Pain, culture and pedagogy: a preliminary investigation of attitudes towards “reasonable” pain tolerance in the grassroots reproduction of a culture of risk

In recent years a considerable body of psychological research has explored the relationship between membership of socio-cultural groups and personal pain perception. Rather less systematic attention has, however, been accorded to how such group membership(s) might influence individual attitudes towards the pain of others. In this paper, immersion in the culture of competitive sport, widely regarded as being exaggeratedly tolerant of “risky” behaviours around pain, is taken as a case-in-point with students of Physical Education (PE) in tertiary education as the key focus. PE students are highly-immersed in competitive sporting culture both academically and (typically) practically, and also represent a key nexus of cross-generational transmission regarding the norms of sport itself. Their attitudes towards the pain that others should reasonably tolerate during a range of activities, sporting and otherwise, were evaluated through a direct comparison with those of peers much less immersed in competitive sporting culture. In total, N=301 (144 PE, 157 non-PE) undergraduate students in the UK responded to a vignette-based survey. Therein, all participants were required to rate the pain (on a standard 0-10 scale) at which a standardised “other” should desist engagement with a set of five defined sporting and non-sporting tasks, each with weak and strong task severities. Results indicated that PE students were significantly more likely to expect others to persevere through higher levels of pain than their non-PE peers, but only during the sport-related tasks - an effect further magnified when task severity was high. In other tasks, there was no significant difference between groups, or valence of the effect was actually reversed. It is argued that the findings underscore some extant knowledge about the relationship between acculturated attitudes to pain, while also having practical implications for understanding sport-based pedagogy, and its potentially problematic role in the ongoing reproduction of a “culture of risk.

To freeze or not to freeze: A culture-sensitive motion capture approach to detecting deceit

We present a new signal for detecting deception: full body motion. Previous work on detecting deception from body movement has relied either on human judges or on specific gestures (such as fidgeting or gaze aversion) that are coded by humans. While this research has helped to build the foundation of the field, results are often characterized by inconsistent and contradictory findings, with small-stakes lies under lab conditions detected at rates little better than guessing. We examine whether a full body motion capture suit, which records the position, velocity, and orientation of 23 points in the subject’s body, could yield a better signal of deception. Interviewees of South Asian (n = 60) or White British culture (n = 30) were required to either tell the truth or lie about two experienced tasks while being interviewed by somebody from their own (n = 60) or different culture (n = 30). We discovered that full body motion–the sum of joint displacements–was indicative of lying 74.4% of the time. Further analyses indicated that including individual limb data in our full body motion measurements can increase its discriminatory power to 82.2%. Furthermore, movement was guilt- and penitential-related, and occurred independently of anxiety, cognitive load, and cultural background. It appears that full body motion can be an objective nonverbal indicator of deceit, showing that lying does not cause people to freeze.The research presented in this paper was part funded by the Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats, website: https://crestresearch.ac.uk/. Funding source: Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Award: ES/N009614/1 and EPSRC grant EP/K033476/1 by Ross Anderson

A Liar and a Copycat: Nonverbal Coordination Increases with Lie Difficulty

Studies of the nonverbal correlates of deception tend to examine liars’ behaviours as independent from the behaviour of the interviewer, ignoring joint action. To address this gap, Experiment 1 examined the effect of telling a truth and easy, difficult and very difficult lies on nonverbal coordination. Nonverbal coordination was measured automatically by applying a Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) algorithm to motion-capture data. In Experiment 2, interviewees also received instructions that influenced the attention they paid to either the nonverbal or verbal behaviour of the interviewer. Results from both Experiments found that interviewer-interviewee nonverbal coordination increased with lie difficulty. This increase was not influenced by the degree to which interviewees paid attention to their nonverbal behaviour, nor by the degree of interviewer’s suspicion. Our findings are consistent with the broader proposition that people rely on automated processes such as mimicry when under cognitive load

Coccolithophorid calcium carbonate dissolution in surface waters

The role of calcifying organisms in the ocean biogeochemistry has been receiving increasing attention since CO2-related global change issues such as ocean acidification were pointed out by the scientific community. The implications of changing oceanic pH in modifying ecosystems dominated by planktonic calcifiers have been shown by mesocosm and laboratory experiments based on CO2 manipulations. The major concern of such experiments focussed on variations in the rates of ecosystem primary production and calcification due to changes in algal physiology or specific composition. Our results, from an interdisciplinary survey of coccolithophore-dominated blooms in the northern Bay of Biscay (NE Atlantic), suggest that biogenic calcite dissolution is occurring in the photic zone where surface waters are oversaturated with respect to calcite. The dissolution of CaCO3 in surface waters, evidenced by scanning electron microscopy observations, has an impact on the preservation and export of carbon in coccolithophore-dominated ecosystems and on the exchange of CO2 across the ocean-atmosphere interface. Both aspects of suspended calcite concentration reduction in natural environments (lower rates of production or dissolution) could be considered as a perturbation of the oceanic carbon cycle. We aim at presenting here a biogeochemical description of processes, including integrated primary production, calcification, and parameters such as transparent exopolymer particles concentration and particulate inorganic carbon profiles, during field studies. A mechanism for calcite dissolution, based on biological activity in microenvironments (including grazing, bacterial respiration and DMS production) is presented as a conceptual model in coccolithophore blooms

What causes hidradenitis suppurativa? - 15 years after

The 14 authors of the first review article on hidradenitis suppurativa (HS) pathogenesis published 2008 in EXPERIMENTAL DERMATOLOGY cumulating from the 1st International Hidradenitis Suppurativa Research Symposium held March 30?April 2, 2006 in Dessau, Germany with 33 participants were prophetic when they wrote "Hopefully, this heralds a welcome new tradition: to get to the molecular heart of HS pathogenesis, which can only be achieved by a renaissance of solid basic HS research, as the key to developing more effective HS therapy." (Kurzen et al. What causes hidradenitis suppurativa? Exp Dermatol 2008;17:455). Fifteen years later, there is no doubt that the desired renaissance of solid basic HS research is progressing with rapid steps and that HS has developed deep roots among inflammatory diseases in Dermatology and beyond, recognized as ?the only inflammatory skin disease than can be healed?. This anniversary article of 43 research-performing authors from all around the globe in the official journal of the European Hidradenitis Suppurativa Foundation e.V. (EHSF e.V.) and the Hidradenitis Suppurativa Foundation, Inc (HSF USA) summarizes the evidence of the intense HS clinical and experimental research during the last 15 years in all aspects of the disease and provides information of the developments to come in the near future