Canadian Arctic sea ice reconstructed from bromine in the Greenland NEEM ice core

Reconstructing the past variability of Arctic sea ice provides an essential context for recent multi-year sea ice decline, although few quantitative reconstructions cover the Holocene period prior to the earliest historical records 1,200 years ago. Photochemical recycling of bromine is observed over first-year, or seasonal, sea ice in so-called "bromine explosions" and we employ a 1-D chemistry transport model to quantify processes of bromine enrichment over first-year sea ice and depositional transport over multi-year sea ice and land ice. We report bromine enrichment in the Northwest Greenland Eemian NEEM ice core since the end of the Eemian interglacial 120,000 years ago, finding the maximum extension of first-year sea ice occurred approximately 9,000 years ago during the Holocene climate optimum, when Greenland temperatures were 2 to 3 degrees C above present values. First-year sea ice extent was lowest during the glacial stadials suggesting complete coverage of the Arctic Ocean by multi-year sea ice. These findings demonstrate a clear relationship between temperature and first-year sea ice extent in the Arctic and suggest multi-year sea ice will continue to decline as polar amplification drives Arctic temperatures beyond the 2 degrees C global average warming target of the recent COP21 Paris climate agreement

Personality psychology: Lexical approaches, assessment methods, and trait concepts reveal only half of the story—Why it is time for a paradigm shift

This article develops a comprehensive philosophy-of-science for personality psychology that goes far beyond the scope of the lexical approaches, assessment methods, and trait concepts that currently prevail. One of the field’s most important guiding scientific assumptions, the lexical hypothesis, is analysed from meta-theoretical viewpoints to reveal that it explicitly describes two sets of phenomena that must be clearly differentiated: 1) lexical repertoires and the representations that they encode and 2) the kinds of phenomena that are represented. Thus far, personality psychologists largely explored only the former, but have seriously neglected studying the latter. Meta-theoretical analyses of these different kinds of phenomena and their distinct natures, commonalities, differences, and interrelations reveal that personality psychology’s focus on lexical approaches, assessment methods, and trait concepts entails a) erroneous meta-theoretical assumptions about what the phenomena being studied actually are, and thus how they can be analysed and interpreted, b) that contemporary personality psychology is largely based on everyday psychological knowledge, and c) a fundamental circularity in the scientific explanations used in trait psychology. These findings seriously challenge the widespread assumptions about the causal and universal status of the phenomena described by prominent personality models. The current state of knowledge about the lexical hypothesis is reviewed, and implications for personality psychology are discussed. Ten desiderata for future research are outlined to overcome the current paradigmatic fixations that are substantially hampering intellectual innovation and progress in the field

Principles of Situation Research: Towards a Better Understanding of Psychological Situations

There is currently no consensus on how to study psychological situations, and situation research is still riddled with problems of conceptualization (what is a situation and what is it not?) and measurement (how can situational information be assessed?). This target article formulates three core principles (with corollaries) to provide a foundation for psychological situation research: the Processing, Reality and Circularity Principles. These principles build upon each other, ranging from basic to more complex issues (e.g. how to study situations in both objective and subjective terms). They are intended to guide and spur more coherent research programs that produce cumulative knowledge on psychological situations. We conclude with a plea for real-life, multi-method, multi-situation, multi-time, multi-group designs that can illuminate the interwoven dynamics between persons (with their personalities and behaviour) and situations

Developing a smart environment for crisis management training

Despite the growth of advanced communication technologies, smart devices etc. the main approach to training strategic planners for crisis management (Gold Commanders)continues to be a paper-based, collective group dynamic exercise. The Pandora project has developed an advanced smart environment for the training of Gold Commanders which uses AI planning techniques to provide a crisis scenario modelled as an event network. This includes points of decision for trainees managed by automated rules from a knowledge base, behavioural modelling of the trainees,and ambient management of the environment to provide affective inputs to control and manage trainee stress. In this context, the system controls and reacts to trainee performance in relation to the events and decision points and can dynamically remodel and reconfigure the event network to respond appropriately to trainee decisions. Trainees can also be pressurised through compression of the timelines or ambient management of the multimedia information presented within the environment, causing them to make decisions under stress or with inadequate information. The environment can also represent any missing trainees within the scenario, which provides the potential to offer a completely autonomous facility for scenario design and test, and potentially a decision support facility, based on a build-up of empirical evidence from real world and training situations. In summary, the Pandora system integrates its computational intelligence, with the intelligence of the trainer and the trainees, to provide an emotionally engaging, augmented reality/virtual reality training environment for crisis managers

Skill in social situations: The essence of savoir-faire

This chapter introduces a measure of savoir-faire that represents the abilities required to engage others in interaction and to behave tactfully and successfully in social situations. Drawing on research in nonverbal and social skills, savoir-faire (which translates as “to know (what) to do”) is a combination of abilities in expressing oneself verbally, engaging others in interactions, and sophisticated social role-playing. We assert that savoir-faire represents a core element of social intelligence and that it is associated with social effectiveness, broadly defined. Using data from a self-report measure of social skills, we extracted the measure of savoir-faire. We demonstrate how savoir-faire, so measured, predicts interpersonal behavior in laboratory-based social situations as well as important social outcomes (e.g., likability, breadth of social networks, attainment of leadership positions)