Dog-related activities and human well-being in Brazilian dog owners: A framework and cross-cultural comparison with a British study

Despite the abundance of studies investigating the benefits of having a dog, the specific aspects of dog ownership that impacts human well-being are not well understood. This study used a qualitative approach to create a framework of the main dog-related activities perceived by Brazilian owners to impact their well-being and compared the findings with those of a similar study in England. Thirty-two Brazilian dog owners from the five regions of the country were remotely interviewed. The thematic analysis of the transcripts generated a total of 58 dog-related activities, organised into 13 themes. Most activities were reported to have a positive effect on participants’ well-being, accounting for 76.8% of the total number of mentions in the interviews. ‘Playing with dog’ and ‘Dog presence’ were the themes most frequently associated with positive well-being outcomes, whereas ‘Unwanted behaviours’ and ‘Failing to meet dog's needs’ were the most commonly associated with negative outcomes. The dog-related activities reported by Brazilian dog owners and the well-being outcomes linked to those activities were consistent with the previous British sample in the framework that emerged. These findings suggest reliability between the two methods used to gather data (remote interview versus focus group) and, most importantly, provide consistent cross-cultural evidence for how certain activities impact dog owner’s well-being.

Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) to Analyse Mental Behaviour in Social Media

A recent British study of people between the ages of 14 and 35 has shown that social media has a negative impact on mental health. The purpose of the paper is to detect people with mental disorders' behaviour in social media in order to help Twitter users in overcoming their mental health problems such as anxiety, phobia, depression, paranoia. The authors have adapted the recurrent neural network (RNN) in order to prevent the situations of threats, suicide, loneliness, or any other form of psychological problem through the analysis of tweets. The obtained results were validated by different experimental measures such as f-measure, recall, precision, entropy, accuracy. The RNN gives best results with 85% of accuracy compared to other techniques in literature such as social cockroaches, decision tree, and naïve Bayes.

Coercive control of women as mothers via strategic mother–child separation

This study extends existing research into abusive men’s use of children as part of their strategies to undermine mothering roles: target women as mothers, damage mother–child relationships and cause mother–child separations. It is the first British study into strategic mother–child separation to be conducted with mothers who were actually separated from their children. The purpose of the study was to illuminate the tactics used in this type of coercive control, to assist women and practitioners to address this problem using recent UK coercive control legislation. Qualitative accounts of six women who described having their children turned against them by abusive ex-partners (who were also the children’s fathers) were examined. Thematic analysis identified eight themes as perpetrator tactics of strategic separation: 1) Lying to and manipulating children; 2) Sabotaging children’s contact with their mothers; 3) Weaponising children; 4) Conditioning children through reward and punishment; 5) Exploiting women’s vulnerability, particularly as mothers; 6) Threatening mothers with taking their children from them; 7) Actively employing mother-blaming by exploiting mother-blaming institutions and practices; and 8) Denigrating mothers and elevating themselves in order to supplant mothers as children’s primary caregivers and attachment figures. Because service responses fail to address this aspect of men’s violence against women and children, the article is positioned to inform policy, practice and service provision. Limitations are outlined and areas for further research highlighted.<br /><br />Key messages<br /><ul><li>Abusive men’s strategic interference in the mother–child relationship is achieved through: the direct and indirect use and abuse of children, undermining mothers via mother-blaming; exploiting professionals, and capitalising on patriarchal institutions and mother-blaming theories, systems and practices.</li><br /><li>Recognising this form of abuse as a criminal offence could be addressed using the recent UK coercive control legislation.</li></ul>

Hypocognitive Mind: How Lack of Conceptual Knowledge Confines What People See and Remember

We examine hypocognition, in which people lack a cognitive or linguistic representation of a concept necessary to identify, interpret, or remember instances of it. Six studies (N = 2,085) revealed that hypocognition degrades retention of fundamental information in everyday living, such as frequency of encounter. Hypocognitive participants reported encountering instances of a concept less often compared to those who knew the concept (Study 1). They failed to discern the presence and encode the frequency of objects for which they were hypocognitive, such as American participants when observing exotic fruits (Studies 2A &amp; 3) and alphabetic letters rendered as unfamiliar symbols (Studies 2B &amp; 5). Hypocognition occurs across cultures: British participants tracked the frequency of Asian dumplings less accurately than Chinese participants, who tracked the frequency of cheese less accurately than the British (Study 4). Lacking an underlying concept impedes remembering even when novel verbal labels are present (Study 5). Finite channels of conceptual knowledge impose a powerful constraint on what people identify, recognize, and remember in their everyday environment. The concepts that people lack impoverish their experience with the world.