Cross-cultural Differences in Children’s Conceptualizations of Happiness at School

Abstract Children’s happiness at school has been mainly investigated from a quantitative perspective, largely overlooking what children understand by happiness and whether their conceptualizations are shaped by culture. Hence, in the present study, using quantification of qualitative data, we investigated whether English (n = 421, M = 10.63 years, 223 girls) and Spanish (n = 223, M = 11.13 years, 112 girls) children reported different conceptualizations of happiness at school. Results showed that English children defined happiness at school as experiencing autonomy, non-violence, and having a positive relationship with teachers. On the other hand, Spanish children mentioned more harmony and having leisure time, as compared to English children. Finally, compared to boys, girls mentioned more in their definitions emotional support, having a positive relationship with teachers, and experiencing competence. The obtained findings are discussed in light of previous well-being literature taking into account the role of culture and the school context in both countries

Emotional Preferences and Goals and Emotion Dysregulation in Children with Asperger’s Syndrome and Typically Developing Children

Objectives: Emotion goals lie at the heart of emotion regulation, as people have to first decide what emotions they want to feel before engaging in emotion regulation. Given that children with Asperger’s Syndrome (AS) are characterized by exhibiting difficulties in emotion regulation, studying whether they display similar or different emotion goals compared to typically developing children (TD) may provide insightful information. Methods: Thirty AS and 30 TD children (10-12 years) reported about their general (i.e., how they want to feel in general) and contextualized (i.e., how they want to feel when confronting vs. collaborating with someone) emotion goals, and about their difficulties in emotion regulation through questionnaires. Results: Results showed that both groups did not differ in their general emotional goals and in their contextualized emotion goals for happiness for collaboration and anger for confrontation. AS children only differed from TD children in a higher preference for sadness for collaboration and happiness for confrontation. These emotion goals predicted their difficulties to engage in goal-directed behaviour. Conclusions: The obtained results support the need to further study emotion goals as an aspect of emotion dysregulation, namely the difficulties to engage in goal-directed behaviour when experiencing different emotions

Children’s Moral Emotion Attribution in the Happy Victimizer Task: The Role of Response Format

Previous research in the happy victimizer tradition indicated that preschool and early elementary-school children attribute positive emotions to the violator of a moral norm, whereas older children attribute negative moral emotions. Cognitive and motivational processes have been suggested as underlying this developmental shift. The current research investigated whether making the happy victimizer task less cognitively demanding, by providing children with alternative response formats, would increase children’s attribution of moral emotions and moral motivation. In Study 1, 93 4- to 7-year-old British children responded to the happy victimizer questions either in a normal condition (where they spontaneously pointed with a finger), a wait condition (where they had to wait before giving their answers), or an arrow condition (where they had to point with a paper arrow). In Study 2, 40 Spanish 4-year-old children responded in the happy victimizer task either in a normal or a wait condition. In both studies, participants’ attribution of moral emotions and moral motivation was significantly higher in the conditions with alternative response formats (wait, arrow) than in the normal condition. The role of cognitive abilities for emotion attribution in the happy victimizer task is discussed

Optimal Linear Multiparty Conditional Disclosure of Secrets Protocols

In a $k$-party CDS protocol, each party sends one message to a referee (without seeing the other messages) such that the referee will learn a secret held by the parties if and only if the inputs of the parties satisfy some condition (e.g., if the inputs are all equal). This simple primitive is used to construct attribute based encryption, symmetrically-private information retrieval, priced oblivious transfer, and secret-sharing schemes for any access structure. Motivated by these applications, CDS protocols have been recently studied in many papers. In this work, we study linear CDS protocols, where each of the messages of the parties is a linear function of the secret and random elements taken from some finite field. Linearity is an important property of CDS protocols as many applications of CDS protocols required it. Our main result is a construction of linear $k$-party CDS protocols for an arbitrary function $f:[N]^{k}\rightarrow \{0,1\}$ with messages of size $O(N^{(k-1)/2})$. By a lower bound of Beimel et al. [TCC 2017], this message size is optimal. We also consider functions with few inputs that return one, and design more efficient CDS protocols for them. CDS protocols can be used to construct secret-sharing schemes for uniform access structures, where for some $k$ all sets of size less than $k$ are unauthorized, all sets of size greater than $k$ are authorized, and each set of size $k$ can be either authorized or unauthorized. We show that our results imply that every $k$-uniform access structure with $n$ parties can be realized by a linear secret-sharing scheme with share size $\min\{ (O(n/k))^{(k-1)/2},O(n \cdot 2^{n/2})\}$. Furthermore, the linear $k$-party CDS protocol with messages of size $O(N^{(k-1)/2})$ was recently used by Liu and Vaikuntanathan [STOC 2018] to construct a linear secret-sharing scheme with share size $O(2^{0.999n})$ for any $n$-party access structure

Antimicrobial resistance among migrants in Europe: a systematic review and meta-analysis

BACKGROUND: Rates of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) are rising globally and there is concern that increased migration is contributing to the burden of antibiotic resistance in Europe. However, the effect of migration on the burden of AMR in Europe has not yet been comprehensively examined. Therefore, we did a systematic review and meta-analysis to identify and synthesise data for AMR carriage or infection in migrants to Europe to examine differences in patterns of AMR across migrant groups and in different settings. METHODS: For this systematic review and meta-analysis, we searched MEDLINE, Embase, PubMed, and Scopus with no language restrictions from Jan 1, 2000, to Jan 18, 2017, for primary data from observational studies reporting antibacterial resistance in common bacterial pathogens among migrants to 21 European Union-15 and European Economic Area countries. To be eligible for inclusion, studies had to report data on carriage or infection with laboratory-confirmed antibiotic-resistant organisms in migrant populations. We extracted data from eligible studies and assessed quality using piloted, standardised forms. We did not examine drug resistance in tuberculosis and excluded articles solely reporting on this parameter. We also excluded articles in which migrant status was determined by ethnicity, country of birth of participants' parents, or was not defined, and articles in which data were not disaggregated by migrant status. Outcomes were carriage of or infection with antibiotic-resistant organisms. We used random-effects models to calculate the pooled prevalence of each outcome. The study protocol is registered with PROSPERO, number CRD42016043681. FINDINGS: We identified 2274 articles, of which 23 observational studies reporting on antibiotic resistance in 2319 migrants were included. The pooled prevalence of any AMR carriage or AMR infection in migrants was 25·4% (95% CI 19·1-31·8; I2 =98%), including meticillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (7·8%, 4·8-10·7; I2 =92%) and antibiotic-resistant Gram-negative bacteria (27·2%, 17·6-36·8; I2 =94%). The pooled prevalence of any AMR carriage or infection was higher in refugees and asylum seekers (33·0%, 18·3-47·6; I2 =98%) than in other migrant groups (6·6%, 1·8-11·3; I2 =92%). The pooled prevalence of antibiotic-resistant organisms was slightly higher in high-migrant community settings (33·1%, 11·1-55·1; I2 =96%) than in migrants in hospitals (24·3%, 16·1-32·6; I2 =98%). We did not find evidence of high rates of transmission of AMR from migrant to host populations. INTERPRETATION: Migrants are exposed to conditions favouring the emergence of drug resistance during transit and in host countries in Europe. Increased antibiotic resistance among refugees and asylum seekers and in high-migrant community settings (such as refugee camps and detention facilities) highlights the need for improved living conditions, access to health care, and initiatives to facilitate detection of and appropriate high-quality treatment for antibiotic-resistant infections during transit and in host countries. Protocols for the prevention and control of infection and for antibiotic surveillance need to be integrated in all aspects of health care, which should be accessible for all migrant groups, and should target determinants of AMR before, during, and after migration. FUNDING: UK National Institute for Health Research Imperial Biomedical Research Centre, Imperial College Healthcare Charity, the Wellcome Trust, and UK National Institute for Health Research Health Protection Research Unit in Healthcare-associated Infections and Antimictobial Resistance at Imperial College London

Non-Zero Inner Product Encryption Schemes from Various Assumptions: LWE, DDH and DCR

In non-zero inner product encryption (NIPE) schemes, ciphertexts and secret keys are associated with vectors and decryption is possible whenever the inner product of these vectors does not equal zero. So far, much effort on constructing bilinear map-based NIPE schemes have been made and this has lead to many efficient schemes. However, the constructions of NIPE schemes without bilinear maps are much less investigated. The only known other NIPE constructions are based on lattices, however, they are all highly inefficient due to the need of converting inner product operations into circuits or branching programs. To remedy our rather poor understanding regarding NIPE schemes without bilinear maps, we provide two methods for constructing NIPE schemes: a direct construction from lattices and a generic construction from functional encryption schemes for inner products (LinFE). For our first direct construction, it highly departs from the traditional lattice-based constructions and we rely heavily on new tools concerning Gaussian measures over multi-dimensional lattices to prove security. For our second generic construction, using the recent constructions of LinFE schemes as building blocks, we obtain the first NIPE constructions based on the DDH and DCR assumptions. In particular, we obtain the first NIPE schemes without bilinear maps or lattices

The role of cognitive emotion regulation on the vicarious emotional response

Perceiving another in need may provoke two possible emotional responses: empathic concern and personal distress. This research aims to test whether different emotion regulation strategies (i.e., reappraisal and rumination) may lead to different vicarious emotional responses (i.e., empathic concern and personal distress). In this sense, we hypothesized that reappraisal may lead to a greater feeling of empathic concern, whereas rumination may lead to a higher feeling of personal distress. To test the hypotheses we used experimental instructions (Study 1) and a priming procedure (Study 2) to manipulate the emotion regulation strategies. The results supported our hypotheses. Furthermore in the rumination condition the emotional experience was described as being more negative and more highly arousing than in the reappraisal condition. We discuss the effect of these two forms of cognitive emotion regulation on empathic concern and personal distress

Unbounded Dynamic Predicate Compositions in Attribute-Based Encryption

We present several transformations that combine a set of attribute-based encryption (ABE) schemes for simpler predicates into a new ABE scheme for more expressive composed predicates. Previous proposals for predicate compositions of this kind, the most recent one being that of Ambrona et.al. at Crypto\u2717, can be considered static (or partially dynamic), meaning that the policy (or its structure) that specifies a composition must be fixed at the setup. Contrastingly, our transformations are dynamic and unbounded: they allow a user to specify an arbitrary and unbounded-size composition policy right into his/her own key or ciphertext. We propose transformations for three classes of composition policies, namely, the classes of any monotone span programs, any branching programs, and any deterministic finite automata. These generalized policies are defined over arbitrary predicates, hence admitting modular compositions. One application from modularity is a new kind of ABE for which policies can be ``nested\u27\u27 over ciphertext and key policies. As another application, we achieve the first fully secure completely unbounded key-policy ABE for non-monotone span programs, in a modular and clean manner, under the q-ratio assumption. Our transformations work inside a generic framework for ABE called symbolic pair encoding, proposed by Agrawal and Chase at Eurocrypt\u2717. At the core of our transformations, we observe and exploit an unbounded nature of the symbolic property so as to achieve unbounded-size policy compositions

Unbounded Dynamic Predicate Compositions in ABE from Standard Assumptions

At Eurocrypt\u2719, Attrapadung presented several transformations that dynamically compose a set of attribute-based encryption (ABE) schemes for simpler predicates into a new ABE scheme for more expressive predicates. Due to the powerful unbounded and modular nature of his compositions, many new ABE schemes can be obtained in a systematic manner. However, his approach heavily relies on $q$-type assumptions, which are not standard. Devising such powerful compositions from standard assumptions was left as an important open problem. In this paper, we present a new framework for constructing ABE schemes that allow unbounded and dynamic predicate compositions among them, and show that the adaptive security of these composed ABE will be preserved by relying only on the standard matrix Diffie-Hellman (MDDH) assumption. This thus resolves the open problem posed by Attrapadung. As for applications, we obtain various ABEs that are the first such instantiations of their kinds from standard assumptions.These include the following adaptively secure large-universe ABEs for Boolean formulae under MDDH: - The first completely unbounded monotone key-policy (KP)/ciphertext-policy (CP) ABE. Such ABE was recently proposed, but only for the KP and small-universe flavor (Kowalczyk and Wee, Eurocrypt\u2719). - The first completely unbounded non-monotone KP/CP-ABE. Especially, our ABEs support a new type of non-monotonicity that subsumes previous two types of non-monotonicity, namely, by Ostrovsky et al. (CCS\u2707) and by Okamoto and Takashima (CRYPTO\u2710). - The first (non-monotone) KP and CP-ABE with constant-size ciphertexts and secret keys, respectively. - The first KP and CP-ABE with constant-size secret keys and ciphertexts, respectively. At the core of our framework lies a new partially symmetric design of the core 1-key 1-ciphertext oracle component called Key Encoding Indistinguishability, which exploits the symmetry so as to obtain compositions