Social distancing has become the most prominent measure many countries have implemented to combat the spread of COVID-19. The aim of the current study was to explore the potential role of empathy and self-construal styles, as individual personality traits, on self-reported social distancing. Participants completed the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, the Singelis Self-Construal Scale, and were asked to rate their level of social distancing and how much they endorsed social distancing on a five-point Likert-scale. Across a large and diverse sample, results (...) showed that trait-levels of empathic concern and perspective taking positively correlates with social distancing. However, we did not find evidence to suggest that trait-levels of personal distress correlates with social distancing. We interpret these findings as suggesting that empathy, both its altruistic and cognitive dimensions, plays an important role in motivating people to socially distance and should be emphasized during times of crisis. Furthermore, we suggest that emphasizing a person’s self-distress during times of crisis may not be an effective approach in promotion social distancing policies. We also found that both independence and interdependence self-construal styles positively correlates with social distancing. While we expected the latter result, we did not expect the former. This suggests that more work is needed to fully understand how self-construal styles, along with their cultural level analogs, influences social distancing. Overall, these results provide us with novel multi-national data about the role of individual differences on social distancing tendencies specifically, and human behavior during a global health crisis more generally. (shrink)

ABSTRACTRecent research has shown that observing others in pain leads to a general facilitation of reaction times. The current study sheds further light on the relationship between pain observation...

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 8, August 2022.

Data Transfer Service (DTS) is an open-source project that is developing a document-centric message model for describing a bulk data transfer activity, with an accompanying set of loosely coupled and platform-independent components for brokering the transfer of data between a wide range of (potentially incompatible) storage resources as scheduled, fault-tolerant batch jobs. The architecture scales from small embedded deployments on a single computer to large distributed deployments through an expandable ‘worker-node pool’ controlled through message-orientated middleware. Data access and transfer efficiency (...) are maximized through the strategic placement of worker nodes at or between particular data sources/sinks. The design is inherently asynchronous, and, when third-party transfer is not available, it side-steps the bandwidth, concurrency and scalability limitations associated with buffering bytes directly through intermediary client applications. It aims to address geographical–topological deployment concerns by allowing service hosting to be either centralized (as part of a shared service) or confined to a single institution or domain. Established design patterns and open-source components are coupled with a proposal for a document-centric and open-standards-based messaging protocol. As part of the development of the message protocol, a bulk data copy activity document is proposed for the first time. (shrink)

Prema najekstremnijem obliku pravnoga realizma sudske odluke ovise o tome što su suci jeli za doručak. Nejasno je je li itko od američkih pravnih realista takvo što zaista i tvrdio. Ponekad se to ekstremno stajalište pripisuje Jeromeu Franku, što nije iznenađujuće s obzirom da se Franka obično smatra najradikalnijim, najskeptičnijim i najciničnijim među tim realistima. Tvrdi se zapravo da su kritičari američkog pravnog realizma promovirali «frankifikaciju» toga pokreta upravo kako bi ga učini..