Objectives Our aim was to measure ambulance sickness absence rates over time, comparing ambulance services and investigate the predictability of rates for future forecasting. Setting All English ambulance services, UK. Design We used a time series design analysing published monthly National Health Service staff sickness rates by gender, age, job role and region, comparing the 10 regional ambulance services in England between 2009 and 2018. Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) and Seasonal ARIMA (SARIMA) models were developed using Stata V.14.2 and trends displayed graphically....

Although online dating allows us to access a wider pool of romantic partners, choice could induce an ‘assessment mindset’, orienting us toward ‘optimal’ or alternative partners and undermining our willingness to commit or remain committed to someone. Contextual changes in judgements of facial attractiveness can shed light on this issue. We directly test this proposal by activating a context where participants imagine choosing between items in picture slideshows (dates or equally attractive desserts), observing its effects on attraction to i) faces on second viewing and ii) novel versus familiar identities. Single women, relative to single men, were less attracted to the same face on second viewing (Experiments 2 and 4), with this sex difference only observed after imagining not ‘matching’ with any romantic dates in our slideshow (i.e., low choice, Experiment 4). No equivalent sex differences were observed in the absence of experimental choice slideshows (Experiment 3), and these effects (Experiment 2) were not moderated by slideshow content (romantic dates or desserts) or choice set size (five versus fifteen items). Following slideshows, novel faces were more attractive than familiar faces (Experiment 1), with this effect stronger in men than in women (Experiment 2), and stronger across both sexes after imagining ‘matching’ with desired romantic dates (i.e., high choice, Experiment 4). Our findings suggest that familiarity does not necessarily ‘breed liking’ when we have the autonomy to choose, revealing lower-order socio-cognitive mechanisms that could underpin online interactions, such as when browsing profiles and deciding how to allocate effort to different users....

In the last decade the term culture war has become hard to avoid. If it is not yet the buzzword of the first part of the twenty-first century, it soon will be. Culture wars seem to be around us everywhere. Each passing week brings some new mention of an outbreak in a public institution, civic space or political arena in some part of the globe. Culture wars are the phenomenon we cannot seem to shake. Battle lines are drawn, rhetorical tools are sharpened and social media awash with vitriol and moralising, and seemingly unbridgeable social gaps. If the immediate post-Cold War period did usher in an era of universal global liberalism, decades on it is now far in the distance, only visible in the rear-view mirror. Instead, around us lie social and political fault lines featuring competing visions of what should be the appropriate normative basis upon which societies should be constituted. They are debates that focus on belonging, on citizenship, on rights and identities....

Beveridge claimed that ‘want’ was ‘in some ways the easiest  to attack’ and yet 80 years after his report was published, poverty persists and indeed, has been increasing in recent years. In this article, we review both the key features of the Beveridge Report in relation to poverty and its implementation by the Labour government 1945–51, before turning to an analysis of how social security policy has changed since then. We then review changes in poverty levels since World War Two and attitudes to poverty. We conclude that Beveridge's plan helped to reduce poverty in the immediate post-war years not least because of full employment. Nevertheless, poverty was not eradicated even at this time due to low levels of wages in work and low levels of benefits out of work. Since then, a number of reforms have generally moved further away from the Beveridge plan including a renewed focus on means testing and cuts in benefit levels. These have also contributed to increased levels of poverty, particularly for those of working age in recent years....

Recent advances in software and hardware have allowed eye tracking to move away from static images to more ecologically relevant video streams. The analysis of eye tracking data for such dynamic stimuli, however, is not without challenges. The frame by frame coding of regions of interest (ROIs) is labour intensive, and computer vision techniques to automatically code such ROIs are not yet mainstream, restricting the use of such stimuli. Combined with the more general problem of defining relevant ROIs for video frames, methods are needed that facilitate data analysis. Here we present a first evaluation of an easy-to-implement data-driven method with the potential to address these issues. To test the new method, we examined the differences in eye movements of self-reported politically left- or right-wing leaning participants to video clips of left- and right-wing politicians. The results show that our method can accurately predict group membership on the basis of eye movement patterns, isolate video clips which best distinguish people on the political left-right spectrum and reveal the section of each video clip with the largest group differences. Our methodology thereby aids the understanding of group differences in gaze behaviour, and the identification of critical stimuli for follow-up studies or for use in saccade diagnosis....

Background The use of analogies as reasoning tools that play a key role in human cognition at all ages has been of interest to educators, scientists, and philosophers ever since Aristotle. Indeed, research has consistently found that analogies provided by teachers can, and do, play an important role in facilitating student understanding of scientific ideas. Despite the effectiveness of teacher provided analogies little research has been undertaken on the use, and effectiveness, of student self-generated analogies in helping them to understand novel situations. Purpose This article reports on a cross-age study of student prediction-making in novel situations that investigated the basis and justification that students provided when asked to make predictions about novel situations. The study investigated whether they self-generated analogies (SGAs) in order to make their predictions and, in particular, whether such predictions and justifications were based on their use of SGAs....

The Central Asia Program invites you to the book launch event Wednesday, September 22, 2021 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM (EST)...

Objective In this study, we aimed to understand the self-regulatory processes facilitating optimal experiences in running by integrating models of self-regulation with flow and clutch states. Method Using an event-focused approach, we interviewed 16 runners less than one day on average after recreational running activities (M = 22.17 hours later, range = 3–46) they described as positive, rewarding experiences. Our analysis drew on principles for thematic and connecting analyses. Results We structured our analysis of the self-regulatory processes facilitating flow and clutch states into three overarching themes: forethought; monitoring; and control. Flow was facilitated by intrinsic experiential motives and non-specific goals, whereas clutch states involved an intrinsic motive to accomplish specific goals. The perceived ease and pleasure during flow motivated runners to continue this experience, which appeared to be aided by active and involuntary distraction. Conversely, clutch states were described as more effortful and less pleasant during the run, with active self-regulation strategies used to exert control over cognition and manage feelings of difficulty. Attending to specific outward or internal sensory stimuli appeared to initiate changes that contributed to the disruption of flow, although many runners described transitioning into a clutch state after flow disruption. No runner reported transitioning from a clutch state into flow....