foulds metric

The Robinson-Foulds (RF) metric is arguably the most widely used measure of phylogenetic tree similarity, despite its well-known shortcomings: For example, moving a single taxon in a tree can result in a tree that has maximum distance to the original one; but the two trees are identical if we remove the single taxon. To this end, we propose a natural extension of the RF metric that does not simply count identical clades but instead, also takes similar clades into consideration. In contrast to previous approaches, our model requires the matching between clades to respect the structure of the two trees, a property that the classical RF metric exhibits, too. We show that computing this generalized RF metric is, unfortunately, NP-hard. We then present a simple Integer Linear Program for its computation, and evaluate it by an all-against-all comparison of 100 trees from a benchmark data set. We find that matchings that respect the tree structure differ significantly from those that do not, underlining the importance of this natural condition.Comment: Peer-reviewed and presented as part of the 13th Workshop on Algorithms in Bioinformatics (WABI2013