‘Can I trust you?’A study of the psychological factors influencing school children’s decision to trust and peer’s perception of their trustworthiness

How children’s trust beliefs in others and how peers determine children’s levels of trustworthiness is the bedrock of all relationships. Yet very little prior research exists on understanding the nature of this relationship and even fewer studies compare across cultures to understand the specificity of potential interventions. Thisstudy addressed these gaps by conductinga set of serial mediation modelsto test the hypothesized causal flow from social mistrustand its subscales (home, school, general mistrust)to anxiety to aggression and to peer-rated untrustworthiness in 2,464 school children aged 8-14 years from the UK (N= 994; M= 11.38 years, female = 45.6%) and Hong Kong (N= 1,470, M = 11.46 years,female = 47.1%). Increased levels of self-reported social mistrust (and its associated subscales) were found to be independently associated with increased untrustworthiness in both countries. Children with high levels of social mistrust, particularly school mistrust, were more likely to have high levels ofanxiety and aggressive behaviors concurrently, which in turn was associated with higher levels of peer-rated untrustworthiness. This explanatory model suggests that future longitudinal intervention studies that aim to reduce aggressive responses from suspicious children may improve peer’s perception of untrustworthiness and childhood relationships with others

UCL-Penn Global Covid Study Webinar Report

The UCL-Penn Global COVID Study examines the short- and longer-term effects of COVID-19 on people's mental health, physical health, and social trust in others. This study consisted of three online surveys of 20-30 minutes long administered at Time 1 (April to July 2020), Time 2 (October - January 2021), and Time 3 (April to July 2021) to participants 18+ years and resident of any country. The survey was available in 7 languages. For more information about study specifics, please visit our OSF page. This summer webinar series sponsored by the UCL Global Engagement Fund featured five themed papers presented by study collaborators and critiqued by leaders and experts in policy, public health, economics, sustainability, aging, and psychology. The latter group of experts were not part of the study and helped inform and provide a more balanced debate on the application of our study findings and completmentary insights on the impacts of COVID-19. All webinar papers will now be peer-reviewed and collated alongside discussant commentaries in an open access COVID special issue as part of the UCL Open: Environment Journal. Webinar recordings can be found on our study website (https://globalcovidstudy.com/events/). This document summarises the webinar series including key take home messages and recommendations as helpfully collated by my research assistants, Kyleigh Melville, Kimberly Loke, and Sammi Lee from the UCL Institute of Education. We hope this document will spark new ideas, conversations, and action. Should you have comments/suggests, please feel free to reach out to us at [email protected]

Peer Problems and Low Self-esteem Mediate the Suspicious and Non-suspicious Schizotypy-Reactive Aggression Relationship in Children and Adolescents

The relationship between schizophrenia and violence has been well-established. Yet very little prior research exists on the factors that might explain the nature of this relationship and even fewer studies seek to clarify the etiology of aggressive behavior in adolescents with specific features of schizotypal personality that might help improve the specificity of intervention. The current study tested whether one dimension of schizotypy alone (i.e., the ‘suspicious’ feature) or the other 8 dimensions (i.e., the ‘non-suspicious’ features) were particularly associated with aggressive behaviors (reactive and proactive aggression), and if peer problems and low self-esteem mediated these relationships. A serial multiple mediation model testing the hypothesized flow from suspicious and non-suspicious schizotypy to peer problems to low self-esteem and to increased aggression was tested in Hong Kong schoolchildren aged 8- to 14-years (N = 1412; Mage = 11.47, SD = 1.67 years, female = 47.6%). Increased suspicious and non-suspicious schizotypal features were found to be independently associated with increased reactive aggression, but not proactive aggression. Children with high levels of suspicious schizotypy and non-suspicious schizotypy were more likely to have poor peer problems and low self-esteem concurrently, which in turn was associated with reactive aggression only. This explanatory model suggests that future longitudinal intervention studies that enhance self-esteem in schizotypal adolescents may potentially reduce co-morbid reactive aggressive behaviors too

Beam-steering Surface Wave Fluid Antennas for MIMO Applications

This paper proposed to use surface wave fluid antennas to realize beam-steering functionality and spatial diversity for MIMO applications. By utilizing the advantage of the non-radiating feature of surface wave propagation, in contrast to the conventional multiple RF input ports approach reported, the proposed design only required one RF input to achieve the spatial diversity. The surface wave fluid antenna is designed to work in the millimeter-wave frequency band from 20 to 26.5 GHz. The preliminary results show that the radiation direction of the antenna can be controlled by changing the position of the fluid metal radiator

Radiation Pattern Diversified Single-Fluid-Channel Surface-Wave Antenna for Mobile Communications

In this paper, an antenna design that combines surface wave and fluidic reconflgurable techniques was presented. The antenna operates in a wide frequency range from 23 to 38 GHz, which covers the Very High 5G Frequency band in the US, Europe, China, Japan, and Korea. In this design, only one RF input port is needed to achieve diversity when compared with the conventional multiple RF input ports approaches. From the simulation results, the proposed antenna design could change its radiation pattern based on the position of the fluid radiator. Such radiation pattern diversity feature can deal with channel interference issues

Reconfigurable Surface Wave Fluid Antenna for Spatial MIMO Applications

This paper presents the design of a surface wave fluid antenna which can realizes beamshaping and spatial diversity for MIMO applications. The proposed design only required one RF input to achieve spatial diversity when comparing to the conventional multiple RF input ports approaches. The surface wave fluid antenna is designed for the millimeter-wave 5G mobile communications band from 24 to 28 GHz. The simulation results show that the radiation direction of the antenna can be controlled by changing the position of the fluid metal radiator

Radiation Pattern Diversified Double-Fluid-Channel Surface-Wave Antenna for Mobile Communications

In this paper, we present an antenna design for millimeter wave 5G applications. The proposed antenna has a wide working frequency range from 23.5 GHz to 36.5 GHz. This can cover the millimeter wave 5G frequency band in most countries. The design is simple and will mitigate the difficulty when implementing in a wireless system with reconfigurable capability. The antenna design only needs a single RF port as input to achieve radiation pattern diversity by moving the fluid radiators in its two channels. With the radiation pattern diversity capability, the problem like weak signal strength and inter channel interference can be eased.The design shows higher dynamic range of patterns turning when compare to the previous work on single-channel surface-wave antenna with the purpose of wider angular coverage with multichannel design. The comparison result of the two designs will also be provided in this paper

Interference mitigation scheme by antenna selection in device-to-device communication underlaying cellular networks

In this paper, we investigate an interference mitigation scheme by antenna selection in device-to- device (D2D) communication underlaying downlink cellular networks. We first present the closed-form expression of the system achievable rate and its asymptotic behaviors at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and the large antenna number scenarios. It is shown that the high SNR approximation increases with more antennas and higher ratio between the transmit SNR at the BS and the D2D transmitter. In addition, a tight approximation is derived for the rate and we reveal two thresholds for both the distance of the D2D link and the transmit SNR at the BS above which the underlaid D2D communication will degrade the system rate. We then particularize on the small cell setting where all users are closely located. In the small cell scenario, we show that the relationship between the distance of the D2D transmitting link and that of the D2D interfering link to the cellular user determines whether the D2D communication can enhance the system achievable rate. Numerical results are provided to verify these results

Maximizing the network outage rate for fast fluid antenna multiple access systems

Using reconfigurable fluid antennas, it is possible to have a software-controlled position-tuneable antenna to realize spatial diversity and multiplexing gains that are previously only possible using multiple antennas. Recent results illustrated that fast fluid antenna multiple access (f-FAMA) which always tunes the antenna to the position for maximum signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) on a symbol-by-symbol basis, could support hundreds of users on the same radio channel, all by a single fluid antenna at each user without complex coordination and optimization. The network outage rate, nevertheless, depends on the SIR threshold chosen for each user. Motivated by this, this paper adopts a first-order approximation to obtain the outage probability expression from which a closed-form solution is derived for optimizing the SIR threshold in maximizing the network outage rate. Moreover, a closed-form expression is provided to estimate the number of users in the f-FAMA network in which the outage rate begins to plateau. Numerical results show that the proposed SIR threshold achieves near-maximal outage rate performance

Joint Transceiver Design for Dual-Functional Full-Duplex Relay Aided Radar-Communication Systems

Driven by the demand for massive and accurate sensing data to achieve wireless network intelligence under a limited available spectrum, the coexistence between radar and communication systems has attracted public attention. In this paper, we investigate a novel dual-functional full-duplex relay aided radar-communication system where the phased-array radar is employed at the amplify-and-forward (AF) relay. A joint transceiver design is proposed to maximize the minimum signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) among all detection directions at the radar receiver under communication quality-of-service and total energy constraints. The formulated optimization problem is particularly challenging due to the highly nonconvex objective function and constraints. Based on the problem structure, we equivalently decompose it into the radar-energy and relay-energy minimization problems under SINR requirements. To solve the radar-energy minimization problem, we propose a low-complexity algorithm based on the alternating direction method of multipliers to optimize the radar transmit power and receiver. The relay-energy minimization problem can be simplified into an equivalent quadratic programming problem by introducing an insightful unitary matrix. Then, the closed-form expression for the AF relay beamforming matrix can be derived, which is jointly determined by the channel condition of relay communication and the detection direction of the radar. After that, we introduce the overall transceiver design algorithm to the original problem and discuss its optimality and computational complexity. Simulation results verify that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms other benchmark algorithms