Search Results (141)

Service-learning is a community-based learning approach that bridges academic knowledge with practical application through purposeful exploration, action, and reflection. In addition to enhancing academic learning in various disciplines, service-learning cultivates students’ self-awareness, personal values, and social responsibility, preparing them with essential skills for life beyond the classroom. However, due to its experiential nature, service-learning presents challenges for effective assessment. This study provides a concrete example of student reflections structured by the Objective, Reflective, Interpretive, and Decisional (ORID) model in practice. Content analysis was implemented by examining undergraduate students’ end-of-semester reflection papers while volunteering during the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar. The results showed that the model provided a guided and structured format for students to reflect on their service-learning, going beyond reporting on factual details to engaging in profound reflections on the emotional, cognitive, and prospective aspects. Moreover, with the solution aspect added to the model, students could express their creativity, articulating on innovative solutions they proposed to overcome challenges and how they turned the challenges into favorable outcomes. Clearly, the model stands as a powerful tool for educators, offering deeper insights into students’ authentic experiences, fostering comprehensive, critical, and insightful reflection, and thereby facilitating the effective assessment of experiential learning. Full article

Transitioning from childhood into adolescence is an extraordinary time of life, associated with major physical, emotional, cognitive, and social changes and characterized by dynamic development in which interaction with the environment modulates the individual resources responsible for well-being and health. This sensitive period is the time when, in addition to hormonal, metabolic, and neural changes, certain behavioral strategies begin to take shape that will shortly go on to define the emotional, social, and cultural identity of the individual. This narrative review aimed to uncover the crucial processes underlying the transition by identifying processes that are responsible for cognitive, psychosocial, and emotional development, in the absence of disease. For this aim, we highlight (1) the physical, psychological, and social determinants during the transition from childhood to adolescence; (2) the role of health-related variables in resilience or vulnerability mechanisms; and (3) recent school-based strategies to promote health and well-being. Recognizing that health and well-being are the result of the interaction of many biological, psychological, social, cultural, and physical factors will lead to comprehensive health promotion involving all actors joining the growth process, from health professionals and the educational community to parents and community. Furthermore, it is important that psychosocial dimensions are strengthened already during childhood to prevent the onset of frailty and illness in adolescence. Full article

The expressions on human faces reveal the emotions we are experiencing internally. Emotion recognition based on facial expression is one of the subfields of social signal processing. It has several applications in different areas, specifically in the interaction between humans and computers. This study presents a simple CCNN-SVM automated model as a viable approach for FER. The model combines a Convolutional Neural Network for feature extraction, certain image preprocessing techniques, and Support Vector Machine (SVM) for classification. Firstly, the input image is preprocessed using face detection, histogram equalization, gamma correction, and resizing techniques. Secondly, the images go through custom single Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CCNN) to extract deep features. Finally, SVM uses the generated features to perform the classification. The suggested model was trained and tested on four datasets, CK+, JAFFE, KDEF, and FER. These datasets consist of seven primary emotional categories, which encompass anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise, and neutrality for CK+, and include contempt for JAFFE. The model put forward demonstrates commendable performance in comparison to existing facial expression recognition techniques. It achieves an impressive accuracy of $99.3\%$ on the CK+ dataset, $98.4\%$ on the JAFFE dataset, $87.18\%$ on the KDEF dataset, and $88.7\%$ on the FER. Full article

(1) Background: Patients who undergo a medical rehabilitation treatment are often facing a physical, emotional and spiritual crisis, mostly due to pain, loss of limb functionality, the memory of the pre-disease days or questions about their role and value in life. Most of the time, the physician does not have the ability to deal with these issues or to provide the expected responses. The aim of this study was to analyze the patient’s perception on spirituality and faith while going through a medical rehabilitation program. (2) Methods: The current study included 173 patients treated in the Rehabilitation Department of the Clinical Rehabilitation Hospital in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Of them, 91 comprised the study group and were assessed in 2023, while 82 comprised the control group and were assessed in 2007. All patients answered a 34-item questionnaire designed by the authors regarding the role of religion, spirituality and prayer in their post-disease life. (3) Results: The results show that 99% of the patients assessed believe in God, 80% pray every day, 50% have less pain after praying and 44% trust their priest the same as they trust their doctor. When comparing groups, results from 2023 show that more patients pray every day, while fewer are afraid of dying, think their disease is serious or wish for the medical team to pray with them, compared to 2007. (4) Conclusions: The physician should not neglect the faith of the patient and should use it to achieve a better rehabilitation outcome. Full article

In Parade’s End, Ford Madox Ford approaches the experience of trauma in an unusual way—it is no longer just past experiences, but the expectancy of dismal events that become as traumatic. Ford chooses worry for such rendering. In order to make the correlation between suffering and sensibility, he places worry in the lives of his characters, which reflects on Ford’s own life. This discussion will introduce the idea that worry is going to be a major component of Ford’s psychologising of war. I explore this worry-driven sensibility and the ways it is reflected, especially in the characters’ obsession with the anticipation of death and face-forward mourning. Within this loss-filled atmosphere, worry over being killed dominates the narrative and continually feeds the sentiment of mournfulness. The Great War transforms into a Greater War, seeping into the societal realm, where it amplifies the private emotional battles of the characters, centred around worry. Consequently, the narrative highlights the coexistence of these personal and public conflicts, ultimately resulting in both physical and psychological losses throughout the story. Full article

Background: According to the World Health Organization, social isolation, particularly of older adults, is a public health issue endangering the well-being of individuals, families, and communities. Social isolation affects health through biological, behavioral, and psychological pathways and is associated with physical and psychological/emotional well-being, increases morbidity and mortality rates, and lowers quality of life. Purpose: This systematic review examined the relationship between social isolation and physical health, including subjective and objective dimensions, and factors that influence this relationship in adults. Methods: This systematic review examined six electronic databases covering the field of health and human services and included results from 1 January 2017 to 10 March 2023 with key terms including adult social connection or social isolation coupled with health, physical, psychological, emotional, mental, or behavioral. The initial search yielded 925 research articles across all databases and was narrowed to 710 when the decision was made to focus on social isolation and physical health. Covidence was used throughout the retrieval and appraisal process, as provided in a PRISMA flow diagram. Twenty-four studies that scored 90 or above in the appraisal process were included in the systematic review. Results: The studies represented included seven studies conducted in the United States and seventeen studies conducted internationally. Regarding study design, twenty-three studies were quantitative, one was qualitative, and one was mixed methods. The majority of quantitative studies were correlational in design with nine being longitudinal. The majority of studies were based on large national data sets representing in total 298,653 participants aged 50 and older. The results indicate that social isolation is related to increases in inflammatory biomarkers associated with diseases, all-cause mortality, lower expectations of longevity, and frailty. In addition, social isolation was associated with cognitive decline and disruptions in sleep. Poor oral health increased social isolation. The results further indicated that decreased physical performance/function and a decline in physical activity were associated with social isolation, as well as decreased overall physical health, poor health behaviors, and self-care, and decreased health-related quality of life. Further research is warranted to examine the possible bidirectionality of these relationships and possible mediating, moderating, or confounding variables. Implications: Future research is needed to explore the biological and behavioral pathways in which social isolation negatively impacts physical health. Going forward, studies are needed that move beyond descriptive, exploratory methods and integrate data from qualitative and mixed-method designs that will inform the development and testing of a conceptual framework related to social isolation and health. By advancing the science behind social isolation, comprehensive interventions can be identified and tested with implications at the individual, family, community, and societal levels to reduce social isolation, particularly among adults, and improve health and quality of life. Full article

Even though women and questions of gender difference are not a core issue in medieval Eastern Christian–Muslim polemic, there are numerous arguments that go back and forth between Muslims and Christians that revolve around women. In the large corpus of polemical texts from the Middle East between the 8th and the 13th centuries, it can be noted that criticism of the other religion involves pointing out illogicalities and absurdities in each other’s doctrines and rituals. Carefully constructed arguments against the claim to Divine endorsement of the faith of the other party are frequently interlaced with criticism of their alleged immoral behavior. Although women feature mostly in the emotive sections of the polemical compositions, there are also reasoned debates about the issue of gender equality in the eyes of God. The discussion of these texts here brings out a range of diverse ideas about women that function primarily as sources for subsidiary arguments against the religious other. At the same time, this study reveals that these arguments were not invented ad hoc. They show the interconnectedness of works within a corpus of polemical texts that spans five centuries. Full article

The generation of co-speech gestures for digital humans is an emerging area in the field of virtual human creation. Prior research has progressed by using acoustic and semantic information as input and adopting a classification method to identify the person’s ID and emotion for driving co-speech gesture generation. However, this endeavor still faces significant challenges. These challenges go beyond the intricate interplay among co-speech gestures, speech acoustic, and semantics; they also encompass the complexities associated with personality, emotion, and other obscure but important factors. This paper introduces “DiT-Gestures”, a speech-conditional diffusion-based and non-autoregressive transformer-based generative model with the WavLM pre-trained model and a dynamic mask attention network (DMAN). It can produce individual and stylized full-body co-speech gestures by only using raw speech audio, eliminating the need for complex multimodal processing and manual annotation. Firstly, considering that speech audio contains acoustic and semantic features and conveys personality traits, emotions, and more subtle information related to accompanying gestures, we pioneer the adaptation of WavLM, a large-scale pre-trained model, to extract the style from raw audio information. Secondly, we replace the causal mask by introducing a learnable dynamic mask for better local modeling in the neighborhood of the target frames. Extensive subjective evaluation experiments are conducted on the Trinity, ZEGGS, and BEAT datasets to confirm WavLM’s and the model’s ability to synthesize natural co-speech gestures with various styles. Full article

Background: Parents of children with chronic conditions face challenges that go beyond basic care and parenting responsibilities. Parents’ experiences can be influenced by perceived stress, emotional experiences, feelings of helplessness, low sense of self-efficacy, anxiety and depression, reducing their quality of life. It is therefore not surprising that parents of children with chronic illnesses are more likely to experience stress, anxiety and depression than parents of healthy children. A prevalent chronic condition is type 1 diabetes. Methods: Parents (31 with children with type 1 diabetes diagnosis and 71 with children without chronic illness) were recruited to complete the measures of the Brief Symptom Inventory-18 (BSI-18), the Parent Health Locus of Control (PHLOC) and Parenting Sense of Competence (PSOC). Results: Significant differences in depression and internal locus of control were found; there was a positive correlation between internal LOC and efficacy in both samples; furthermore, there was a negative correlation between somatization and satisfaction in the experimental group. Conclusions: The ongoing experiences and challenges faced daily make parents perceive themselves as capable. Active involvement in supporting and managing the needs of child with type 1 diabetes could be a source of empowerment for the parent, contributing to the maintenance of their sense of competence. It is important, therefore, to consider the well-being and perception of the parent at a personal level, regardless of the child’s situation. Full article

This study aimed to investigate two specific behavioral manifestations of the executive attention systems in preschoolers and kindergarteners, beyond the unique contribution of intelligence. We tested post-error slowing [${\overline{RT}}_{Post-error trial}-{\overline{RT}}_{Not post-error trial}$] as a marker of reactive control and delayed disinhibition as a novel marker for proactive control. One hundred and eighty preschool- and kindergarten-aged children, as well as their mothers (final sample: 155 children and 174 mothers), performed an adapted task based on Go/NoGo and Stroop-like paradigms—the emotional day-night task. The children showed reliable post-error slowing and delayed disinhibition (mean size effects of 238.18 ms and 58.31 ms, respectively), while the adult size effects were 40–50% smaller. The post-error slowing effect was present for both sexes in all the tested ages, while the delayed disinhibition effect was present only for girls. Both effects showed large individual differences that became smaller in adulthood. Our findings emphasize the earlier maturation of reactive control compared to proactive control, and the earlier maturation of proactive cognitive control in girls compared to boys. Full article

Schools represent the ideal setting for educating children about the acquisition of active lifestyles seen not only from a health point of view but also from psycho-pedagogical and social perspectives. Based on evidence from scientific literature, there is a need to include physical activity in school routines, especially in primary schools, where the habits learned by children stay with them in their later years and adulthood. With the support of the school medicine service, schools become a favorable context for planning health education sessions aimed at students, with particular reference to prevention. Within teaching, it is necessary to consider the motor area as a fundamental tool for acquiring correct lifestyles, facilitating cognitive development, inclusiveness, and psycho-emotional and socio-relational factors. Schools can play a fundamental role, becoming the key to promoting physical activity at different times of the day, such as during class hours (with active breaks), during breaks, before and after lessons, and by integrating movement into teaching. This review is the result of an in-depth overview of the available literature on the relationship of schools with health and health promotion from a preventive perspective, with awareness of how the issue is being approached and the need for further future reflections that will go hand in hand with the coming changes. Full article

Countless polls, studies and surveys conducted prior to and following the 2016 UK Referendum on Membership of the European Union confirmed immigration to be the key emotive issue for not only the British electorate, but several Western European nations. By critiquing key pieces of EU legislation, Go, Went, Gone (2015) by Jenny Erpenbeck offers a humanising, caustic warning of the troubling politicisation of EU and non-EU migration in Germany, suggesting the ways by which literature can destabilise institutional optics of power and counteract myths surrounding the process of racial othering. Full article

There are many ways people express their reactions in the media. Text data is one of them, for example, comments, reviews, blog posts, messages, etc. Analysis of emotions expressed there is in high demand nowadays for various purposes. This research provides a method of performing sentiment analysis of text information using machine learning. The authors trained a classifier based on the BERT encoder, which recognizes emotions in text messages in English written in chat style. To handle raw chat-style messages, authors developed an enhanced text standardization layer. The list of emotions identified includes admiration, amusement, anger, annoyance, approval, caring, confusion, curiosity, desire, disappointment, disapproval, disgust, embarrassment, excitement, fear, gratitude, grief, joy, love, nervousness, optimism, pride, realization, relief, remorse, sadness, and surprise. The model solves the problem of multiclass multilabel text classification, which means that more than one class can be predicted from one piece of text. The authors trained the model on the GoEmotions dataset, which consists of 54,263 text comments from Reddit. The model reached a macro-averaged F1-Score of 0.50704 in emotions prediction and 0.7349 in sentiments prediction on the testing dataset. The presented model increased the quality of emotions prediction by 10.2% and sentiments prediction by 6.5% in comparison to the baseline approach. Full article

This study explored the association of spousal support and marital satisfaction with the subjective well-being of fathers and mothers using a mediation analysis. Data were gathered from 360 fathers and 338 mothers (aged 25–50 years). Subjective well-being was measured as an outcome using the Japanese version of the World Health Organization-Five Well-Being Index. Marital satisfaction was measured as a mediating variable using the Japanese version of the Marital Relationship Satisfaction Scale. Spousal social support (including instrumental, emotional, and appraisal support) was measured as an independent variable using four-point scales. Control variables were the father’s and mother’s ages, number of children, age of the youngest child, children going to nursery school or kindergarten, use of childcare services, self-evaluated low economic status, and weekday working hours. Among fathers, instrumental and emotional support had significant direct and indirect effects, with the latter mediated by the impact of marital satisfaction on subjective well-being; appraisal support had only significant indirect effects. Among mothers, instrumental support had significant direct and indirect effects; emotional and appraisal support had only significant indirect effects. Our findings indicate that social support from spouses has protective direct and indirect effects on subjective well-being among parents and suggest the need for mutual support between spouses to facilitate effective co-parenting. Full article

The maintenance of psychological well-being (PWB) in the older adult population is a pivotal goal for our rapidly aging society. PWB is a multicomponent construct that can be influenced by several factors in the lifespan. The beneficial role of divergent thinking (DT) and cognitive reserve (CR) in sustaining older subjects’ PWB has been scarcely investigated so far. The present study aims to investigate the relationships between DT, CR, and PWB in a sample of 121 healthy older adults (61 females; M age: 73.39 ± 6.66 years; M education: 11.33 ± 4.81 years). The results highlight that better DT performance predicts higher CR, which mediates an indirect positive effect of DT on emotional competence, one of the PWB factors. It follows that DT and CR can be considered protective factors in aging, and their effects go beyond cognitive functioning, revealing a positive effect even on some PWB components. The practical implications regarding targeted health interventions for prevention in the older adult population to support well-being and promote healthy aging are discussed. Full article