Young people’s leisure patterns: testing social age,social gender,and linguistic capital hypotheses

We analysed young people’s leisure activities in order to identify their leisure habitus, discover how they combined activities into leisure patterns, and examine how leisure patterns were socially structured. We argue that the effects of age, gender, and language on how young people’s leisure patterns are structured are mediated by social class. We found that leisure practices could be classified in terms of three habitus: the frequent leisure habitus, the cultural activity habitus, and the social vs. entertainment habitus. The different combinations of these three leisure habitus by young people resulted in four patterns which we refer to as social, omnivorous, entertainment, and religious leisure patterns. The association of leisure patterns with indicators of social position suggests that, as predicted by our theoretical framework, age, gender, and language effects are diminished once we take into account the mediating role of social class. Young people’s leisure practices are therefore socially differentiated, with young immigrants forming a vulnerable group that should be the particular focus of youth leisure policies.     

Children’s Deliberate Control of Facial Action Units Involved in Sad and Happy Expressions

Few attempts have been made since the pioneer work of Ekman et al. (1980) to examine the development of the deliberate control of facial action units in children. We are reporting here two studies concerned with this issue. In Study 1, we investigated children’s ability to activate facial action units involved in sadness and happiness expressions as well as combinations of these action units. In Study 2, we examined children’s ability to pose happiness and sadness with their face, without telling them which action unit to activate. The children who took part in this study were simply asked to portray happiness and sadness as convincingly as possible. The results of Study 1 indicate a strong developmental progression in children’s ability to produce elementary facial components of both emotions as well as in their ability to produce a combination of the elements in the case of happiness. In agreement with prior research in motor development, several non-target action units were also activated when children performed the task. Their occurrence persisted throughout childhood, indicating limitations in the finer motor control achieved by children across age. The results obtained in Study 2 paralleled those obtained in Study 1 in many respects, providing evidence that the children used the technique of deliberate action to pose the two target emotions.     

Recession,austerity and gender: A comparison of eight European labour markets

The collapse in GDP brought about by the global economic crisis in 2008 affected female employment less than male employment, whereas austerity has been particularly harsh on women, a gendered impact described in the literature as “he‐cession to sh(e)‐austerity”. This article analyses gendered trends in the labour markets of eight European countries, decomposing quarterly changes in labour participation of women and men and in employment by sector. The “he‐cession to sh(e)‐austerity” scenario is not observed in all countries. Other channels through which austerity policies can jeopardize gender equality and women's rights are identified with reference to a typology of such policies.     

Employment Quality: Are There Differences by Types of Contract?

Measuring welfare state generosity in developing and transitional welfare states is often challenged not only by lack of comparative quantitative data, but also by issues of conceptual stretching. This paper demonstrates and discusses the use of one of the key measures of welfare entitlement generosity developed in the comparative welfare state research in the context of post-communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). With the new time series data provided by the Comparative Welfare Entitlements Dataset CWED2, comparative approaches including the CEE countries have become feasible. This paper first discusses quantitative measures of welfare entitlement generosity in the tradition of the social rights of citizenship approach and how they can be applied for cross-country comparisons. It then demonstrates empirically how the emerging CEE welfare states’ generosity compares to mature “old” OECD welfare states. Finally, the paper shows the potential and the pitfalls of quantitative measures of welfare state generosity by discussing, to what extent do indicators of social security scheme generosity measure the same in established and emerging welfare states, which functional equivalents may be relevant in the context of emerging welfare states and how far can we stretch our theoretical concepts.     

Spokespersons’ Nonverbal Behavior in Times of Crisis: The Relative Importance of Visual and Vocal Cues

When a chief executive officer or spokesperson responds to an organizational crisis, he or she communicates not only with verbal cues but also visual and vocal cues. While most research in the area of crisis communication has focused on verbal cues (e.g., apologies, denial), this paper explores the relative importance of visual and vocal cues by spokespersons of organizations in crisis. Two experimental studies have more specifically examined the impact of a spokesperson’s visual cues of deception (i.e., gaze aversion, posture shifts, adaptors), because sending a credible response is crucial in times of crisis. Each study focused on the interplay of these visual cues with two specific vocal cues that have also been linked to perceptions of deception (speech disturbances in study 1; voice pitch in study 2). Both studies show that visual cues of deception negatively affect both consumers’ attitudes towards the organization (study 1) and their purchase intentions (study 2) after a crisis. In addition, the findings indicate that in crisis communication, the impact of visual cues dominates the outcomes of vocal cues. In both studies, vocal cues only affected consumers’ perceptions when the spokesperson displayed visual cues of deception. More specifically, the findings show that crisis communication messages with speech disturbances (study 1) or a raised voice pitch (study 2) can negatively affect organizational post-crisis perceptions.     

Tail density estimation for exploratory data analysis using kernel methods

It is often critical to accurately model the upper tail behaviour of a random process. Nonparametric density estimation methods are commonly implemented as exploratory data analysis techniques for this purpose and can avoid model specification biases implied by using parametric estimators. In particular, kernel-based estimators place minimal assumptions on the data, and provide improved visualisation over scatterplots and histograms. However kernel density estimators can perform poorly when estimating tail behaviour above a threshold, and can over-emphasise bumps in the density for heavy tailed data. We develop a transformation kernel density estimator which is able to handle heavy tailed and bounded data, and is robust to threshold choice. We derive closed form expressions for its asymptotic bias and variance, which demonstrate its good performance in the tail region. Finite sample performance is illustrated in numerical studies, and in an expanded analysis of the performance of global climate models.     

Disentangling an avian assemblages’ evolutionary and functional history in a Chihuahuan desert city

Urban Ecosystems - Urban green spaces have been shown to be important hotspots of biodiversity in cities of temperate and humid/semihumid tropical ecoregions. Nonetheless, whether this pattern...