Smartphone Use and Well-Being in Two Contexts

Excessive smartphone use is a growing concern in many societies around the world today. To date, attention has primarily been paid to psychological correlates of use, including well-being, with less work concentrating on the role that context plays in smartphone use. This was the goal of the current project. College student smartphone use was measured twice over 1 week in two contexts – a college campus and an outdoor camp – and participant well-being was measured using the SPANE. The findings indicate that daily smartphone use significantly decreased for camp participants and significantly increased for campus participants, and latency to use a phone upon waking significantly increased for camp participants but remained stable for campus participants. Additionally, waiting longer to use a phone upon waking at the end of the week significantly predicted reduced well-being but only for camp participants. Overall, these findings suggest that setting is an important contextual variable to consider when pursuing an understanding of the complex relation between smartphone use and well-being.

Tenor

This paper presents work-in-progress on the contextual variable tenor, here reconceptualised as ‘interactant relations’ in order to explore a radically different view of the relations of the interactants to the text in context. The functions of speaker/addressee are the starting point of an exploration of interactant relations because they represent the only features with the capacity to manage a text’s processes. This view implies that speaker/addressee have the capacity to internalise communal conventions, which places them at the centre of the language process. Implications of the results of the exploration for the classification of register are proposed. The paper’s methodology extends previous work on contextual networks (see especially Hasan 2001a, 2009b, 2014, 2016).i

Human confidence judgments reflect reliability-based hierarchical integration of contextual information

Our immediate observations must be supplemented with contextual information to resolve ambiguities. However, the context is often ambiguous too, and thus it should be inferred itself to guide behavior. Here, we introduce a novel hierarchical task (airplane task) in which participants should infer a higher-level, contextual variable to inform probabilistic inference about a hidden dependent variable at a lower level. By controlling the reliability of past sensory evidence through varying the sample size of the observations, we find that humans estimate the reliability of the context and combine it with current sensory uncertainty to inform their confidence reports. Behavior closely follows inference by probabilistic message passing between latent variables across hierarchical state representations. Commonly reported inferential fallacies, such as sample size insensitivity, are not present, and neither did participants appear to rely on simple heuristics. Our results reveal uncertainty-sensitive integration of information at different hierarchical levels and temporal scales.

Healthcare vs social sciences students: who identifies the most?

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyse and compare the level of professional identity strength between healthcare and social sciences students. Design/methodology/approach Based on a sample of 339 students, the authors conduct an ANOVA analysis in order to compare students’ professional identity strength across the abovementioned groups. Findings The authors’ results show that there are significant differences in professional identity strength between healthcare and social sciences students. In particular, healthcare sciences students show stronger professional identity than social sciences students. Originality/value This study contributes to the existing literature on professional identity in higher education by being the first study comparing student’s professional identity between bachelor degrees from different professional fields of study and by showing the relevance of discipline as a contextual variable in the study of students’ professional identity.

Human confidence judgments reflect reliability-based hierarchical integration of contextual information

Because of uncertainty inherent in perception, our immediate observations must be supplemented with contextual information to resolve ambiguities. However, often context too is ambiguous, and thus it should be inferred itself to guide behavior. We developed a novel hierarchical task where participants should infer a higher-level, contextual variable to inform probabilistic inference about a hidden dependent variable at a lower level. By controlling the reliability of the past sensory evidence through sample size, we found that humans estimate the reliability of the context and combine it with current sensory uncertainty to inform their confidence reports. Indeed, behavior closely follows inference by probabilistic message passing between latent variables across hierarchical state representations. Despite the sophistication of our task, commonly reported inferential fallacies, such as sample size insensitivity, are not present, and neither do participants appear to rely on simple heuristics. Our results reveal ubiquitous probabilistic representations of uncertainty at different hierarchical levels and temporal scales of the environment.

Similarity and decision time in preferential choice

Choice option similarity is a key contextual variable in multiattribute choice. Based on theories of preference accumulation, we predicted that decision times would be longer when the available choice options were similar compared with when they were dissimilar, controlling for the relative desirabilities of the options. We tested for the relationship between similarity and decision time in an experiment involving incentivised binary choices between items of equivalent desirability and found that our predictions were confirmed. Our results show how the effects of contextual factors on key decision variables can be accurately predicted by existing computational theories of decision-making.

Intergenerational Influence on Adolescents' Proenvironmental Behavior

We investigated the process of intergenerational influence on adolescents' proenvironmental behavior in Chinese families. By differentiating 2 types of social influence (i.e., informational and normative influence), we found that adolescents' proenvironmental behavior was positively related to both informational and normative influence in Chinese families. Furthermore, when we tested the contextual variable of parental power, we found that it moderated the 2 main effects, but in different directions. That is, the relationship between informational influence and adolescents' proenvironmental behavior became stronger when adolescents perceived higher levels of parental power, with the opposite result with respect to normative influence. We have contributed to the literature on intergenerational influence, social influence, and adolescents' proenvironmental behavior.

EUROsceptycyzm – propozycja konceptualizacji

The authors aim at defining the “EURO-scepticism” as an analytical category. The paper starts with an overview of the most important works on the wider concept of Euroscepticism, following the positioning of Eurosceptic views on the monetary integration in Europe. This part of the article focuses on the subject-approach to EUROscepticism. Next, the authors indicate the most important factors determining the phenomenon. Special attention is dedicated to the economic crisis (2007–2014) which is understood as an important contextual variable of EURO-scepticism. The analysis is summarised with the concluding remarks on the present state of EURO-scepticism in Europe as well as with a speculative statement on the probable end of the “permissive consensus” phase in the process of legitimising the European integration project

Nonverbal interaction patterns in the Delhi Metro

The aim of the article is to describe the nonverbal communication patterns that passengers of the Delhi Metro use to manage density-induced territorial intrusions, and to identify some of the contextual variables that affect their deployment. After introducing the notion of “interrogative look” and the dataset, the following section depicts the techniques that passengers were observed to employ in order to solve the problem of territorial intrusion without breaking anonymity. The bulk of the analysis deals with the structure and function of “interrogative looks”, an objectively defined pattern of nonverbal behavior that the touched uses to signal her discontent to the toucher. The rest of the section describes a less frequent pattern whereby passengers contagiously signal the playful character of their mischiefs. Next is examined if and how density, i.e., the number of individuals per surface unit, influences as a contextual variable the occurrence of interrogative looks. The closing discussion considers the main findings from the standpoint of their local specificity.