Helping but Not Always Empathic: Helping Behavior, Dispositional Empathic Concern, and the Principle of Care

This research investigates the relative strength of dispositional empathic concern and a moral principle to care about others as correlates of helping behavior. The empathy–helping and care–helping relationships are investigated using data from the General Social Survey, a nationally representative random sample of the U.S. adult population. Thirteen helping behaviors are investigated. The results show that the care–helping relationship is stronger than the empathy–helping relationship for most helping behaviors, and that the empathy–helping relationship is mediated by the principle of care

Dust emission from high latitude cirrus clouds

In order to study dust emission from grains in the interstellar medium, the infrared properties were analyzed in a number of isolated high latitude dust clouds which contain no dominant internal heating sources. The clouds are spatially resolved, have a simple geometry, and are mapped in the IRAS bands at 12, 25, 60, and 100 microns. For a number of these clouds, extinction data (A sub B) were obtained from starcounts. A large part (30 to 50 percent) of the infrared radiation of the clouds in the IRAS wavelength range of 8 to 130 micron is emitted in the short wavelength bands at 12 and 25 micron. The 60/100 micron ratios for the integrated fluxes of the clouds have a typical value of 0.19 + or - 0.05

How do gelotophobes interpret laughter in ambiguous situations? An experimental validation of the concept

The present study was designed to examine the phenomenon of the fear of being laughed at. Three groups of adults, preselected with respect to: (1) having no fear of being laughed at, (2) being borderline with respect to the fear of being laughed at, and (3) being abnormally afraid of being laughed at (gelotophobic). All the subjects listened to tape recordings of laughter. These recordings of laughter reflected a variety of emotional qualities. The subjects rated these recordings according to several criteria and estimated the emotional-motivational state of the laughing person. The subjects were also shown 20 cartoons depicting social situations that involved laughter or the potential of someone's being laughed at and were asked to stipulate what a target person in the cartoon would think or say. It was shown that gelotophobes experienced positively motivated laughter as more unpleasant than did subjects in the non-gelotophobic groups. The gelotophobic group was also more prone to estimate that the laughing person was in a state of negative affect. Those with no fear of laughter and those on the borderline experienced an increase in mood level after the laughter perception task whereas the gelotophobes remained unaffected. Finally, in the semi-projective cartoon evaluation task, the gelotophobes gave more answers that expressed mockery and fear of being laughed at than the other subjects. The results of these experiments show that anomalies relating to individual subjects' degrees of fear of laughter (gelotophobia) exist and can be predicted by the measures describe

How productive are academic researchers in agriculture-related sciences? The Mexican case

This paper explores the effect of commercial farmers-academic researchers linkages on research productivity in fields related to agriculture. Using original data and econometric analysis, our findings show a positive and significant relationship between intensive linkages with a small number of commercial farmers and research productivity, when this is defined as publications in ISI journals. This evidence seems contrary to other contributions that argue that strong ties with the business sector reduce research productivity and distort the original purposes of university, i.e., conducting basic research and preparing highly-trained professionals. When research productivity is defined more broadly adding other types of research outputs, the relationship is also positive and significant confirming the argument that close ties between public research institutions and businesses foster the emergence of new ideas that can be translated into innovations with commercial and/or social value. Another important finding is that researchers in public institutions produce several types of research outputs; therefore, measuring research productivity only by published ISI papers misses important dimensions of research activities.agriculture sector, research productivity, university-business sector interaction, university-industry collaboration

Full-Scale Turbofan Engine Noise-Source Separation Using a Four-Signal Method

Contributions from the combustor to the overall propulsion noise of civilian transport aircraft are starting to become important due to turbofan design trends and expected advances in mitigation of other noise sources. During on-ground, static-engine acoustic tests, combustor noise is generally sub-dominant to other engine noise sources because of the absence of in-flight effects. Consequently, noise-source separation techniques are needed to extract combustor-noise information from the total noise signature in order to further progress. A novel four-signal source-separation method is applied to data from a static, full-scale engine test and compared to previous methods. The new method is, in a sense, a combination of two- and three-signal techniques and represents an attempt to alleviate some of the weaknesses of each of those approaches. This work is supported by the NASA Advanced Air Vehicles Program, Advanced Air Transport Technology Project, Aircraft Noise Reduction Subproject and the NASA Glenn Faculty Fellowship Program