Past research on construal level theory (CLT) has shown that adopting a temporally distant (vs. temporally close) orientation facilitates a more abstract, “bigger picture” representation of events. Furthermore, research on other forms of psychological distance (e.g., self-distance) has linked abstract representations of past interpersonal negative events to positive psychological benefits, such as reduced negative affect. Despite this connection, little work has been done looking at how temporal distance, a form of psychological distance, may also result in positive psychological outcomes. Moreover, few have explored the effects of temporal distance on reasoning within an interpersonal context. Provided the past literature on psychological distance, I hypothesize that a distant temporal orientation when reasoning over a recent romantic relationship conflict will result in greater abstract representations of the past conflict. Given that the context is in an interpersonal domain, I predict that the abstract representation will manifest itself through a more inclusive reasoning strategy, which will lead to beneficial reasoning strategies for the relationship. I test these hypotheses by randomly assigning participants to a present-oriented mindset, or a future-oriented mindset when reflecting on their past conflict. Results from two experiments (Study 1: College students; Study 2: Age-heterogeneous community sample) indicate that taking a future-orientation leads to an inclusive reasoning strategy (i.e., greater non-self centered word use) and also leads to reasoning that is considered conducive to positive relationship outcomes (e.g., lower partner blame and greater expression of growth). Implications for research on psychological distance and reasoning are discussed.

Svarbią paauglio gyvenimo dalį sudaro laisvalaikis, kurio metu vyksta aktyvus socialinės komunikacijos procesas. Todėl kalbant apie veiksnius, darančius įtaką paauglio psichosocialinei raidai, svarbus tampa laisvalaikio pasirinkimas. Labai svarbu pažinti paauglių laisvalaikio praleidimo būdus ir jų moralines vertybes. Vienas didžiausių bendro nusikalstamumo variklių šiandien yra vaikų ir paauglių neužimtumas. Sėkmingai išsprendus paauglių užimtumo problemą bei tikslingai organizuojant jų laisvalaikį, galima tikėtis teigiamų pokyčių šiose abiejose srityse. Magistro baigiamąjį darbą sudaro teorinė, metodinė ir praktinė dalys, darbo pabaigoje pateikiamos išvados. Pirmoje darbo dalyje analizuojama lietuvių ir užsienio autorių literatūra paauglių laisvalaikio organizavimo ir vertybinių orientacijų formavimosi tematika. Pateikiama laisvalaikio sampratų istorinė kaita, analizuojama šiuolaikinė laisvalaikio samprata, formos, funkcijos. Taip pat apžvelgiama laisvalaikio reikšmė paauglių vertybinių orientacijų ugdyme. Analizuojami veiksniai, įtakojantys paauglių vertybinių orientacijų formavimąsi: šeima, mokykla, žiniasklaida. Pateikiami laisvalaikio organizavimo edukologiniu aspektu pagrindai: apžvelgiama papildomo ugdymo reikšmė, funkcijos, formos, principai bei neformalaus ugdymo organizavimo principai. Antroje darbo dalyje pateikiama tyrimo metodika ir organizavimas. Trečioje darbo dalyje atliekamas tyrimas, kurio tikslas - ištirti 7–10 klasių moksleivių popamokinę veiklą... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / Leisure takes quite important place in teenages life, when the process of active social communication is going on. So when we are talking about the factors which affect psychological development of the teenages, the choice of leisure types becomes very important. It is very important to find out the types of teenages leisure activities also their moral values. The most powerfull engine of nowadays criminality - is vacancy of the kids and teenages. We could expect positive changes in both these areas if we would solve the problem of teenages employment and organize the leisure time specifically. This Master‘s final work consists of theoretical, methodical and practical parts, the findings are presented in the end of this work A literature of Lithuanian and foreign authors which describes the organization of teenages leisure and formation of teenages values orientations is analyzed in the first part of the work. There are presented historical change of leisure conceptions, the analysis of the contemporary conception of leisure, forms and fuctions of the leisure. We also take a look at the meaning of leisure time in education of formation of teenages values orientations. There is made analysis of the factors which affects the formation of teenages values orientations: family, school, mass media. There are given the basics for organization of the leisure in educology aspect: there are presented the meaning of additional education, functions, forms, principles and the principles... [to full text]

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The Nelson R Mandela Medical School is currently implementing Curriculum 2001, which is based on integrated, student centred, problem and groupbased learning. In 2002 a three-week orientation Module was introduced to prepare students for Problem Based Learning (PBL). The aim of this programme was to assist first year students through the transition period from high school to university life and prepare them for a new way of learning. In the university context the word orientation has come to mean assisting students to become accustomed to the new environment of university education and to make the first few weeks as friendly and informative as possible so that this transition is made effectively. It is also a socialisation process whereby students get to know what the expectations of the departments and the university are as well as being an introduction to the values and standards of the group the student is entering. For the students the change from school where they are accustomed to a particular approach to learning is a huge step to a tertiary institution where the approach to learning is different. The purpose of this study was: 1) To ascertain what students understood about the new curriculum before they embarked on it and did orientation help them to understand it better? (2) In what ways did the students perceive the orientation programme as a help to prepare first year medical students and especially for PBL? (3) What particular aspects of the orientation programme do students perceive help them in a new situation and did this prepare them for a new way of learning? (4) In what ways do staff perceive the contribution of orientation to the new PBL curriculum? Both qualitative and quantitative data was gathered from questionnaires, interviews and focus group sessions with first and second year students and staff. The first year students agreed that the orientation Programme did assist them to prepare for a new way of learning. Preparing students for a new way of learning and assistance with making the many transitions into university life is very important and necessary if students are to be successful. / Thesis (M.Ed.) - University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2004.

Interactive tabletop systems are becoming popular platforms for group activities. However, current common tabletops do not provide capabilities to differentiate interactions among simultaneous users, i.e. to associate a touch point with its proper owner. My thesis proposes and explores the use of an important biometric property of users as the basis for touch discrimination on multi-user tabletops: Finger Orientation (FO). In this thesis, I first collect the FO ranges of users standing in different positions around a tabletop. Second, I implement a system that uses FO to determine where the users are standing, and based on that extrapolate the owner of the touch. Next, I evaluate the system with two separate experiments, present the results, and discuss all findings. Furthermore, I explore some enhancements with a simple quantitative study. My results indicate that finger orientation is a good natural biometric trait enhances multi-user recognition on tabletops.

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Our understanding of the nature of Earth’s D” region was changed significantly by a recent finding by Murakami et al. (2004), who revealed a phase transition from perovskite to post-perovskite structure in MgSiO3 at about 125 GPa and 2500 K, corresponding to conditions of the lowermost mantle. A perovskite to post-perovskite phase transition accounts for many unusual features of the D” region, including its notable seismic anisotropy, and also accounts for the unusual topology of the D” discontinuity. However, the experimentally synthesised post-perovskite phase of MgSiO3 is not quenchable to ambient conditions, which means that many of its physical properties remain difficult to determine. On the other hand, there are several post-perovskite oxides, CaIrO3, CaPtO3, CaRhO3 and CaRuO3, which can be quenched to ambient conditions, maintaining their structure. High pressure synthesis of CaIr1-xPtxO3 solid solutions (x = 0, 0.3, 0.5, 0.7) and CaIr0.5Rh0.5O3 was conducted at the University of Edinburgh and Geodynamics Research Center, Ehime University, and structures and physical properties of these novel post-perovskite materials determined. Substantial [100] grain growth was observed in all solid solutions leading to pronounced texture even in powdered materials. Temperature-independent paramagnetism above 150 K and small magnetic entropy observed in heat capacity measurements suggest that CaIrO3 is an intrinsically weak itinerant ferromagnetic metal, while electrical resistivity measurements show that it is a narrow bandgap semiconductor, possibly due to grain boundary effects. CaIrO3 undergoes a magnetic transition at 108K and possesses a saturated magnetic moment of 0.04 μB. Doping with Pt or Rh induces Curie-Weiss paramagnetism and suppresses the magnetic transition. The anisotropic structure and morphology of CaIrO3 combined with the Ir4+ spin-orbit coupling results in a large magnetic anisotropy constant of 1.77 x 106 Jm-3, comparable to values for permanent magnet materials. A new high-pressure phase of CaIr0.5Pt0.5O3 was synthesised at 60GPa, 1900K using a laser-heated DAC (diamond anvil cell) at GRC, Ehime University. Its Raman spectra resemble those of perovskite phases of CaIrO3 and CaMnO3, implying that CaIr0.5Pt0.5O3 undergoes a post-perovskite to perovskite phase transition with increasing pressure. I estimate an increase in thermodynamic Grüneisen parameter γth across the post-perovskite to perovskite transition of 34 %, with similar magnitude to (Mg,Fe)SiO3 and MgGeO3, suggesting that CaIr0.5Pt0.5O3 is a promising analogue for experimentally simulating the competitive stability between perovskite and post-perovskite phase of magnesium silicates in Earth’s lowermost mantle. Such estimation is reliable since the estimated and directly calculated thermodynamic Grüneisen parameter γth from heat capacity show consistent values. The marked effect that Pt has on stabilising the post-perovskite structure in CaIr1-xPtxO3 solid solutions explains why the post-perovskite to perovskite phase transition has not been observed for CaPtO3 in contrast to other quenchable post-perovskite oxides: CaIrO3, CaRhO3 and CaRuO3.Work presented here demonstrates that CaIrO3 solid solutions can be used to provide new insight into factors stabilising post-perovskite structures in Earth’s lowermost mantle.

Rats learn to navigate to a specific location faster in a familiar environment (Keith and Mcvety 1988). It has been proposed that place learning does not require specific reward signals, but rather, that it occurs automatically. One of the strongest pieces of evidence for the automatic nature of place learning comes from the observation that place and head direction cells reference their receptive fields to prominent landmarks in an environment without needing a reward signal (O’Keefe and Conway 1978; Taube et al. 1990b). It has also been proposed that an allocentric representation of an environment would be bound to the landmarks with the greatest relative stability to guide its orientation (O’Keefe and Nadel 1978). The first two parts of this thesis explore whether place and head direction cells automatically use the most coherent landmarks for orientation. Head direction cells have been shown to orient their preferred firing directs coherently when being exposed to conflicting landmarks in an environment (Yoganarasimha et al. 2006). A model of head direction cells was thus used to explore the necessary mechanisms required to implement an allocentric system that selects landmarks based on their relative stability. We found that the simple addition of Hebbian projections combined with units representing the orientation of landmarks to the head direction cell system is sufficient for the system to exhibit such a capacity. We then recorded both entorhinal head direction cells and CA1 place cells and at the same time subjected the rats to repeated experiences of landmark conflicts. During the conflicts a subset of landmarks always maintained a fixed relative relationship with each other. We found that the visual landmarks retained their ability to control the place and head direction cells even after repeated experience of conflict and that the simultaneously recorded place cells exhibited coherent representations between conflicts. However, the ’stable landmarks’ did not show significantly greater control over the place and head direction cells when comparing to the unstable landmarks. This argues against the hypothesis that the relative stability between landmarks is encoded automatically. We did observe a trend that, with more conflict experience, the ’stable landmarks’ appeared to exert greater control over the cells. The last part of the thesis explores whether goal sensitive cells (Ainge et al. 2007a) discovered from CA1 of hippocampus are developed due to familiarity with the environment or from the demands for rats to perform a win-stay behaviour. We used the same win-stay task as in Ainge et al. and found that there were few or no goal sensitive cells on the first day of training. Subsequent development of goal sensitive activity correlated significantly with the rat’s performance during the learning phase of the task. The correlation provides support to the hypothesis that the development of goal sensitive cells is associated to the learning of the win-stay task though it does not rule out the possibility that these goal sensitive cells are developed due to the accumulated experience on the maze. In summary, this thesis explores what kind of spatial information is encoded by place and head direction cells and finds that relative stability between landmarks without a reward signal is not automatically encoded. On the other hand, when additional information is required to solve a task, CA1 place cells adapt their spatial code to provide the necessary information to guide successful navigation.

In Deutschland und Europa setzen immer mehr Unternehmen Maßnahmen zur "sexuellen Orientierung", zumeist im Rahmen von aktuell an Bedeutung gewinnenden Diversity Management-Ansätzen. Vor diesem Hintergrund gibt der Artikel einen strukturierten Überblick über den Stand der Personalforschung in diesem Bereich. Neben wenigen Studien zu Bi- und Transsexualität bezieht sich der größte Teil der Forschung auf das Phänomen Homosexualität und lässt sich in drei thematische Gruppen unterteilen: 1. der Umgang mit der eigenen Homosexualität am Arbeitsplatz, 2. das Arbeits- und Organisationsklima für Lesben und Schwule und 3. der organisationale Umgang mit Homosexualität bzw. der "sexuellen Orientierung". Es zeigt sich, dass schwule, lesbische, bisexuelle und auch transidente Beschäftigte unterschiedlichen Barrieren am Arbeitsplatz begegnen und entsprechende Maßnahmen von Unternehmensseite dazu beitragen können, diese abzubauen. Es wird diskutiert, inwieweit sich daraus positive ökonomische Konsequenzen für Unternehmen ergeben können. (author's abstract)

An exploratory investigation using a case study approach was undertaken in five organisations in different sectors, to explore whether there is any connection between CEO leadership style and adoption of the marketing concept by the organisation. Findings emerged on several levels. The market orientation and marketing concept, beyond the level of customer focus, is not well understood in organisations. The integration of market orientation and marketing effort across the organisation presents as the most problematic component of the marketing concept, as well as the one where CEO leadership style has the most potential to impact. The language of leadership theory is not actively assumed by people working in the case study organisations. The way people experience leadership style is ultimately personal, interpersonal and difficult to describe. Leadership attributes are valued differently in different organisations. Highly regarded leadership strengths result in perceived weaknesses being forgiven. In relation to the main research question, intuitively most people believed there is a connection between CEO leadership style and adoption of the marketing concept, but this was difficult to test at an organisational level due to small sample sizes and because each case study business presented with relatively high market orientations and CEOs with appropriate leadership styles. The CEO leadership themes commonly determined to be relevant were people focus (in terms of customers and staff), vision, change orientation, and passion/enthusiasm for the business. Survey data at the individual level was aggregated across the five organisations and analysed. Results showed the above attributes, and others associated with transformational leadership approaches, were related to perceptions of market orientation. While these results cannot be statistically generalisable because of the small and unrepresentative sample used, the findings suggest that the link between individual organisation members' perceptions of market orientation and CEO leadership would be worthy of a larger study.