Effects of different simplified milk recording methods on genetic evaluation with test-day animal model

The aims of the present study were to compare estimated breeding values (EBV) for milk yield using different testing schemes with a test-day animal model and to evaluate the effect of different testing schemes on the ranking of top sheep. Alternative recording schemes that use less information than that currently obtained with a monthly test-day schedule were employed to estimate breeding values. A random regression animal mixed model that used a spline function of days in milk was fitted. EBVs obtained with alternative recording schemes showed different degrees of Spearman correlation with EBVs obtained using the monthly recording scheme. These correlations ranged from 0.77 to 0.92. A reduction in accuracy and intensity of selection could be anticipated if these alternative schemes are used; more research in this area is needed to reduce the costs of test-day recording

Development of a new screening tool for cyber pornography. Psychometric properties of the Cyber Pornography Addiction Test (CYPAT)

Objective: Internet pornography addiction typically involves viewing, downloading and trading online pornography or engagement in adult fantasy role-play. There are some well-validated inventories measuring perceived addiction to internet pornography but these instruments are often too long for a functionally use and fast scoring. The aim of this study was to evaluate the psychometric properties of the cyber pornography addiction test (CYPAT), a new, brief, screening measure for assessing cyber pornography.Method: Participants of this study completed the CYPAT, the CPUI, the TAS-20 and the FACES-IV. Descriptive statistics were calculated and Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) were applied.Results: Cronbach's alpha coefficient suggested excellent reliability of the measure. Results of this study revealed also good construct, convergent and divergent validity.Conclusions: CYPAT is a brief self-report screening scale composed of 11 items scored on a five-point Likert scale with good psychometrics properties. The implications of these findings for future theoretical and empirical research in this field are discusse

Investigating hyper-vigilance for social threat of lonely children

The hypothesis that lonely children show hypervigilance for social threat was examined in a series of three studies that employed different methods including advanced eye-tracking technology. Hypervigilance for social threat was operationalized as hostility to ambiguously motivated social exclusion in a variation of the hostile attribution paradigm (Study 1), scores on the Children’s Rejection-Sensitivity Questionnaire (Study 2), and visual attention to socially rejecting stimuli (Study 3). The participants were 185 children (11 years-7 months to 12 years-6 months), 248 children (9 years-4 months to 11 years-8 months) and 140 children (8 years-10 months to 12 years-10 months) in the three studies, respectively. Regression analyses showed that, with depressive symptoms covaried, there were quadratic relations between loneliness and these different measures of hypervigilance to social threat. As hypothesized, only children in the upper range of loneliness demonstrated elevated hostility to ambiguously motivated social exclusion, higher scores on the rejection sensitivity questionnaire, and disengagement difficulties when viewing socially rejecting stimuli. We found that very lonely children are hypersensitive to social threat

The quality of political information

The article conceptualizes the quality of political information and shows how the concept can be used for empirical research. I distinguish three aspects of quality (intelligibility, relevance, validity) and use them to judge the constituent foundations of political information, that is component claims (statements of alleged facts) and connection claims (argumentative statements created by causally linking two component claims). The resulting conceptual map thus entails six manifestations of information quality (component claimintelligibility, connection claim intelligibility, component claimrelevance, connection claim relevance, component claim validity, and connection claim validity). I explain how the conceptual map can be used to make sense of the eclectic variety of existing research, and how it can advance new empirical research, as a guide for determining variation in information quality, as a conceptual template for the analysis of different types of political messages and their common quality deficiencies, and as a generator of new research questions and theoretical expectations

Aging is associated with positive responding to neutral information but reduced recovery from negative information

Studies on aging and emotion suggest an increase in reported positive affect, a processing bias of positive over negative information, as well as increasingly adaptive regulation in response to negative events with advancing age. These findings imply that older individuals evaluate information differently, resulting in lowered reactivity to, and/or faster recovery from, negative information, while maintaining more positive responding to positive information. We examined this hypothesis in an ongoing study on Midlife in the US (MIDUS II) where emotional reactivity and recovery were assessed in a large number of respondents (N = 159) from a wide age range (36–84 years). We recorded eye-blink startle magnitudes and corrugator activity during and after the presentation of positive, neutral and negative pictures. The most robust age effect was found in response to neutral stimuli, where increasing age is associated with a decreased corrugator and eyeblink startle response to neutral stimuli. These data suggest that an age-related positivity effect does not essentially alter the response to emotion-laden information, but is reflected in a more positive interpretation of affectively ambiguous information. Furthermore, older women showed reduced corrugator recovery from negative pictures relative to the younger women and men, suggesting that an age-related prioritization of well-being is not necessarily reflected in adaptive regulation of negative affect

Spreading in Social Systems: Reflections

In this final chapter, we consider the state-of-the-art for spreading in social systems and discuss the future of the field. As part of this reflection, we identify a set of key challenges ahead. The challenges include the following questions: how can we improve the quality, quantity, extent, and accessibility of datasets? How can we extract more information from limited datasets? How can we take individual cognition and decision making processes into account? How can we incorporate other complexity of the real contagion processes? Finally, how can we translate research into positive real-world impact? In the following, we provide more context for each of these open questions.Comment: 7 pages, chapter to appear in "Spreading Dynamics in Social Systems"; Eds. Sune Lehmann and Yong-Yeol Ahn, Springer Natur

Longitudinal genetic analysis for loneliness in Dutch twins.

In previous studies we obtained evidence that variation in loneliness has a genetic component. Based on adult twin data, the heritability estimate for loneliness, which was assessed as an ordinal trait, was 48%. These analyses were done on loneliness scores averaged over items ('I feel lonely' and 'Nobody loves me') and over time points. In this article we present a longitudinal analysis of loneliness data assessed in 5 surveys (1991 through 2002) in Dutch twins (N = 8389) for the two separate items of the loneliness scale. From the longitudinal growth modeling it was found sufficient to have non-zero variance for the intercept only, while the other effects (linear, quadratic and cubic slope) had zero variance. For the item 'I feel lonely' we observed an increasing age trend up to age 30, followed by a decline to age 50. Heritability for individual differences in the intercept was estimated at 77%. For the item 'Nobody loves me' no significant trend over age was seen; the heritability of the intercept was estimated at 70%

ELVIS: Entertainment-led video summaries

© ACM, 2010. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications, 6(3): Article no. 17 (2010) http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1823746.1823751Video summaries present the user with a condensed and succinct representation of the content of a video stream. Usually this is achieved by attaching degrees of importance to low-level image, audio and text features. However, video content elicits strong and measurable physiological responses in the user, which are potentially rich indicators of what video content is memorable to or emotionally engaging for an individual user. This article proposes a technique that exploits such physiological responses to a given video stream by a given user to produce Entertainment-Led VIdeo Summaries (ELVIS). ELVIS is made up of five analysis phases which correspond to the analyses of five physiological response measures: electro-dermal response (EDR), heart rate (HR), blood volume pulse (BVP), respiration rate (RR), and respiration amplitude (RA). Through these analyses, the temporal locations of the most entertaining video subsegments, as they occur within the video stream as a whole, are automatically identified. The effectiveness of the ELVIS technique is verified through a statistical analysis of data collected during a set of user trials. Our results show that ELVIS is more consistent than RANDOM, EDR, HR, BVP, RR and RA selections in identifying the most entertaining video subsegments for content in the comedy, horror/comedy, and horror genres. Subjective user reports also reveal that ELVIS video summaries are comparatively easy to understand, enjoyable, and informative

Loneliness, social relations and health and wellbeing in deprived communities

There is growing policy concern about the extent of loneliness in advanced societies, and its prevalence among various social groups. This study looks at loneliness among people living in deprived communities, where there may be additional barriers to social engagement including low incomes, fear of crime, poor services and transient populations. The aim was to examine the prevalence of loneliness, and also its associations with different types of social contacts and forms of social support, and its links to self-reported health and wellbeing in the population group. The method involved a cross-sectional survey of 4,302 adults across 15 communities, with the data analysed using multinomial logistic regression controlling for sociodemographics, then for all other predictors within each domain of interest. Frequent feelings of loneliness were more common among those who: had contact with family monthly or less; had contact with neighbours weekly or less; rarely talked to people in the neighbourhood; and who had no available sources of practical or emotional support. Feelings of loneliness were most strongly associated with poor mental health, but were also associated with long-term problems of stress, anxiety and depression, and with low mental wellbeing, though to a lesser degree. The findings are consistent with a view that situational loneliness may be the product of residential structures and resources in deprived areas. The findings also show that neighbourly behaviours of different kinds are important for protecting against loneliness in deprived communities. Familiarity within the neighbourhood, as active acquaintance rather than merely recognition, is also important. The findings are indicative of several mechanisms that may link loneliness to health and wellbeing in our study group: loneliness itself as a stressor; lonely people not responding well to the many other stressors in deprived areas; and loneliness as the product of weak social buffering to protect against stressors

Childhood loneliness as a predictor of adolescent depressive symptoms: an 8-year longitudinal study

Childhood loneliness is characterised by children’s perceived dissatisfaction with aspects of their social relationships. This 8-year prospective study investigates whether loneliness in childhood predicts depressive symptoms in adolescence, controlling for early childhood indicators of emotional problems and a sociometric measure of peer social preference. 296 children were tested in the infant years of primary school (T1 5 years of age), in the upper primary school (T2 9 years of age) and in secondary school (T3 13 years of age). At T1, children completed the loneliness assessment and sociometric interview. Their teachers completed externalisation and internalisation rating scales for each child. At T2, children completed a loneliness assessment, a measure of depressive symptoms, and the sociometric interview. At T3, children completed the depressive symptom assessment. An SEM analysis showed that depressive symptoms in early adolescence (age 13) were predicted by reports of depressive symptoms at age 8, which were themselves predicted by internalisation in the infant school (5 years). The interactive effect of loneliness at 5 and 9, indicative of prolonged loneliness in childhood, also predicted depressive symptoms at age 13. Parent and peer-related loneliness at age 5 and 9, peer acceptance variables, and duration of parent loneliness did not predict depression. Our results suggest that enduring peer-related loneliness during childhood constitutes an interpersonal stressor that predisposes children to adolescent depressive symptoms. Possible mediators are discussed