Mitä tekniikan tutkimus voisi oppia Karl Popperin tieteenfilosofiasta?

Tekniikan tutkimus ja tuotekehitys koetaan ratkaisuksi saada Suomi nousuun ja vientikaupalle kilpailukykyä. Lähes kaikki tunnistavat myös tutkimuksen ongelmat: pyritään suuriin monikansallisiin ja -vuotisiin projekteihin, jotka ovat kankeita ja luovat tehottomuutta. Esitän tässä artikkelissa Karl Popperin tieteenfilosofian lähtökohdista ammentavan kokonaisvaltaisen lähestymistavan, jolla tekniikan tutkimukseen saadaan sellaista ketteryyttä ja määrätietoisuutta, joka mahdollistaa uusien innovaatioiden nykyistä nopeamman luomisen

“A good method of making money?” : Seasonal Wilderness Guides` wellbeing in Finnish Lapland

Tourism is growing in Finnish Lapland and a major part of tourism is strongly focused on the winter season which usually runs from November or December until the following April. The tourism field provides a lot of seasonal-based employment in wintertime and seasonal income is a big motivator for these employees. Working conditions and wellbeing of these seasonal employees are an important topic in the growing field of tourism at the moment, and we need to be made more aware of this. In Lapland there is a growing need for foreign employees, but also for qualified employees. The seasonal labor employees often go through very tough outdoor working conditions and can endure extreme arctic winter weather in Lapland. Because the tourism field in Finnish Lapland is so diverse and wide ranging, I have chosen to focus my study on foreign wintertime wilderness guides who hold the Wilderness guide degree. In this research paper, I intend to focus on the working conditions and rights of these foreign employees and to discover their wellbeing, motivation and satisfaction. I aim to find out what are the main things affecting the wilderness guides` wellbeing during the winter season and how do they maintain their wellbeing throughout the season. The Frederick Herzberg`s Two-Factor Theory of work motivation is used as the theoretical framework and completed with the emotional labor view by Arlie Russell Hochschild. Erik Allardt`s wellbeing perspective is used to have a closer look at the wellbeing. Literature consists of written documents and research that is mostly published by the University of Lapland. The primary qualitative data consists of five semi-structured interviews which were done before the winter season 2017-2018 and five thematic interviews which were done afterwards in the summer of 2018. Seven professional foreign wilderness guides were interviewed and three of them participated for both interviews. The research results show that Herzberg’s theory held true for most of these topics and work required strong motivation to do it. The seasonal work required a lot of flexibility and commitment from the wilderness guides, but they were willing to accept those norms. Motivating factors were also supporting the wilderness guides wellbeing. Some of the hygiene factors were partly missing as there was a serious deficiency in the working conditions. Most of the wilderness guides saw the seasonal job as a combination of their lifestyle and work life. This research brought new information considering the foreign wilderness guide`s state of wellbeing in Finland`s Lapland. This topic of foreign wilderness guides wellbeing still has plenty of space for further research and understanding and can work as a tool for both employees and employers who are engaged in the tourism field

Associations Between Sympathetic Nervous System Synchrony, Movement Synchrony, and Speech in Couple Therapy

Background: Research on interpersonal synchrony has mostly focused on a single modality, and hence little is known about the connections between different types of social attunement. In this study, the relationship between sympathetic nervous system synchrony, movement synchrony, and the amount of speech were studied in couple therapy. Methods: Data comprised 12 couple therapy cases (24 clients and 10 therapists working in pairs as co-therapists). Synchrony in electrodermal activity, head and body movement, and the amount of speech and simultaneous speech during the sessions were analyzed in 12 sessions at the start of couple therapy (all 72 dyads) and eight sessions at the end of therapy (48 dyads). Synchrony was calculated from cross-correlations using time lags and compared to segment-shuffled pseudo synchrony. The associations between the synchrony modalities and speech were analyzed using complex modeling (Mplus). Findings: Couple therapy participants’ synchrony mostly occurred in-phase (positive synchrony). Anti-phase (negative) synchrony was more common in movement than in sympathetic nervous system activity. Synchrony in sympathetic nervous system activity only correlated with movement synchrony between the client-therapist dyads (r = 0.66 body synchrony, r = 0.59 head synchrony). Movement synchrony and the amount of speech correlated negatively between spouses (r = −0.62 body synchrony, r = −0.47 head synchrony) and co-therapists (r = −0.39 body synchrony, r = −0.28 head synchrony), meaning that the more time the dyad members talked during the session, the less bodily synchrony they exhibited. Conclusion: The different roles and relationships in couple therapy were associated with the extent to which synchrony modalities were linked with each other. In the relationship between clients and therapists, synchrony in arousal levels and movement “walked hand in hand”, whereas in the other relationships (spouse or colleague) they were not linked. Generally, more talk time by the therapy participants was associated with anti-phase movement synchrony. If, as suggested, emotions prepare us for motor action, an important finding of this study is that sympathetic nervous system activity can also synchronize with that of others independently of motor action.publishedVersio

Challenges and added value of measuring embodied variables in psychotherapy

Research on embodied aspects of clinical encounters is growing, but discussion on the premises of including embodied variables in empirical research is scarce. Studies have repeatedly demonstrated that embodied aspects of psychotherapy interaction are vital in developing a therapeutic alliance, and these should be considered to better understand the change process in psychotherapy. However, the field is still debating which methods should be used and which features of the embodied aspects are relevant in the clinical context. The field lacks methodological consistency as well as a theoretical model. In the Relational Mind research project, we have studied the embodied aspects of interaction in the context of couple therapy for almost a decade and have gained experience with the positive and negative aspects of studying embodied variables in quantitative and qualitative studies. We have set out to develop the methodology (or procedures) for studying embodied variables in a multiperson setting, concentrating on interpersonal synchrony of sympathetic nervous system responses and movements, and we have strived to create methods for integrating information from different embodied modalities. In this narrative review, we share our experiences of the challenges and added value of studying embodied aspects in psychotherapy. The research field urgently needs an ongoing discussion of what researchers should take into consideration when studying the embodied aspects of interaction. We urge researchers to collaborate between research groups to jointly decide on the basic parameters of studies on the different embodied modalities of the research so that the individual researcher can become more aware of the impact the methodological choices have on their studies, results, and interpretations. We also see the use of embodied variables as having added value in the clinical work of psychotherapists, since it not only deepens our understanding about what is helpful in psychotherapy but will enable fine-tuning therapy processes to better suit clients who are verbally less fluent

On the Degree of Team Cooperation in CD Grammar Systems.

In this paper, we introduce a dynamical complexity measure, namely the degree of team cooperation, in the aim of investigating "how much" the components of a grammar system cooperate when forming a team in the process of generating terminal words. We present several results which strongly suggest that this measure is trivial in the sense that the degree of team cooperation of any language is bounded by a constant. Finally, we prove that the degree of team cooperation of a given cooperating/distributed grammar system cannot be algorithmically computed and discuss a decision problem

Visual processing speed is linked to functional connectivity between right frontoparietal and visual networks

Visual information processing requires an efficient visual attention system. The neural theory of visual attention (TVA) proposes that visual processing speed depends on the coordinated activity between frontoparietal and occipital brain areas. Previous research has shown that the coordinated activity between (i.e., functional connectivity and “inter-FC”) cingulo-opercular (COn) and right-frontoparietal (RFPn) networks is linked to visual processing speed. However, how inter-FC of COn and RFPn with visual networks links to visual processing speed has not been directly addressed yet. Forty-eight healthy adult participants (27 females) underwent resting-state (rs-)fMRI and performed a whole-report psychophysical task. To obtain inter-FC, we analyzed the entire frequency range available in our rs-fMRI data (i.e., 0.01–0.4 Hz) to avoid discarding neural information. Following previous approaches, we analyzed the data across frequency bins (Hz): Slow-5 (0.01–0.027), Slow-4 (0.027–0.073), Slow-3 (0.073–0.198), and Slow-2 (0.198–0.4). We used the mathematical TVA framework to estimate an individual, latent-level visual processing speed parameter. We found that visual processing speed was negatively associated with inter-FC between RFPn and visual networks in Slow-5 and Slow-2, with no corresponding significant association for inter-FC between COn and visual networks. These results provide the first empirical evidence that links inter-FC between RFPn and visual networks with the visual processing speed parameter. These findings suggest that direct connectivity between occipital and right frontoparietal, but not frontoinsular, regions support visual processing speed