Contextualizing entrepreneurial identity amongst Syrian refugees in Jordan: the emergence of a destabilized habitus?

This paper aims to contextualise the entrepreneurial identity of Syrian refugees living outside refugee camps in Jordan. The research adopts a social lens to consider the situation Syrians find themselves in by drawing on the work of Bourdieu. A qualitative design is applied to explore the different experiences and perceptions that pervade refugee stories and the work of refugee aid agencies. By contextualising entrepreneurial identity in the Jordanian context, the paper reveals how a destabilized refugee habitus based on an embodied disposition of survivability is emerging. The paper makes an empirical and conceptual contribution by highlighting how the entrepreneurial activities of Syrian refugees are driven by their experiences of the harsh social conditions they find themselves in

The impact of xerostomia on oral-health-related quality of life among younger adults

BACKGROUND: Recent research has suggested that chronic dry mouth affects the day-to-day lives of older people living in institutions. The condition has usually been considered to be a feature of old age, but recent work by our team produced the somewhat surprising finding that 10% of people in their early thirties are affected. This raises the issue of whether dry mouth is a trivial condition or a more substantial threat to quality of life among younger people. The objective of this study was to examine the association between xerostomia and oral-health-related quality of life among young adults while controlling for clinical oral health status and other potential confounding factors. METHODS: Cross-sectional analysis of data from a longstanding prospective observational study of a Dunedin (New Zealand) birth cohort: clinical dental examinations and questionnaires were used at age 32. The main measures were xerostomia (the subjective feeling of dry mouth, measured with a single question) and oral-health-related quality of life (OHRQoL) measured using the short-form Oral Health Impact Profile (OHIP-14). RESULTS: Of the 923 participants (48.9% female), one in ten were categorised as 'xerostomic', with no apparent gender difference. There was a strong association between xerostomia and OHRQoL (across all OHIP-14 domains) which persisted after multivariate analysis to control for clinical characteristics, gender, smoking status and personality characteristics (negative emotionality and positive emotionality). CONCLUSION: Xerostomia is not a trivial condition; it appears to have marked and consistent effects on sufferers' day-to-day lives

Can grapheme-color synesthesia be induced by hypnosis?

Grapheme-color synesthesia is a perceptual experience where graphemes, letters or words evoke a specific color, which are experienced either as spatially coincident with the grapheme inducer (projector sub-type) or elsewhere, perhaps without a definite spatial location (associator sub-type). Here, we address the question of whether synesthesia can be rapidly produced using a hypnotic color suggestion to examine the possibility of “hypnotic synesthesia”, i.e., subjectively experienced color hallucinations similar to those experienced by projector synesthetes. We assess the efficacy of this intervention using an “embedded figures” test, in which participants are required to detect a shape (e.g., a square) composed of local graphemic elements. For grapheme-color synesthetes, better performance on the task has been linked to a higher proportion of graphemes perceived as colored.We found no performance benefits on this test when using a hypnotic suggestion, as compared to a no-suggestion control condition. The same result was found when participants were separated according to the degree to which they were susceptible to the suggestion (number of colored trials perceived). However, we found a relationship between accuracy and subjective reports of color in those participants who reported a large proportion of colored trials: trials in which the embedded figure was accurately recognized (relative to trials in which it was not) were associated with reports of more intense colors occupying a greater spatial extent. Collectively, this implies that hypnotic color was only perceived after shape detection rather than aiding in shape detection via color-based perceptual grouping. The results suggest that hypnotically induced colors are not directly comparable to synesthetic ones

Networks of Emotion Concepts

The aim of this work was to study the similarity network and hierarchical clustering of Finnish emotion concepts. Native speakers of Finnish evaluated similarity between the 50 most frequently used Finnish words describing emotional experiences. We hypothesized that methods developed within network theory, such as identifying clusters and specific local network structures, can reveal structures that would be difficult to discover using traditional methods such as multidimensional scaling (MDS) and ordinary cluster analysis. The concepts divided into three main clusters, which can be described as negative, positive, and surprise. Negative and positive clusters divided further into meaningful sub-clusters, corresponding to those found in previous studies. Importantly, this method allowed the same concept to be a member in more than one cluster. Our results suggest that studying particular network structures that do not fit into a low-dimensional description can shed additional light on why subjects evaluate certain concepts as similar. To encourage the use of network methods in analyzing similarity data, we provide the analysis software for free use (http://www.becs.tkk.fi/similaritynets/)

Contrasting deficits on executive functions between ADHD and reading disabled children

BACKGROUND. The object of this study was to analyze the executive functioning of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or reading disability (RD) independent of their non-executive deficits. METHODS: Three carefully diagnosed groups of children, aged between 7 and 12 years (35 ADHD, 22 RD and 30 typically developing children), were tested on a wide range of tasks related to five major domains of executive functioning (EF): inhibition, visual working memory, planning, cognitive flexibility, and verbal fluency. Additional tasks were selected for each domain to control for non-executive processing. RESULTS: ADHD children were impaired on interference control, but not on prepotent and ongoing response suppression. ADHD showed deficits on visual working memory, planning, cognitive flexibility and phonetic fluency. RD children were impaired on phonetic fluency. The only EF measure that differentiated ADHD from RD was planning. CONCLUSIONS: The present sample of ADHD children showed several EF deficits, whereas RD children were almost spared executive dysfunction, but exhibited deficits in phonetic fluency