Within-person analyses of situational interest and boredom: Interactions between task-specific perceptions and achievement goals

Despite the increasing number of studies examining the correlates of interest and boredom, surprisingly little research has focused on within-person fluctuations in these emotions, making it difficult to describe their situational nature. To address this gap in the literature, this study conducted repeated measurements (12 times) on a sample of 158 undergraduate students using a variety of self-report assessments, and examined the within-person relationships between task-specific perceptions (expectancy, utility, and difficulty) and interest and boredom. This study further explored the role of achievement goals in predicting between-person differences in these within-person relationships. Utilizing hierarchical-linear modeling, we found that, on average, a higher perception of both expectancy and utility, as well as a lower perception of difficulty, was associated with higher interest and lower boredom levels within individuals. Moreover, mastery-approach goals weakened the negative within-person relationship between difficulty and interest and the negative within-person relationship between utility and boredom. Mastery-avoidance and performance-avoidance goals strengthened the negative relationship between expectancy and boredom. These results suggest how educators can more effectively instruct students with different types of goals, minimizing boredom and maximizing interest and learning.

An enhanced fall detection system for elderly person monitoring using consumer home networks

Various fall-detection solutions have been previously proposed to create a reliable surveillance system for elderly people with high requirements on accuracy, sensitivity and specificity. In this paper, an enhanced fall detection system is proposed for elderly person monitoring that is based on smart sensors worn on the body and operating through consumer home networks. With treble thresholds, accidental falls can be detected in the home healthcare environment. By utilizing information gathered from an accelerometer, cardiotachometer and smart sensors, the impacts of falls can be logged and distinguished from normal daily activities. The proposed system has been deployed in a prototype system as detailed in this paper. From a test group of 30 healthy participants, it was found that the proposed fall detection system can achieve a high detection accuracy of 97.5%, while the sensitivity and specificity are 96.8% and 98.1% respectively. Therefore, this system can reliably be developed and deployed into a consumer product for use as an elderly person monitoring device with high accuracy and a low false positive rate.

Ethics of care in supporting disabled forced migrants: interactions with professionals and ethical dilemmas in health and social care in the South-East of England

This article explores the interactions between disabled forced migrants with care needs and professionals and the restrictive legal, policy and practice context that health and social care professionals have to confront, based on the findings of a qualitative study with 45 participants in the South-East of England. In-depth interviews were conducted with 15 forced migrants who had diverse impairments and chronic illnesses (8 women and 7 men), 13 family caregivers and 17 support workers and strategic professionals working in social care and the third sector in Slough, Reading and London. The legal status of forced migrants significantly affects their entitlements to health and social care provision, resulting in prolonged periods of destitution for many families. National asylum support policies, difficult working relationships with UK Border Agency, higher eligibility thresholds and reduced social care budgets of local authorities were identified as significant barriers in responding to the support needs of disabled forced migrants and family caregivers. In this context, social workers experienced considerable ethical dilemmas. The research raises profound questions about the potential and limitations of health and social care policies, provision, and practice as means of protection and support in fulfilling the human rights of forced migrants with care needs.

The acquisition of person and number morphology within the verbal domain in Early Greek

The aim of this paper is to examine the acquisition pattern of person and number verb morphology within the generative framework and to compare the results of the analyses with previous research in Greek and other European languages. The study considers previous data on the acquisition of subject-verb agreement, and thereafter, examines the acquisition of person and number morphology in a new dataset of two monolingual Greek-speaking children. The analyses present quantitative data of accuracy of person and number marking, error data, and qualitative analyses addressing the productivity of person and number marking. The results suggest that person and number morphology is used correctly and productively from a very early age in Greek speaking children. The findings provide new insight into early Greek language acquisition and are also relevant for research in early development of languages with rich inflectional morphology.

Video stimuli reduce object-directed imitation accuracy: a novel two-person motion-tracking approach

Imitation is an important form of social behavior, and research has aimed to discover and explain the neural and kinematic aspects of imitation. However, much of this research has featured single participants imitating in response to pre-recorded video stimuli. This is in spite of findings that show reduced neural activation to video vs. real life movement stimuli, particularly in the motor cortex. We investigated the degree to which video stimuli may affect the imitation process using a novel motion tracking paradigm with high spatial and temporal resolution. We recorded 14 positions on the hands, arms, and heads of two individuals in an imitation experiment. One individual freely moved within given parameters (moving balls across a series of pegs) and a second participant imitated. This task was performed with either simple (one ball) or complex (three balls) movement difficulty, and either face-to-face or via a live video projection. After an exploratory analysis, three dependent variables were chosen for examination: 3D grip position, joint angles in the arm, and grip aperture. A cross-correlation and multivariate analysis revealed that object-directed imitation task accuracy (as represented by grip position) was reduced in video compared to face-to-face feedback, and in complex compared to simple difficulty. This was most prevalent in the left-right and forward-back motions, relevant to the imitator sitting face-to-face with the actor or with a live projected video of the same actor. The results suggest that for tasks which require object-directed imitation, video stimuli may not be an ecologically valid way to present task materials. However, no similar effects were found in the joint angle and grip aperture variables, suggesting that there are limits to the influence of video stimuli on imitation. The implications of these results are discussed with regards to previous findings, and with suggestions for future experimentation.

'he perceives himself as a caterpillar […]' constructions of the disabled subject in the critical response to Alfred Hitchcock's 'Rear Window'

This chapter focuses on critical responses to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, especially their construction of disability. The suggestion is that such criticism takes the disabled body to be both necessary and superfluous to the meaning of the film, a difficulty that, I argue, can be read more widely within film theory. Ever since Christian Metz’s ‘the Imaginary Signifier’, the condition of being ‘bound to a wheelchair’ is understood to have a resonance for theories of film spectatorship, but only ever in a sense that does away with the wheelchair as a mark of difference.

Reasonable adjustments for disabled pupils: what support do parents want for their child?

Schools in England (as elsewhere in Europe) have a duty to promote equality for disabled people and make reasonable adjustments for disabled children. There is, however, a degree of uncertainty about how well-placed parents are addressed to use the legislation to ensure their child’s needs. This paper presents data drawn from a national questionnaire designed for schools to use to identify their disabled pupils and examines, in detail, parental responses to a question on the kinds of support their child finds helpful in offsetting any difficulties they experience. It illustrates the complex and varied nature of the ‘reasonable adjustments’ that are required and an overriding sense that need to be underpinned by the values of a responsive child-centred approach, one that recognises that parents’ knowledge and understanding of their child are important. Schools need to have in place the two-way communication process that supports them in ‘knowing’ about the visible and invisible challenges that pupils with difficulties and disabilities face in participating in school life.

Supporting schools in identifying and safeguarding the needs of disabled children: the challenges for data collection

Conceptualisations of disability that emphasise the contextual and cultural nature of disability and the embodiment of these within a national system of data collection present a number of challenges especially where this process is devolved to schools. The requirement for measures based on contextual and subjective experiences gives rise to particular difficulties in achieving parity in the way data is analysed and reported. This paper presents an account of the testing of a tool intended for use by schools as they collect data from parents to identify children who meet the criteria of disability established in Disability Discrimination Acts (DDAs). Data were validated through interviews with parents and teachers and observations of children and highlighted the pivotal role of the criterion of impact. The findings are set in the context of schools meeting their legal duties to identify disabled children and their support needs in a way that captures the complexity of disabled children’s school lives and provides useful and useable data.

Constitutional Haploinsufficiency of Tumor Suppressor Genes in Mentally Retarded Patients With Microdeletions in 17p13.1

Chromosome microdeletions or duplications are detected in 10-20% of patients with mental impairment and normal karyotypes. A few cases have been reported of mental impairment with microdeletions comprising tumor suppressor genes. By array-CGH we detected 4 mentally impaired individuals carrying de novo microdeletions sharing an overlapping segment of similar to 180 kb in 17p13.1. This segment encompasses 18 genes, including 3 involved in cancer, namely KCTD11/REN, DLG4/PSD95, and GPS2. Furthermore, in 2 of the patients, the deletions also included TP53, the most frequently inactivated gene in human cancers. The 3 tumor suppressor genes KCTD11, DLG4, and GPS2, in addition to the GABARAP gene, have a known or suspected function in neuronal development and are candidates for causing mental impairment in our patients. Among our 4 patients with deletions in 17p13.1, 3 were part of a Brazilian cohort of 300 mentally retarded individuals, suggesting that this segment may be particularly prone to rearrangements and appears to be an important cause (similar to 1%) of mental retardation. Further, the constitutive deletion of tumor suppressor genes in these patients, particularly TP53, probably confers a significantly increased lifetime risk for cancer and warrants careful oncological surveillance of these patients. Constitutional chromosome deletions containing tumor suppressor genes in patients with mental impairment or congenital abnormalities may represent an important mechanism linking abnormal phenotypes with increased risks of cancer. Copyright (C) 2009 S. Karger AG, Basel

Operations research/management science tools for integrating people with disabilities into employment. A study on Valencia`s Sheltered Work Centres for Disabled

People with disabilities have a right to a full life in every sense and one of those fundamental rights is the possibility to work. In this paper, the importance of social employment integration of disabled people is highlighted as one of the stakeholders to be satisfied by companies in the new framework that corporate social responsibility is constructing. The objective of the paper is to revise the benefits of some well-known operations research/management science tools that, if applied correctly, have a double positive impact on work accessibility and improved productivity. The responses collected from managers of Valencia`s ShelteredWork Centres for Disabled by means of a structured questionnaire are used to analyse the level of implementation of these tools and their impact depending on the type of centre, the kind of disability and other structural variables.

Job rotation in assembly lines employing disabled workers

In this paper we consider the programming of job rotation in the assembly line worker assignment and balancing problem. The motivation for this study comes from the designing of assembly lines in sheltered work centers for the disabled, where workers have different task execution times. In this context, the well-known training aspects associated with job rotation are particularly desired. We propose a metric along with a mixed integer linear model and a heuristic decomposition method to solve this new job rotation problem. Computational results show the efficacy of the proposed heuristics. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.