Marriage, religion and human flourishing: how sustainable is the classic Durkheim thesis in contemporary Europe?

This paper draws on the three waves of the European Values Survey across five countries (Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Northern Ireland, Spain and Sweden) to investigate the relationship between indicators of positive psychology (conceptualised as feelings of happiness and satisfaction with life), religiosity (conceptualised as self-assigned religious affiliation and self-reported religious attendance) and marital status. The results demonstrate that religiosity is, in general, positively correlated with both indicators of positive psychology. Further, across all waves and all countries, the pattern emerges that those respondents who are married are likely to report higher levels of happiness and greater satisfaction in life. These data provide contemporary support for the classic Durkheim thesis linking the two institutions of marriage and religion with human flourishing

Prayer, personality and happiness: a study among undergraduate students in Wales

In order to examine the association between prayer and happiness, a sample of 131 undergraduate students attending a university in Wales completed three measures: the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire, the abbreviated Eysenck Personality Questionnaire Revised, and prayer frequency assessed on a 5-point scale. The data demonstrated a significant positive correlation between prayer frequency and happiness before controlling for individual differences in personality. After controlling for personality, however, this apparent association vanished

OSN Mood Tracking: Exploring the Use of Online Social Network Activity as an Indicator of Mood Changes

Online social networks (OSNs) have become an integral part of our everyday lives, where we share our thoughts and feelings. This study analyses the extent to which the changes of an individual’s real-world psychological mood can be inferred by tracking their online activity on Facebook and Twitter. By capturing activities from the OSNs and ground truth data via experience sampling, it was found that mood changes can be detected within a window of 7 days for 61% of the participants by using specific, combined online activity signals. The participants fall into three distinct groups: those whose mood correlates positively with their online activity, those who correlate negatively and those who display a weak correlation. We trained two classifiers to identify these groups using features from their online activity, which achieved precision of 95.2% and 84.4% respectively. Our results suggest that real-world mood changes can be passively tracked through online activity on OSNs

Sex differences in eye gaze and symbolic cueing of attention

Observing a face with averted eyes results in a reflexive shift of attention to the gazed-at location. Here we present results that show that this effect is weaker in males than in females (Experiment 1). This result is predicted by the ‘extreme male brain’ theory of autism (Baron-Cohen, 2003), which suggests that males in the normal population should display more autism-like traits than females (e.g., poor joint attention). Indeed, participants′ scores on the Autism-Spectrum Quotient (Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Stott, Bolton, & Goodyear, 2001) negatively correlated with cueing magnitude. Furthermore, exogenous orienting did not differ between the sexes in two peripheral cueing experiments (Experiments 2a and 2b). However, a final experiment showed that using non-predictive arrows instead of eyes as a central cue also revealed a large gender difference. This demonstrates that reduced orienting from central cues in males generalizes beyond gaze cues. These results show that while peripheral cueing is equivalent in the male and female brains, the attention systems of the two sexes treat noninformative symbolic cues very differently

Predictive gaze cues and personality judgements: Should eye trust you?

Although following another person’s gaze is essential in fluent social interactions, the reflexive nature of this gaze-cuing effect means that gaze can be used to deceive. In a gaze-cuing procedure, participants were presented with several faces that looked to the left or right. Some faces always looked to the target (predictive-valid), some never looked to the target (predictive-invalid), and others looked toward and away from the target in equal proportions (nonpredictive). The standard gaze-cuing effects appeared to be unaffected by these contingencies. Nevertheless, participants tended to choose the predictive valid faces as appearing more trustworthy than the predictive-invalid faces. This effect was negatively related to scores on a scale assessing autistic-like traits. Further, we present tentative evidence that the ‘‘deceptive’’ faces were encoded more strongly in memory than the "cooperative" faces. These data demonstrate the important interactions among attention, gaze perception, facial identity recognition, and personality judgments

Preliminary orbital elements of six visual binary stars

International audiencePreliminary new orbital elements were computed for the visual binary stars A 1 - ADS 1345, A 2629 - ADS 3610, BU 560 - ADS 4371, STF 3115 - ADS 4376, STF 1426 AB - ADS 7730 and STF 2437 - ADS 11956. Using Straizys and Kuriliene's data, we derived new formulae for computing dynamical parallaxes for luminosity classes IV and V. The values found for those systems are in agreement with the {Hipparcos} parallaxes and the corresponding systemic masses are consistent with the spectral types

Locating the ‘radical’ in 'Shoot the Messenger'

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below, copyright 2013 @ Edinburgh University Press.The 2006 BBC drama Shoot the Messenger is based on the psychological journey of a Black schoolteacher, Joe Pascale, accused of assaulting a Black male pupil. The allegation triggers Joe's mental breakdown which is articulated, through Joe's first-person narration, as a vindictive loathing of Black people. In turn, a range of common stereotypical characterisations and discourses based on a Black culture of hypocrisy, blame and entitlement is presented. The text is therefore laid wide open to a critique of its neo-conservatism and hegemonic narratives of Black Britishness. However, the drama's presentation of Black mental illness suggests that Shoot the Messenger may also be interpreted as a critique of social inequality and the destabilising effects of living with ethnicised social categories. Through an analysis of issues of representation, the article reclaims this controversial text as a radical drama and examines its implications for and within a critical cultural politics of ‘race’ and representation

Toward a user-centered design of a weather forecasting decision-support tool

Hazard Services is a software toolkit that integrates information management, hazard alerting, and communication functions into a single user interface. When complete, National Weather Service forecasters across the United States will use Hazard Services for operational issuance of weather and hydrologic alerts, making the system an instrumental part of the threat management process. As a new decision-support tool, incorporating an understanding of user requirements and behavior is an important part of building a system that is usable, allowing users to perform work-related tasks efficiently and effectively. This paper discusses the Hazard Services system and findings from a usability evaluation with a sample of end users. Usability evaluations are frequently used to support software and website development and can provide feedback on a system’s efficiency of use, effectiveness, and learnability. In the present study, a user-testing evaluation assessed task performance in terms of error rates, error types, response time, and subjective feedback from a questionnaire. A series of design recommendations was developed based on the evaluation’s findings. The recommendations not only further the design of Hazard Services, but they may also inform the designs of other decision-support tools used in weather and hydrologic forecasting. Incorporating usability evaluation into the iterative design of decision-support tools, such as Hazard Services, can improve system efficiency, effectiveness, and user experience

Physiological Indicators of Task Demand, Fatigue, and Cognition in Future Digital Manufacturing Environments

As Digital Manufacturing transforms traditionally physical work into more system-monitoring tasks, new methods are required for understanding people's mental workload and prolonged capacity for focused attention. Many physiological measures have shown promise for detecting changes in cognitive state, and recent advances in sensor technology offer minimally-invasive ways to monitor our cognitive activity. Previous research in functional near-infrared spectroscopy, for example, has observed changes in cerebral hemodynamic response during periods of high demand within tasks. This work investigated the relationships among task demand, fatigue, and attention degradation in a sustained attention task, and their effect on heart rate, breathing rate, nose temperature and hemodynamic response in the prefrontal cortex and middle temporal gyrus. Analysis revealed a small but significant effect of fatigue on heart rate relative to baseline, breathing rate and hemodynamic response. Task demand had a small but significant effect on breathing rate and nose temperature, both relative to baseline, but no difference between levels of demand was observed in heart rate or hemodynamic response. Our results provide insight into what physiological data can tell us about cognitive state, ability to focus, and the impact of fatigue over time

Research based theatre in dementia knowledge transfer: views from the front line

Purpose - Formal ties between the theatre and research dissemination have only recently developed and its general efficacy is largely unknown. Here we aim to redress this neglect by examining the effectiveness of a research based theatrical event in promoting dementia knowledge transfer with a group of front line care workers. The event ran over eight days and consisted of an original theatrical production followed by a chaired audience discussion and workshops. Design/methodology/approach-Questionnaires which had been developed specifically for this evaluation were completed by 863 front line workers on the day of the event, eliciting their profiles and immediate reactions. Three months after the event, thirty completed a follow-up questionnaire and eight were interviewed. Findings-Attendance was well received with high degrees of both cognitive and emotional engagement being expressed in the initial questionnaire. The follow-up evaluation suggested that these positive reactions were sustained over time. However, many taking part in this follow-up thought that their practice had not changed as a result of event attendance. This apparent discrepancy between knowledge transfer and utilisation appeared to be partly the result of the influence of contextual factors in impeding this utilisation within work settings. Originality/value-Evidence is provided on the positive impact of theatre on dementia carers’ working lives. This is sufficient to warrant further applications of this method, provided there is careful attention to embedding the messages in the workplace context and evaluating their efficacy