Helmholtz Centre Potsdam - GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences
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Perceptions of Truth Commissions in Spain
No full textTruth commissions are used for many purposes, including reconciliation within a country. Often, there is an assumption that more truth will bring more reconciliation. However, there is little empirical evidence that this is so. The proposed research will investigate a range of questions related to these issues through a survey experiment in Spain. Spain followed its transition with a “Pact of Forgetting” and there has been little formal investigation of the violence committed during the Civil War and the Franco era. This study tests whether different formats of truth commission impact on perceptions of reconciliation, polarization and trust in democracy and whether these perceptions are affected by political position. The study also tests perceptions on whether the past should be reopened. A number of experimental primes will be embedded in an original survey, which will ask various outcome questions. The survey will be delivered through a survey marketing firm. The respondents are voluntary members of the firm’s panel and are aged 18 years and over
Effects of social status perception on lexical alignment
No full textIn conversations, speakers align with each other at several linguistic levels. Speakers mimic the way their conversational partners choose, combine and utter words. Moreover, speakers eventually converge to similar conceptualisations, reaching a common understanding of the situation under discussion (Garrod & Pickering, 2004).
Why and how do speakers align with each other? Different explanations have been proposed. Whereas unmediated accounts explain alignment in terms of priming, mediated accounts explain alignment in terms of strategic choices employed to enhance mutual comprehension (Branigan et al., 2011) or to regulate social distance (Van Baaren et al., 2003). The two types of mechanisms are not mutually exclusive, indeed it is reasonable to think that priming effects might be modulated by strategic choices, when necessary.
Lexical alignment, which, at a behavioural level, manifests itself as the repetition of each other’s words, is a suitable field to study how strategic and automatic mechanisms may interact (e.g. Branigan et al., 2011; Suffill et al., 2021).
Sociolinguistic studies suggest that social status, community membership and power dynamics might influence linguistic alignment (Dragojevic et al., 2016). More specifically, alignment may be seen as an attempt to reduce social distance, by increasing social affiliation. Moreover, observational studies suggest that speakers tend to align more to higher status partners (Aronsson et al., 1987; Gregory & Webster, 1996). However, it is not clear whether such tendency can be attested in experimental settings and whether it also concerns lexical alignment. Admittedly, experimental settings - simplified and controlled approximations of real-life dialogues - might indeed reduce the impact of social information on lexical production. Social information might modulate speakers’ tendency to align only when speakers draw their attention to it, as when the context requires to take partner-specific information into account (Pickering & Garrod, 2004).
In our present study, we adopt a widely used experimental paradigm that allows measuring lexical alignment in different conditions (Tobar-Henríquez et al., 2019). In an online experiment, we ask participants to match and name some objects following their partner's directions, which consist of a referring expression for each object. We operationalise lexical alignment as the participants' tendency to repeat low frequency referring expressions previously used by their conversational partner. In fact, participants don't play with human partners, but with a bot.
Participants play two sessions of the same task with two different partners (in fact, the same bot) and stimuli. Before each session, we ask participants to provide a written description and a picture of themselves, and we provide them with a written description and a picture of their partner. We carefully created the descriptions by combining information about education level, job and hobbies to produce high and low-status fictitious partners.
We investigate whether partners' social status modulate participants' tendency to align at a lexical level. Moreover, by asking the participants to rate the social status of their partner before or at the end of the task, we investigate to what extent the attention paid to such social information influences lexical alignment
Perceived behavioral plasticity and climate policy support
No full textInvestigate people’s perceived behavioral plasticity of high-impact consumer behaviors and their relationship with behavior-regulating public policies. Moreover, we will explore how both are associated with socioeconomic status, perceived effectiveness of individual action in mitigating climate change, need for systemic change, and environmental identity
Older MAsterS Track and Field AThletes PercEptions and Functional Impacts of PRe-Competition Chiropractic MAnual Therapies on Plantar FlexoR Muscle Strength, Accuracy Motor Skill, and Sports PerformancE (MasterCare)
No full textAthletes want to optimise their performance and prevent injuries, and they typically explore many different strategies to give them a competitive advantage in sports events. Worldwide, manual therapies and chiropractic have been increasingly utilised in sports to help elite and masters athletes with pain management, return to sports and rehabilitation after an injury, injury prevention, enhancement of performance, and to recover faster after competitions.
Pre-competition chiropractic manual therapies (CMT) may be a way to identify and prevent a potential injury and to contribute to enhancing sports performance in masters athletes. Although there is vast research addressing the role of the best and common practices of chiropractic in older adults, none of them, thus far, have included the ageing athletic population until now.
Therefore, the aim of this project is to explore and increase the understanding of the aged 60+ athlete’s perceptions from the chiropractic encounter, the biomechanical and sports performance experiences, and its potential short-term functional impacts on plantar flexor muscle strength and accuracy motor skill performances
Do Green Nudges Enhance Waste Recycling Practices? Evidence from a meta-analytical review
No full textGlobally, proper disposal of urban waste has become a pressing concern due to its unprecedented growth. Not only does it threaten public health and environment, it is also directly linked to society production and consumption. How to effectively mobilize the public's waste sorting behavior and increase the resource recovery rate is an important issue of concern to policy makers and scholars. This paper will follow a strict, transparent and open process for summarizing the effects of experiments promoting waste sorting interventions, discussing the factors influencing the experiments and providing detailed recommendations for subsequent interventions
Intervening on Loneliness to Reduce Object Attachment in Hoarding Disorder:
No full textHoarding disorder (HD) is characterized by the need to acquire and save possessions accompanied by strong emotional distress when discarding items regardless of their actual value, leading to disorganized clutter and unusable living areas (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). According to the cognitive-behavioural model of HD, these symptoms are due to information processing problems and a range of beliefs about possessions including high levels of object attachment (Frost & Hartl, 1996). The model also suggests that strong object attachment in HD has its origins in negative childhood experiences (Kyrios et al., 2018). This is consistent with attachment theory, which posits that people with insecure interpersonal attachments are more likely to develop strong object attachment to compensate for unmet relatedness needs (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2007, 2008). We therefore proposed a compensatory model of HD which suggests that interpersonal difficulties cause and maintain object attachment and hoarding symptoms (Yap & Grisham, 2021).
Consistent with the compensatory model, research has shown that people with HD experience significantly more interpersonal difficulties (Grisham et al., 2018; Grisham et al., 2008; Norberg et al., 2018). Although, it is typically assumed that interpersonal difficulties such as loneliness are a result of hoarding symptoms, there is now greater recognition that interpersonal difficulties could be a cause of higher object attachment and hoarding, as indicated by experimental and correlational studies in non-clinical samples (Bartz et al., 2016; Epley et al., 2008; Keefer et al., 2012; Kehoe & Egan, 2019; Yap et al., 2020).
Although there is preliminary empirical evidence for the compensatory model, no experimental research has tested the model in a sample of individuals with high levels of hoarding symptoms. We therefore do not know if the model applies to people with clinical levels of hoarding.
In this proposed study, 2000 participants recruited from MTurk will be screened for high levels of hoarding symptoms. Individuals with high hoarding symptoms will be randomly allocated to either an experimental condition (an online belongingness intervention) or an active control condition (an online health education program). The possibility that a reduction in loneliness can lower object attachment and improve hoarding symptoms will have important implications for our understanding of its aetiology. The experiment will also inform us about whether addressing interpersonal difficulties is an important component to include in psychological treatments for HD
Follow-up: Categorizing divisive social media content
No full textThe relationship between individuals’ emotional reactions to social media content and the nature of that content is not well understood. In particular, the valence of the reaction, the intensity of the reaction, whether or not the person agrees with the opinion expressed, and how familiar they are with the topic may be related in some way. Additionally, such affective data could be captured and applied as a subjective metadata layer as another form of big data with a personal twist that may be harnessed by, for instance, an AI-based decision support aid. In particular, people’s affective responses to content could be used as a trigger for encouraging metacognition in the moment for individuals, or perhaps even be used to identify possible sources of misinformation at the group level. In the first survey, we explored the possible relationships between these features and orientations towards social media content broadly, involving both old and new forms of social media. In this follow-up survey, we ask people to categorize the social media content from the first survey in order to ensure that our assumed categorizations were accurate. This work is expected to help us to better understand how the personal and the “big social” are related, as well as to inform a methodology for capturing and using such subjective metadata in algorithms
ALPQ (Affected Limb Perception Questionnaire: evaluation of the upper-limb perception after stroke)
No full textOur brain builds representations of our body for perception and action by integrating multisensory inputs coming from afferent signals (e.g. somatosensations) and from the surrounding world (e.g. visual signals). [e.g. Bassolino & Serino, 2021] Although the perception and the experience of ones’ own body are given for granted in typical conditions, several studies have shown that body representations can be impaired following a cerebrovascular accident. [e.g. Schwoebel & Coslett, 2005]. However, such deficits are not systematically assessed in clinical routine, despite they might represent important factors in determining patients’ recovery.
We therefore developed a structured questionnaire to assess subjective disturbance in the perception of the contralesional limb reflecting distortion in body representations (BRs). The questionnaire is composed of items assessing a wide spectrum of body-related deficits (e.g. anosognosia for hemiplegia, somatoparaphrenia, see the paragraph below “Dependent variable”). In case of a positive answer to an item describing a possible symptom, additional questions are asked by the experimenter to further describe the characteristics of the reported sensations.
The time constraint is the main challenge in stroke acute phase both with respect to the workload of the clinician, and to patient’s fatigue and vigilance. Taking this in consideration, we developed two versions of the questionnaire: a shorter version, based on binary answers, compatible with acute patients in an acute stroke unit and a longer version aimed for a more quantitative assessment of the deficits using visual analog scales for patients at later stages of the disease.
This project aims at:
(i) estimating the prevalence and quantifying the severity of BRs distortions following stroke,
(ii) describing which cognitive and sensorimotor deficits are associated with BRs distortions,
(iii) unrevealing the anatomical correlates of the distortions,
(iv) assessing the evolution of BRs distortions, along different phases of disease and recovery.
The shorter version of the questionnaire will be administered to eligible stroke patients from acute unit. In addition, the longer version of the questionnaire will be administered to eligible sub-acute stroke (> 2 weeks after stroke) patients in rehabilitation centers. Finally, all patients who have displayed a BRs disorder in acute or sub-acute phase will be invited to complete the longer version of the questionnaire once more at the chronic stage (> 6 months after stroke) of the disease. Cognitive and sensorimotor deficits will also be evaluated (see below “Dependent variable”, Complementary assessments). All eligible patients will be included, and their brain lesion analysed, in order to provide unbiased insight into the neural correlate of the deficit
Use of technology for promoting health education at population level in India for modern medicine and traditional medicine- A scoping review
No full textHealth literacy is an essential part of attaining health. Technologies that aid in health education or promotion of modern and traditional medicine is a topic of recent interest. We need more focused evaluation of these technologies, evidence of health benefits and population engagement in order to streamline the process for reaching the masses. A detailed knowledge about the type of technologies used in the Indian context and how they affect the health of masses need to be studied extensively to make a set of policies, programs, and conditions that promote health and enable individuals to make healthy choices