Behavioural Sciences
Harnessing anger for social change
Dr Monique Turner of Michigan State University, is an expert in persuasion and health and risk communication, and is conducting research into the way people cognitively process campaign messages. Emotions, including anger, are known to be predominant in persuasion, decision-making and risk assessments. Although commonly associated with negative behaviours, anger as a positive motivator in behaviour change is a promising […]
Fathers who use violence: Shifting the focus toward the perpetrator
Professor Cathy Humphreys of the University of Melbourne and Dr Susan Heward-Belle of the University of Sydney examine the best ways we can bring about organisational change in the way we handle domestic abuse and domestic violence by fathers, using communities of practice that allow bottom-up participatory action research to bring about top-down complex systems change. When examining the field […]
The effect of religiosity on emotional well-being among prisoners
Studies show that religion enhances emotional well-being among prisoners, but they rarely address how. Professors Sung Joon Jang and Byron R. Johnson at the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University, examine the effects of religion on offenders in the South African correctional system. They test whether religiosity is likely to lead to a sense of meaning and purpose […]
Meaningful human control: Designing safety into automated driving systems
Automated vehicles hold great potential for improving traffic flow, fuel consumption and road safety, while reducing workload and stress for drivers. However, the vehicle still requires human supervision, with the human-machine interface improving the human’s ability to supervise the automated driving system (ADS). Simply putting the human in control of supervising such an automated system, however, is not meaningful. Humans […]
A new frontier for hate
James Hawdon, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Peace Studies and Violence Prevention at Virginia Tech, USA, has spent many years studying online hate, including hate speech and other forms of cyberviolence. His work has examined how hate speech gets produced, how the hate groups and individuals that produce it become radicalised, how it spreads across the […]
Couples bickering: Disaffiliation and discord in Chinese conversation
In “Couples Bickering”, Guodong Yu, Yaxin Wu and Paul Drew use conversation analysis on candid, everyday conversations in Mandarin from China in order to understand communication and social action. Using the relationships in interaction of arguments and conflicts found in conversations between couples, they show how there are many linguistic and grammatical ways that conflict can be limited to bickering, […]
Home advantage in the NHL
Since his retirement in 2003, Dr Marshall Jones, a professor at Penn State’s College of Medicine, has focused his research efforts on trying to explain how the home advantage in team sports works. The home advantage is the tendency for the home team to win more often than it loses. In the National Hockey League (NHL) the home advantage had […]
Creative or destructive: The perspective may be a matter of convenience
Creativity is largely understood as the production of novel and useful ideas or things. In this article, we look at the research of Chetan Walia, who argues for a new dynamic definition of creativity in order to better understand the difference between creativity, creator, and creation. This new dynamic definition will allow us to more effectively consider how negative creativity […]
Timely intervention helps protect the sexual health of adolescents
Teenagers often take risks and make poor choices around their sexual health. In young people, particularly those living in deprived areas, HIV, sexually transmitted infections and unplanned pregnancy remain major challenges. Dr Dianne Morrison-Beedy of The Ohio State University College of Nursing, Columbus, Ohio, USA, has developed an evidence-based sexual risk reduction intervention for adolescents called The Health Improvement Project […]
White identity in the Caribbean
What does it mean to be white in a black majority population? That’s the question addressed in ongoing research into racial identity and ethnicity by Michiru Ito from Japan’s Otsuma Women’s University. Focusing on ‘whiteness’ in the Caribbean islands of Barbados and Trinidad, Ms Ito’s work reveals substantial differences between the two islands in how people who identify as white […]