Body Satisfaction and Sexual Health in Dutch Female University Students

Studies in the field of body image have primarily addressed its negative aspects, such as body dissatisfaction. The present study focused instead on women who are satisfied with their bodies and on how body satisfaction relates to sexual health. A sample of 319 Dutch female university students completed an online survey that included items about body image evaluation, body image investment, overweight preoccupation, body image affect during sexual activity, sexual frequency, sexual functioning, and sexual self-esteem. We found that the level of body dissatisfaction was minimal in our sample. The majority reported neutral or mildly positive body evaluations, and in 30% of the sample these evaluations were clearly positive. Comparisons between women who reported positive versus neutral body evaluations showed that the body-satisfied women had lower body mass indexes (BMIs) and reported less body image investment, less overweight preoccupation, and less body self-consciousness during sexual activity. With regard to sexual health, they reported higher sexual self-esteem and better sexual functioning. Furthermore, we found that body image self-consciousness was negatively associated with sexual functioning, sexual self-esteem, and frequency of sexual activity with a partner. Body satisfaction did not account for a portion of the relationship of body self-consciousness during sexual activity with sexual health.     

The Role of Scientific Expertise in COVID-19 Policy-making: Evidence from Four European Countries

Public Organization Review - Immense uncertainty and the need for drastic interventions cause politicians to rely heavily on scientific advice for underpinning or legitimating their COVID-19...     

New Spatial Concepts Between Innovation and Lock-in: The Case of the Dutch Deltametropolis

It is often proclaimed that planning concepts serve an innovative function in the political process. They are praised as powerful tools that carry new insights and understandings into policy arenas. By examining the emergence and development of a new planning concept in the Dutch national spatial policy-making process, the deltametropolis concept, this paper questions this position. It argues that new spatial concepts tend to lose much of their innovative capacities when they enter the political arena and become encased in the traditional urban–rural planning discourse, thus reaffirming established planning orientations. The Dutch case of the deltametropolis illustrates that new spatial concepts may entail potential for innovation as much as for lock-in.     

Will they stay or will they go? How network properties of WebICs predict dropout rates of valuable Wikipedians

This paper contributes to our understanding of an increasingly prevalent work system, web-based internet communities (WebICs). We are particularly interested in how WebICs are governed given the fact how different they are compared to more classical forms of organization. We study the governance of a WebIC by studying the structure and dynamics of their edit network. Given the fact that the edit network is a relational structure, social network analysis is key to understanding these work systems. We demonstrate that characteristics of the edit network contribute to predicting the dropout hazard of valuable WebIC members. Since WebICs exist only thanks to the activity of their contributors, predicting drop-outs becomes crucial. The results show that reputation and controversy have different effects for different types of Wikipedians; i.e., an actor’s reputation decreases the dropout hazard of active Wikipedians, while participation on controversial pages decreases the dropout hazard of highly active Wikipedians.     

Testing whether reduced cognitive performance in burnout can be reversed by a motivational intervention

It has been suggested that the motivation to spend effort is decreased in burnout patients, resulting in reduced cognitive performance. A question that remains is whether this decreased motivation can be reversed by motivational interventions. We investigated this by examining the effect of a motivational intervention on cognitive performance. We presented 40 burnout patients in The Netherlands and 40 matched healthy controls with a complex attention task. As expected, in a first block of trials the performance of the burnout patients was poorer than that of healthy controls. Subsequently, we provided the participants with fake positive feedback about their performance and announced that we would financially reward those who performed best in a subsequent block of trials. Contrary to the healthy controls, the burnout patients did not improve their performance and experienced more aversion to spend effort. The study demonstrated that impaired cognitive performance in burnout patients could not be reversed by motivational interventions, which is in line with contemporary theories on burnout that state that physiological changes in burnout may underlie a relatively long-term decrease in motivation. The implication of these results is that in practice employers and therapists might need to accept that there could be a reduction in cognitive performance in employees with burnout.     

Going global: professional mobility and concerns for LGBT workers

The world of work has regularized the practice of people moving from one country to another to accept job assignments. Travel and relocation are stress-laden endeavours. For LGBT people, the risks can be more complicated than they are for heterosexuals. This article explores particular challenges that LGBT people face when they travel and relocate for business, both domestically and internationally. The article is contextualized with a literature review on sexual minorities and workplace issues, and uses auto-ethnographic stories of three of the authors’ lived experiences as sexual minorities relocating for professional reasons in order to examine issues related to LGBT relocation. These issues include legal, social, cultural and familial considerations. Implications and suggestions for human resource developers are presented, which include acquiring awareness around the psychological and physiological reactions to new and diverse ecologies, or ‘eco-shocks’.     

A deletion/substitution/addition algorithm for classification neural networks,with applications to biomedical data

Neural networks are a popular machine learning tool, particularly in applications such as protein structure prediction; however, overfitting can pose an obstacle to their effective use. Due to the large number of parameters in a typical neural network, one may obtain a network fit that perfectly predicts the learning data, yet fails to generalize to other data sets. One way of reducing the size of the parmeter space is to alter the network topology so that some edges are removed; however it is often not immediately apparent which edges should be eliminated. We propose a data-adaptive method of selecting an optimal network architecture using a deletion/substitution/addition algorithm. Results of this approach to classification are presented on simulated data and the breast cancer data of Wolberg and Mangasarian [1990. Multisurface method of pattern separation for medical diagnosis applied to breast cytology. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. 87, 9193–9196].     

Institutional Shifts In Inter-Municipal Service Delivery

Comparative research on inter-municipal cooperation in eight European countries shows that there is a great variety of institutional arrangements for cooperation across the different countries. Also, these arrangements tend to change over time in terms of the scope of cooperation among partners, their composition and the degree of organizational integration. This article describes and analyzes the variety of and shifts in institutional arrangements for a specific class of inter-municipal cooperation arrangements: those that are set up to provide for the joint delivery of public services. It is argued that specific arrangements are typically the outcomes of interaction between national institutional contexts, environmental factors and local preferences.