All carrot – no stick: an alternative award framework to enhance ‘international’ students’ sense of belonging and engagement in the extracurricular

A sense of belonging and feeling at home at their institution are key factors in student success at university. Engaging with extracurricular activities is part of this dynamic, and an area in which ‘international’ students face additional barriers. These include institutional and psychological barriers to belonging, resulting in a shortage of meaningful opportunities to belong and a lack of motivation to take part. Increased belonging uncertainty and negative stereotype threat are among the potential concerns for such students. In response, we have developed the Student Extracurricular Engagement Award for pre-sessional undergraduate students at the University of Leeds Language Centre, UK. This scheme draws on theoretical approaches related to co-construction, participation, identity, opportunity and motivation. This innovative educational intervention seeks to address the issues affecting belonging by providing encouragement and guidance in engaging with the university’s extracurricular activities. By validating activities in areas other than academic language and literacies, the award raises student awareness of the value of their successes in those areas. This more holistic and rhizomatic approach to student learning is argued to bring a greater sense of belonging to ‘international’ students

Familiarity affects social network structure and discovery of prey patch locations in foraging stickleback shoals

Numerous factors affect the fine-scale social structure of animal groups, but it is unclear how important such factors are in determining how individuals encounter resources. Familiarity affects shoal choice and structure in many social fishes. Here, we show that familiarity between shoal members of sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus) affects both fine-scale social organization and the discovery of resources. Social network analysis revealed that sticklebacks remained closer to familiar than to unfamiliar individuals within the same shoal. Network-based diffusion analysis revealed that there was a strong untransmitted social effect on patch discovery, with individuals tending to discover a task sooner if a familiar individual from their group had previously done so than if an unfamiliar fish had done so. However, in contrast to the effect of familiarity, the frequency with which individuals had previously associated with one another had no effect upon the likelihood of prey patch discovery. This may have been due to the influence of fish on one another's movements; the effect of familiarity on discovery of an empty ‘control’ patch was as strong as for discovery of an actual prey patch. Our results demonstrate that factors affecting fine-scale social interactions can also influence how individuals encounter and exploit resources.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Social traditions

Social traditions, here defined as displaying inter-group behavioural differences acquired through social learning, have been identified in a number of primate species. Here we review research methods used in the wild and in captivity to identify the presence of both primate social traditions and the necessary social learning mechanisms involved. Moving beyond evidence of the presence of primate social traditions, to their function, longevity, biased transmission, conformity and cumulative nature, allows for the exploration of convergences and divergences between primate and human traditions

Perching but not foraging networks predict the spread of novel foraging skills in starlings

The directed social learning hypothesis suggests that information does not spread evenly through animal groups, but rather individual characteristics and patterns of physical proximity guide the social transmission of information along specific pathways. Network-based diffusion analysis (NBDA) allows researchers to test whether information spreads following a social network. However, the explanatory power of different social networks has rarely been compared, and current models do not easily accommodate random effects (e.g. allowing for individuals within groups to correlate in their asocial solving rates). We tested whether the spread of two novel foraging skills through captive starling groups was affected by individual- and group-level random and fixed effects (i.e. sex, age, body condition, dominance rank and demonstrator status) and perching or foraging networks. We extended NBDA to include random effects and conducted model discrimination in a Bayesian context. We found that social learning increased the rate at which birds acquired the novel foraging task solutions by 6.67 times, and acquiring one of the two novel foraging task solutions facilitated the asocial acquisition of the other. Surprisingly, the spread of task solutions followed the perching rather than the foraging social network. Upon acquiring a task solution, foraging performance was facilitated by the presence of group mates. Our results highlight the importance of considering more than one social network when predicting the spread of information through animal groups. This article is part of a Special Issue entitled: Cognition in the wild

Effects of a physiotherapy and occupational therapy intervention on mobility and activity in care home residents: a cluster randomised controlled trial

Objective To compare the clinical effectiveness of a programme of physiotherapy and occupational therapy with standard care in care home residents who have mobility limitations and are dependent in performing activities of daily living

Indicators of implicit and explicit social anxiety influence threat-related interpretive bias as a function of working memory capacity

Interpretive biases play a crucial role in anxiety disorders. The aim of the current study was to examine factors that determine the relative strength of threat-related interpretive biases that are characteristic of individuals high in social anxiety. Different (dual process) models argue that both implicit and explicit processes determine information processing biases and behavior, and that their impact is moderated by the availability of executive resources such as working memory capacity (WMC). Based on these models, we expected indicators of implicit social anxiety to predict threat-related interpretive bias in individuals low, but not high in WMC. Indicators of explicit social anxiety should predict threat-related interpretive bias in individuals high, but not low in WMC. As expected, WMC moderated the impact of implicit social anxiety on threat-related interpretive bias, although the simple slope for individuals low in WMC was not statistically significant. The hypotheses regarding explicit social anxiety (with fear of negative evaluation used as an indicator) were fully supported. The clinical implications of these findings are discussed

The conceptual foundations of Network-Based Diffusion Analysis: choosing networks and interpreting results

Network-based diffusion analysis (NBDA) is a statistical technique for detecting the social transmission of behavioural innovations in groups of animals, including humans. The strength of social transmission is inferred from the extent to which the diffusion (spread) of the innovation follows a social network. NBDA can have two goals: a) to establish whether social transmission is occurring and how strong its effects are; and/or b) to establish the typical pathways of information transfer. The technique has been used in a range of taxa, including primates, cetaceans, birds and fish, using a range of different types of network.  Here I investigate the conceptual underpinnings of NBDA, in order to establish the meaning of results using different networks. I develop a model of the social transmission process whereby observation of performance of the behaviour offers a naïve individual the opportunity to learn that behaviour pattern for themselves. I then establish how NBDAs using different networks relate to this underlying process, and thus how we can interpret the results of each. My analysis shows that different network or networks are appropriate depending on the specific goal or goals of the study, and establishes how the parameter estimates yielded from an NBDA can be interpreted for different networks