Hemlöshet börjar bli en ökande del av det amerikanska samhället. Få studier har gjorts där den hemlöse själv beskriver sitt behov av omvårdnad och sjukvård. Denna studie syftar till att belysa vad amerikanska hemlösa uttryckt som sitt dagliga behov av omvårdnad och sjukvård. Graneheim och Lundmans (2004) kvalitativa innehållsanalys har använts för att bearbeta data. Med de existerande levnadsomständigheterna för hemlösa uppkommer behov och komplikationer som riskerar att orsaka ett ökat behov av sjukvård. I deras sökande efter behövlig sjukvård möttes de av utmaningar. I datamaterialet upptäcktes negativa yttringar likväl som uttryck av behov av omvårdnad som blivit tillgodosedda. Slutsats, hemlösa är i ett stort behov av omvårdnad och sjukvård i sitt dagliga liv. Sjukvårdssystemet behöver förändra sitt tillvägagångssätt och utvecklas för att bättre kunna möta de behov som finns bland dessa personer. / Homelessness is becoming an increasing part of the American society. Few studies have been done describing what the homeless themselves express as needs in care and healthcare. The aim in this study is to describe how homeless American individuals express needs of care and healthcare in their daily life. In doing so literature were analyzed by Graneheim and Lundmans (2004) qualitative content analysis. With the living conditions of the homeless there arose needs and complications, having the potential to cause health care needs. There were obstacles in their way while trying to receive health care. Negative expressions as well as fulfillment in care were also discovered in the data. In conclusion the homeless individuals are in great need of care and health care in their daily lives. The health care system needs to broaden its views and approaches when it comes to caring for these individuals to be able to meet their conditions better.

In developed countries, suicidal behaviour is recognised as a significant public health problem among young people, but there are few studies from developing countries on this subject. The present thesis aims at estimating the extent of the problem and at exploring factors related to suicidal behaviour among young people in a developing country, Nicaragua, using a combined quantitative and qualitative approach. Three studies were conducted between 1999 and 2006. In the first study, all hospital admitted suicide attempt cases in the area of León were assessed over a three year period. Secondly, a qualitative study using individual in-depth interviews was conducted with eight girls aged between 12 and 19 admitted to hospital after attempting suicide. Thirdly, a study using the Attitudes Towards Suicides (ATTS) questionnaire was conducted in a community based sample of 278 young people aged 15-24 years to assess own suicidal behaviours, attitudes towards suicide as well as exposure to suicidal behaviour among significant others. The hospital surveillance showed that suicide attempt rates were highest among females in the age group 15-19 years with a female rate three times that of males (302.9 versus 98.9 per 100,000 inhabits per year). Drug intoxication and pesticides were the most commonly used methods for the attempts. A consistent seasonal variation with peaks in May-June and September-October was found in each of the three years, possibly related to exam periods in schools. Findings in the qualitative approach led to a tentative model for pathways to suicidal behaviour based on four main categories: Structuring conditions, triggering events, emotions and action taken. Dysfunctional families, lack of confidential and trustworthy contacts and interpersonal conflicts followed by emotions of shame and anger were some important components in the model. The community studies showed that suicidal expressions (life-weariness, death wishes, suicidal ideation, suicide plans and suicide attempts) were common among young people where more than 44.8% of males and 47.4% of females reported some kind of suicidal expression. Gender differences were small. Exposure to suicidal behaviour among others was associated with higher levels of self-reported suicidal behaviour. The attitude study showed that boys had less pro-preventive attitudes than girls, possibly indicating their higher risk for completed suicide. Exposure to suicidal behaviour and own suicidal behaviour showed an association with specific patterns of attitudes. The findings should be taken into consideration when planning for prevention of suicidal behaviour among young people in a developing country like Nicaragua.

The subject matter of this dissertation is children’s use and development of emotive expressions. While prior studies have either focused on facial expressions of emotions or on emotions in the social mechanisms of in situ interactions, this thesis opts to merge two traditions by applying an interactional approach to the interpretation of child–child and child–adult encounters. This approach is further supplemented with an interpretational frame stemming from studies on child development, sociology and psychology. In order to depict the multi-leveled process of socialization, a number of sub-areas are investigated such as the emotive expressions per se; how and when these expressions are used in interaction with parents and siblings; the kinds of responses the children get after using an emotive expression; parental acts (verbal or nonverbal) that bear on children’s conduct and their choice of such expressions. Finally, the relation between nonverbal displays and language as expressive means for emotions is analyzed from a developmental perspective. The data consists of video-recordings of five sibling groups in the ages between 1 ½ and 5 ½ who were followed for 2 ½ years in their home environment. In all, 19 recordings (15 h) were transcribed and analyzed. The results from the study lead to several different taxonomies previously not discussed in the pertinent literature: (i) the nonverbal, vocal and verbal emotive expressions used by children; (ii) the different means these expressions were put to in child–parent encounters; (iii) the ways relations to siblings can be seen as creating and shaping certain emotive processes. Furthermore, this work demonstrates that parental responses are of vital importance for the outcome of specific child expressions. As parents reprimand, comfort, praise and mediate in their interaction with their children, they create paths later used by the child as she practices and acquires her own expressive means for handling emotions in interactional contexts. Finally, a developmental frame of language and nonverbal acts is elaborated and suggested as a tool for discovering the paths of linguistic and emotional socialization. / För att köpa boken skicka en beställning till exp@ling.su.se/ To order the book send an e-mail to exp@ling.su.se

The aim of this study was to investigate the emotions among the staff at the group housings when they observe the caretakers expressions of masturbation and how the staff handles these expressions in their daily and long-term work. The theoretical concepts that were used in this study are group housing as a public and private arena, occupational role, relation, humanistic effort, pedagogical effort, empowerment, care ethic and emotions. The concepts are related to each other and constitutes the foundation for the analysis of the empirical data used in this study. A qualitative study was carried out, in forms of half structured interviews with six informants, of which the majority was women. It came to light that the interviewees only had positive feelings for the caretaker’s expressions of masturbation. The interviewees had different procedures in their daily work, while there were more similarities in how the staff worked in a long-term perspective with the caretaker’s expressions of masturbation.

The purpose of the study is to show the conditions there are by working with aesthetic expressions in pre-school and how these activities are implemented. Questions that we are going to discuss are: What are the conditions for working with aesthetics in pre-school? How is the work implemented when it comes to aesthetic expressions? Our ambition has been to study what conditions it takes to use aesthetic expressions in a way that is meaningful for the children and also show the conditions and alternative methods that are present in different schools. We have used a web survey to reach a result in the study. This web survey includes questions about the different aesthetic activities and has given us the answers to the questions above.   The result shows that there are different ways of working and different views at aesthetic expressions. Conclusions that can be shown from the result are that all of the educationalists have a positive attitude to work with creative activities. Furthermore, the educationalists express that a use of aesthetic expressions bring joy and harmony to the groups of children in pre-school. It is also shown that if a learning situation is going to appear, it requires that the environment is carefully planned and inspiring. However, one negative factor of work with aesthetic expressions is that it requires a lot of time to plan, and it also requires knowledge about how these activities can be implemented in pre-schools. This knowledge is in some cases deficient. / Syftet med studien är att synliggöra vilka förutsättningar det finns att arbeta med estetiska uttrycksformer i förskolan samt hur dessa aktiviteter genomförs. Frågor som vi tar upp är: Hur ser förutsättningarna ut för att arbeta med estetik i förskolan? Hur genomförs arbetet kring estetiska uttrycksformer? Vår ambition har varit att studera vilka förutsättningar det krävs för att använda sig av estetiska uttrycksformer på ett meningsfullt sätt för barnen samt synliggöra de förutsättningar och arbetssätt som förekommer i olika verksamheter. För att komma fram till ett resultat i studien har vi använt oss av en webbenkät som innefattar frågor kring de olika estetiska aktiviteterna, dessa frågor har sedan gett oss svar på ovanstående frågeställningar.   Resultatet visar att det finns olika arbetssätt samt synsätt på estetiska uttrycksformer. Några slutsatser som kan dras utifrån resultatet är att samtliga pedagoger är positiva till att arbeta med skapande aktiviteter. Vidare uttrycker de att det skapas en glädje och harmoni i barngruppen under tillfällen då barnen använder sig av estetiska uttrycksformer. Det framkommer även att för att ett lärande skulle kunna äga rum krävs det att miljön är genomtänkt och inspirerande. Det som däremot kan ses som en negativ faktor i arbete med estetiska uttrycksformer är att det tar tid att planera. Dessutom krävs det kunskap kring hur det kan genomföras i verksamheten. Denna kunskap visar sig i vissa fall vara bristande.

This study analyzed racial differences in the way African Americans and Caucasians perceive emotion from facial expressions and tone of voice. Participants were African American (n=25) and Caucasian (n=26) college students. The study utilizes 56 images of African American and Caucasian faces balanced for race and sex from the NimStim stimulus set (Tottenham, 2006). The study also utilized visual and auditory stimuli form the DANVA2. Participants were asked to judged emotion for each stimulus in the tasks. The BFRT, the WASI, and the Seashore Rhythm test were used as exclusionary criteria. In general the study found few differences in the way African Americans and Caucasians perceived emotion, though racial differences emerged as an interaction with other factors. The results of the study supported the theory of universality of emotion perception and expression though social influences, which may affect emotion perception, is also a possibility. Areas of future research were discussed.

Becoming a face expert takes years of learning and development. Many research programs are devoted to studying face perception, particularly given its prerequisite role in social interaction, yet its fundamental neural operations are poorly understood. One reason is that there are many possible explanations for a change in facial appearance, such as lighting, expression, or identity. Despite general agreement that the brain extracts multiple layers of feature detectors arranged into hierarchies to interpret causes of sensory information, very little work has been done to develop computational models of these processes, especially for complex stimuli like faces. The studies presented in this thesis used nonlinear generative models developed within machine learning to solve several face perception problems. Applying a deep hierarchical neural network, we showed that it is possible to learn representations capable of perceiving facial actions, expressions, and identities, better than similar non-hierarchical architectures. We then demonstrated that a generative architecture can be used to interpret high-level neural activity by synthesizing images in a top-down pass. Using this approach we showed that deep layers of a network can be activated to generate faces corresponding to particular categories. To facilitate training models to learn rich and varied facial features, we introduced a new expression database with the largest number of labeled faces collected to date. We found that a model trained on these images learned to recognize expressions comparably to human observers. Next we considered models trained on pairs of images, making it possible to learn how faces change appearance to take on different expressions. Modeling higher-order associations between images allowed us to efficiently match images of the same type according to a learned pairwise similarity measure. These models performed well on several tasks, including matching expressions and identities, and demonstrated performance superior to competing models. In sum, these studies showed that neural networks that extract highly nonlinear features from images using architectures inspired by the brain can solve difficult face perception tasks with minimal guidance by human experts.

Early-latency theories of emotional processing state that at least coarse monitoring of the emotional valence (a pleasure-displeasure continuum) of facial expressions should be both rapid and highly automated (LeDoux, 1995; Russell, 1980). Research has largely substantiated early-latency differential processing of emotional versus non-emotional facial expressions; however, the effect of valence on early-latency processing of emotional facial expression remains unclear. In an effort to delineate the effects of valence on early-latency emotional facial expression processing, the current investigation compared ERP responses to positive (happy and surprise), neutral, and negative (afraid and sad) basic facial expression photographs as well as to positive (happy-surprise), neutral (afraid-surprise, happy-afraid, happy-sad, sad-surprise), and negative (sad-afraid) morph facial expression photographs during a valence-rating task. Morphing manipulations have been shown to decrease the familiarity of facial patterns and thus preclude any overlearned responses to specific facial codes. Accordingly, it was proposed that morph stimuli would disrupt more detailed emotional identification to reveal a valence response independent of a specific identifiable emotion (Balconi & Lucchiari, 2005; Schweinberger, Burton & Kelly, 1999). ERP results revealed early-latency differentiation between positive, neutral, and negative morph facial expressions approximately 108 milliseconds post-stimulus (P1) within the right electrode cluster; negative morph facial expressions continued to elicit significantly smaller ERP amplitudes than other valence categories approximately 164 milliseconds post-stimulus (N170). Consistent with previous imaging research on emotional facial expression processing, source localization revealed substantial dipole activation within regions of the mesolimbic dopamine system. Thus, these findings confirm rapid valence processing of facial expressions and suggest that negative valence processing may continue to modulate subsequent structural facial processing.

Becoming a face expert takes years of learning and development. Many research programs are devoted to studying face perception, particularly given its prerequisite role in social interaction, yet its fundamental neural operations are poorly understood. One reason is that there are many possible explanations for a change in facial appearance, such as lighting, expression, or identity. Despite general agreement that the brain extracts multiple layers of feature detectors arranged into hierarchies to interpret causes of sensory information, very little work has been done to develop computational models of these processes, especially for complex stimuli like faces. The studies presented in this thesis used nonlinear generative models developed within machine learning to solve several face perception problems. Applying a deep hierarchical neural network, we showed that it is possible to learn representations capable of perceiving facial actions, expressions, and identities, better than similar non-hierarchical architectures. We then demonstrated that a generative architecture can be used to interpret high-level neural activity by synthesizing images in a top-down pass. Using this approach we showed that deep layers of a network can be activated to generate faces corresponding to particular categories. To facilitate training models to learn rich and varied facial features, we introduced a new expression database with the largest number of labeled faces collected to date. We found that a model trained on these images learned to recognize expressions comparably to human observers. Next we considered models trained on pairs of images, making it possible to learn how faces change appearance to take on different expressions. Modeling higher-order associations between images allowed us to efficiently match images of the same type according to a learned pairwise similarity measure. These models performed well on several tasks, including matching expressions and identities, and demonstrated performance superior to competing models. In sum, these studies showed that neural networks that extract highly nonlinear features from images using architectures inspired by the brain can solve difficult face perception tasks with minimal guidance by human experts.

In a study involving two languages: French and Arabic, this thesis examines the patterns and meanings of Arabic religious expressions as a code alternation practice in Algerian television interviews. It is concerned with investigating what participants may accomplish by selecting Arabic over French in some points of interaction to deploy religious expressions in their utterances. It also aims at exploring what the function is that these expressions may achieve for the organization of talk-in-interaction. Based on their manifestation in the participants’ utterances, the current study identifies four categories of the use of religious expressions in Algerian media talk where they appear as: transition words to switch to Arabic to keep going on in interaction; in adjacency pairs as a result of a reciprocal invocation between participants; devices to hold the floor and continue turns in interaction; and finally, signals for closing turns and shifting topics where a speakership change or a move to a new topic is possible.