The Nature of Personality Disorders among Females

The study aimed to review the literature about personality disorders among females and the role of potential gender bias in diagnosis with these disorders. Personality disorder PD had defined as an inflexible pattern of long duration leading to significant distress or impairment. Women suffer from many types of stress throughout their life according to economic position and social status. However, there are many opinions on the gender differences in PD's and gender can be a powerful element to determine mental health. Unfortunately, there is gender and social bias to view mental illness depending on the patient's gender. Many regions in the world have social cultures that contribute to disorders' development. Due to stigma and social traditions, the Arab region seems to be further away from global diagnosis and statistics for personality disorders. Finally, It's essential for clinicians and researchers to move away from being satisfied with the results of Western studies and not trying to generalize only western findings in diagnosing disorders.

The Nature of Personality Disorders among Females

The study aimed to review the literature about personality disorders among females and the role of potential gender bias in diagnosis with these disorders. Personality disorder PD had defined as an inflexible pattern of long duration leading to significant distress or impairment. Women suffer from many types of stress throughout their life according to economic position and social status. However, there are many opinions on the gender differences in PD's and gender can be a powerful element to determine mental health. Unfortunately, there is gender and social bias to view mental illness depending on the patient's gender. Many regions in the world have social cultures that contribute to disorders' development. Due to stigma and social traditions, the Arab region seems to be further away from global diagnosis and statistics for personality disorders. Finally, It's essential for clinicians and researchers to move away from being satisfied with the results of Western studies and not trying to generalize only western findings in diagnosing disorders.

The Relationship between Social Stigma and Brexit of European Teachers in the United Kingdom: The Inquiry of Sociocultural and Psychological Racism

Due to the development of the national policies and Brexit in the United Kingdom, teachers from European Union may experience bias and difficulties due to their background and status. From the sociology of education perspective, the researcher employed the stigma approach and the sociocultural and psychological racism theory as the theoretical frameworks to understand how experienced European teachers who lived in the United Kingdom describe their experiences. The phenomenological design with two sessions of in-depth interview tool was employed to recruit 86 participants all around the United Kingdom. The results indicated that workplace bullying, discrimination and stigma due to nationality, and limited promotion opportunities were key concerns. The outcomes of this study captured the contemporary situation, stigma, social bias and discrimination problems based on the people who have settled in the UK for at least two decades. Policymakers, government leaders, human resources professionals, social caring professionals and researchers may take this study as the opportunity to polish and reform their community. Received: 19 July 2021 / Accepted: 13 September 2021 / Published: 5 November 2021

Opposing Association of Situational and Chronic Loneliness with Interpersonal Distance

Loneliness is a prevalent condition with adverse effects on physical and mental health. Evolutionary theories suggest it evolved to drive people to reconnect. However, chronic loneliness may result in a negative social bias and self-preservation behaviors, paradoxically driving individuals away from social interactions. Lonely people often feel they are not close to anyone; however, little is known about their interpersonal distance preferences. During COVID-19, many experienced situational loneliness related to actual social isolation. Therefore, there was a unique opportunity to examine both chronic and situational (COVID-19-related) loneliness. In the present study, 479 participants completed an online task that experimentally assessed interpersonal distance preferences in four conditions—passively being approached by a friend or a stranger, and actively approaching a friend or a stranger. Results show that high chronic loneliness was related to a greater preferred distance across conditions. Intriguingly, by contrast, high COVID-19-related loneliness was related to a smaller preferred distance across conditions. These findings provide further support for the evolutionary theory of loneliness: situational loneliness indeed seems to drive people towards reconnection, while chronic loneliness seems to drive people away from it. Implications for the amelioration of chronic loneliness are discussed based on these findings.

Using Social Media for Citizen Participation: Contexts, Empowerment, and Inclusion

Social media have been increasingly used by governments and planning professionals to gain public opinions, distribute information, and support participation in planning practices. Nevertheless, few studies have been conducted to understand the influence of local contexts and the extent to which social media can enhance citizen power and inclusion. This study investigates the role of social media in citizen participation by taking case studies in the Netherlands. It adopts a mixed methods approach that combines interviews, web scraping, and content analysis to understand the characteristics of social media participation. There are several key findings. First, support policies and a high level of social media penetration rate are preconditions for more inclusive participation. Second, social media enhance social inclusion by engaging many participants, who may not be able to participate via traditional methods. Third, they facilitate interactions and different levels of citizen power, though the government still plays a leading role within top-down approaches. Finally, they improve the effectiveness of participation regarding transparency, accessibility, and workable solutions. However, there are several potential political and social bias associated with social media technology. The combination of online and offline participation methods is properly necessary to engage different groups in the planning process.

Link Recommendation for Social Influence Maximization

Social link recommendation systems, like “People-you-may-know” on Facebook, “Who-to-follow” on Twitter, and “Suggested-Accounts” on Instagram assist the users of a social network in establishing new connections with other users. While these systems are becoming more and more important in the growth of social media, they tend to increase the popularity of users that are already popular. Indeed, since link recommenders aim to predict user behavior, they accelerate the creation of links that are likely to be created in the future and, consequently, reinforce social bias by suggesting few (popular) users, giving few chances to most users to create new connections and increase their popularity. In this article, we measure the popularity of a user by means of her social influence, which is her capability to influence other users’ opinions, and we propose a link recommendation algorithm that evaluates the links to suggest according to their increment in social influence instead of their likelihood of being created. In detail, we give a factor approximation algorithm for the problem of maximizing the social influence of a given set of target users by suggesting a fixed number of new connections considering the Linear Threshold model as model for diffusion. We experimentally show that, with few new links and small computational time, our algorithm is able to increase by far the social influence of the target users. We compare our algorithm with several baselines and show that it is the most effective one in terms of increased influence.