The effects of listening on speaker and listener while talking about character strengths: an open science school-wide collaboration.

Listening is understood to be a foundational element in practices that rely on effective conversations, but there is a gap in our understanding of what the effects of high-quality listening are on both the speaker and listener. This registered report addressed this gap by training one group of participants to listen well as speakers discuss their character strengths, allowing us to isolate the role relational listening plays in strengths-based conversations. Participants were paired and randomly assigned to a high-quality listening (experimental) or moderate-quality listening (comparison) condition manipulated through a validated video-based training.

Phase behavior of polymer dispersed liquid crystals, comparison between mean-field theory, and coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations.

We report a simulation methodology to quantitatively predict the thermodynamic behaviour (phase diagrams) of polymer mixtures, that exhibit phases with broken orientational symmetry. Our system consists of a binary mixture of short oligomers ( = 4) and long rod-like mesogens ( = 8). Using coarse-grained molecular dynamics (CGMD) simulations we infer the topology of the temperature-dependent free energy landscape, from the probability distributions of the components for a range of compositions.

Social contagion of challenge-seeking behavior.

Despite having little economic utility, people are sometimes motivated to seek challenges (i.e., proactively choosing to work on a more difficult task than an easier one).

A prospective study of changes in bone health in adult cancer patients treated with pelvic radiotherapy.

Background: Cancer is a major health problem in today's world. Many patients of pelvic malignancies need treatment by radiation therapy. Post-treatment morbidity due to loss of bone health is less commonly studied.

Q factor: A measure of competition between the topper and the average in percolation and in self-organized criticality.

We define the Q factor in the percolation problem as the quotient of the size of the largest cluster and the average size of all clusters. As the occupation probability p is increased, the Q factor for the system size L grows systematically to its maximum value Q_{max}(L) at a specific value p_{max}(L) and then gradually decays. Our numerical study of site percolation problems on the square, triangular, and simple cubic lattices exhibits that the asymptotic values of p_{max}, though close, are distinct from the corresponding percolation thresholds of these lattices.