Combating Stress with Yoga: A Theoretical Model of Self-Regulation

Exposure to environmental stressors may challenge children’s developing self-regulatory abilities and increase their risk of developing emotional and behavior problems. Interventions aimed at improving children’s self-regulatory skills, specifically emotion regulation and attentional control, may reduce children’s risk for adjustment problems. The present study proposed a novel theoretical model which describes how participation in yoga may increase children’s self-regulatory skills and increase children’s mindfulness, or the ability to focus attention on the present moment. Both self-regulation and mindfulness were expected to be associated with fewer anxiety problems. Components of the theoretical model were evaluated using a very small sample of at-risk, elementary-aged children who participated in a school-based yoga program. Consistent with expectations, emotion regulation was statistically and significantly associated with better mindfulness and less anxiety; attentional control was associated with fewer anxiety problems. Contrary to expectations, attentional control was unrelated to mindfulness. Moreover, mindfulness did not interact with either attentional control or emotion regulation to predict anxiety. Results are discussed in terms of theoretical implications and critical next steps needed to evaluate yoga as a potential tool for reducing children’s risk for problem behavior by way of strengthening self-regulatory mechanisms

I See Their Purpose : Looking at the Role of Family Advocates in Partnering with Families and Advocating for Children in Guatemala City

The purpose of this study was to get an in-depth, complete picture of a social worker and child/family advocate in Guatemala City, Guatemala. The intent was to study the participant’s work and responsibilities in order to examine how she processed and completed her dual role as social worker/advocate and mother to a group of children in a children’s home. A focus on responsibility, the effect of her dual role, and the influence of her personal and religious convictions emerged throughout the study. The participant’s unique position in a dual role offered insight into the various aspects of advocacy and intervention in the developing county of Guatemala

The Potential Electoral Influence of Internet Memes

The rising popularity of social media has affected the communication methods of political candidates within the United States. Given the online presence of candidates in recent years, this paper argues that it’s time to consider internet memes – one of the many facets most commonly found on social media – as political rhetoric. This paper seeks to discern which components of an internet meme are most effective in persuading a young voter, using a visually rhetorical approach to understand which characteristics make it most effective. The study also seeks to find which demographics are most likely to be influenced, using Cambridge Analytica’s belief that voter personalities matter. Using Limor Shifman’s three memetic dimensions – content, form, and stance – the author created three pairs of memes about a fictional political candidate, Jonathan Bell, and then distributed the memes as a Canvas survey for 159 college students. The effectiveness of the meme was measured by its ability to influence a young voter to share it, like the candidate it references, and evaluate their knowledge of the candidate referenced as reliable. Using STATA contingency tables and ordered probit analyses, all four of the significant findings of the study were determined as not influenced by the characteristics of the memes, but rather the characteristics of their recipients. Prior exposure and interaction with internet memes, gender, race, and grade point average were the determining factors for a young voter’s susceptibility to the rhetoric contained within the memes in the survey. This paper offers empirical results to anyone with an interest in memetics, the young electorate, or political communication. It suggests that if internet memes want to be treated as a form of communicative media, scholars first need to understand to whom memes communicate and why

Dualities in Spin Ladders

We introduce a set of discrete modular transformations $T_\ell,U_\ell$ and $S_\ell$ in order to study the relationships between the different phases of the Heisenberg ladders obtained with all possible exchange coupling constants. For the 2 legged ladder we show that the $RVB$ phase is invariant under the $S_\ell$ transformation, while the Haldane phase is invariant under $U_\ell$. These two phases are related by $T_\ell$. Moreover there is a "mixed" phase, that is invariant under $T_\ell$, and which under $U_\ell$ becomes the RVB phase, while under $S_\ell$ becomes the Haldane phase. For odd ladders there exists only the $T_\ell$ transformation which, for strong coupling, maps the effective antiferromagnetic spin 1/2 chain into the spin 3/2 chain.Comment: REVTEX file, 5 pages, 2 EPS figure

Experimental tests for the Babu-Zee two-loop model of Majorana neutrino masses

The smallness of the observed neutrino masses might have a radiative origin. Here we revisit a specific two-loop model of neutrino mass, independently proposed by Babu and Zee. We point out that current constraints from neutrino data can be used to derive strict lower limits on the branching ratio of flavour changing charged lepton decays, such as $\mu \to e \gamma$. Non-observation of Br($\mu \to e \gamma$) at the level of $10^{-13}$ would rule out singly charged scalar masses smaller than 590 GeV (5.04 TeV) in case of normal (inverse) neutrino mass hierarchy. Conversely, decay branching ratios of the non-standard scalars of the model can be fixed by the measured neutrino angles (and mass scale). Thus, if the scalars of the model are light enough to be produced at the LHC or ILC, measuring their decay properties would serve as a direct test of the model as the origin of neutrino masses.Comment: 14 pages, 16 figure

Decaying neutralino dark matter in anomalous U(1)HU(1)_H models

In supersymmetric models extended with an anomalous $U(1)_H$ different R-parity violating couplings can yield an unstable neutralino. We show that in this context astrophysical and cosmological constraints on neutralino decaying dark matter forbid bilinear R-parity breaking neutralino decays and lead to a class of purely trilinear R-parity violating scenarios in which the neutralino is stable on cosmological scales. We have found that among the resulting models some of them become suitable to explain the observed anomalies in cosmic-ray electron/positron fluxes.Comment: 19 pages, 3 figures. References added, typos corrected, accepted version in Phys Rev

The elementary excitations of the exactly solvable Russian doll BCS model of superconductivity

The recently proposed Russian doll BCS model provides a simple example of a many body system whose renormalization group analysis reveals the existence of limit cycles in the running coupling constants of the model. The model was first studied using RG, mean field and numerical methods showing the Russian doll scaling of the spectrum, E(n) ~ E0 exp(-l n}, where l is the RG period. In this paper we use the recently discovered exact solution of this model to study the low energy spectrum. We find that, in addition to the standard quasiparticles, the electrons can bind into Cooper pairs that are different from those forming the condensate and with higher energy. These excited Cooper pairs can be described by a quantum number Q which appears in the Bethe ansatz equation and has a RG interpretation.Comment: 36 pages, 12 figure

Nonlinear sigma model study of a frustrated spin ladder

A model of two-leg spin-S ladder with two additional frustrating diagonal exchange couplings J_{D}, J_{D}' is studied within the framework of the nonlinear sigma model approach. The phase diagram has a rich structure and contains 2S gapless phase boundaries which split off the boundary to the fully saturated ferromagnetic phase when J_{D} and J_{D}' become different. For the S=1/2 case, the phase boundaries are identified as separating two topologically distinct Haldane-type phases discussed recently by Kim et al. (cond-mat/9910023).Comment: revtex 4 pages, figures embedded (psfig

Maternal Digital Media Use during Infant Feeding and the Quality of Feeding Interactions

Experimental research with parents of older children suggests parents’ engagement with technological devices (e.g., television, mobile devices) in the presence of their children decreases the quality of parent-child interactions. Many mothers report frequent use of technological devices during infant feeding but, to date, few studies have explored the potential association between maternal technological device use during feeding and the quality of infant feeding interactions. To this end, mothers (n = 25) and their infants (mean age = 19.3 ± 6.4 weeks) participated in a within-subject, experimental study to explore associations between maternal digital media use and feeding interaction quality within a laboratory setting. Dyads were video-recorded while breastfeeding under two counterbalanced conditions: Digital Media Use versus Control. Mothers engaged their infants in significantly less cognitive growth fostering during the Digital Media Use compared to Control condition. Infants of mothers with typically low levels of technology use during feeding showed a significant decrease in their responsiveness to their mother during the Digital Media Use compared to Control condition. These results illustrate maternal digital media use was associated with decreases in some, but not all, aspects of the quality of the feeding interaction, meriting further investigation with larger, more diverse samples