A qualitative study of psychological, social and behavioral barriers to appropriate food portion size control

Background: Given the worldwide prevalence of overweight and obesity, there is a clear need for meaningful practical healthy eating advice - not only in relation to food choice, but also on appropriate food portion sizes. As the majority of portion size research to date has been overwhelmingly quantitative in design, there is a clear need to qualitatively explore consumers’ views in order to fully understand how food portion size decisions are made. Using qualitative methodology this present study aimed to explore consumers’ views about factors influencing their portion size selection and consumption and to identify barriers to appropriate portion size control.

Methods: Ten focus groups with four to nine participants in each were formed with a total of 66 persons (aged 19–64 years) living on the island of Ireland. The semi-structured discussions elicited participants’ perceptions of suggested serving size guidance and explored the influence of personal, social and environmental factors on their food portion size consumption. Audiotapes of the discussions were professionally transcribed verbatim, loaded into NVivo 9, and analysed using an inductive thematic analysis procedure.
Results: The rich descriptive data derived from participants highlight that unhealthy portion size behaviors emanate from various psychological, social and behavioral factors. These bypass reflective and deliberative control, and converge to constitute significant barriers to healthy portion size control. Seven significant barriers to healthy portion size control were apparent: (1) lack of clarity and irrelevance of suggested serving size guidance; (2) guiltless eating; (3) lack of self-control over food cues; (4) distracted eating; (5) social pressures; (6) emotional eating rewards;
and (7) quantification habits ingrained from childhood.

Conclusions: Portion size control strategies should empower consumers to overcome these effects so that the consumption of appropriate food portion sizes becomes automatic and habitual.
Keywords: Food portion size, Barriers, Obesity, Consumers, Qualitative study. © 2013 Spence et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd

Who Feels Inferior? A Test of the Status Anxiety Hypothesis of Social Inequalities in Health

The empirical association between income inequality, population health and other social problems is now well established and the research literature suggests that the relationship is not artefactual. Debate is still ongoing as to the cause of this association. Wilkinson, Marmot and colleagues have argued for some time that the relationship stems from the psycho-social effects of status comparisons. Here, income inequality is a marker of a wider status hierarchy that provokes an emotional stress response in individuals that is harmful to health and well-being. We label this the ‘status anxiety hypothesis’. If true, this would imply a structured relationship between income inequality at the societal level, individual income rank and anxiety relating to social status. This paper sets out strong and weak forms of the hypothesis and then presents three predictions concerning the structuring of ‘status anxiety’ at the individual level given different levels of national income inequality and varying individual income. We then test these predictions using data from a cross-national survey of over 34,000 individuals carried out in 2007 in 31 European countries. Respondents from low inequality countries reported less status anxiety than those in higher inequality countries at all points on the income rank curve. This is an important precondition of support for the status anxiety hypothesis and may be seen as providing support for the weaker version of the hypothesis. However, we do not find evidence to support the stronger version of the hypothesis which requires the negative effect of income rank on status anxiety to be exacerbated by increasing income inequality.

Socio-emotional effects of the transition from sight to blindness,

The research examined the socio-emotional impact of sight loss on a sample of 18 blind and partially sighted adults from the East coast of Scotland (average age 64). The impact of sight loss in four core areas mood, self concept, social connectedness and loss was explored. Data was collected using the mental health and social functioning sub-scales of the National Eye Institute Visual Functioning Questionnaire-25 and semi-structured interviews. Data indicated that participants experienced reduced mental health and decreased social functioning as a result of sight loss. Data also showed that participants shared common socio-emotional issues during transition from sight to blindness, starting with diagnosis, coping with deterioration of sight, experiencing loss, experiencing changed perceptions of self in relation to society, experiencing others in a changed way and experiencing rehabilitation. A theoretical model describing the socio-emotional transition from sight to blindness is proposed. Implications for practice are explored.

Empowering the Shamed Self: Recognition and Critical Social Work

Summary: This article provides a review of the contribution of Axel Honneth’s model of recognition for critical social work. While Honneth’s tripartite conceptualisation of optimal identity-formation is positively appraised, his analysis of the link between misrecognition, the experience of shame and eventual sense of moral outrage, is contested. Drawing on a range of sources, including the sociology of shame, Honneth’s ideas about the emotional antecedents of emancipatory action are revised to guide critical social work with misrecognised service users.

Findings: The intellectual background to Honneth’s recognition model, emanating from leading German philosophers, is described and its application to social work set out. Even so, Honneth’s model is found to be deficient in one primary regard: its assumption about the emotional antecedents to quests for withheld recognition is misapprehended. In particular, the argument in this article is that the ubiquitous emotion of shame, which Honneth argues flows from misrecognition, must be carefully addressed through the medium of relationship, otherwise it might lead to repressed shame and frustrated attempts at social struggle. To this end, a social work process is delineated for dealing with shame, following episodes of misrecognition.

Applications: Honneth’s model of recognition, along with revised ideas about how to recognise and manage shame, is incorporated into a conceptual framework for critical social work practice. With this renewed understanding of the impact of shame, following misrecognition, social workers should be better equipped conceptually to enable service users to take action for empowerment.

Emotional development among early school-age children: Gender differences in the role of problem behaviours

There has been an increasing focus on social and emotional development in educational programmes in early childhood as both variables are believed to influence behavioural outcomes in the classroom. However, relationships between social and emotional development and behaviour in early childhood have rarely been explored. This article sets out to investigate the conceptualisation of these variables and their inter-relationships. Structural equation models were used to assess if differences exist between boys and girls in relation to social and emotional competences, which could affect the relative success of such programmes. This article is based on cross-sectional data collected from 749 four- to six-year-olds and their teachers. The findings generally supported the hypothesised relationships between social and emotional development variables and prosocial behaviour (including internalising behaviour) for boys and girls. However, some gender differences were noted in externalising behaviour, which teachers often consider to be most significant due to its potentially disruptive nature in the classroom.

Emotional insecurity in the family and community and youth delinquency in Northern Ireland: A person-oriented analysis across five-waves

Background: Over one billion children are exposed worldwide to political violence and armed conflict. Currently, conclusions about bases for adjustment problems are qualified by limited longitudinal research from a process-oriented, social-ecological perspective. In this study, we examined a theoretically-based model for the impact of multiple levels of the social ecology (family, community) on adolescent delinquency. Specifically, this study explored the impact of children’s emotional insecurity about both the family and community on youth delinquency in Northern Ireland. Methods: In the context of a five-wave longitudinal research design, participants included 999 mother-child dyads in Belfast (482 boys, 517 girls), drawn from socially-deprived, ethnically-homogenous areas that had experienced political violence. Youth ranged in age from 10 to 20 and were 12.18 (SD = 1.82) years old on average at Time 1. Findings: The longitudinal analyses were conducted in hierarchical linear modeling (HLM), allowing for the modeling of inter-individual differences in intra-individual change. Intra-individual trajectories of emotional insecurity about the family related to children’s delinquency. Greater insecurity about the community worsened the impact of family conflict on youth’s insecurity about the family, consistent with the notion that youth’s insecurity about the community sensitizes them to exposure to family conflict in the home. Conclusions: The results suggest that ameliorating children’s insecurity about family and community in contexts of political violence is an important goal toward improving adolescents’ well-being, including reduced risk for delinquency.

Emotions & social change in Ireland:Exploring habitus shift in liquid modernity

Drawing on insights from a range of disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, history, politics, but particularly sociology and sociological theory, this thesis explores the relationship between emotions and social change in late or 'liquid' modernity. It deploys the Republic of Ireland in the twentieth century as a case study. It argues that the Irish case in an ideal site for this research given the speed and scale of changes that have occurred there, particularly since the 1950's. The primary research question guiding the study is: What has been the effect of 'social change' in Ireland on the emotional lives of Irish people? The thesis is structured in three parts. Part one (chapters one to three) is primarily theoretical. It aims to develop a distinctive theoretical framework, process-relational realism, and argues that three concepts, properly treated, are central to answering the research question. These are emotion, power and (emotional) habitus. Part two is a bridging chapter, in which the empirical portion of the study, its design and method, are outlined. This study is based on a series of qualitative life-history interviews conducted using the Biographical Narrative Research Method. Part three is primarily empirical. The first chapter critically explores Bauman's concept of liquid modernity in relation to the Irish case and offers a short social history of the Irish twentieth century, which focuses on emotions and power. The second deploys two (ideal-type) interview cases to support the argument that Ireland experienced a habitus shift, from a relatively homogeneous to a heterogeneous habitus, and a corresponding shift from a relatively repressive emotional regime to a more expressive one, with significant effects on the emotional habitus. The final chapter takes a broader view of these changes, suggests that social change has been ambivalent, and outlines a new typology of emotional pathologies that the study suggests are characteristic of contemporary emotional life.

Emotional response to images of wind turbines: A psychophysiological study of their visual impact on the landscape

Social acceptance for wind turbines is variable, providing a challenge to the implementation of this energy source. Psychological research could contribute to the science of climate change. Here we focus on the emotional responses to the visual impact of wind turbines on the landscape, a factor which dominates attitudes towards this technology. Participants in the laboratory viewed images of turbines and other constructions (churches, pylons and power-plants) against rural scenes, and provided psychophysiological and self-report measures of their emotional reactions. We hypothesised that the emotional response to wind turbines would be more negative and intense than to control objects, and that this difference would be accentuated for turbine opponents. As predicted, the psychophysiological response to turbines was stronger than the response to churches, but did not differ from that of other industrial constructions. In contrast with predictions, turbines were rated as less aversive and more calming compared with other industrial constructions, and equivalent to churches. Supporters and non-supporters did not differ significantly from each other. We discuss how a methodology using photo manipulations and emotional self-assessments can help estimate the emotional reaction to the visual impact on the landscape at the planning stage for new wind turbine applications.

Generating a Word-Emotion Lexicon from #Emotional Tweets

Research in emotion analysis of text suggest that emotion lexicon based features are superior to corpus based n-gram features. However the static nature of the general purpose emotion lexicons make them less suited to social media analysis, where the need to adopt to changes in vocabulary usage and context is crucial. In this paper we propose a set of methods to extract a word-emotion lexicon automatically from an emotion labelled corpus of tweets. Our results confirm that the features derived from these lexicons outperform the standard Bag-of-words features when applied to an emotion classification task. Furthermore, a comparative analysis with both manually crafted lexicons and a state-of-the-art lexicon generated using Point-Wise Mutual Information, show that the lexicons generated from the proposed methods lead to significantly better classi- fication performance.

Growing Up On an Interface: Findings and Implications for the Social Needs, Mental Health and Lifetime Opportunities of Belfast Youth

In this research we aimed to find out what types of risk (if any) affected young people and children growing up in places of high religious segregation or what we normally call interface communities. This is important as we know that risk and experiences of harm and violence can have negative impacts upon development, emotional well-being and future prospects. It is important to understand what types of risk affect young people and children so as we can respond to these in terms of aiding better personal and community development with regard to health, work, education and wider opportunities.

Increasing Ambient Temperature Reduces Emotional Well-Being

This study examines the impact of ambient temperature on emotional well-being in the U.S. population aged 18+. The U.S. is an interesting test case because of its resources, technology and variation in climate across different areas, which also allows us to examine whether adaptation to different climates could weaken or even eliminate the impact of heat on well-being. Using survey responses from 1.9 million Americans over the period from 2008 to 2013, we estimate the effect of temperature on well-being from exogenous day-to-day temperature variation within respondents’ area of residence and test whether this effect varies across areas with different climates. We find that increasing temperatures significantly reduce well-being. Compared to average daily temperatures in the 50–60 °F (10–16 °C) range, temperatures above 70 °F (21 °C) reduce positive emotions (e.g. joy, happiness), increase negative emotions (e.g. stress, anger), and increase fatigue (feeling tired, low energy). These effects are particularly strong among less educated and older Americans. However, there is no consistent evidence that heat effects on well-being differ across areas with mild and hot summers, suggesting limited variation in heat adaptation.

Leadership and emotional intelligence in nursing and midwifery education and practice: a discussion paper

Aim
A discussion of the concepts of leadership and emotional intelligence in nursing and midwifery education and practice.

Background
The need for emotionally intelligent leadership in the health professions is acknowledged internationally throughout the nursing and midwifery literature. The concepts of emotional intelligence and emotional-social intelligence have emerged as important factors for effective leadership in the healthcare professions and require further exploration and discussion. This paper will explore these concepts and discuss their importance in the healthcare setting with reference to current practices in the UK, Ireland and internationally.

Design
Discussion paper.

Data sources
A search of published evidence from 1990–2015 using key words (as outlined below) was undertaken from which relevant sources were selected to build an informed discussion.

Implications for nursing/midwifery
Fostering emotionally intelligent leadership in nursing and midwifery supports the provision of high quality and compassionate care. Globally, leadership has important implications for all stakeholders in the healthcare professions with responsibility for maintaining high standards of care. This includes all grades of nurses and midwives, students entering the professions, managerial staff, academics and policy makers.

Conclusion
This paper discusses the conceptual models of leadership and emotional intelligence and demonstrates an important link between the two. Further robust studies are required for ongoing evaluation of the different models of emotional intelligence and their link with effective leadership behaviour in the healthcare field internationally. This is of particular significance for professional undergraduate education to promote ongoing compassionate, safe and high quality standards of care.