Yes / Purpose The purpose of this article was to examine the joint effects of regulatory focus, entrepreneurial persistence, and institutional support on new venture performance. Design/methodology/approach This paper uses a random survey approach to sample 204 new ventures from Ghana. The moderated mediation method was used to analyze the survey data. Findings The findings from this paper show that entrepreneurs’ promotion focus positively relates to persistence whiles prevent focus negatively influences persistence. Besides, persistence mediates the link between regulatory focus (promotion and prevention focus) and new venture performance. These relationships are positively moderated by perceived institutional support. Research limitations/implications Using data from only the manufacturing sector in Ghana limits the generalisability of this paper. Also, persistence was not observed or measured directly in this paper but was only used as a self-reporting variable that captures an individual’s tendency to persist. Originality/value The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, this paper contributes to regulatory focus literature by enhancing our knowledge of how self-regulation could help explain entrepreneurial decision-making. Second, this paper broadens self-regulation literature by adding institutional context as a moderating variable. Third, this paper helps clarify the potential role of persistence in entrepreneurship.

Osteoporosis is a debilitating disease that afflicts an estimated 25 million Americans, especially women. Suboptimal intakes of calcium, phosphorus, and vitamin D contribute to development of osteoporosis. Results from the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES III) indicate that adult women do not meet the Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) for calcium. Results from other national studies indicate that adult women consume less than the recommended number of servings of dairy foods per day. Focus groups were conducted in rural and urban areas of Virginia to gain insight into middle aged women's perceptions of dairy foods. Four focus groups were conducted with a total of 39 women. The majority of the women were between the ages of 35 to 50 years; all were non-Hispanic white women. All had a minimum of a high school education, and the majority had some education beyond high school. Discussion questions addressed preferences for dairy foods, advantages and disadvantages of dairy foods, factors that influence dairy food choices, and possibilities for product improvements. Focus group discussions were audio taped and transcribed by the moderator. The moderator identified major and minor themes; women's responses were organized thematically. Results were reported in the following broad theme categories: perceptions of health and nutrition that influenced dairy food choices and factors that influenced dairy food choices. The predominant negative perception of dairy foods was that dairy foods were high in fat. Women also negatively associated dairy foods with lactose intolerance and kidney stones. The predominant positive perception of dairy foods was that dairy foods were a good source of calcium. Women also believed dairy foods were a good source of vitamins, although they were unsure of specific vitamins found in dairy foods. Participants were aware of osteoporosis, but many were not knowledgeable about risk factors or prevention related to osteoporosis. Many women used calcium supplements or vitamin-mineral supplements to help meet dietary calcium requirements. Results indicate a need for education on the role of dairy foods in osteoporosis prevention. Women's preferences for dairy foods influenced dairy food choices. Product characteristics, such as sensory attributes, convenience, cost, availability, and packaging, were mentioned as factors that greatly influenced dairy food choices. The majority of women stated that other household members influenced dairy food choices. Women also mentioned that physicians and media sources, such as magazine advertisements and television commercials, influenced their dairy food choices. Nutrition education for this population should continue to promote the view that "all foods can fit" into a healthy eating pattern. Nutrition education should be geared toward the fast paced lifestyle these women lead. Product development should focus on convenience items. / Master of Science

The purpose of the present study was to gain insight on the real and perceived needs of food stamp recipients for use in developing nutrition education programs. Six focus group interviews with 26 food stamp recipients were conducted in six Virginia counties. Transcripts of the meetings were analyzed to identify themes prevalent in all of the focus group interviews. Ninety-two 24-hour food recalls from a different sub-group of food stamp recipients were also analyzed for food consumption frequencies, trends in food preparation, and common food purchasing locations. A key finding was that most focus group participants made food-related decisions while in the grocery store. Explanations for incidences of food resource scarcities included beliefs that the amount of food stamps was insufficient and that poor food purchasing decisions were made. Predominant food behavior changes that had been previously attempted were decreasing consumption of fat and fried foods and reducing portion sizes. Most of the reasons for attempting those behavior changes involved a desire for weight loss. Prevalent nutrition education interests were low-fat cooking and child nutrition. Results of the 24-hour food recall analysis indicated an inadequate consumption of fruits, vegetables, whole grain cereals, and dairy products. Seventy-five percent of the subjects purchased food in a grocery store and prepared meals at home. / Master of Science

Augmented reality provides its user with additional information not available through the natural real-world environment. This additional information displayed to the user potentially poses a risk of perceptual and cognitive load and vision-based difficulties. The presence of real-world objects together with virtual augmenting information requires the user to repeatedly switch eye focus between the two in order to extract information from both environments. Switching eye focus may result in additional time on user tasks and lower task accuracy. Thus, one of the goals of this research was to understand the impact of switching eye focus between real-world and virtual information on user task performance. Secondly, focus depth, which is an important parameter and a depth cue, may affect the user's view of the augmented world. If focus depth is not adjusted properly, it may result in vision-based difficulties and reduce speed, accuracy, and comfort while using an augmented reality display. Thus, the second goal of this thesis was to study the effect of focus depth on task performance in augmented reality systems. In augmented reality environments, real-world and virtual information are found at different distances from the user. To focus at different depths, the user's eye needs to accommodate and converge, which may strain the eye and degrade performance on tasks. However, no research in augmented reality has explored this issue. Hence, the third goal of this thesis was to determine if distance of virtual information from the user impacts task performance. To accomplish these goals, a 3x3x3 within subjects design was used. The experimental task for the study required the user to repeatedly switch eye focus between the virtual text and real-world text. A monocular see-through head- mounted display was used for this research. Results of this study revealed that switching between real-world and virtual information in augmented reality is extremely difficult when information is displayed at optical infinity. Virtual information displayed at optical infinity may be unsuitable for tasks of the nature used in this research. There was no impact of focus depth on user task performance and hence it is preliminarily recommended that manufacturers of head-mounted displays may only need to make fixed focus depth displays; this clearly merits additional intensive research. Further, user task performance was better when focus depth, virtual information, and real-world information were all at the same distance from the user as compared to conditions when they were mismatched. Based on this result we recommend presenting virtual information at the same distance as real-world information of interest. / Master of Science

Yes / Women are discharged home from hospital increasingly early, but there is little evidence examining the postnatal hospital discharge process and how this may impact on the health of women and babies. In particular, there is little on sepsis prevention advice, despite it being the biggest direct cause of maternal mortality. Aim To explore the perceptions of women and senior student midwives related to the postnatal hospital discharge process and maternal sepsis prevention advice. Methods Three focus group interviews were undertaken, involving 9 senior student midwives and 14 women attending paid or specialist classes for vulnerable migrant women. Findings All participants believed that the postnatal hospital discharge process was inadequate, rushed and inconsistent. Sepsis advice was patchy and the condition underplayed. Conclusions Cost effective, time-efficient and innovative ways to impart vital information are required to support the postnatal hospital discharge process.

In this dissertation, I start with an analysis of negation in eleven benchmark corpora covering six Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks. With a thorough investigation, I first show that (a) these benchmarks contain fewer negations compared to general-purpose English and (b) the few negations they contain are often unimportant. Further, my empirical studies demonstrate that state-of-the-art transformers trained using these corpora obtain substantially worse results with the instances that contain negation, especially if the negations are important. Second, I investigate whether translating negation is also an issue for modern machine translation (MT) systems. My studies find that indeed the presence of negation can significantly impact translation quality, in some cases resulting in reductions of over 60%. In light of these findings, I investigate strategies to better understand the semantics of negation. I start with identifying the focus of negation. I develop a neural model that takes into account the scope of negation, context from neighboring sentences, or both. My best proposed system obtains an accuracy improvement of 7.4% over prior work. Further, I analyze the main error categories of the systems through a detailed error analysis. Next, I explore more practical ways to understand the semantics of negation. I consider revealing the meaning of negation by revealing their affirmative interpretations. First, I propose a question-answer driven approach to create AFIN, a collection of 3,001 sentences with verbal negations and their affirmative interpretations. Then, I present an automated procedure to collect pairs of sentences with negation and their affirmative interpretations, resulting in over 150,000 pairs. Experimental results demonstrate that leveraging these pairs helps (a) a T5 system generate affirmative interpretations from negations in AFIN and (b) state-of-the-art transformers solve natural language understanding tasks, including natural language inference and sentiment analysis. Furthermore, I develop a plug-and-play affirmative interpretation generator that is potentially useful in improving a number of natural language understanding tasks where negation poses a challenge.

While obesity is now recognized as a major health concern in Ghana, the major drivers, causal factors, and their spatial variation remain unclear. Nutritional changes and lack of physical activity are frequently blamed but the underlying factors, particularly cultural values and practices, remain understudied. Using hot spot analysis and spatial autocorrelation, this research investigates the spatial patterns of obesity in Ghana and the explanatory factors. We also use focus group discussions to examine the primary cultural factors underlying these patterns. The results show that wealth, high education, and urban residence are the best positive predictors of obesity, while poverty, low education, and rural residence are the best (negative) predictors of obesity. Consequently, improving the socioeconomic status, for example, through higher levels of education and urbanization may increase obesity rates. Furthermore, the cultural preference for fat body as the ideal body size drives individual aspiration for weight gain which can lead to obesity. Thus, reducing obesity rates in Ghana is impossible without addressing the underlying cultural values.

2023 / The way an individual observes their world can impact overall wellbeing. Observation is a fundamental component of mindfulness, as how one chooses to focus can greatly impact one’s ability to live in the present moment. Since there are many benefits to mindfulness, it would be advantageous to have a tool to assess individuals’ type of focus to help individualize mindfulness-based treatments. Current mindfulness questionnaires, such as the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ), do not adequately assess for where one tends to focus (internally vs. externally), or the function of that focus (adaptive vs. maladaptive). This gap presented an important opportunity to develop a more refined tool to assess individual differences in mindfulness behaviors. The current project consisted of two studies. The first study aimed to develop a new questionnaire, entitled the Adaptive-Maladaptive Focus Scale (AMFS). In the first phase, 153 participants assisted in item generation through an online survey. The second phase of the study aimed to test the psychometric properties of the AMFS. This involved recruiting participants (N=915) from the general population through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk). The initial structure of the 48-item AMFS was evaluated, and convergent and discriminant validity were assessed. The results of the exploratory-confirmatory factor analysis indicated a 2-factor solution with an acceptable model fit, resulting in Adaptive and Maladaptive factors (χ2(1128)=9,900.2, p<0.001, Root Mean Square Error of Approximation=0.05 (p<0.05), Tucker-Lewis Index=0.87, Comparative Fit Index=0.98). Following the data-driven approach, items were conceptually divided into internal and external dimensions within the Adaptive and Maladaptive factors (Maladaptive internal α=0.91; Maladaptive external α=0.83; Adaptive internal α=0.77; Adaptive external α=0.85). The final iteration of the AMFS consisted of 30 items. The second study aimed to validate the AMFS with an interoceptive behavioral paradigm and to understand how the AMFS may predict anxiety sensitivity (AS, measured with the Anxiety Sensitivity Index-3, ASI-3). The study recruited students from Boston University (N=41) to engage in a heart rate perception task, called the Schandry paradigm, which assesses interoceptive focus. Participants completed demographic questions, the AMFS and ASI-3. Findings did not reveal significant correlations between heartbeat perception (HBP) accuracy and either of the internal dimensional scores. There was a trend for Adaptive focus to correlate with HBP scores (r(41)= 0.29, p=0.07). Maladaptive focus was correlated with anxiety AS total scores (r(41)= 0.76, p<0.001). Those with higher overall AS also had more accurate HBP (χ2(1)=5.28, p=0.02). Individuals who endorsed higher physical AS also had more accurate HBP (χ2(3)=9.14, p=0.03). Ultimately, findings from this study revealed the importance of having a validated scale in the anxiety and mindfulness fields to help researchers and clinicians differentiate between types of focus. By understanding where one focuses and why, providers can more adequately individualize treatment, which is an important step forward for functional and precision medicine. / 2027-01-29T00:00:00Z

[pt] O presente trabalho de tese é destinado ao estudo do decaimento do méson D+ KS(pi)&#8722;(pi)+(pi)+ com dados coletados pelo experimento FOCUS do Fermilab. O estado final, composto por 4 mésons pseudo- escalares, pode ser alcançado através de uma considerável variedade de sub- estruturas ressonantes. O proposito da análise é encontrar quais são estes possíveis canais intermediários através de suas contribuições e fases relativas. Para tanto, é utilizado o formalismo de Análise de Amplitudes usando o chamado Modelo Isobárico. A dinâmica do decaimento é definida através de uma função que contém as características (formas funcionais das ressonâncias, distribuição angular, etc) dos canais que intervêm no decaimento e cujo domínio é um espaço o de fase determinado por 5 invariantes (devido às restrições de decaimento em quatro corpos sem spin). A função é então ajustada ao conjunto de dados coletados. Nos resultados, verificamos uma grande contribuição do méson vetor-axial a1(1260) (52%) seguido do vetor-axial K1(1400) (34%). Além disso, o modelo apresenta contribuição da ressonância (sigma) (cerca de 8%, vinda de a1(sigmapi)KS e sigmaKSpi) e uma razoável contribuição da ressonância escalar K&#8722; (14%). O estado K já foi visto em seu modo neutro em outros decaimentos de charme, porém ainda não em seu modo carregado. Não encontramos contribui ção significativa do decaimento direto em 4 corpos (não- ressonante). Esta tese vem se somar ao esforço no entendimento da dinâmica das intera ções fortes a baixas energias, que nos últimos anos tem ganhado da física de mésons charmosos uma importante contribuição. / [en] This thesis is devoted to the study of the decay D+ KS(pi)&#8722; (pi)+(pi)+ with data collected from the FOCUS experiment, at Fermilab. The final state composed of 4 pseudo-scalars can be produced through a number of resonant sub-structures. The purpose of this analysis is to find the contributing intermediate states by measuring their relative strenghts and phases. For that, the Amplitude Analysis formalism is used, with the so-called Isobar Model. The decay dynamics is described through a function which has the features of the contributing channels (functional forms of the resonances, angular distribution, etc) and which domain is a phase space determined by 5 invariants (due to the kinematical constraints of a 4- body spinless decay). The data sample is thus fitted to this function. Our results show a dominant contribution of the axial- vector meson a1(1260) (52%), followed by the K1(1400) axial-vector (34%). Moreover, the model presents a contribution from the sigma meson (about 8% as a1(sigmapi)KS and sigmaKSpi) and a significant contribution from the scalar k&#8722;. The k state has been reported in its neutral mode in other charm decays but not is its charged mode. We find no significant contribution from the direct 4-body decay (non-resonant). This work adds to the effort in the understanding of the strong-interaction dynamics at low energies, which in recent years have been receiving an important contribution from charm meson physics.

We investigated race and gender differences in regulatory focus, which distinguishes between two modes of motivational regulation: promotion and prevention focus. Item response theory was used to examine measurement equivalence/invariance and mean differences across groups were examined. Several items functioned differently across groups, but differences cancelled out at the test-level. Analyses using an undergraduate student sample (N = 1,845) revealed that females were significantly more promotion and prevention focused than males and African Americans were significantly more promotion and prevention focused than Caucasians. Interestingly, both gender and racial minority groups scored higher on regulatory focus indicators than the majority groups. Arguably, unlike minority group members, majority group members would have less of a necessity to prevent failure or to promote their own success. Implications for these motivation regulation differences can be applied to workforce settings in which managers seek to provide equal opportunities for both genders and racial groups.