Facial expressions and personality: A kinematical investigation during an emotion induction experiment

Background/Aims: In order to elucidate the relationship between personality traits and expression of positive emotions in healthy volunteers, standardized personality inventories and kinematical analysis of facial expressions can be helpful and were applied in the present study. Methods: Markers fixed at distinct points of the face emitting ultrasonic signals at high frequency gave a direct measure of facial movements with high spatial-temporal resolution. Forty-six healthy participants (mean age: 40.7 years; 20 males, 26 females) watching a witty movie ('Mr. Bean') were investigated. Results: Speed of `laughing' was associated with higher scores on Zuckerman's Sensation Seeking Scale and NEO-FFI (Openness to Experience). Conclusion: Kinematical analysis of facial expressions seems to reflect sensation seeking and related personality styles. Higher speed of facial movements in sensation seekers suggests lowered serotonergic function. Copyright (c) 2006 S. Karger AG, Basel

Employees, workers and the ‘sharing economy’ Changing practices and changing concepts in The United Kingdom

Recent years have seen a radical shift in the practice and profile of the labour economy in the United Kingdom consisting in the considerable growth of the so-called ‘Sharing Economy’ or ‘Gig Economy’, better identified as the ‘On-demand Economy’. From that starting point, it is argued that a corresponding change seems to have occurred in the set of concepts which the labour/ employment law of the United Kingdom uses to analyse and to characterize the work relations and work contracts which are created, made, and operated within this rapidly growing sector of the labour market. Two recent high-profile Employment Tribunal decisions in the Uber and Citysprint cases, and a decision of the Court of Appeal in this same area in the Pimlico Plumbers case have served to confirm the legislative creation of a third intermediate category of ‘workers’ who benefit from a set of employment rights which is more limited than that enjoyed by employees but which is nevertheless very important. This crystallization of labour law’s newly tripartite taxonomy of work relations has occurred very largely in the context of the on-demand economy, and is beneficial to those located in that sector. This is, however, a rather fragile conceptual structure

Uber, TaskRabbit and Co: platforms as employers? rethinking the legal analysis of crowdwork

One of the key assumptions underpinning the rise of ‘crowdsourced work’ – from transport apps including Uber to online platforms such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk – is the assertion put forward by most platforms that crowdworkers are self-employed, independent contractors. As a result, individuals might find themselves without recourse to worker-protective norms, from minimum wage and working time law to health and safety regulations and unfair dismissal protection. But is this account accurate? In this paper, we hope to challenge prevailing assumptions, arguing that in certain scenarios crowdworkers can, and should, be classified as workers within the scope of domestic employment law. The approach proposed, however, is an initially counterintuitive one: we advocate the adoption of a functional concept of the employer as a regulatory solution to crowdwork employment, with platforms, crowdworkers, and service users each shouldering their appropriate share of employer responsibilitie

Entscheidungsprozesse beim Übersetzen: Routine und Reflexion bei Novizen und Berufsübersetzern

This article focuses on the decision-making processes involved in research and knowledge integration in translation processes. First, the relevance of decision taking intranslation is discussed. Second, the psychology of decision making as seen by Jungermann et al. (2005) is introduced, who propose a categorization of decision-making processes intofour types: “routinized”, “stereotype”, “reflected” and “constructed”. This classification is then applied to the translations by five professional translators and five novices of five segments occurring in a popular-science text. The analysis reveals that the decision-making types are distributed differently among students and professional translators, which also has to be seen against the background of whether the decisions made were successful or not. The preliminary results of this study show that students resort to reflected decisions in most cases, but with a low success rate. Professionals achieve a higher success rate when making reflected decisions. As expected, they also make more routinized decisions than students. The professionals’ success rates improve with increasing cognitive involvement, while their failure rates are relatively high when making routinized decisions, an aspect worthwhile considering in translation didactics

Birth timing and spacing: implications for parental leave dynamics and child penalties

We use rich population-level administrative data from Denmark to develop new facts about the relationship between the timing and spacing of births and labor market outcomes. We show that there is substantial heterogeneity in the age at first birth across maternal skill levels. The spacing of pregnancies is also tighter on average for highly skilled mothers, resulting in them experiencing higher levels of fertility and time on parental leave in the years immediately after first birth. We estimate event studies by skill level and find that much of the child penalties in earnings and participation in the 5 years following first birth can be explained by incapacitation effects from parental leave around subsequent births, especially for the highly educated

The dynamics of abusive relationships

Domestic abuse encompasses a range of damaging behaviours beyond physical violence, including economic and emotional abuse. This paper provides the first evidence of the impact of cohabiting with an abusive partner on victims’ economic outcomes. In so doing, we highlight the systematic role played by economic suppression in such relationships. Using administrative data and a matched control event study design, along with a within-individual comparison of outcomes across relationships, we document three new facts. First, women who begin relationships with (eventually) physically abusive men suffer large and significant earnings and employment falls immediately upon cohabiting with the abusive partner. Second, abusive men impose economic costs on all their female partners, even those who do not report physical violence. Third, this decline in economic outcomes is non-monotonic in women’s pre-cohabitation outside options. To rationalize these findings, we develop a new dynamic model of abusive relationships where women do not perfectly observe their partner’s type, and abusive men have an incentive to use economic suppression to sabotage women’s outside options and their ability to later exit the relationship. We show that this model is consistent with all three empirical facts. We harness the model’s predictions to revisit some classic results on domestic violence and show that the relationship between domestic violence and women’s outside options is crucially linked to breakup dynamics