A Cultural Approach to a Canadian Tragedy: The Indian Residential Schools as a Sacred Enterprise

For over a century, the Canadian state funded a church-run system of residential schools designed to assimilate Aboriginal children into Euro-Canadian culture. In addition to the problems associated with its ethnocentric philosophy, the school system was also characterised by terrible health conditions and physical and sexual abuse of the students was widespread. Recently, the schools have been the object of the most successful struggle for redress in Canadian history. One particularly puzzling aspect about the school system is that it persisted for so long, despite that many of its failings were known very early in its operation. In this article, this puzzle is addressed via a cultural analysis of a political struggle over the residential schools that occurred within Canadian Anglicanism at the outset of the twentieth century. The article concludes that the meaning of the school system as a sacred enterprise contributed to its persistence.

Sharing the vision: representing the matters of concern for design-led fledgling companies in Scotland

Design is being performed on an ever-increasing spectrum of complex practices arising in response to emerging markets and technologies, co-design, digital interaction, service design and cultures of innovation. This emerging notion of design has led to an expansive array of collaborative and facilitation skills to demonstrate and share how such methods can shape innovation. The meaning of these design things in practice can't be taken for granted as matters of fact, which raises a key challenge for design to represent its role through the contradictory nature of matters of concern. This paper explores an innovative, object-oriented approach within the field of design research, visually combining an actor-network theory framework with situational analysis, to report on the role of design for fledgling companies in Scotland, established and funded through the knowledge exchange hub Design in Action (DiA). Key findings and visual maps are presented from reflective discussions with actors from a selection of the businesses within DiA's portfolio. The suggestion is that any notions of strategic value, of engendering meaningful change, of sharing the vision of design, through design things, should be grounded in the reflexive interpretations of matters of concern that emerge.

On L2 grammar and processing: the case of oblique relative clauses and the Null-Prep phenomenon

This dissertation investigates the acquisition of oblique relative clauses in L2 Spanish by English and Moroccan Arabic speakers in order to understand the role of previous linguistic knowledge and its interaction with Universal Grammar on the one hand, and the relationship between grammatical knowledge and its use in real-time, on the other hand. Three types of tasks were employed: an oral production task, an on-line self-paced grammaticality judgment task, and an on-line self-paced reading comprehension task. Results indicated that the acquisition of oblique relative clauses in Spanish is a problematic area for second language learners of intermediate proficiency in the language, regardless of their native language. In particular, this study has showed that, even when the learners’ native language shares the main properties of the L2, i.e., fronting of the obligatory preposition (Pied-Piping), there is still room for divergence, especially in production and timed grammatical intuitions. On the other hand, reaction time data have shown that L2 learners can and do converge at the level of sentence processing, showing exactly the same real-time effects for oblique relative clauses that native speakers had. Processing results demonstrated that native and non-native speakers alike are able to apply universal processing principles such as the Minimal Chain Principle (De Vincenzi, 1991) even when the L2 learners still have incomplete grammatical representations, a result that contradicts some of the predictions of the Shallow Structure Hypothesis (Clahsen & Felser, 2006). Results further suggest that the L2 processing and comprehension domains may be able to access some type of information that it is not yet available to other grammatical modules, probably because transfer of certain L1 properties occurs asymmetrically across linguistic domains. In addition, this study also explored the Null-Prep phenomenon in L2 Spanish, and proposed that Null-Prep is an interlanguage stage, fully available and accounted within UG, which intermediate L2 as well as first language learners go through in the development of pied-piping oblique relative clauses. It is hypothesized that this intermediate stage is the result of optionality of the obligatory preposition in the derivation, when it is not crucial for the meaning of the sentence, and when the DP is going to be in an A-bar position, so it can get default case. This optionality can be predicted by the Bottleneck Hypothesis (Slabakova, 2009c) if we consider that these prepositions are some sort of functional morphology. This study contributes to the field of SLA and L2 processing in various ways. First, it demonstrates that the grammatical representations may be dissociated from grammatical processing in the sense that L2 learners, unlike native speakers, can present unexpected asymmetries such as a convergent processing but divergent grammatical intuitions or production. This conclusion is only possible under the assumption of a modular language system. Finally, it contributes to the general debate of generative SLA since in argues for a fully UG-constrained interlanguage grammar.

“The Secret Garden”: Artists, Bohemia and Gentrification in the Ouseburn Valley, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.

Research has pointed to the importance of artists in the early stages of gentrification; however, few studies have examined specifically the meaning of gentrification and place-change from the perspective of artists themselves, and few studies have investigated the role of ‘creative city’ policies as unintended drivers of gentrification processes. This study generates insights into artists’ own views of gentrification processes within the gentrifying bohemia of the Ouseburn Valley in Newcastle upon Tyne in the North East of England. We stress that gentrification in this area cannot solely be understood as a process of displacement, but is also clearly linked to the growth of modes of regulation and commercialisation within social space. Increasing regulation, brought about by greater local state focus on ‘creative districts’, has impacted the Valley. Alongside this, projects of property development as well as a general growth in the popularity of the Valley as a nightlife consumption district and area of production for commercially-orientated creative class workers have challenged artists’ values of the area as a ‘secret garden’ where romantically inflected values of self-expression, autonomy, spontaneity and non-instrumental artist cooperation can be found.

Original sin: divine and symbolic violence in the turn to the Apostle Paul

When we take a step back from the imposing figure of physical violence, it becomes possible to examine other structurally violent forces that constantly shape our cultural and political landscapes. One of the driving interests in the “turn to Paul” in recent continental philosophy stems from wrestling with questions about the real nature of contemporary violence. Paul is positioned as a thinker whose messianic experience began to cut through the violent masquerade of the existing order. The crucifixion and resurrection of the Messiah (a slave and a God co-existing in one body) exposed the empty grounding upon which power resided. The Christ-event signifies a moment of violent interruption in the existing order which Paul enjoins the Gentiles to participate in through a dedication of love for the neighbour. This divine violence aims to reveal and subvert the “powers,” epitomised in the Roman Empire, in order to fulfil the labour of the Messianic now-time which had arrived. The impetus behind this research comes from a typically enigmatic and provocative section of text by the Slovene philosopher, cultural critic, and Christian atheist Slavoj Žižek. He claims that 'the notion of love should be given here all its Paulinian weight: the domain of pure violence… is the domain of love' (2008a, 173). In this move he links Paul’s idea of love to that of Walter Benjamin’s divine violence; the sublime and the cataclysmic come together in this seemingly perverse notion. At stake here is the way in which uncovering violent forces in the “zero-level” of our narrative worldviews aids the diagnosis of contemporary political and ethical issues. It is not enough to imagine Paul’s encounter with the Christ-event as non-violent. This Jewish apocalyptic movement was engaged in a violent struggle within an existing order that God’s wrath will soon dismantle. Paul’s weak violence, inspired by his fidelity to the Christ-event, places all responsibility over creation in the role of the individual within the collective body. The centre piece of this re-imagined construction of the Pauline narrative comes in Romans 13: the violent dedication to love understood in the radical nature of the now-time. 3 This research examines the role that narratives play in the creation and diagnosis of these violent forces. In order to construct a new genealogy of violence in Christianity it is crucial to understand the role of the slave of Christ (the revolutionary messianic subject). This turn in the Symbolic is examined through creating a literary structure in which we can approach a radical Nietzschean shift in Pauline thought. The claim here, a claim which is also central to Paul’s letters, is that when the symbolic violence which manipulates our worldviews is undone by a divine violence, if even for a moment, new possibilities are created in the opening for a transvaluation of values. Through this we uncover the nature of original sin: the consequences of the interconnected reality of our actions. The role of literature is vital in the construction of this narrative; starting with Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, and continuing through works such as Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, this thesis draws upon the power of literature in the shaping of our narrative worlds. Typical of the continental philosophy at the heart of this work, a diverse range of illustrations and inspirations from fiction is pulled into its narrative to reflect the symbolic universe that this work was forged through. What this work attempts to do is give this theory a greater grounding in Paul’s letters by demonstrating this radical kenotic power at the heart of the Christ-event. Romans 13 reveals, in a way that has not yet been picked up by Critchley, Žižek, and others, that Paul opposed the biopolitical power of the Roman Empire through the weak violence of love that is the labour of the slaves of Christ on the “now-time” that had arrived.

Performing masculinity, performing the self: Rudolfo Anaya's Bless me, Ultima and Heart of Aztlan

This article explores how Bless Me, Ultima and Heart of Aztlan, the two earliest novels by acclaimed Chicano writer Rudolfo Anaya, problematise and negotiate Chicano masculinity issues. I will focus on the main characters of the novels, who, at different vital moments of their lives, question the meaning of manhood amidst important socio-economic changes and conflicting cultural traditions. Anaya reveals the complexity of being “mestizo” in American society, and exposes how hegemonic standards of masculinity are Manichean, restrictive and reliant on gender inequality. I will finally examine whether the novels challenge hegemonic gender orders, successfully negotiate non-heterosexist ideals of manhood, and ultimately contribute to the advancement of egalitarian gender relations for the Chicana/o community

A Comparative Study on the Homeroom Teachers’ Perception of the School guidance in Korea and Finland

This study has four major purposes. First, it compares school guidance of homeroom teachers in Korea and Finland, in order to understand the reality of education, based on the teachers’ perceptions. Secondly, it also considers the topic within its historical, social, and cultural backgrounds, from a critical standpoint. Thirdly, it investigates the direction of the improvement of school guidance, based on the analysis of similarities and differences between Korea and Finland, with regards to the meaning, practice, and environmental factors of the school guidance. Lastly, the influential factors surrounding the school guidance are noted by analysing empirical data from a microscopic approach, and extending the understanding of it into a social context. As for the methods, it employs thematic analysis approach through 10 homeroom teacher interviews in the lower secondary schools. As a result, firstly, the teachers in both countries assumed similarly, that the role of the teacher was not only to teach the subject, but also to care about every aspects of the students’ development in their school life. In addition, they accepted the fact that school guidance became more significant. However, the school guidance became the top priority for the Korean teachers, while teaching subject is the main task for the Finnish teachers. Secondly, the homeroom teachers in both countries hoped to have a better working environment, to perform school guidance concerning education budget for the resources of school guidance, tight curriculum, and increasing the teachers’ tasks. Thirdly, the school guidance in Korea seemed to be influenced by social expectation and government demand, whereas, the Finnish teachers considered school guidance in more aspects of adjustment and academic motivation, rather than resolving the social problems. Fourthly, the Korean teachers perceived that the trust and respect from the society and home became weakened, also expressing doubts about the educational policies and the attitude of the government with regards to school guidance. On the other hand, the Finnish teachers believed that they were trusted and respected by the society. However, blurred lines in the roles and accountability between the homeroom teachers, home, and the society were also controversial among the teachers in both countries. To sum up, Finland needs to ameliorate the system and conditions for school guidance of the homeroom teachers. The consensus on the role and tasks of Finnish homeroom teachers for school guidance seem to be also necessary. Meanwhile, Korea should improve the social system and social consciousness of the teacher, school guidance, and schooling, preceding the reform of the education system or conditions.

Forecasting exchange rates in the presence of instabilities

Many exchange rate papers articulate the view that instabilities constitute a major impediment to exchange rate predictability. In this thesis we implement Bayesian and other techniques to account for such instabilities, and examine some of the main obstacles to exchange rate models' predictive ability. We first consider in Chapter 2 a time-varying parameter model in which fluctuations in exchange rates are related to short-term nominal interest rates ensuing from monetary policy rules, such as Taylor rules. Unlike the existing exchange rate studies, the parameters of our Taylor rules are allowed to change over time, in light of the widespread evidence of shifts in fundamentals - for example in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis. Focusing on quarterly data frequency from the crisis, we detect forecast improvements upon a random walk (RW) benchmark for at least half, and for as many as seven out of 10, of the currencies considered. Results are stronger when we allow the time-varying parameters of the Taylor rules to differ between countries. In Chapter 3 we look closely at the role of time-variation in parameters and other sources of uncertainty in hindering exchange rate models' predictive power. We apply a Bayesian setup that incorporates the notion that the relevant set of exchange rate determinants and their corresponding coefficients, change over time. Using statistical and economic measures of performance, we first find that predictive models which allow for sudden, rather than smooth, changes in the coefficients yield significant forecast improvements and economic gains at horizons beyond 1-month. At shorter horizons, however, our methods fail to forecast better than the RW. And we identify uncertainty in coefficients' estimation and uncertainty about the precise degree of coefficients variability to incorporate in the models, as the main factors obstructing predictive ability. Chapter 4 focus on the problem of the time-varying predictive ability of economic fundamentals for exchange rates. It uses bootstrap-based methods to uncover the time-specific conditioning information for predicting fluctuations in exchange rates. Employing several metrics for statistical and economic evaluation of forecasting performance, we find that our approach based on pre-selecting and validating fundamentals across bootstrap replications generates more accurate forecasts than the RW. The approach, known as bumping, robustly reveals parsimonious models with out-of-sample predictive power at 1-month horizon; and outperforms alternative methods, including Bayesian, bagging, and standard forecast combinations. Chapter 5 exploits the predictive content of daily commodity prices for monthly commodity-currency exchange rates. It builds on the idea that the effect of daily commodity price fluctuations on commodity currencies is short-lived, and therefore harder to pin down at low frequencies. Using MIxed DAta Sampling (MIDAS) models, and Bayesian estimation methods to account for time-variation in predictive ability, the chapter demonstrates the usefulness of suitably exploiting such short-lived effects in improving exchange rate forecasts. It further shows that the usual low-frequency predictors, such as money supplies and interest rates differentials, typically receive little support from the data at monthly frequency, whereas MIDAS models featuring daily commodity prices are highly likely. The chapter also introduces the random walk Metropolis-Hastings technique as a new tool to estimate MIDAS regressions.

The symbolic, socio-economic and exchange value of Imperial German and National Socialist medals and badges, 1701 to the present

This thesis examines the manufacture, use, exchange (including gift exchange), collecting and commodification of German medals and badges from the early 18th century until the present-day, with particular attention being given to the symbols that were deployed by the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) between 1919 and 1945. It does so by focusing in particular on the construction of value through insignia, and how such badges and their symbolic and monetary value changed over time. In order to achieve this, the thesis adopts a chronological structure, which encompasses the creation of Prussia in 1701, the Napoleonic wars and the increased democratisation of military awards such as the Iron Cross during the Great War. The collapse of the Kaiserreich in 1918 was the major factor that led to the creation of the NSDAP under the eventual strangle-hold of Hitler, a fundamentally racist and anti-Semitic movement that continued the German tradition of awarding and wearing badges. The traditional symbols of Imperial Germany, such as the eagle, were then infused with the swastika, an emblem that was meant to signify anti-Semitism, thus creating a hybrid identity. This combination was then replicated en-masse, and eventually eclipsed all the symbols that had possessed symbolic significance in Germany’s past. After Hitler was appointed Chancellor in 1933, millions of medals and badges were produced in an effort to create a racially based “People’s Community”, but the steel and iron that were required for munitions eventually led to substitute materials being utilised and developed in order to manufacture millions of politically oriented badges. The Second World War unleashed Nazi terror across Europe, and the conscripts and volunteers who took part in this fight for living-space were rewarded with medals that were modelled on those that had been instituted during Imperial times. The colonial conquest and occupation of the East by the Wehrmacht, the Order Police and the Waffen-SS surpassed the brutality of former wars that finally culminated in the Holocaust, and some of these horrific crimes and the perpetrators of them were perversely rewarded with medals and badges. Despite Nazism being thoroughly discredited, many of the Allied soldiers who occupied Germany took part in the age-old practice of obtaining trophies of war, which reconfigured the meaning of Nazi badges as souvenirs, and began the process of their increased commodification on an emerging secondary collectors’ market. In order to analyse the dynamics of this market, a “basket” of badges is examined that enables a discussion of the role that aesthetics, scarcity and authenticity have in determining the price of the artefacts. In summary, this thesis demonstrates how the symbolic, socio-economic and exchange value of German military and political medals and badges has changed substantially over time, provides a stimulus for scholars to conduct research in this under-developed area, and encourages collectors to investigate the artefacts that they collect in a more historically contextualised manner.

MAXIMIZING LANDSCAPE PERFORMANCE AT ADVENTIST HOSPITAL: HEALING THE PEOPLE, HEALING SLIGO CREEK

This paper answers the question of whether a design intervention on Washington Adventist Hospital’s Takoma Park campus can combine stormwater Best Management Practices with outdoor healing spaces, to improve the health of the local creek (Sligo Creek) while creating a restorative environment for the hospital community. To improve the health of Sligo Creek, a campus-wide stormwater analysis was undertaken, in addition to an intervention-site-specific stormwater analysis, and a literature review of stormwater best management practices. To create a restorative environment, a literature review of healing gardens was undertaken, in addition to a campus-wide site analysis, to uncover the most ideally suited site to create a restorative environment.

The role of context in image annotation and recommendation

With the rise of smart phones, lifelogging devices (e.g. Google Glass) and popularity of image sharing websites (e.g. Flickr), users are capturing and sharing every aspect of their life online producing a wealth of visual content. Of these uploaded images, the majority are poorly annotated or exist in complete semantic isolation making the process of building retrieval systems difficult as one must firstly understand the meaning of an image in order to retrieve it. To alleviate this problem, many image sharing websites offer manual annotation tools which allow the user to “tag” their photos, however, these techniques are laborious and as a result have been poorly adopted; Sigurbjörnsson and van Zwol (2008) showed that 64% of images uploaded to Flickr are annotated with < 4 tags. Due to this, an entire body of research has focused on the automatic annotation of images (Hanbury, 2008; Smeulders et al., 2000; Zhang et al., 2012a) where one attempts to bridge the semantic gap between an image’s appearance and meaning e.g. the objects present. Despite two decades of research the semantic gap still largely exists and as a result automatic annotation models often offer unsatisfactory performance for industrial implementation. Further, these techniques can only annotate what they see, thus ignoring the “bigger picture” surrounding an image (e.g. its location, the event, the people present etc). Much work has therefore focused on building photo tag recommendation (PTR) methods which aid the user in the annotation process by suggesting tags related to those already present. These works have mainly focused on computing relationships between tags based on historical images e.g. that NY and timessquare co-exist in many images and are therefore highly correlated. However, tags are inherently noisy, sparse and ill-defined often resulting in poor PTR accuracy e.g. does NY refer to New York or New Year? This thesis proposes the exploitation of an image’s context which, unlike textual evidences, is always present, in order to alleviate this ambiguity in the tag recommendation process. Specifically we exploit the “what, who, where, when and how” of the image capture process in order to complement textual evidences in various photo tag recommendation and retrieval scenarios. In part II, we combine text, content-based (e.g. # of faces present) and contextual (e.g. day-of-the-week taken) signals for tag recommendation purposes, achieving up to a 75% improvement to precision@5 in comparison to a text-only TF-IDF baseline. We then consider external knowledge sources (i.e. Wikipedia & Twitter) as an alternative to (slower moving) Flickr in order to build recommendation models on, showing that similar accuracy could be achieved on these faster moving, yet entirely textual, datasets. In part II, we also highlight the merits of diversifying tag recommendation lists before discussing at length various problems with existing automatic image annotation and photo tag recommendation evaluation collections. In part III, we propose three new image retrieval scenarios, namely “visual event summarisation”, “image popularity prediction” and “lifelog summarisation”. In the first scenario, we attempt to produce a rank of relevant and diverse images for various news events by (i) removing irrelevant images such memes and visual duplicates (ii) before semantically clustering images based on the tweets in which they were originally posted. Using this approach, we were able to achieve over 50% precision for images in the top 5 ranks. In the second retrieval scenario, we show that by combining contextual and content-based features from images, we are able to predict if it will become “popular” (or not) with 74% accuracy, using an SVM classifier. Finally, in chapter 9 we employ blur detection and perceptual-hash clustering in order to remove noisy images from lifelogs, before combining visual and geo-temporal signals in order to capture a user’s “key moments” within their day. We believe that the results of this thesis show an important step towards building effective image retrieval models when there lacks sufficient textual content (i.e. a cold start).

The Educational Imaginary in Radical Reconstruction: Congressional Public Policy Rhetoric and American Federalism, 1862-1872

Facing the exigencies of Emancipation, a South in ruins, and ongoing violence, between 1862 and 1872 the United States Congress debated the role education would play in the postbellum polity. Positing schooling as a panacea for the nation’s problems, a determiner of individual worth, and a way of ameliorating state and federal tensions, congressional leaders envisioned education as a way of reshaping American political life. In pursuit of this vision, many policymakers advocated national school agencies and assertive interventions into state educational systems. Interrogating the meaning of “education” for congressional leaders, this study examines the role of this ambiguous concept in negotiating the contradictions of federal and state identity, projecting visions of social change, evaluating civic preparedness, and enabling broader debates over the nation’s future. Examining legislative debates over the Reconstruction Acts, Freedmen’s Bureau, Bureau of Education, and two bills for national education reform in the early 1870s, this project examines how disparate educational visions of Republicans and Democrats collided and mutated amid the vicissitudes of public policy argument. Engaging rhetorical concepts of temporality, disposition, and political judgment, it examines the allure and limitations of education policy rhetoric, and how this rhetoric shifted amid the difficult process of coming to policy agreements in a tumultuous era. In a broader historical sense, this project considers the role of Reconstruction Era congressional rhetoric in shaping the long-term development of contemporary Americans’ “educational imaginary,” the tacit, often unarticulated assumptions about schooling that inflect how contemporary Americans engage in political life, civic judgment, and social reform. Treating the analysis of public policy debate as a way to gain insights into transitions in American political life, the study considers how Reconstruction Era debate converged upon certain common agreements, and obfuscated significant fault lines, that persist in contemporary arguments.

The Ethics of Eating Animals in Tudor and Stuart Theaters

A pressing challenge for the study of animal ethics in early modern literature is the very breadth of the category “animal,” which occludes the distinct ecological and economic roles of different species. Understanding the significance of deer to a hunter as distinct from the meaning of swine for a London pork vendor requires a historical investigation into humans’ ecological and cultural relationships with individual animals. For the constituents of England’s agricultural networks – shepherds, butchers, fishwives, eaters at tables high and low – animals matter differently. While recent scholarship on food and animal ethics often emphasizes ecological reciprocation, I insist that this mutualism is always out of balance, both across and within species lines. Focusing on drama by William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and the anonymous authors of late medieval biblical plays, my research investigates how sixteenth-century theaters use food animals to mediate and negotiate the complexities of a changing meat economy. On the English stage, playwrights use food animals to impress the ethico-political implications of land enclosure, forest emparkment, the search for new fisheries, and air and water pollution from urban slaughterhouses and markets. Concurrent developments in animal husbandry and theatrical production in the period thus led to new ideas about emplacement, embodiment, and the ethics of interspecies interdependence.

The New Bottom Line: Black Women Cultural Entrepreneurs Re-Define Success in The Connected Economy

Black women cultural entrepreneurs are a group of entrepreneurs that merit further inquiry. Using qualitative interview and participant observation data, this dissertation investigates the ways in which black women cultural entrepreneurs define success. My findings reveal that black women cultural entrepreneurs are a particular interpretive community with values, perspectives and experiences, which are not wholly idiosyncratic, but shaped by collective experiences and larger social forces. Black women are not a monolith, but they are neither disconnected individuals completely devoid of group identity. The meaning they give to their businesses, professional experiences and understandings of success are influenced by their shared social position and identity as black women. For black women cultural entrepreneurs, the New Bottom Line goes beyond financial gain. This group, while not uniform in their understandings of success, largely understand the most meaningful accomplishments they can realize as social impact in the form of cultural intervention, black community uplift and professional/creative agency. These particular considerations represent a new paramount concern, and alternative understanding of what is typically understood as the bottom line. The structural, social and personal challenges that black women cultural entrepreneurs encounter have shaped their particular perspectives on success. I also explore the ways research participants articulated an oppositional consciousness to create an alternative means of defining and achieving success. I argue that this consciousness empowers them with resources, connections and meaning not readily conferred in traditional entrepreneurial settings. In this sense, the personal, social and structural challenges have been foundational to the formation of an alternative economy, which I refer to as The Connected Economy. Leading and participating in The Connected Economy, black women cultural entrepreneurs represent a black feminist and womanist critique of dominant understandings of success.

On the Economic Aspects of Unemployment: The Case of Consumer Confidence

Unemployment is related to economic, political and social aspects. One of the least analysed economic aspects is the relationship of unemployment to the level of confidence that characterizes some macroeconomic relevant agents, such as consumers or investors. Expanding previous work on this matter, this chapter considers a fuzzy logic methodology in order to uncover the relationship that exists between the unemployment rate and the consumer confidence level for a large group of European Union countries, in the period 1995-2015. It is concluded that this relationship is stronger than apparently it looks, especially in certain countries. This result should therefore be used as an extra argument in making economic decisions leading to the diminishment of unemployment, which will boost economic confidence.