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Let’s get positive: how foreign language teaching enjoyment can create a positive feedback loop
No full textResearch on learners’ foreign language emotions has revealed the existence of a positive feedback loop where increased enjoyment leads to better performance which, in turn, strengthens learners’ enjoyment and boosts overall happiness. The current study follows this avenue focusing on teachers’ foreign language teaching enjoyment (FLTE) and its relationships with engagement, mindfulness, and burnout. The participants, who were 496 English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers from Iran, completed four electronic surveys. The proposed mediation model based on data collected from EFL teachers indicated that FLTE partially mediated the relationship between mindfulness and engagement as well as their burnout. The results revealed that mindful EFL teachers who enjoy the profession are more likely to experience higher levels of work engagement and job satisfaction, thus creating a positive feedback loop. In addition, the findings suggest the importance of positive emotions in EFL teachers’ psychological flourishing based on the tenets of positive psychology. Finally, implications and suggestions for further research are offered
Exploring thematic influences on theme park visitors’ satisfaction: an empirical study on Disneyland China
Get PDFThis study aims to explore thematic influences on theme park visitors’ satisfaction through user-generated data. To this end, we first used an unsupervised machine learning method, structural topic modelling, and analyzed 112,000 reviews post by visitors to Shanghai Disney Resort from June 16, 2016 to March 4, 2022. Our findings are of great significance for reflecting consumer behaviour through user-generated data. Specifically, we find that visitors’ satisfaction is highly related to service in the theme park and their playing feeling, and early tourists pay more attention to the experience of specific playing items while later tourists focus on the overall playing experience. In addition, an empirical study is conducted by treating the ratings associated with each review as dependent variable and each topic represented by comments as independent variables, which shows that the relationship between the customer reviews and ratings by tourists becomes less pronounced over time. In other words, as time goes, customers review can reflect their subjective feelings or experience, but the rating is not. We discover the “dynamics” of user-generated data over time and gain a better understanding of the aspects and concerns of visitors’ satisfaction over time. The findings of the study contribute to the literature on tourism, service, and consumer behavior while also providing valuable practical implications
The future of Northern Ireland: the role of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement Institutions
Get PDFSince the 2016 Brexit referendum a series of crises has gripped Northern Ireland's politics. This has had a destabilising effect across society, which has arguably been felt most acutely by political unionism. The Belfast/Good Friday Agreement (B/GFA) of 1998 created a series of institutions to deal with political conflict in Northern Ireland, manage cross-border cooperation and normalise relations between the UK and Ireland. However, many aspects of it have been sparingly and ineffectually deployed, most notably the second and third strands dealing with north/south and east/west relations respectively. In this article, the authors argue that regular use of the institutional arrangements created by the Agreement would help to deal with the challenges currently facing Northern Ireland and help address unionist anxieties over the Protocol. Use of the North-South Ministerial Council (NSMC), the British Irish Council (BIC) and the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference (BIIGC) should be prioritised. The unresolved issues arising from Brexit require a recommitment to the intergovernmental logic at the heart of the 1998 Agreement, despite the obstacles
How Foreign Language Enjoyment acts as a buoy for sagging motivation: A longitudinal investigation
Get PDFThe current study contributes to the recent debate on the question whether learner emotions can be intrinsically motivating or whether they are no more than diffuse action tendencies (Dörnyei 2020). Adopting a longitudinal approach, we combined repeated ANOVAs and mixed effects modeling to capture interactions between Language Enjoyment (FLE) and its three dimensions, Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety (FLCA) and Attitudes/Motivation (AM) and its four dimensions over the course of one semester. Participants were 360 FL learners of English, German, French and Spanish in a Kuwaiti university. FLE (and the dimensions FLE Personal and FLE Social) and FLCA remained stable over time but FLE Teacher decreased significantly. Levels of AM also decreased significantly and, more specifically, the dimensions Motivation and Attitudes toward the Learning Situation. Mixed effects modeling analyses revealed that FLE (including FLE Personal and FLE Social) and FLCA had medium effects on the AM dimensions. Significant interaction effects were found for FLE Teacher and Time for the AM dimensions. We argue that high FLE can act as a buoy for sagging motivation and thus become intrinsically motivating
Filling in the middle: the “Workless” frame in action in UK welfare reform
Get PDFThe gender-blind “workless” frame has been increasingly prominent in UK welfare discourse in recent decades and played a significant role in the political justification of Universal Credit (UC) – a key plank of UK welfare reform since 2013. Meanwhile, UC has been highlighted as problematic for gender equality. This article seeks to “fill in the middle” between the use of the “workless” frame in recent welfare discourse, including at the agenda-setting stage of UC, and the gendered implications of UC. It does this by analysing how the frame functions in government evaluation frameworks, impact assessments (including equality impact assessments) and in the implementation of UC (drawing on secondary analysis of interviews with claimants and focus groups with welfare practitioners). The analysis suggests that the “workless” frame is promoting gender rowback by de-gendering welfare, de-valuing care – particularly that performed by lone parents – and undermining the sharing of care in couple households
The impact of debt, taxation and financial crisis on earnings management: the case of Greece
Get PDFThe purpose of this study is to empirically investigate the Greek firms’ earnings management policies compared with debt, taxation and the financial crisis.
In this paper, we show that existed measures of real earnings management, whether corrected for performance or not, rely crucially on strong assumptions. We provide a novel modeling that permits panel structure so as to correct for heterogeneity across firms while permitting to determine endogenously the number of underlying firm-groups in the data generating process.
The empirical results indicate that Greek firms are likely to reduce earnings manipulation activities when they face liquidity risk. Taxation and financial crisis have a negative and positive effect on earnings management, respectively.
The effect of debt, taxation and financial crisis on earnings management has never been investigated in Greece. The empirical results offer valuable information to shareholders and investors as they can understand how some main factors, such as debt, taxation and financial crisis, influence firm’s accounting practices
Defund – not defend – the police: a response to Fleetwood and Lea
Get PDFWe argue that defunding the police is necessary to address fundamental and systemic problems plaguing British policing. We do so in response to an article written by Fleetwood & Lea (2022), published in this journal, claiming that ‘defunding the police does not translate well to the UK’ (p.172)
Updating perceptual expectations as certainty diminishes
Get PDFForming expectations about what we are likely to perceive often facilitates perception. We
forge such expectations on the basis of strong statistical relationships between events in our
environment. However, due to our ever-changing world these relationships often subsequently
degrade or even disappear, yet it is unclear how these altered statistics influence perceptual
expectations. We examined this question across two studies by training participants in perfect
relationships between actions (index or little finger abductions) and outcomes (clockwise or
counter-clockwise gratings), before degrading the predictive relationship in a test phase – such
that ‘expected’ events followed actions on 50-75% of trials and ‘unexpected’ events ensued
on the remainder. Perceptual decisions about outcomes were faster and less error prone on
expected than unexpected trials when predictive relationships remained high and reduced as
the relationship diminished. Drift diffusion modelling indicated that these effects are explained
by shifting the starting point in the evidence accumulation process as well as biasing the rate
of evidence accumulation – with the former reflecting biases from statistics within the training
session and the latter those of the test session. These findings demonstrate how perceptual
expectations are updated as statistical certainty diminishes, with interacting influences
speculatively dependent upon learning consolidation. We discuss how underlying
mechanisms optimise the interaction between learning and perception – allowing our
experiences to reflect a nuanced, ever-changing environment
Houses and homes
No full textBook synopsis: Politics has always been at the heart of the English country house, in its design and construction, as well as in the activities and experiences of those who lived in and visited these places. As Britain moved from an agrarian to an imperial economy over the course of the eighteenth century, the home mirrored the social change experienced in the public sphere.
This collection focuses on the relationship between the country house and the mutable nature of British politics in the eighteenth century. Essays explore the country house as a stage for politicking, a vehicle for political advancement, a symbol of party allegiance or political values, and a setting for appropriate lifestyles. Initially the exclusive purview of the landed aristocracy, politics increasingly came to be played out in the open, augmented by the emergence of career politicians - usually untitled members of the patriciate - and men of new money, much of it created on Caribbean plantations or in the employ of the East India Company. Politics and the English Country House, 1688-1800 reveals how, during this period of profound change, the country house remained a constant. The country house was the definitive tangible manifestation of social standing and, for the political class, owning one became almost an imperative.
In its consideration of the country house as lived and spatial experience, as an aesthetic and symbolic object, and as an economic engine, this book offers a new perspective on the complexity of political meaning embedded in the eighteenth-century country house - and on ourselves as active recipients and interpreters of its various narratives, more than two centuries later
A meta-analysis of genetic effects on neurodevelopmental disorders and co-occurring conditions
Get PDFA systematic understanding of the aetiology of neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs) and their co-occurrence with other conditions during childhood and adolescence remains incomplete. In the current meta-analysis, we synthesized the literature on (1) the contribution of genetic and environmental factors to NDDs, (2) the genetic and environmental overlap between different NDDs, and (3) the co-occurrence between NDDs and disruptive, impulse control and conduct disorders (DICCs). Searches were conducted across three platforms: Web of Science, Ovid Medline and Ovid Embase. Studies were included only if 75% or more of the sample consisted of children and/or adolescents and the studies had measured the aetiology of NDDs and DICCs using single-generation family designs or genomic methods. Studies that had selected participants on the basis of unrelated diagnoses or injuries were excluded. We performed multilevel, random-effects meta-analyses on 296 independent studies, including over four million (partly overlapping) individuals. We further explored developmental trajectories and the moderating roles of gender, measurement, geography and ancestry. We found all NDDs to be substantially heritable (family-based heritability, 0.66 (s.e. = 0.03); SNP heritability, 0.19 (s.e. = 0.03)). Meta-analytic genetic correlations between NDDs were moderate (grand family-based genetic correlation, 0.36 (s.e. = 0.12); grand SNP-based genetic correlation, 0.39 (s.e. = 0.19)) but differed substantially between pairs of disorders. The genetic overlap between NDDs and DICCs was strong (grand family-based genetic correlation, 0.62 (s.e. = 0.20)). While our work provides evidence to inform and potentially guide clinical and educational diagnostic procedures and practice, it also highlights the imbalance in the research effort that has characterized developmental genetics research
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