Integrating the voices of ordinary peopel in the understanding of well-being

The aim of this communication in the II Scientific Meeting in Psychology is to present some of the research, that is being done at the University of Évora, around the construct of Well-being, and to discuss the importance of integrating the voices of ordinary people in the understanding of Well-being. We will invite and argue for qualitative research that includes and facilitates our research participants’ thoughtful contributions about Well-being, in a rigorous and system- atic way. We will also briefly discuss some findings of a previous study, about former psychotherapy patients perspectives about Well-being, to empirically illustrate our thoughts.FC

Effects of clown doctors on child and caregiver anxiety at the entrance to the surgery care unit and separation from caregivers

This study investigated the effects of hospital Clown Doctors intervention on child and caregiver preoperative anxiety at the entrance to the surgery care unit and separation from caregivers. A total of 88 children (aged 4-12 years) were assigned to one of the following two groups: Clown Doctors intervention or control group (standard care). Independent observational records using the modified Yale Preoperative Anxiety Scale instrument assessed children’s anxiety, while the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory measured caregiver’s state anxiety. In addition, caregivers assessed the children’s functional health problems by completing the Functional Status Questionnaire. Although no effects of Clown Doctors were found on children’s anxiety, results showed that both low functional health problems and Clown Doctors intervention were significant predictors of lower caregiver anxiety. Caregivers also reported being very satisfied with their intervention. Overall, this study demonstrated the positive role of Clown Doctors for caregivers at a specific pediatric hospital setting.peer-reviewe

Finding Academic Experts on a MultiSensor Approach using Shannon's Entropy

Expert finding is an information retrieval task concerned with the search for the most knowledgeable people, in some topic, with basis on documents describing peoples activities. The task involves taking a user query as input and returning a list of people sorted by their level of expertise regarding the user query. This paper introduces a novel approach for combining multiple estimators of expertise based on a multisensor data fusion framework together with the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence and Shannon's entropy. More specifically, we defined three sensors which detect heterogeneous information derived from the textual contents, from the graph structure of the citation patterns for the community of experts, and from profile information about the academic experts. Given the evidences collected, each sensor may define different candidates as experts and consequently do not agree in a final ranking decision. To deal with these conflicts, we applied the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence combined with Shannon's Entropy formula to fuse this information and come up with a more accurate and reliable final ranking list. Experiments made over two datasets of academic publications from the Computer Science domain attest for the adequacy of the proposed approach over the traditional state of the art approaches. We also made experiments against representative supervised state of the art algorithms. Results revealed that the proposed method achieved a similar performance when compared to these supervised techniques, confirming the capabilities of the proposed framework

Applying a Life-Cycle Costs Approach to Water

This working paper presents findings and recommendations from the application of a life-cycle costs approach (LCCA) to water supply services in rural communities and small towns1 in four countries -- Andhra Pradesh (India), Burkina Faso, Ghana and Mozambique