”Technisierung und Subjektivierung. Zur Veränderung des Arbeitshandelns in der Wissensgesellschaft“ Workshop der Akademie für Technikfolgenabschätzung in Baden-Württemberg, 28./29.11.2002

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

The expressive and communicative functions of preschool children's smiles in an achievement-situation

Two studies examined how different social contexts determine whether preschoolers' smiles in an achievement-game serve an expressive function indicating success versus failure experiences and/or a communicative function. Facial behavior was coded with the Facial Action Coding System. Unexpectedly, in Study 1 children (N=19) smiled more often after failure than after success. Study 2 investigated the influence of face-to-face contact with the experimenter on preschoolers' smiles (N=20). However, there were no differences between success and failure, but with face-to-face contact subjects exhibited more smiles than without. Features of the social situation that are supposed to determine the predominance of the communicative or expressive function of a smile are discussed.We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Detlef Friedrich and Katja Johann in the data collection and Signe Preuschoft in coding and analyzing the data.     

Sektion Jugendsoziologie Tätigkeitsbericht 2004

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

A Theory of Rational Choice under Ignorance

This paper contributes to a theory of rational choice for decision-makers with incomplete preferences due to partial ignorance, whose beliefs are representable as sets of acceptable priors. We focus on the limiting case of `Complete Ignorance' which can be viewed as reduced form of the general case of partial ignorance. Rationality is conceptualized in terms of a `Principle of Preference-Basedness', according to which rational choice should be isomorphic to asserted preference. The main result characterizes axiomatically a new choice-rule called `Simultaneous Expected Utility Maximization'. It can be interpreted as agreement in a bargaining game (Kalai-Smorodinsky solution) whose players correspond to the (extremal) `acceptable priors' among which the decision maker has suspended judgment. An essential but non-standard feature of Simultaneous Expected Utility choices is their dependence on the entire choice set. This is justified by the conception of optimality as compromise rather than as superiority in pairwise comparisons.     

Cox regression with missing covariate data using a modified partial likelihood method

Missing covariate values is a common problem in survival analysis. In this paper we propose a novel method for the Cox regression model that is close to maximum likelihood but avoids the use of the EM-algorithm. It exploits that the observed hazard function is multiplicative in the baseline hazard function with the idea being to profile out this function before carrying out the estimation of the parameter of interest. In this step one uses a Breslow type estimator to estimate the cumulative baseline hazard function. We focus on the situation where the observed covariates are categorical which allows us to calculate estimators without having to assume anything about the distribution of the covariates. We show that the proposed estimator is consistent and asymptotically normal, and derive a consistent estimator of the variance–covariance matrix that does not involve any choice of a perturbation parameter. Moderate sample size performance of the estimators is investigated via simulation and by application to a real data example.     

生命周期不同阶段的幽默理解与加工机制

以往学者们大多将幽默作为一种语言现象进行研究,几乎没人关注幽默的神经心理加工过程。现代脑成像技术给学者们提供了一种更为客观的方式,有助于揭开幽默大脑加工的神秘面纱。尽管幽默的认知神经心理机制的研究已经能够帮助人们建立起对人类幽默理解的系统认识,但目前还有很多可扩展的方向：首先,目前的绝大多数研究都以成年人为研究对象,研究的外部效度存在问题,仅有个别研究着眼于儿童和老年人的幽默理解认知机制,应该开展针对其他年龄段的研究,从人类生命周期的角度整合不同年龄段的幽默理解神经心理加工机制发展变化的特点。其次,应着重结合汉语的特点和我国社会发展的特点进行研究,形成中国特色的汉语幽默认知加工理论。     

Population age structure and consumption growth: evidence from National Transfer Accounts

We assess the effects of the population age structure and the population dynamics on economic growth. Following recent research, we focus on the generational turnover effect to characterize the influence of birth and death rates, depending on the age profile of individual consumption, the extent of annuity market imperfections, and the willingness of households to shift consumption over time. Using data from the National Transfer Accounts on age profiles of consumption for a number of different countries, we assess—in a comparative way—the sign and the magnitude of the generational turnover effect and its impact on economic growth. We find considerable cross-country differences and trace them back to the underlying variation in demography and in the age structure of consumption.     

Attitude strength moderates adverse effects to questionnaire design

ABSTRACT

The presentation and visual design of the “don’t know” category in rating scales on respondents’ behavior may have ambivalent effects. The hypothesis is that attitude strength toward the topic influences the respondents’ sensitivity to the graphical design of the scale. A paper-and-pencil questionnaire conducted among 307 German university students contained an experimental variation of the presentation of a “don’t know” category and its visual design. A multinomial logistic regression shows that presenting a “don’t know” category drives respondents toward extreme categories. The visual design of the “don’t know” category influences the distribution of responses, all the more that the respondents’ attitudes toward the item topic are weak.     

The FARSEEING real-world fall repository: a large-scale collaborative database to collect and share sensor signals from real-world falls

Background

Real-world fall events objectively measured by body-worn sensors can improve the understanding of fall events in older people. However, these events are rare and hence challenging to capture. Therefore, the FARSEEING (FAll Repository for the design of Smart and sElf-adaptive Environments prolonging Independent livinG) consortium and associated partners started to build up a meta-database of real-world falls.

Results

Between January 2012 and December 2015 more than 300 real-world fall events have been recorded. This is currently the largest collection of real-world fall data recorded with inertial sensors. A signal processing and fall verification procedure has been developed and applied to the data. Since the end of 2015, 208 verified real-world fall events are available for analyses. The fall events have been recorded within several studies, with different methods, and in different populations. All sensor signals include at least accelerometer measurements and 58 % additionally include gyroscope and magnetometer measurements. The collection of data is ongoing and open to further partners contributing with fall signals. The FARSEEING consortium also aims to share the collected real-world falls data with other researchers on request.

Conclusions

The FARSEEING meta-database will help to improve the understanding of falls and enable new approaches in fall risk assessment, fall prevention, and fall detection in both aging and disease.