scholarly journals Hedonism and the choice of everyday activities

2016 ◽  
Vol 113 (35) ◽  
pp. 9769-9773 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maxime Taquet ◽  
Jordi Quoidbach ◽  
Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye ◽  
Martin Desseilles ◽  
James J. Gross

Most theories of motivation have highlighted that human behavior is guided by the hedonic principle, according to which our choices of daily activities aim to minimize negative affect and maximize positive affect. However, it is not clear how to reconcile this idea with the fact that people routinely engage in unpleasant yet necessary activities. To address this issue, we monitored in real time the activities and moods of over 28,000 people across an average of 27 d using a multiplatform smartphone application. We found that people’s choices of activities followed a hedonic flexibility principle. Specifically, people were more likely to engage in mood-increasing activities (e.g., play sports) when they felt bad, and to engage in useful but mood-decreasing activities (e.g., housework) when they felt good. These findings clarify how hedonic considerations shape human behavior. They may explain how humans overcome the allure of short-term gains in happiness to maximize long-term welfare.

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Glenn Kiekens ◽  
Penelope Hasking ◽  
Matthew Nock ◽  
Mark Edward Boyes ◽  
Olivia J Kirtley ◽  
...  

Introduction: Although research over the past decade has resulted in significantly increased knowledge about distal risk factors for non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI), little is known about short-term (proximal) factors that predict NSSI thoughts and behaviors. Drawing on contemporaneous theories of NSSI, as well as the concept of ideation-to-action, the present study clarifies (a) real-time factors that predict NSSI thoughts and (b) the extent to which theoretically important momentary factors (i.e., negative affect, positive affect, and self-efficacy to resist NSSI) predict NSSI behavior in daily life, beyond NSSI thoughts.Methods: Using Experience Sampling Methodology (ESM), intensive longitudinal data was obtained from 30 young adults with frequent NSSI episodes in the last year. Participants completed assessments up to eight times per day for 12 consecutive days (signal-contingent sampling). This resulted in the collection of 2,222 assessments (median compliance = 79.2%) during which 591 NSSI thoughts and 270 NSSI behaviors were recorded. Using the dynamic structural equation modeling framework, multilevel vector autoregressive models were constructed. Results: Within the same assessment, negative affect was positively associated with NSSI thoughts, whereas positive affect and self-efficacy to resist NSSI were each negatively associated with NSSI thoughts. Across assessments, higher-than-usual negative affect and self-efficacy to resist NSSI were predictive of short-term change in NSSI thoughts. While fluctuations in both negative affect and positive affect prospectively predicted NSSI behavior, these factors became non-significant in models that controlled for the predictive effect of NSSI thoughts. In contrast, self-efficacy to resist NSSI incrementally predicted a lower probability of engaging in NSSI, above and beyond NSSI thoughts. Discussion: This study provides preliminary evidence that affective fluctuations may uniquely predict NSSI thoughts but not NSSI behaviors, and point to the role of personal belief in the ability to resist NSSI in preventing NSSI behavior. These findings illustrate the need to differentiate between the development of NSSI thoughts and the progression from NSSI thoughts to behavior, as these are likely distinct processes, with different predictors.


Author(s):  
Alexia Barrable ◽  
David Booth ◽  
Dylan Adams ◽  
Gary Beauchamp

Nature connection, which describes a positive relationship between humans and the rest of nature, has been recognised as a worthwhile goal of all education. Given its association with wellbeing, as well as the fact that it can predict ecological behaviours in children, there have been several calls for it to become central to environmental education, and an important tool in tackling climate change. Previous research has reported the success of short-term interventions in increasing nature connection in children, but to date no empirical studies have looked at how mindful engagement with nature can promote both nature connection and positive affect. This study took place in a nature reserve in Wales and included n = 74 children, aged 9–10, who took part in three mindful activities. Pre- and post- measures included nature connection and positive/negative affect. Analysis showed a significant small to medium effect of the activity on nature connection. Moreover, positive affect significantly increased post-activity, while negative affect showed a small decrease.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Wan ◽  
Lorraine McIntyre ◽  
Debra Kent ◽  
Dennis Leong ◽  
Sarah B Henderson

BACKGROUND Data from poison centers have the potential to be valuable for public health surveillance of long-term trends, short-term aberrations from those trends, and poisonings occurring in near-real-time. This information can enable long-term prevention via programs and policies and short-term control via immediate public health response. Over the past decade, there has been an increasing use of poison control data for surveillance in the United States, Europe, and New Zealand, but this resource still remains widely underused. OBJECTIVE The British Columbia (BC) Drug and Poison Information Centre (DPIC) is one of five such services in Canada, and it is the only one nested within a public health agency. This study aimed to demonstrate how DPIC data are used for routine public health surveillance in near-real-time using the case study of its alerting system for illness related to consumption of shellfish (ASIRCS). METHODS Every hour, a connection is opened between the WBM software Visual Dotlab Enterprise, which holds the DPIC database, and the R statistical computing environment. This platform is used to extract, clean, and merge all necessary raw data tables into a single data file. ASIRCS automatically and retrospectively scans a 24-hour window within the data file for new cases related to illnesses from shellfish consumption. Detected cases are queried using a list of attributes: the caller location, exposure type, reasons for the exposure, and a list of keywords searched in the clinical notes. The alert generates a report that is tailored to the needs of food safety specialists, who then assess and respond to detected cases. RESULTS The ASIRCS system alerted on 79 cases between January 2015 and December 2016, and retrospective analysis found 11 cases that were missed. All cases were reviewed by food safety specialists, and 58% (46/79) were referred to designated regional health authority contacts for follow-up. Of the 42% (33/79) cases that were not referred to health authorities, some were missing follow-up information, some were triggered by allergies to shellfish, and some were triggered by shellfish-related keywords appearing in the case notes for nonshellfish-related cases. Improvements were made between 2015 and 2016 to reduce the number of cases with missing follow-up information. CONCLUSIONS The surveillance capacity is evident within poison control data as shown from the novel use of DPIC data for identifying illnesses related to shellfish consumption in BC. The further development of surveillance programs could improve and enhance response to public health emergencies related to acute illnesses, chronic diseases, and environmental exposures.


Author(s):  
Tzu-Chieh Hung ◽  
Kuei-Yuan Chan

Implementing microgrids has become a current trend in the electric utility industry to either improve system reliability or energy access for energy sustainability. This study proposes a probability-based strategy for both long- and short-term power dispatch with wind and load uncertainty. The long-term power dispatch is used to determine a suitable capacity of energy storage, and the short-term power dispatch is used for real-time operation. For both short- and long-term power dispatch, the trends of wind energy and electricity demand are extracted using the wavelet packet analysis method and the moving average technique. The uncertainties from wind speed and power generation data are modeled with log-normal and extreme value distributions, respectively. From the obtained power dispatch and model forecasting, the capacity of energy storage is determined. To validate the proposed approach, a real-time operating simulation is used as a case study to observe the behavior of the wind-integrated electrical system. Results show that the proposed method can estimate the uncertainty variation range of wind energy and the state of charge of energy storage effectively.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Shahzad Shabbir ◽  
Muhammad Adnan Ayub ◽  
Farman Ali Khan ◽  
Jeffrey Davis

Purpose Short-term motivation encompasses specific, challenging and attainable goals that develop in the limited timespan. On the other hand, long-term motivation indicates a sort of continuing commitment that is required to complete assigned task. As short-term motivational problems span for a limited period of time, such as a session, therefore, they need to be addressed in real time to keep the learner engaged in the learning process. Similarly, long-term learners’ motivation plays an equally important role to retain the learner in the long run and minimize the risk of dropout. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to incorporate a comprehensive learner motivation model that is based on short-term and long-term aspects of the learners' motivation. This approach enables Web-based educational systems to identify the real-time motivational state of the learner and provide personalized interventions to keep the learners engaged in learning process. Design/methodology/approach Recent research regarding personalized Web-based educational systems demonstrates learner’s motivation to be an essential component of the learning model. This is because of the fact that low motivation results in either students’ less engagement or complete drop out from the learning activities. A learner motivation model is considered to be a set of perceptions and beliefs that the system has developed about a learner. This includes both short-term and long-term motivations of leaners. Findings This study proposed a framework of a domain independent learners’ motivation model based on firm educational theories. The proposed framework consists of two modules. The primary module deals with real-time identification of motivation and logging off activities such as login, forum participation and adherence to assessment deadline. Secondary module maintains the profile of leaners associated with both short-term and long-term motivation. A study was conducted to verify the impact of learners’ motivation model and personalized interventional strategies based on proposed model, using Systematical Information Education Method assessment standards. The results show an increase in motivational index and the characteristics associated with motivation during the conducted study. Originality/value Motivational diagnosis is important for both traditional classrooms and Web-based education systems. It is one of the major elements that contribute in the success of the learning process. However, dropout rate among online students is very high, which leads to incorporate motivational elements in more personalized way because motivated students will retain the course until they successfully complete it. Hence, identifying learner’s motivation, updating learners’ motivation model based on this identification and providing personalized interventions are the key for the success of Web-based educational systems.


1987 ◽  
Vol 112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth W. Stephens

AbstractFor a number of years, nuclear regulators have grappled with difficult questions such as: “How safe is safe enough?” Such issues take on new dimensions in the long time-frame of high-level waste disposal.Many of the challenges facing regulators involve assessment of long-term materials performance. Because real-time experiments cannot be conducted, it is necessary to rely extensively on modeling. This raises issues regarding the extent to which long-term extrapolations of short-term data are justified, the question of how closely models must represent reality to be trusted, and practical matters such as methods for validating unique computer codes.Issues such as these illustrate how regulators must make decisions in a climate of uncertainty. Methods used by non-technical disciplines to make decisions under uncertainty have been examined and offer solutions for regulators and licensees alike.


Author(s):  
Shay Lehmann ◽  
Alla Reddy ◽  
Chan Samsundar ◽  
Tuan Huynh

Like any legacy subway system that first opened in the early 1900s, the New York City subway system operates using technology that dates from many different eras. Although some of this technology may be outdated, efforts to modernize are often hindered by budgetary limits, competing priorities, and managing the tradeoff between short-term service disruptions and long-term service improvements. At New York City Transit (NYCT), the locations of all trains on all lines are not visible to any one person in any one place and, for much of the system, train locations can only be seen at field towers for the handful of interlockings in its operational jurisdiction as result of the legacy signal system, which may come as a surprise to many daily commuters or personnel at newer metros. In 2019, developers at NYCT gained full access to the legacy signal system’s underlying track circuit occupancy data and developed an algorithm to automatically track trains and match these data with schedules and manual dispatchers’ logs in real time. This data-driven solution enables real-time train identification and tracking long before a full system modernization could be completed. This information is being provided to select personnel as part of a pilot program via several different tools with the aim of improving service management and reporting.


2000 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 85-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laraine Winter ◽  
M. Powell Lawton ◽  
Robin J. Casten ◽  
Robert L. Sando

Long-term and moderately short-term effects of bereavement and marriage on psychological well-being (PWB) among older people were investigated. The aspect of PWB that was examined was the prevalence of six affects, rated in terms of their frequency during the past year. Affect frequency of four groups was tested: Recently widowed, recently married, and widowed and married elders unselected for length of time in those marital statuses. As predicted, both length of time in the marital status and congruence between the positive event (marriage) and positive affect and between congruence of the negative event (bereavement and negative affect) were associated with group differences. Depressive affect was greatest among the recently bereaved but the recently-married, long-married, and longer-bereaved groups did not differ in depression. Positive affect was greatest among the recently married and other groups did not differ in this respect. Hostility, anxiety, shyness, and contentment were not predicted to differ among groups; in fact, contentment was least in the bereaved; shyness was least among the recently-married, and hostility was lowest among the long-widowed. Results are discussed in terms of the joint influences of time since a life event and the differential relevance of positive and negative affect states to positive and negative events. Continued research attention to the covariation of these factors in relation to the affective aspects of PWB is needed to understand the conditions of stability and change.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lei Xiao ◽  
Minghai Xu ◽  
Zhongyi Hu

The predator algorithm is a representative pioneering work that achieves state-of-the-art performance on several popular visual tracking benchmarks and with great success when commercially applied to real-time face tracking in long-term unconstrained videos. However, there are two major drawbacks of predator algorithm when applied to inland CCTV (closed-circuit television) ship tracking. First, the LK short-term tracker within predator algorithm easily tends to drift if the target ship suffers partial or even full occlusion, mainly because the corner-points-like features employed by LK tracker are very sensitive to occlusion appearance change. Second, the cascaded detector within the predator algorithm searches for candidate objects in a predefined scale set, usually including 3-5 elements, which hampers the tracker to adapt to the potential diverse scale variations of the target ship. In this paper, we design a random projection based short-term tracker which can dramatically ease the tracking drift when the ship is under occlusion. Furthermore, a forward-backward feedback mechanism is proposed to estimate the scale variation between two consecutive frames. We prove that these two strategies gain significant improvements over the predator algorithm and also show that the proposed method outperforms several other state-of-the-art trackers.


1992 ◽  
Vol 75 (2) ◽  
pp. 355-361 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jagdish Dua ◽  
Lorette Hargreaves

Three groups of subjects, 15 Longer-term Exercisers, 14 Short-term Exercisers, and 18 Nonexercisers completed questionnaires designed to measure negative affect associated with thoughts, negative affect associated with day-to-day experiences, positive affect associated with thoughts, and positive affect associated with day-to-day experiences, depression, and stress. All the subjects also provided a rating of their over-all general stress. The Longer-term Exercisers reported more positive affect associated with their thoughts and day-to-day experiences than the Nonexercisers. There also was a trend for the Longer-term Exercisers to report less over-all stress than the Nonexercisers.


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