Building Successful Collaborations: A Guide to a Collaboration Among Non-profit Agencies and Between Non-profit Agencies and Businesses

In the framework of the Millennium Scholarship, Carolyn Parkinson was hosted at the Cambridge & North Dumfries Community Foundation. This report is the result of her research in the area of collaboration among non-profit agencies and between non-profit agencies and businesses. The document includes information about partnerships and collaborations, factors determining success, conflict areas and solutions, as well as information on working with businesses along with an appendix that provides information for possible collaboration agreements

Visual perspective and the characteristics of mind wandering

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When Imagining Yourself in Pain, Visual Perspective Matters : The Neural and Behavioral Correlates of Simulated Sensory Experiences

© 2015 Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyPeer reviewedPublisher PD

Similar Neural Responses Predict Friendship

Human social networks are overwhelmingly homophilous: individuals tend to befriend others who are similar to them in terms of a range of physical attributes (e.g., age, gender). Do similarities among friends reflect deeper similarities in how we perceive, interpret, and respond to the world? To test whether friendship, and more generally, social network proximity, is associated with increased similarity of real-time mental responding, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan subjects’ brains during free viewing of naturalistic movies. Here we show evidence for neural homophily: neural responses when viewing audiovisual movies are exceptionally similar among friends, and that similarity decreases with increasing distance in a real-world social network. These results suggest that we are exceptionally similar to our friends in how we perceive and respond to the world around us, which has implications for interpersonal influence and attraction

Social Network Analysis for Social Neuroscientists

Although social neuroscience is concerned with understanding how the brain interacts with its social environment, prevailing research in the field has primarily considered the human brain in isolation, deprived of its rich social context. Emerging work in social neuroscience that leverages tools from network analysis has begun to pursue this issue, advancing knowledge of how the human brain influences and is influenced by the structures of its social environment. In this paper, we provide an overview of key theory and methods in network analysis (especially for social systems) as an introduction for social neuroscientists who are interested in relating individual cognition to the structures of an individual's social environments. We also highlight some exciting new work as examples of how to productively use these tools to investigate questions of relevance to social neuroscientists. We include tutorials to help with practical implementation of the concepts that we discuss. We conclude by highlighting a broad range of exciting research opportunities for social neuroscientists who are interested in using network analysis to study social systems.Comment: the revision includes new tables that summarize (1) key network terms and (2) limitations and challenge

From mind perception to mental connection: Synchrony as a mechanism for social understanding

Abstract Connecting deeply with another mind is as enigmatic as it is fulfilling. Why people ''click'' with some people but not others is one of the great unsolved mysteries of science. However, researchers from psychology and neuroscience are converging on a likely physiological basis for connection -neural synchrony (entrainment). Here, we review research on the necessary precursors for interpersonal synchrony: the ability to detect a mind and resonate with its outputs. Further, We describe potential mechanisms for the development of synchrony between two minds. We then consider recent neuroimaging and behavioral evidence for the adaptive benefits of synchrony, including neural efficiency and the release of a reward signal that promotes future social interaction. In nature, neural synchrony yields behavioral synchrony. Humans use behavioral synchrony to promote neural synchrony, and thus, social bonding. This reverse-engineering of social connection is an important innovation likely underlying this distinctively human capacity to create large-scale social coordination and cohesion. At different states in our lives, the signs of love may vary: dependence, attraction, contentment, worry, loyalty, grief, but at the heart, the source is always the same. Human beings have the rare capacity to connect with each other, against all odds. Michael Dorris People seek meaning in life through the company of others. Yet, as anyone who has ever felt lonely in a crowd can attest, company alone is not enough. What people really seek is connection, the pleasurable mutual engagement between oneself and another mind. However, despite its importance, the origin of mental connection is one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of science. Here we review studies from a diverse literature that, collectively, converge on an origin of mental connection. First, we review evidence that the perceptual systems in the human brain are tuned to seek other minds and predict their behavior. Second, we suggest that the ability to dynamically predict behavior affords synchrony. We highlight the importance of synchrony as an adaptive neural mechanism by which people entrain to others; an adaptation that blurs the self-other boundary and promotes social bonds through the pleasurable feeling of connection. Finally, we speculate that the human brain, in contrast to the brains of other species, is uniquely able to reverse engineer connectionby-synchrony, thereby creating mass social coordination and cohesion. How the Brain Finds a Mind As Piaget famously opined, cognitive development is about making models. As children develop, their models of the world become increasingly sophisticated via the shaping Social and Personality Psychology Compass 6/8 (2012): 589-606, 10.1111/j.1751-9004.2012 ª 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd processes of assimilation and accommodation From birth, humans are predisposed to attend to animate beings. Newborns look more at faces than any other objects The brain's Turing Tests Alan Turing, a mathematician and computer scientist, famously outlined a scenario that would define whether a computer could be said to ''think.'' In this scenario, a person asks a series of spontaneous questions, and a second person or a computer responds to these questions via text. A computer passes the ''Turing Test'' if a human judge confuses its text responses with that of a real person. Today, computer programs can pass the Turing Test, albeit briefly. Indeed, Artificial Conversational Entities, or ''chatterbots,'' initiate thousands of ''chats'' daily with unsuspecting Internet users who believe they are conversing with other human beings. By mimicking the behavioral characteristics of natural conversation, these chatterbots trigger the inference of another mind. It is one thing to fool someone into believing that computer-generated text originated from a live source. The brain, after all, did not evolve to process the veracity of text message authorship. Fooling the brain's perceptual systems is a taller order. The human brain employs several perceptual Turing Tests devoted to scrutinizing faces, movements, and voices for evidence of minds worth modeling. The facial Turing Test: it looks like it has a mind It is hard to overstate the importance of the face as a social stimulus. Faces identify people, display mental states, and are evaluated along a host of dimensions (e.g., attractiveness, maturity, trustworthiness). Faces are important for the very reason that their root word suggests: they serve as the façades of other minds. Commensurate with this importance, faces capture attention faster than other objects This ability was recently investigated by Wheatley, Weinberg, Looser, Moran, and Hajcak Participants were asked to simply split an ordered row of faces (e.g., Other researchers have investigated the characteristics of movement that evoke the perception of a mind, including ''non-Newtonian'' velocity changes The vocal Turing Test: it sounds like it has a mind The voice has been referred to as an ''auditory face Summary: mind detection Mind-imposters are easy to come by. Mannequins have faces and eyes, robots move, and automated messages speak. Yet we know that manufactured faces, mechanical motion, and programmed speech do not belong to another mind. These simple qualities are enough to catch our attention and initially fool our low-level detection processes. But the human mind has a more discerning model of what it means to have a mind, and these primitive copies are quickly discarded as non-minds. This allows us to study the clothes on a mannequin without engaging with it, to crash robotic toys together in mock-battle without remorse, and to hang up on the automated solicitor mid-sentence. Indeed, doing any of these things (conversing with a mannequin; apologizing to a toy; adhering to social niceties with a recording) would be considered aberrant behavior. The healthy human brain institutes multiple levels of perceptual scrutiny in order to discriminate true minds from mind imposters

Towards transformation: exploring the impact of culture, creativity and the arts of health and wellbeing

Background: Health providers and promoters are increasingly looking for more innovative ways to deliver quality services and reach ambitious health targets, and are exploring a diverse range of approaches that might help meet those objectives, especially with target, resistant or hard to reach groups. The arts and culture sectors are identified as potential areas of ‘innovation’ that could enhance and help deliver this health strategy and there have been numerous calls for ‘evidence’ of impact, effectiveness or of value, and clear indicators that, as a result of these activities, change is really happening. There are clearly contextual, ideological and value differences between art and health workers. There is little consensus about the best ways of collecting data, and of gathering evidence that will be both meaningful to each group and adequately represent the true value of arts and health activities. The aim at the outset of the Invest to Save: Arts in Health evaluation was to explore the value and impact of arts activities beyond artistic merit and their potential in improving public health and well being; explicitly: 1. Exploring and measuring the perceived value and impact of arts engagement 2. Exploring the concept of the ‘transformative effect’ 3. Exploring the value of participatory evaluation as a means of capacity building, development and sustainabilit

A test of the integration of the hopelessness and response styles theories of depression in middle adolescence.

The current study examined several theories of depression in a sample of middle adolescents. At Time 1, 367 ninth graders completed measures assessing depressogenic inferential styles, the tendency to ruminate in response to depressed mood, and depressive symptoms. Six weeks later, participants completed measures assessing negative events and depressive symptoms. In line with the hopelessness theory, a depressogenic weakest link interacted with negative events to predict increases in hopelessness depression symptoms but not in more general depressive symptoms. Further, providing partial support for the response styles theory, the tendency to ruminate in response to depressed mood predicted increases in hopelessness depression symptoms but not in more general depressive symptoms. Contrary to the integrative theory, the relationship between a depressogenic weakest link and increases in hopelessness depression symptoms following negative events was not moderated by a ruminative response style

Do aluminium-based phosphate binders continue to have a role in contemporary nephrology practice?

Background: Aluminium-containing phosphate binders have long been used for treatment of hyperphosphatemia in dialysis patients. Their safety became controversial in the early 1980's after reports of aluminium related neurological and bone disease began to appear. Available historical evidence however, suggests that neurological toxicity may have primarily been caused by excessive exposure to aluminium in dialysis fluid, rather than aluminium-containing oral phosphate binders. Limited evidence suggests that aluminium bone disease may also be on the decline in the era of aluminium removal from dialysis fluid, even with continued use of aluminium binders