411 research outputs found

    Public Sector Labour Relations in the United States: Austerity, Politics and Policy

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    Public sector unions around the world are under threat from political forces. Combined, the financial crisis and austerity measures have challenged public sector unions' legitimacy. In the U.S., the postrecession assault on public sector unions is rooted in political ideology, with not only a widening polarization along the liberal-conservative spectrum playing a key role, but cultural cognition and economic downturn, too. This research provides a comparative historical analysis of changes in public sector collective bargaining rights at state and local levels in 50 states. The article describes the variations in public sector industrial relations at the state and local levels in the short and medium term. It also proposes a theoretical model to explain similar and diverging patterns which can be observed across the states.Gewerkschaften des öffentlichen Dienstes sehen weltweit ihre Legitimation in Frage gestellt und sind bedroht durch politische Gegner, die Finanzkrise und Sparmaßnahmen. In den USA wurzelt der Angriff auf die Gewerkschaften des öffentlichen Dienstes in politischer Ideologie, insbesondere der zunehmenden Polarisierung im liberal-konservativen Spektrum, dem Feld der kulturellen Kognition und des wirtschaftlichen Abschwungs. Der Beitrag liefert eine historisch-komparative Analyse der VerĂ€nderungen Rechte des collective bargaining im öffentlichen Dienst auf staatlicher und lokaler Ebene aller 50 Staaten der USA. Dabei werden die kurz- und mittelfristigen VerĂ€nderungen der industriellen Beziehungen des öffentlichen Dienstes auf staatlicher und lokaler Ebene beschrieben und darĂŒber hinaus ein Modell zur ErklĂ€rung von Ähnlichkeiten und Abweichungen zwischen den Bundesstaaten vorgeschlagen

    Thermal Fluctuations in a Lamellar Phase of a Binary Amphiphile-Solvent Mixture: A Molecular Dynamics Study

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    We investigate thermal fluctuations in a smectic A phase of an amphiphile-solvent mixture with molecular dynamics simulations. We use an idealized model system, where solvent particles are represented by simple beads, and amphiphiles by bead-and-spring tetramers. At a solvent bead fraction of 20 % and sufficiently low temperature, the amphiphiles self-assemble into a highly oriented lamellar phase. Our study aims at comparing the structure of this phase with the predictions of the elastic theory of thermally fluctuating fluid membrane stacks [Lei et al., J. Phys. II 5, 1155 (1995)]. We suggest a method which permits to calculate the bending rigidity and compressibility modulus of the lamellar stack from the simulation data. The simulation results are in reasonable agreement with the theory

    Emotion recognition bias depends on stimulus morphing strategy

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    Emotion recognition is vital for social interactions, and atypical (or biased) emotion recognition has been linked to mental health disorders including depression and anxiety. However, biases in emotion recognition vary across studies, and it is unclear whether this reflects genuine group differences in psychological processes underlying emotion recognition or differences in methodologies. One common method to measure biases in emotion recognition involves morphing a face between two emotional expressions in different ratios and asking participants to categorise the faces as belonging to one of the two emotion categories (‘direct-morphing’ method). However, this method creates morphed faces that are not ecologically valid. Alternatively, faces may be morphed through a neutral expression (‘morphing-through-neutral’ method), which is more ecologically valid since emotional expressions usually start from a neutral face. To compare these two approaches, we measured emotion recognition biases using two morphing techniques in 136 participants who also completed measures of anxiety (GAD-7) and depression (PHQ-9). Biases obtained using the two methods differed significantly: In the direct-morphing method, participants perceived the central 50% happy/50% angry face as slightly happy, whereas in the morphing-through-neutral method the neutral face was seen as angry. There were no associations between biases and depression or anxiety scores for either morphing method. This study is the first to directly compare emotion recognition biases obtained using two different morphing methods and is a first step towards reconciling discrepancies in the literature. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.3758/s13414-022-02532-0

    Perceiving threat in others: The role of body morphology.

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    People make judgments of others based on appearance, and these inferences can affect social interactions. Although the importance of facial appearance in these judgments is well established, the impact of the body morphology remains unclear. Specifically, it is unknown whether experimentally varied body morphology has an impact on perception of threat in others. In two preregistered experiments (N = 250), participants made judgments of perceived threat of body stimuli of varying morphology, both in the absence (Experiment 1) and presence (Experiment 2) of facial information. Bodies were perceived as more threatening as they increased in mass with added musculature and portliness, and less threatening as they increased in emaciation. The impact of musculature endured even in the presence of faces, although faces contributed more to the overall threat judgment. The relative contributions of the faces and bodies seemed to be driven by discordance, such that threatening faces exerted the most influence when paired with non-threatening bodies, and vice versa. This suggests that the faces and bodies were not perceived as entirely independent and separate components. Overall, these findings suggest that body morphology plays an important role in perceived threat and may bias real-world judgments

    Multisensory Uncertainty Reduction for Hand Localization in Children and Adults

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    Adults can integrate multiple sensory estimates to reduce their uncertainty in perceptual and motor tasks. In recent studies, children did not show this ability until after 8 years. Here we investigated development of the ability to integrate vision with proprioception to localize the hand. We tested 109 4- to 12-year-olds and adults on a simple pointing task. Participants used an unseen hand beneath a table to point to targets presented on top of the table to vision alone, proprioception alone, or both together. Overall, 7- to 9-year-olds’ and adults’ points were significantly less variable given vision and proprioception together compared with either alone. However, this variance reduction was present at all ages in the subset of participants whose proprioceptive estimates were less than two times more variable than their visual. These results, together with analyses of cue weighting, indicate that all groups integrated vision and proprioception, but only 7- to 9-year-olds and adults consistently selected cue weights that were appropriate to their own single-cue reliabilities. Cue weights used at 4–6 and 10–12 years still allowed over half of participants at these ages to reduce their pointing variability. One explanation for poorer group-level cue weighting at 10–12 years is that this ages represents a period of relatively rapid physical growth. An existing Bayesian model of hand localization did not describe either adults’ or children’s data well, but the results suggest future improvements to the model
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