The Social Costs in Communication Hiccups Between Native and Nonnative Speakers

It is well-established that native speakers perceive nonnative speakers with strong foreign accents, compared with those with a more nativelike accent, as less intelligent and competent, less ambitious and dependable as coworkers, and less comfortable around native speakers. But little is known about how nonnative speakers themselves are affected when communication hiccups—often due to incorrect or accented pronunciations—occur in their conversations with native speakers. In this experiment, mispronunciations of an English word were elicited from native Chinese speakers in phone conversations via the Internet with an American English speaker, who then either asked for clarification of the word or showed no confusion about the word but asked about something else. Chinese speakers’ reactions were measured using a combination of self-reports, facial affective coding, and skin-conductance responses. When the American asked for clarification—compared with when he did not—Chinese speakers were left feeling more anxious, embarrassed, and unsure of their English abilities, as well as feeling less positive about the American, finding him less attractive socially and their conversation with him less enjoyable.postprin

Challenges in Creating a Disaster Resilient Built Environment

With the increase in occurrences of high impact disasters, the concept of risk reduction and resilience is widely recognised. Recent disasters have highlighted the exposure of urban cities to natural disasters and emphasised the need of making cities resilient to disasters. Built environment plays an important role in every city and need to be functional and operational at a time of a disaster and is expected to provide protection to people and other facilities. However, recent disasters have highlighted the vulnerability of the built assets to natural disasters and therefore it is very much important to focus on creating a disaster resilient built environment within cities. However the process of making a disaster resilient built environment is a complex process where many challenges are involved. Accordingly the paper aims at exploring the challenges involved in building a disaster resilient built environment. Paper discusses the findings of some expert interviews and three case studies which have been conducted in Sri Lanka by selecting three cities which are potentially vulnerable to threats posed by natural hazards. The empirical evidence revealed, lack of regulatory frameworks; unplanned cities and urbanisation; old building stocks and at risk infrastructure; unauthorised structures; institutional arrangements; inadequate capacities of municipal councils; lack of funding; inadequacy of qualified human resources; and corruption and unlawful activities as major challenges for creating a disaster resilient built environment within Sri Lankan cities. The paper proposes a set of recommendations to address these prevailing concerns and to build a more resilient built environment within cities

How Intense Policy Demanders Shape Postreform Politics: Evidence from the Affordable Care Act

The implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has been a politically volatile process. The ACA\u27s institutional design and delayed feedback effects created a window of opportunity for its partisan opponents to launch challenges at both the federal and state level. Yet as recent research suggests, postreform politics depends on more than policy feedback alone; rather, it is shaped by the partisan and interest-group environment. We argue that “intense policy demanders” played an important role in defining the policy alternatives that comprised congressional Republicans\u27 efforts to repeal and replace the ACA. To test this argument, we drew on an original data set of bill introductions in the House of Representatives between 2011 and 2016. Our analysis suggests that business contributions and political ideology affected the likelihood that House Republicans would introduce measures repealing significant portions of the ACA. A secondary analysis shows that intense policy demanders also shaped the vote on House Republicans\u27 initial ACA replacement plan. These findings highlight the role intense policy demanders can play in shaping the postreform political agenda

'Reflexive Expectations' in EU-China Relations: A media analysis approach

To reverse the downturn in and develop EU–China relations requires mutual understanding. However, the opaque nature of Chinese politics makes it difficult to track China's expectations and its changing views of the EU and their relationship. This paper examines the official Chinese media discourse on the EU's ‘actorness’ and partnership with China. This helps to bridge the gap between international relations and media studies by linking government foreign relations to media discourse. It argues that China's relations with the EU should be characterized neither as a case of a ‘Capability–Expectations Gap’ (Hill, 1993) nor as an ‘Expectation Deficit’ (Tsuruoka, 2008), but should rather be seen as a matter of ‘Reflexive Expectations’ by China. The media analysis shows that China's changing national identity, interests and perception of the EU's capability at various times and in various situations influence expectations

The Herts and Minds study: Evaluating the effectiveness of Mentalization-Based Treatment (MBT) as an intervention for children in foster care with emotional and/or behavioural problems: a phase II, feasibility, randomised controlled trial.

Trial registration at https://doi.org/10.1186/ISRCTN90349442 © The Authors 2017. Open Access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. Nick Midgley, Sarah Jane Besser, Helen Dye, Pasco Fearon, tim Gale, Kiri Jefferies-Sewell, Karen Irvine, Joyce Robinson, Solange Wyatt, David Wellsted and Sally Wood, 'The Herts and minds study: evaluating the effectiveness of mentalization-based treatment (MBT) as an intervention for children in foster care with emotional and/or behavioural problems: a phase II, feasibility, randomised controlled trial', Pilot and Feasibility Studies, Vol. 3(12, February 2017. The published version is available online at doi: 10.1186/s40814-017-0127-xBackground A significant proportion of children in the social care system in England present with mental health problems, with the majority experiencing some form of emotional and behavioural difficulties. The most effective treatments for these children are currently unknown, partly due to a lack of robust, controlled studies. Researchers have identified a number of obstacles to conducting well-designed research with this population, making the need to test the feasibility of a randomised controlled trial especially important. Methods/design This protocol outlines a two-arm, randomised control feasibility trial to explore the acceptability and credibility of mentalization-based treatment (MBT) as a treatment for reducing emotional and behavioural difficulties in looked after children and to test the possibility of addressing a number of methodological challenges to conducting high-quality research with this population. MBT is a relatively new intervention which, in the adaptation of the model tested here, includes many of the features of therapy identified in NICE guidelines as necessary to support children in care. The two arms are MBT and usual clinical care (UCC). The study will take place in Hertfordshire Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust with follow-up at 12 and 24 weeks. Discussion This study will aim to ascertain whether it is worthwhile and feasible to progress to testing the intervention in a full-scale definitive randomised controlled trial (RCT). This study therefore has the potential to improve our understanding of the obstacles to conducting high-quality research with this very vulnerable population, and in the medium term, could help to improve the stability of foster placements and the emotional well-being of children in care. Trial registration ISRCTN90349442Peer reviewe

Austria announces unlimited guarantee for bank savings

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