El texto completo de este trabajo no está disponible en el Repositorio Académico UPC por restricciones de la casa editorial donde ha sido publicado. / This letter has the purpose to comment the article by Marwaha et al. regarding affective instability and mental disorders. We wish to highlight the importance to report the proper measures of association in case-control studies, and the impact of adjusting the results when finding associations with possible confounders in the bivariate analysis. / Revisión por pares / Revisión por pares

The purpose of this study was to explore the implications of cultural dimensions on the relationship between job satisfaction facets, role stressors, and organizational commitment. Using data from 214 university employees, the moderating influence of individualistic and collectivistic orientations as expressed through four cultural dimensions (responsibility, affiliation, social welfare, and achievement) on those relationships were investigated. Results indicated that role ambiguity had a greater negative influence on affective commitment for those who were more cooperative as opposed to competitive in their achievement orientation; whereas the relationship between coworker and supervision satisfaction and affective commitment was stronger for those who endorsed an individualist achievement orientation. Responsibility was found to moderate the relationship between satisfaction with the nature of work and continuance commitment more strongly and negatively for those who endorsed a collectivist orientation. The prediction that the relationship between role stressors and normative commitment would be more negative for those endorsing a collectivist orientation of affiliation was supported. Support was also found for the more positive influence of a collectivist orientation of affiliation on the relationship between job satisfaction facets (coworkers and supervision) and normative commitment. Finally, support was found for the collectivist orientation of affiliation positively influencing the relationship of satisfaction with the nature of work with normative commitment. Cross-cultural psychology has moved towards the inclusion of cultural dimensions into the study of psychological behavior in the workplace in a two-pronged approach: refining the theory of cross-cultural industrial/organizational psychology and determining the processes by which cultural dimensions are linked to work behaviors. This study aimed to tackle both approaches by extending the empirical research that is ongoing in the area and accelerating the theoretical development.

This thesis explores how public high school teachers in Tacoma, WA, USA conceptualize the values and rewards of their career through their professional interactions at various levels of the educational institution. By analyzing teachers’ career motivations, goals, and definitions of success, it becomes clear that these teachers most highly prioritize their affective labor and the relationships they build with their students. Teachers consistently emphasize the non-financial, student-centered elements of the compensation they receive for their work, and their grievances about the structure of the school system primarily center around the constraints placed upon their performance of student-centered affective labor by the neoliberal foci of the institution of the public school. Ultimately, it is argued that teachers’ choice to emphasize this affective labor can be seen as a public reclamation of a historically feminized form of labor in an effort to cultivate a vocational sense of meaning within their career.

Fructose consumption has become a normalized part of the standard American diet over the past 40 years. While fructose consumption is a known risk factor of metabolic syndrome, there is increasing evidence that fructose consumption influences brain and behavior. Recently, more interest has been focused on mitochondrial dysfunction as a potential link between metabolic stress and modifications of the central nervous system. Mitochondria are in the unique position of both regulating and being vulnerable to alterations in energy homeostasis. Sex-differences are well categorized in the presentation of metabolic symptoms associated with excessive fructose consumption. Thus, it is important to characterize sex-specific outcomes in the arena of brain and behavior in order to develop better strategies for mitigating the effects of fructose consumption. Therefore, I determined the extent to which a high fructose diet modified physiological outcomes, serum corticosterone, and affective-like behavior in male and female rats. In addition, I examined the potential of excessive fructose consumption to modify synaptic mitochondrial respiration at baseline and following an acute stress experience. In males, serum corticosterone was increased following an acute stress event, and this increase was modified by diet. Fructose consumption resulted in decreased affective-like behavior in the open field test and synaptic mitochondrial respiration was altered by both diet and acute stress experience. In females, fructose consumption altered weight and caloric efficiency. Females demonstrated increased depressive-like behavior in a forced swim test. Corticosterone concentrations were only increased by acute stress experience, and synaptic mitochondrial function was modified by diet in groups that underwent an acute stressor.

Objective: To examine nutrient-specific and individual-specific correlates of valenced and arousal-based affective evaluations of foods across the spectrum of disordered eating, as well as to examine the validity of automatic and controlled processes of affective evaluation. Methods: 283 undergraduate women provided implicit and explicit valence and arousal-based evaluations of 120 food photos with known nutritional information (i.e., high or low added fat, high or low added sugar). Participants completed structurally similar indirect and direct affect misattribution procedures (AMP; Payne et al., 2005; 2008). These AMPs were paired with novel arousal-based AMPs to investigate both fundamental dimensions of affective evaluations of foods: valence and arousal. Participants completed questionnaires assessing body mass index, hunger, eating restriction, and binge eating. Results: Nomothetically, added fat and added sugar enhance the pleasantness and arousal of affective evaluations of foods. Idiographically, hunger and binge eating are associated with higher arousal, whereas BMI and restriction enhance pleasantness ratings. Added fat enhances the pleasantness ratings of women who are hungrier, or who endorse greater restriction, and enhances both the pleasantness and the arousal ratings of heavier women. In contrast, added sugar is especially influential on the pleasantness and arousal ratings of less hungry women. Restriction was related only to valenced affective evaluations, whereas binge eating related only to arousal affective evaluations. Finally, patterns of findings are largely similar across implicit and explicit affective evaluations, albeit stronger for explicit. Conclusions: Findings support the utility of distinguishing nutrients in future work, underscore the importance of examining both the valence and the arousal dimensions of affective evaluations, and provide modest support for the validity of dual-process models of affective evaluation of foods.

The purpose of this qualitative case study was to provide insight into affective learning during seventh-grade students' early experiences of improvising and spontaneously creating melodies in jazz style. As data collection progressed, the instructor's focus of engaging students to learn improvisation through anxiety-based affective strategies became the transforming factor of this qualitative study. Subsequently, the overarching research question evolved into: What is the nature of affective teaching and learning during students' early experiences of improvising and spontaneously creating melodies in jazz style, where the instructor intentionally incorporates affective learning experiences using Wisconsin's Comprehensive Musicianship through Performance model? Supplementary research questions included: (a) How does the teacher navigate teaching and learning experiences that target anxiety during the process of learning to improvise in the jazz band rehearsal? (b) How do the students engage with the instructor's targeted teaching strategies in the jazz band setting? (c) How do the students perceive the implementation of teaching and learning experiences created by the teacher? The seventh-grade jazz band director and six seventh-grade jazz students (three girls and three boys with one set of triplets) from a Midwest middle school music program participated. Data collection occurred during the 2011 - 2012 school year. Data included three semi-structured interviews, rehearsal observations over four months, and the instructor's Comprehensive Musicianship through Performance (CMP) teaching plan. Using MacIntyre, Potter, and Burns' (2012) socio-educational model for music motivation, an adaptation of Robert Gardner's socio-educational model of motivation in second language acquisition, I applied the model's categories--(a) anxiety, (b) integrativeness, (c) attitudes toward the learning situation, (d) motivation, and (e) perceived competence--to my data. Because MacIntyre, et al. (2012) identified anxiety as an outcome that significantly and negatively predicted perceived competence through their quantitative study, I analyzed the instructor's teaching and learning strategies that targeted anxiety and the students' perceptions of their own anxiety while learning to solo improvise. The findings in this study revealed how an instructor integrated anxiety-inducing experiences in a manner that positively influenced student motivation. The progression began with game-like solo improvisation experiences and developed into unanticipated improvised solos assigned by the instructor. By incorporating teaching and learning strategies that incrementally increased anxiety within the learning situation context, anxiety as a negative outcome (MacIntyre's et al., 2012) transformed into positive experiences. The students gradually became comfortable with the emotion of anxiety, began to take risks and, ultimately, developed more interest to continue learning and improvising.

A deeper understanding of human physiology, combined with improvements in sensing technologies, is fulfilling the vision of affective computing, where applications monitor and react to changes in affect. Further, the proliferation of commodity mobile devices is extending these applications into the natural environment, where they become a pervasive part of our daily lives. This work examines one such pervasive affective computing application with significant implications for long-term health and quality of life adaptive just-in-time interventions (AJITIs). We discuss fundamental components needed to design AJITIs based for one kind of affective data, namely stress. Chronic stress has significant long-term behavioral and physical health consequences, including an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, cancer, anxiety and depression. This dissertation presents the state-of-the-art of Just-in-time interventions for stress. It includes a new architecture. that is used to describe the most important issues in the design, implementation, and evaluation of AJITIs. Then, the most important mechanisms available in the literature are described, and classified. The dissertation also presents a simulation model to study and evaluate different strategies and algorithms for interventions selection. Then, a new hybrid mechanism based on value iteration and monte carlo simulation method is proposed. This semi-online algorithm dynamically builds a transition probability matrix (TPM) which is used to obtain a new policy for intervention selection. We present this algorithm in two different versions. The first version uses a pre-determined number of stress episodes as a training set to create a TPM, and then to generate the policy that will be used to select interventions in the future. In the second version, we use each new stress episode to update the TPM, and a pre-determined number of episodes to update our selection policy for interventions. We also present a completely online learning algorithm for intervention selection based on Q-learning with eligibility traces. We show that this algorithm could be used by an affective computing system to select and deliver in mobile environments. Finally, we conducts posthoc experiments and simulations to demonstrate feasibility of both real-time stress forecasting and stress intervention adaptation and optimization.

Retention and productivity levels of a workforce are one of the essential ingredients for organisations to prosper in today's competitive business environment. Turnover intentions of the workforce are an important consideration for managers of organisations, employees, families, and communities alike. This study investigated a comprehensive model of turnover intentions that included two proximal variables, (job satisfaction, and organisational commitment), the distal variables of organisational justice, work strain, work overload, and work-to-family conflict and family-to-work conflict with the turnover intentions. A questionnaire was completed by 114 participants of the Allied Health workforce at the Waikato District Health Board, from allied health occupational groups, psychologists, physiotherapists, social workers, dieticians, and speech language therapists. Job satisfaction, affective commitment, distributive, interactional, and procedural justice, strain and family-to-work conflict were correlated with turnover intentions. Results of the mediated regression analyses found that job satisfaction and affective commitment are significant mediators between distributive, interactional, and procedural justice, work strain, and family work conflict with turnover intentions. The major implications from this research are that managers of organisation need to foster job satisfaction and affective commitment within their organisation to reduce turnover intentions. In the final chapter, the conclusions are discussed in terms of its practical implications to organisations, employees and the need for future research.

<p>The long-term goal of this project has been to help strengthen the customer focus at the product development department of Pergo. To achieve this a Kansei Engineering case study was performed, to provide information about the chosen customer group, the contract market. </p><p>Kansei Engineering is a Japanese methodology for gathering and analysing information about the relation between the customer’s impression of a product and the actual physical properties of that same product. </p><p>The results show clear differences between the flooring entrepreneurs and the architects in their average ratings. The factor analysis led to four factors that are important when this group of customers evaluates laminate flooring, namely Reliable and practical, Modern design, Classic style and Nice and solid. </p><p>The regression analysis was done both on the 17 Kansei-words and on the factors. The type of decor and surface were found to have most influence on the customer’s impressions. Among the surfaces matt oiled turned out to be most popular and for most of the Kansei-words, the unexpected combination of wood- like decor and tile-format was rated the most positive.</p>

Thesis (M.Com. (Industrial Psychology))--North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2006.