OBSERVATION AND COMPARISON OF MEALTIME BEHAVIORS IN A SAMPLE OF CHILDREN WITH AVOIDANT/RESTRICTIVE FOOD INTAKE DISORDERS AND A CONTROL SAMPLE OF CHILDREN WITH TYPICAL DEVELOPMENT

Despite widespread use of behavioral observations to evaluate child feeding behaviors in research and clinical practice, few studies have comprehensively characterized mealtimes or identified features that differentiate children with and without disordered feeding; these were the aims of the current study. Mealtime observations were conducted for 18 children with avoidant restrictive food intake disorder (ARFID) and 21 typically developing children. Observations were coded inductively, and associations between disorder and observed mealtime actions were examined. Most behaviors were observed across both clinical and nonclinical mealtimes, and many did not differ in frequency between children with and without ARFID. However, significant group differences were observed in the frequencies of behaviors relating to food intake, visual and physical engagement with feeding, and movement during mealtimes. The comparability of behaviors across clinical and nonclinical groups suggests that eating behaviors exist on a continuum from “normal” to “abnormal,” with group differences relating to frequency rather than type of behavior. The behavioral differences observed in this study suggest that identification of children with ARFID should focus on child engagement with food and restlessness during mealtimes. Reliance on emotional and escape‐maintained behaviors will lead to underrecognition of families in need of clinical support.     

The first signs of prospective memory

We conducted a study to examine the impact of motivation and length of delay on performance on prospective memory (PM) tasks in 2-year of children. A total of 158 children aged exactly 24 months were asked to perform a naturalistic PM task. Length of delay (10?min; 35?min) and motivation (high; very high) were between-subjects factors. Two thirds of children had to be excluded from the analysis because of poor retrospective memory for the PM task instructions which were no longer remembered at the end of the session. For the children who did remember the instructions, both motivation and delay had significant effects on PM. Also, their PM performance was reliably above zero, even after the long delay. The findings indicate that when children as young as 24 months are able to remember the PM task instructions they can reliably succeed in PM tasks that are intrinsically motivating for them.     

Food and Sustainability Challenges Under Climate Changes

Plants are permanently impacted by their environments, and their abilities to tolerate multiple fluctuating environmental conditions vary as a function of several genetic and natural factors. Over the past decades, scientific innovations and applications of the knowledge derived from biotechnological investigations to agriculture caused a substantial increase of the yields of many crops. However, due to exacerbating effects of climate change and a growing human population, a crisis of malnutrition may arise in the upcoming decades in some places in the world. So, effective, ethical and managerial regulations and fair policies should be set up and applied at the local and global levels so that Earth may fairly provide the food and living accommodation needed by its inhabitants. To save some energy consumption, electric devices (for e.g., smartphones, laptops, street lights, traffic lights, etc.) should be manufactured to work with solar energy, whenever available, particularly in sunny countries where sun is available most of the time. Such characteristic will save energy and make solar energy-based smartphones and laptops less cumbersome in terms of chargers and plugging issues.     

More emotional facial expressions during episodic than during semantic autobiographical retrieval

There is a substantial body of research on the relationship between emotion and autobiographical memory. Using facial analysis software, our study addressed this relationship by investigating basic emotional facial expressions that may be detected during autobiographical recall. Participants were asked to retrieve 3 autobiographical memories, each of which was triggered by one of the following cue words: happy, sad, and city. The autobiographical recall was analyzed by a software for facial analysis that detects and classifies basic emotional expressions. Analyses showed that emotional cues triggered the corresponding basic facial expressions (i.e., happy facial expression for memories cued by happy). Furthermore, we dissociated episodic and semantic retrieval, observing more emotional facial expressions during episodic than during semantic retrieval, regardless of the emotional valence of cues. Our study provides insight into facial expressions that are associated with emotional autobiographical memory. It also highlights an ecological tool to reveal physiological changes that are associated with emotion and memory.     

The Sense of Quality of Life and Religious Strategies of Coping with Stress in Prison Inmates

The aim of the presented research was to analyze differences in religious strategies of coping with stress in a group of prison inmates characterized by different levels of the sense of quality of life—general, psychophysical, psychosocial, personal, and metaphysical. The participants were 390 males, aged 19–68 years, serving sentences in prisons in Poland. The measures used were the Sense of Quality of Life Questionnaire by M. Stra?-Romanowska and K. I. Pargament’s RCOPE Questionnaire. As expected, individuals with a high sense of quality of life—both general and pertaining to specific dimensions—more often chose positive religious strategies, whereas participants with a low sense of quality of life more often chose negative strategies. The exception was the metaphysical aspect of the quality of life: individuals with a high intensity of this dimension more often chose some of the positive as well as negative religious strategies.     

Kuhn's Structural Revolutions and the Development of Christian Doctrine: A Systematic Discussion

In 1845, John Henry Cardinal Newman wrote a treatise describing the development of Christian doctrine. Since then, his ideas have been challenged, in particular by Protestant theologians who have argued that the development of doctrine does not progress in either a smooth or linear path. In the philosophy of science, Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has challenged the idea that science is purely driven by objective and rational motives. In this paper, Kuhn's ideas are applied to the development of Christian doctrine. Drawing from historical examples, it is shown that Kuhn's contextual approach to describe the progress of science aids in understanding the way doctrines themselves develop. Although this is not the first time that theology and Kuhn have conversed, the notion of doctrinal development being systematically and methodically shown to have parallels with Kuhn's ideas is novel. Ultimately, this work is another important step in building interdisciplinary links between science and theology.     

Voice and persuasion in a banking telemarketing context

Voice has been neglected in research on advertising and persuasion. The present study examined the influence of voice and sex on the credibility of the voice source in a banking telemarketing context as well as with regards to the attitude toward the advertisement, and subjects' behavioral intention. An experiment using voices of a man and a woman was conducted. A recorded mock-telemarketing message consisted of an advertisement for an ATM card offered by a Canadian bank. Subjects were undergraduate students (N=399; 71.6% women, 28.4% men; M age=26.5 yr., SD = 7.4). They completed a questionnaire after hearing the message in telemarketing conditions. Analysis indicated a moderate intensity, an unmarked intonation, and a fast speech rate are associated with a more credible source than the other combinations. Sex was not a significant moderator in the relationship between voice characteristics and source credibility. Voice characteristics significantly affected attitudes toward the advertisement and behavioral intention.     

Effects on memory of early testing and accuracy assessment for central and contextual content

ABSTRACT

Memory for an event is influenced by many factors including retention interval, frequency of assessment, and type of information assessed concerning the event. We examined the usefulness of observer memory for contextual information in assessing accuracy of memory for central information. Participants viewed a video of a purse being stolen and were asked questions concerning the perpetrator and surrounding context of the event, including where and when the event occurred and who else was present. Participants tested immediately after seeing the video exhibited better memory than those tested for the first time 48 hours after the event. Additionally, testing immediately after viewing the video reduced forgetting over the 48-hour delay (i.e. early testing attenuated subsequent forgetting). Moreover, memory for the context of the event correlated positively with memory of the central information (i.e. perpetrator), and memory concerning other people at the event tended to have the highest correlation with perpetrator memory.     

‘Faking brands’: Consumer responses to counterfeiting

Whilst counterfeiting is regarded as one of the ‘oldest crimes in history’, contextualised treatments of Middle East and North Africa (MENA region) are rare despite growing interconnections with the global economy. Accordingly, this paper explores consumer motivations to purchase counterfeit products and identifies possible counter‐influences. Data from a survey of 400 respondents drawn from Morocco was tested with logistic regression models to determine the significant factors that trigger responsiveness and deterrence to counterfeit products. The tests were based on three product categories: clothing, cosmetics and mobile phones. Additionally, consumer demographics and selected social triggers were evaluated to build a profile of consumers typically likely to consider buying (or avoiding) counterfeit goods. Results show that concerns related to health, disappointment risk and integrity are the most significant countervailing factors on behavioural intentions towards purchasing counterfeits. On a socio‐demographic level, it was found that low‐income consumers are more positively disposed to buying counterfeits. Gender also seems to have an explanatory force. Women with higher educational backgrounds are less likely than men to consider buying counterfeit goods. For all the products evaluated, quality and price consistently proved the most important factors driving the intention to buy counterfeits. The implications are highlighted; combating counterfeiting is not an exclusive preserve of any single entity (governments, business or para‐governmental agencies) but a shared responsibility. There is a lot at stake for consumers, manufacturers and the industrial nations if the menace is not effectively checked. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Multicriteria Optimization Technique for Optimal Design of Orthotropic Bridges

The design improvement of large‐scale structures such as cable stayed and suspension bridges with large spans is one of the major engineering optimization problems faced by design engineers. In many real‐life engineering design problems, it is necessary to carry out large‐scale experimental physical models for only one prototype to construct the feasible solution set that is too expensive and not practical. For these reasons, an experimental search for optimal solutions is often not carried out at all. This paper presents a technique for multicriteria analysis, which involve the finite element analysis of the prototype in the optimization process. The improvement of the Suez Canal Bridge in Egypt is introduced as a real‐life large‐scale case study. The parameter space investigation method, the visual basic for application programming language, and Femap as finite element analysis software provide an implementation tools to construct the feasible and Pareto solution sets for the studied bridge. An efficient combination between the parameter space investigation method and the finite element programme was successfully investigated to obtain the Pareto solution set. This study shows possibility to apply the multicriteria optimization method for more applications on different large‐scale structural systems in the future. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.