Men’s Judgment and Behavior Toward Women Wearing High Heels

Research has consistently shown that the appearance of women’s apparel influences men’s behavior and judgment. However, the effect of women’s shoe heels has received little interest. Female confederates wearing black shoes with 0-, 5-, or 9-cm heels walked on the street. In a first experiment, we examined the number of men in the street who smiled at the female confederate. More smiles were addressed to the confederate with high heels. In a second experiment, the confederates asked men and women to respond to a short survey. It was found that high heels increased males’ but not females’ compliance with the request. In a third experiment, photographs of the same woman’s body profile wearing high heels or not were evaluated by men. Results showed that high heels were associated with greater sexiness, overall physical attractiveness, breast attractiveness, beauty, attractiveness to other men, and willingness to date. All the experiments supported the notion that high heels increase women’s attractiveness to men.     

Macroeconomic imbalances in Europe: How to overcome the fallacy of unit labour costs

Policy recommendations based on unit labour costs (ULC) indices can lead to undesirable and counterproductive policies, because they do not reveal possible distortions in the base year. In this paper, we discuss the problems with the ULC-current account relation and provide an alternative measure for relative wage costs called Wage Competitive index (WCI) based on the assumption of convergence of the returns on capital. We show how to calculate it and that it is more efficient than traditional ULC and REER indicators. The implication is that policymakers should not focus on nominal wage setting only, but also more broadly on all factors which affect the return on capital. This implies that the well-known Rehn–Meidner rule, which underlies the Macroeconomic Dialogue should be modified.     

Political regimes and the family: how sex-role attitudes continue to differ in reunified Germany

We exploit the German separation and later reunification to investigate whether political regimes can shape attitudes about appropriate roles for women in the family and the labor market. During the divided years, East German institutions encouraged female employment, while the West German system deterred women, in particular mothers, from full-time employment. Our results show that East Germans are significantly more likely to hold egalitarian sex-role attitudes than West Germans. Despite a scenario of partial policy convergence after reunification, we find no evidence for a convergence process in gender attitudes. Indeed, if anything, the gap in attitudes rather increased.     

The DYNAMO-HIA Model: An Efficient Implementation of a Risk Factor/Chronic Disease Markov Model for Use in Health Impact Assessment (HIA)

In Health Impact Assessment (HIA), or priority-setting for health policy, effects of risk factors (exposures) on health need to be modeled, such as with a Markov model, in which exposure influences mortality and disease incidence rates. Because many risk factors are related to a variety of chronic diseases, these Markov models potentially contain a large number of states (risk factor and disease combinations), providing a challenge both technically (keeping down execution time and memory use) and practically (estimating the model parameters and retaining transparency). To meet this challenge, we propose an approach that combines micro-simulation of the exposure information with macro-simulation of the diseases and survival. This approach allows users to simulate exposure in detail while avoiding the need for large simulated populations because of the relative rareness of chronic disease events. Further efficiency is gained by splitting the disease state space into smaller spaces, each of which contains a cluster of diseases that is independent of the other clusters. The challenge of feasible input data requirements is met by including parameter calculation routines, which use marginal population data to estimate the transitions between states. As an illustration, we present the recently developed model DYNAMO-HIA (DYNAMIC MODEL for Health Impact Assessment) that implements this approach.     

GEHA--the pan-European "Genetics of Healthy Aging" project

The pan-European "Genetics of Healthy Aging" (GEHA) consortium is undertaking a large study of long-lived individuals, which officially began on 22 May 2004. The consortium aims to identify genes that promote longevity and good health during the process of aging. The project will involve scientists working in multiple disciplines and using a variety of techniques.     

Coaching für die Chefärztin der Chirurgischen Abteilung eines Kreiskrankenhauses

Coaching the head physician of a surgical department The author presents an individual coaching of a female head physician, who is leading the surgical department of a hospital for half a year. The motive were conflicts in the relationship to the colleagues, mainly an interactional conflict with the assistant medical director, caused by dysfunctional patterns of understanding and behaviour. Together with the coach objectives were developed to find a more planning, structuring and communicative leading style. Further more, interventions were prepared and the interactions with the assistant analyzed. Finally, as a first conflict intervention a team discussion is prepared and successfully supported.     

Attitudes of nurses towards 8-h and 12-h shift systems

Twelve-hour shift schedules are becoming increasingly popular. The present study was designed to investigate the attitudes of nurses, their priorities with respect to working time and other aspects of the working conditions, and to analyse the conditions leading to a diminished satisfaction with the shift schedule and to aspirations for a change of schedule. Questionnaires were returned by 880 nurses (78% return rate) from 12 hospitals. A total of 65% worked 12-h shifts and 35% worked 8-h shifts. A considerable proportion of both groups showed a low satisfaction with their schedule and a desire to change the schedule (44% of those working 12-h shifts, 47% of those working 8-h shifts). Concerning effects of the shift schedule on work strain, continuity of service, health, family and leisure time, 8-h shifts were rated more favourably, especially by those working these shifts, but also by nurses working 12-h systems, with the exception of effects on leisure time and to some extent also on continuity of service and on family. Effects of the shift schedule on social responsibilities and leisure time activities turned out to be a major moderating variable in both groups with respect to schedule satisfaction and attitudes towards a change of schedule. Apparently neither type of shift system, traditional 12-h shift rosters or rotating 8-h shifts, is very appealing to the nurses. A stronger relationship between social consequences and health state in nurses working 12-h shifts indicates that in this group negative effects on family and leisure time might be due to an increased need for recuperation, which reduces effective leisure time.