Religiosity and its association with positive and negative emotions among college students from Algeria

To explore the associations between religiosity and both positive and negative emotions and traits, a sample of 244 volunteer Muslim college students from Algeria was recruited. The students responded to five self-rating scales to assess religiosity, physical health, mental health, happiness, and satisfaction with life, in addition to the Arabic Scale of Optimism and Pessimism, and the Kuwait University Anxiety Scale. Religiosity and satisfaction with life were higher among women than men. Among men, religiosity was significantly correlated only with mental health. However, in women, religiosity was significantly and positively correlated with physical health, mental health, happiness, satisfaction with life, and optimism, whereas religiosity correlated negatively with both anxiety and pessimism. Factor analysis yielded a single bipolar factor labelled positive emotions and religiosity vs. neurotic tendency (anxiety and pessimism) in women. Two orthogonal factors were extracted in men: positive vs. negative traits of mental health, and religiosity. The present results are compatible with the wider literature on the association between religion and positive variables among a Muslim context.     

A New VNS Metaheuristic Using MADS as a Local Optimizer

We propose a new hybrid metaheuristic VNSMADS that is an implementation of the Variable Neighbourhood Search (VNS) algorithm with the Mesh Adaptive Direct Search (MADS) as the local search. Because MADS is a Derivative‐Free Optimization method, the targeted problems may be non‐smooth on black box functions possessing several local optima. Constraints other than bounds on the variables are not considered. VNSMADS is applied on a real‐world problem from Finance: the portfolio selection problem using the investor preferences. Numerical results show the efficiency of our approach. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.