We use a cultural psychology approach to examine the relevance of the Health Belief Model (HBM) for predicting a variety of behaviors that had been recommended by health officials during the initial ...stages of the COVID-19 lockdown for containing the spread of the virus and not overburdening the health system in Europe. Our study is grounded in the assumption that health behavior is activated based on locally relevant perceptions of threats, susceptibility and benefits in engaging in protective behavior, which requires careful attention to how these perceptions might be structured and activated. We assess the validity of the HBM in two European countries that have been relatively understudied, using simultaneous measurements during acute periods of infection in Romania and Italy. An online questionnaire provided a total of (
= 1863) valid answers from both countries. First, to understand individual difference patterns within and across populations, we fit a General Linear Model in which endorsement was predicted by behavior, country, their interaction, and a random effect for participants. Second, we assess the effect of demographics and health beliefs on prevention behaviors by fitting a multi-group path model across countries, in which each behavior was predicted by the observed health belief variables and demographics. Health beliefs showed stronger relationships with the recommended behaviors than demographics. Confirming previously reported relationships, self-efficacy, perceived severity, and perceived benefits were consistently related to the greater adoption of individual behaviors, whereas greater perceived barriers were related to lower adoption of health behaviors. However, we also point to important location specific effects that suggest that local norms shape protective behavior in highly contextualized ways.
There have been long-standing debates on the relationships between values as important motivational goals and well-being. We used a longitudinal network perspective to examine how value states and ...well-being are related over time, separating within-person lagged, within-person contemporaneous, and between-person perspectives. A total of 227 young adults (1,007 observation points) participated in the study and rated their values states and well-being over a 6-day period. Value-well-being linkages varied across levels of analysis for participants who reported at least three times (N = 187). Momentary self-transcendence values predicted both simultaneous and subsequent well-being. The motivationally opposing self-enhancement values negatively related to well-being contemporaneously within person. This supports clinical research emphasizing that pursuing other-focused values increases well-being and highlights the importance of values for well-being. At the same time, individual differences in self-transcendence values were negatively related to well-being, supporting previous value models. In line with self-determination theory, openness to change values were related to well-being at both the within- and between-person level. These patterns unify diverging theoretical positions, and suggest that different dynamics operate across levels (within-person lagged or contemporaneous vs. between-person). We also provide new insights into value dynamics by describing how distributions of value states may give rise to more stable value differences between individuals. Overall, within- and between-person associations differed suggesting greater attention to person-level processes is needed.
A central hypothesis to account for the ubiquity of rituals across cultures is their supposed anxiolytic effects: rituals being maintained because they reduce existential anxiety and uncertainty. We ...aimed to test the anxiolytic effects of rituals by investigating two possible underlying mechanisms for it: cognitive load and repetitive movement. In our pre-registered experiment (osf.io/rsu9x), 180 undergraduates took part in either a stress or a control condition and were subsequently assigned to either control, cognitive load, undirected movement, a combination of undirected movement and cognitive load, or a ritualistic intervention. Using both repeated self-report measures and continuous physiological indicators of anxiety, we failed to find direct support for a cognitive suppression effect of anxiety through ritualistic behavior. Nevertheless, we found that induced stress increased participants' subsequent repetitive behavior, which in turn reduced physiological arousal. This study provides novel evidence for plausible underlying effects of the proposed anxiolytic effect of rituals: repetitive behavior but not cognitive load may decrease physiological stress responses during ritual.
We experimentally investigate Kerr nonlinearity mitigation of a 28-GBd polarization-multiplexed 16-QAM signal in a five-channel 50-GHz spaced wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) system. Optical ...phase conjugation (OPC) employing the mid-link spectral inversion technique is implemented by using a dual-pump polarization-independent fiber-optic parametric amplifier and compared to digital backpropagation (DBP) compensation over up to 800-km in a dispersion-managed link. In the single-channel case, the use of the DBP algorithm outperformed the OPC with a Q-factor improvement of 0.9 dB after 800-km transmission. However, signal transmission was not possible with DBP in the WDM scenario over the same link length while it was enabled by the OPC with a maximum Q-factor of 8.6 dB.
Abstract
The current study aimed to replicate the development of the
Five-Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire
(FFMQ) in a sample of 399 undergraduate students. We factor analyzed the
Mindful Attention ...and Awareness Questionnaire
(MAAS), the
Freiburg Mindfulness Scale
, the
Southampton Mindfulness Questionnaire
(SMQ), the
Cognitive Affective Mindfulness Scale Revised
(CAMS-R), and the
Kentucky Inventory of Mindfulness Skills
(KIMS), but also extended the analysis by including a conceptually related measure, the
Philadelphia Mindfulness Scale
(PHLMS), and a conceptually unrelated measure, the
Langer Mindfulness Scale
(LMS). Overall, we found a partial replication of the five-factor structure, with the exception of non-reacting and non-judging which formed a single factor. The PHLMS items loaded as expected with theoretically related factors, whereas the LMS items emerged as separate factor. Finally, we found a new factor that was mostly defined by negatively worded items indicating possible item wording artifacts within the FFMQ. Our conceptual validation study indicates that some facets of the FFMQ can be recovered, but item wording factors may threaten the stability of these facets. Additionally, measures such as the LMS appear to measure not only theoretically, but also empirically different constructs.
Roadmap of optical communications Agrell, Erik; Karlsson, Magnus; Chraplyvy, A R ...
Journal of optics,
06/2016, Letnik:
18, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Lightwave communications is a necessity for the information age. Optical links provide enormous bandwidth, and the optical fiber is the only medium that can meet the modern society's needs for ...transporting massive amounts of data over long distances. Applications range from global high-capacity networks, which constitute the backbone of the internet, to the massively parallel interconnects that provide data connectivity inside datacenters and supercomputers. Optical communications is a diverse and rapidly changing field, where experts in photonics, communications, electronics, and signal processing work side by side to meet the ever-increasing demands for higher capacity, lower cost, and lower energy consumption, while adapting the system design to novel services and technologies. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of this rich research field, Journal of Optics has invited 16 researchers, each a world-leading expert in their respective subfields, to contribute a section to this invited review article, summarizing their views on state-of-the-art and future developments in optical communications.
Next-generation optical communication networks aim to vastly increase capacity by exploiting a larger optical transmission window covering the S-C-L-band. Simultaneously, the clear market trend is to ...maximize capacity per wavelength to reduce operational costs. This approach requires an increase in spectral efficiency, resulting in stringent requirements on the transceivers, which may not be satisfied in a multi-band (MB) scenario by current commercial components designed for operation in C-band. Transceiver specifications for MB operation can be relaxed through additional digital signal processing (DSP), at the cost of additional complexity, and by more resource-intensive calibration procedures. In this context, we experimentally characterize the wavelength-dependent frequency-resolved in-phase/quadrature (I/Q) imbalance of a standard C-band IQ-modulator and coherent receiver operating in an S-C-L-band system utilizing receiver-side DSP. This operation allows us to understand the nature of the wavelength-dependency of I/Q imbalance in MB systems. In the considered scenario, we validate the effectiveness of a cost-effective strategy for transceiver impairments mitigation and monitoring based on standard wavelength-independent calibration and reduced-complexity DSP.
Rituals are performed within specific socio-ecological niches, yet the different effects of the same ritual form across different niches (community contexts) remains unclear. Here, using longitudinal ...measures over a two-week period during Diwali (the Indian festival of light), we investigate the relationship between ritual time allocation and social cohesion in two Indian communities. First, the positive effects of ritual on social bonding, perceived health and affect were highest on the focal day of the festival. Second, we observed anticipatory effects of ritualistic commitment on affect prior to the main day of the festival. Third, social bonding patterns were similar in the two Indian settings, indicating that Diwali fosters social cohesion across diverse social ecologies (cultural niches). However, individually focused emotional benefits appear to dampened in more cosmopolitan environments. Finally, time investments reveal diminishing marginal utilities for ritual activities on social cognition. Ritual time investments were linked to greater affect and family cohesion up to a certain limit. We argue that attention to the diminishing returns of ritual time investments on social cohesion across diverse human ecologies is an important horizon for future cross-cultural investigations. This article is part of the theme issue 'Ritual renaissance: new insights into the most human of behaviours'.
We present a linear and nonlinear digital pre-distortion (DPD) tailored to the components of an optical transmitter. The DPD concept uses nonlinear models of the transmitter devices, which are ...obtained from direct component measurements. While the digital-to-analog converter and driver amplifier are modeled jointly by a Volterra series, the modulator is modeled independently as a Wiener system. This allows for a block-wise compensation of the modulator by a Hammerstein system and a pre-distortion of the electrical components by a second Volterra series. In simulations and extensive experiments, the performance of our approach for nonlinear DPD is compared to an equivalent linear solution as well as to a configuration without any DPD. The experiments were performed using M-ary quadrature-amplitude modulation (M-QAM) formats ranging from 16- to 128-QAM at a symbol rate of 32 GBd. It is shown that the DPD improves the required optical signal-to-noise ratio at a bit error ratio of 2·10 -2 by at least 1.2 dB. Nonlinear DPD outperforms linear DPD by an additional 0.9 and 2.7 dB for higher-order modulation formats such as 64-QAM and 128-QAM, respectively.
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