Understanding and Changing Community Attitudes Toward Vulnerable Families: A Review of Literature and Practice.

Communities can play an important role in protecting children and supporting vulnerable families. However, there is currently a lack of understanding of what communities actually think and do regarding these groups. The purpose of this study was to review and synthesize evidence on community attitudes and behaviors toward vulnerable families.

Stressful life transitions and wellbeing: A comparison of the stress buffering hypothesis and the social identity model of identity change.

The relationship between stressful life transitions and wellbeing is well established, however, the protective role of social connectedness has received mixed support. We test two theoretical models, the Stress Buffering Hypothesis and the Social Identity Model of Identity Change, to determine which best explains the relationship between social connectedness, stress, and wellbeing. Study 1 (N=165) was an experiment in which participants considered the impact of moving cities versus receiving a serious health diagnosis.

Failure to demonstrate that playing violent video games diminishes prosocial behavior.

Background: Past research has found that playing a classic prosocial video game resulted in heightened prosocial behavior when compared to a control group, whereas playing a classic violent video game had no effect. Given purported links between violent video games and poor social behavior, this result is surprising. Here our aim was to assess whether this finding may be due to the specific games used.

Multisensory integration with a head-mounted display: role of mental and manual load.

Objective: The aim of this study was to replicate the finding that multisensory integration with a head-mounted display (HMD) is particularly difficult when a person is walking and hearing sound from a free-field speaker, and to extend the finding with a response method intended to reduce workload.

Background: HMDs can support the information needs of workers whose work requires mobility, but some low-cost solutions for delivering auditory information may be less effective than others.

Method: For the study, 24 participants detected whether shapes moving on the HMD screen made a sound appropriate to their forms when they collided with other shapes.

Audio-visual speech cue combination.

Background: Different sources of sensory information can interact, often shaping what we think we have seen or heard. This can enhance the precision of perceptual decisions relative to those made on the basis of a single source of information. From a computational perspective, there are multiple reasons why this might happen, and each predicts a different degree of enhanced precision.