Changing hearts and minds: theorizing how, when, and under what conditions three social influence implementation strategies work

Background: Opinion leadership, educational outreach visiting, and innovation championing are commonly used strategies to address barriers to implementing innovations and evidence-based practices in healthcare settings. Despite voluminous research, ambiguities persist in how these strategies work and under what conditions they work well, work poorly, or work at all. The current paper develops middle-range theories to address this gap. Methods: Conceptual articles, systematic reviews, and empirical studies informed the development of causal pathway diagrams (CPDs). CPDs are visualization tools for depicting and theorizing about the causal process through which strategies operate, including the mechanisms they activate, the barriers they address, and the proximal and distal outcomes they produce. CPDs also clarify the contextual conditions (i.e., preconditions and moderators) that influence whether, and to what extent, the strategy's causal process unfolds successfully. Expert panels of implementation scientists and health professionals rated the plausibility of these preliminary CPDs and offered comments and suggestions on them. Findings: Theoretically, opinion leadership addresses potential adopters' uncertainty about likely consequences of innovation use (determinant) by promoting positive attitude formation about the innovation (mechanism), which results in an adoption decision (proximal outcome), which leads to innovation use (intermediate outcome). As this causal process repeats, penetration, or spread of innovation use, occurs (distal outcome). Educational outreach visiting addresses knowledge barriers, attitudinal barriers, and behavioral barriers (determinants) by promoting critical thinking and reflection about evidence and practice (mechanism), which results in behavioral intention (proximal outcome), behavior change (intermediate outcome), and fidelity, or guideline adherence (distal outcome). Innovation championing addresses organizational inertia, indifference, and resistance (determinants) by promoting buy-in to the vision, fostering a positive implementation climate, and increasing collective efficacy (mechanisms), which leads to participation in implementation activities (proximal outcome), initial use of the innovation with increasing skill (intermediate outcome) and, ultimately, greater penetration and fidelity (distal outcomes). Experts found the preliminary CPDs plausible or highly plausible and suggested additional mechanisms, moderators, and preconditions, which were used to amend the initial CPD. Discussion: The middle-range theories depicted in the CPDs furnish testable propositions for implementation research and offer guidance for selecting, designing, and evaluating these social influence implementation strategies in both research studies and practice settings

Dark Energy and Neutrino CPT Violation

In this paper we study the dynamical CPT violation in the neutrino sector induced by the dark energy of the Universe. Specifically we consider a dark energy model where the dark energy scalar derivatively interacts with the right-handed neutrinos. This type of derivative coupling leads to a cosmological CPT violation during the evolution of the background field of the dark energy. We calculate the induced CPT violation of left-handed neutrinos and find the CPT violation produced in this way is consistent with the present experimental limit and sensitive to the future neutrino oscillation experiments, such as the neutrino factory.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures. Typos corrected and references added. To be published in EPJ

Space-time evolution and HBT analysis of relativistic heavy ion collisions in a chiral SU(3) x SU(3) model

The space-time dynamics and pion-HBT radii in central heavy ion-collisions at CERN-SPS and BNL-RHIC are investigated within a hydrodynamic simulation. The dependence of the dynamics and the HBT-parameters on the EoS is studied with different parametrisations of a chiral SU(3) sigma-omega model. The selfconsistent collective expansion includes the effects of effective hadron masses, generated by the nonstrange and strange scalar condensates. Different chiral EoS show different types of phase transitions and even a crossover. The influence of the order of the phase transition and of the difference in the latent heat on the space-time dynamics and pion-HBT radii is studied. A small latent heat, i.e. a weak first-order chiral phase transition, or even a smooth crossover leads to distinctly different HBT predictions than a strong first order phase transition. A quantitative description of the data, both at SPS energies as well as at RHIC energies, appears difficult to achieve within the ideal hydrodynamical approach using the SU(3) chiral EoS. A strong first-order quasi-adiabatic chiral phase transition seems to be disfavored by the pion-HBT data from CERN-SPS and BNL-RHIC

The Labour of Love: Seasonal Migration from Jharkhand to the Brick Kilns of Other States in India

Seasonal casual labour migration in India has conventionally been understood as the result of extreme poverty whereby villagers are forced to become migrants for the dry six months to subsist or merely survive. This article draws on fieldwork in a village in Jharkhand and a brick kiln in West Bengal to argue that migrants do not understand their movement in economic terms alone. Many see the brick kilns as a temporary space of freedom to escape problems back home, explore a new country, gain independence from parents or live out prohibited amorous relationships. It is suggested that Jharkhandi activists and policy-makers’ construction of such migration as a ‘problem’ is as much about their vision of how the new tribal state ought to be as about exploitation. Migration to the kilns is seen by them as a threat to the purity and regulation of the social and sexual tribal citizen. This moralising perspective creates a climate that paradoxically encourages many young people to flee to the brick kilns where they can live ‘freely’. In this way, the new puritanism at home helps to reproduce the conditions for capitalist exploitation and the extraction of surplus value

Genuine Correlations of Like-Sign Particles in Hadronic Z0 Decays

Correlations among hadrons with the same electric charge produced in Z0 decays are studied using the high statistics data collected from 1991 through 1995 with the OPAL detector at LEP. Normalized factorial cumulants up to fourth order are used to measure genuine particle correlations as a function of the size of phase space domains in rapidity, azimuthal angle and transverse momentum. Both all-charge and like-sign particle combinations show strong positive genuine correlations. One-dimensional cumulants initially increase rapidly with decreasing size of the phase space cells but saturate quickly. In contrast, cumulants in two- and three-dimensional domains continue to increase. The strong rise of the cumulants for all-charge multiplets is increasingly driven by that of like-sign multiplets. This points to the likely influence of Bose-Einstein correlations. Some of the recently proposed algorithms to simulate Bose-Einstein effects, implemented in the Monte Carlo model PYTHIA, are found to reproduce reasonably well the measured second- and higher-order correlations between particles with the same charge as well as those in all-charge particle multiplets.Comment: 26 pages, 6 figures, Submitted to Phys. Lett.

Customer emotions in service failure and recovery encounters

Emotions play a significant role in the workplace, and considerable attention has been given to the study of employee emotions. Customers also play a central function in organizations, but much less is known about customer emotions. This chapter reviews the growing literature on customer emotions in employee–customer interfaces with a focus on service failure and recovery encounters, where emotions are heightened. It highlights emerging themes and key findings, addresses the measurement, modeling, and management of customer emotions, and identifies future research streams. Attention is given to emotional contagion, relationships between affective and cognitive processes, customer anger, customer rage, and individual differences

Nucleosomes in gene regulation: theoretical approaches

This work reviews current theoretical approaches of biophysics and bioinformatics for the description of nucleosome arrangements in chromatin and transcription factor binding to nucleosomal organized DNA. The role of nucleosomes in gene regulation is discussed from molecular-mechanistic and biological point of view. In addition to classical problems of this field, actual questions of epigenetic regulation are discussed. The authors selected for discussion what seem to be the most interesting concepts and hypotheses. Mathematical approaches are described in a simplified language to attract attention to the most important directions of this field

Comprehensive analysis of epigenetic clocks reveals associations between disproportionate biological ageing and hippocampal volume

The concept of age acceleration, the difference between biological age and chronological age, is of growing interest, particularly with respect to age-related disorders, such as Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). Whilst studies have reported associations with AD risk and related phenotypes, there remains a lack of consensus on these associations. Here we aimed to comprehensively investigate the relationship between five recognised measures of age acceleration, based on DNA methylation patterns (DNAm age), and cross-sectional and longitudinal cognition and AD-related neuroimaging phenotypes (volumetric MRI and Amyloid-β PET) in the Australian Imaging, Biomarkers and Lifestyle (AIBL) and the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI). Significant associations were observed between age acceleration using the Hannum epigenetic clock and cross-sectional hippocampal volume in AIBL and replicated in ADNI. In AIBL, several other findings were observed cross-sectionally, including a significant association between hippocampal volume and the Hannum and Phenoage epigenetic clocks. Further, significant associations were also observed between hippocampal volume and the Zhang and Phenoage epigenetic clocks within Amyloid-β positive individuals. However, these were not validated within the ADNI cohort. No associations between age acceleration and other Alzheimer’s disease-related phenotypes, including measures of cognition or brain Amyloid-β burden, were observed, and there was no association with longitudinal change in any phenotype. This study presents a link between age acceleration, as determined using DNA methylation, and hippocampal volume that was statistically significant across two highly characterised cohorts. The results presented in this study contribute to a growing literature that supports the role of epigenetic modifications in ageing and AD-related phenotypes