Turkish investors, Dogus Group, are bringing to Zadar one of the most famous hotel brands in the world, the famous Hyatt, which will be the first hotel in Croatia. The entire project is estimated at a total value of 100 million euros, and the new hotel would be located in the former Maraska building, which is located in the city center.”We are small enough that we must not be average. The policy of the Ministry of Tourism and this Government is to encourage excellence in all segments, not only in tourism. The results of the Dogus Group are impressive, and the results of the season in Croatia are a record with 83 million overnight stays”, Said Anton Kliman, Minister of Tourism.The grand opening of the new hotel under the Hyatt cap is planned for 2019, and in addition to the hotel, hotel annexes, a new building with luxury apartments, a commercial shopping center, a restaurant and a yacht club would be built. “We strongly believe in the great potential of Croatia and therefore continue to invest in areas and sectors that fit in a sustainable way into the corporate policy of the Dogus Group. We have several hotels and marinas on the Croatian coast and we are convinced that the Maraska project will contribute to the beauty of the city of Zadar, as well as the development of the tourism portfolio of the Dogus Group.”, Said Hüsnü Akhan, CEO of Dogus Group.”We are thrilled to be starting one of the most prestigious projects in Zadar with our partner Hyatt. Our collaboration with Hyatt in Turkey has lasted for more than 20 years, and today, with the Maraska project, it goes a step further. Croatia has great opportunities for the development of luxury tourism, which we are strongly focused on. Together with Hyatt, we hope to strengthen the potential of this region and attract tourists from Croatia and the world”, Said Naci Baserdem, President of the Dogus Tourism Group, adding that the hotel will create 170 new jobs and have a positive impact on indirect employment.With the completion of this project, the total amount of Dogus Group’s investments in Croatia will increase to EUR 350 million. Interestingly, the interest of the Dogus Group is not limited to that, but investors from Turkey are interested in taking over the ACI marina as well as for hotel investments in Zagreb and Split.Photo: Dogus group
Everyone who has followed my journalistic work knows that these days I am going crazy watching what is happening with concessions in Bol, Novalja, Dubrovnik (Gruž)… It is simply incomprehensible the audacity of the authorities to put a finger in everyone’s eyes! Until when!Giving absolute support to the demands of the local population to manage, use and earn on natural and all other goods created by the generation of locals, I use this opportunity to say something wider about everything, different than expected.Our Dalmatians, Primorje and Istrians were silent when they were deprived of the hotels built on the lands of their grandfathers, now, as in Bol or Novalja on Zrče, they are also deprived of their beaches.Others, foreigners or domestic investors, are building marinas in their places, foreigners are getting concessions on ports (Gruž…), the EU and the state are banning small-scale fishing, and now they are left without their local beaches… So far, the biggest cause of this silence has been land, and by selling the inherited ancestry, a profit was made for a beautiful life.At the same time, the state, not knowing how to employ people by the sea, how to keep people on the islands, allowed rent without paying taxes. And that easy life, that self-employment through profitable renting is also the cause of the silence of our people who live by the sea.Will they be silent even when they impose rental taxes on them soon?I know that it is dangerous for me to point the finger at a local man who calmly watched his hotels being looted, sold his heritage without remorse, built dozens of concrete apartments on his native stone house, received guests on the black your identity. I know that these words will be resented to me, but someone has to say them, and not for someone else, but for us, the hosts themselves. How to respond to critics of family accommodation, when they show pictures of Makarska towards Biokovo, Vodice, Rogoznica, Vir, Premantura….…Were we allowed to allow ourselves that? We have destroyed the substance from which we want to live well!Let’s go back to concessions….Fifteen years ago, the mayor of an Istrian tourist destination boasted to me that there were some investors who would build a marina in his place. I asked him why the marina would not be built and managed by the utility company of that place. And so it would be! Today, this marina fills the budget of this successful tourist place.Today, there is no reasonable man in Croatia who can accept the fact that the residents of Bol are being deprived of the concession for their and Croatian symbol – the Golden War! What’s more, it’s astonishingly audacious and again, like the arrogance shown many times in the last 20 years, the way it’s done. A similar thing happened recently in Novalja with Zrče.All this is happening while we are bragging about the growth figures of our tourism, on which, unfortunately, the local population (and even the state) earns the least!Wouldn’t it be logical for the local community to finance free kindergartens, provide scholarships for pupils and students to return home to earn money from managing beaches and ports? tourism has raised real estate prices so much that local youth cannot start independent living in their place of birth at these prices)…For years, like a parrot, I quoted old Kripendorf: “Tourism as much and as the local population wants and needs. “..!No one can convince me that the people of Dubrovnik forgot to moor boats (they still do that every day), charge taxes, build and rent a shopping center to a strong retail chain, manage a bus station or charge parking in the city where the parking lot is a lottery. And for all that, to receive a large compensation, which would flow into the city budget and new development projects of Dubrovnik, and not as, in the case of giving concessions to others, who would draw profits from the city and Croatia for 40 years.For years, I have been defending the thesis that there is no difference between foreign and domestic ownership in terms of efficiency and competitiveness, but that the advantage of domestic ownership lies in keeping profits in the country. This thesis was successfully proved by the esteemed Slovenian economist Dr. Jože Mencinger. He proves that the sale of national property increases imports and consumption. “Many countries have opted for hasty privatization, selling their most valuable companies”Well, now, says Mencinger,”foreigners take their large profits from these countries. “And one more thing.Tourism is a good that does not happen to us by chance, but because of this piece of land and everything on it that we inherited from our ancestors. The magic word is: positional rent. And in our country it is unknown. Namely, when you sell an olive grove and a foreigner or someone else builds a house on it and then rents it out, you have sold it and lost forever the value you inherited and not created yourself.Many of us sold our olive grove, house, vineyard for a little one-time, short-lived happiness, and so we created competition in our own place, town, bay… We sold hotels, mostly to foreigners and left them to reap the benefits of our positional rent. If we now, when we become an increasingly important European and world tourist destination, let someone else benefit from this fact, taking over our airports and seaports, marinas, beaches, accommodation, trade, financial and telecommunications sector, food and fuel production, and all take that profit from our positional rent out of the country, then we are really a nation without a future.And it is precisely in the use and retention of all this, and much more, that lies the key answer to the question, to which no previous Croatian government has been able to give an answer – how to develop? We entered the EU after selling to the countries with which we are today in the community of our most profitable companies. Let’s start behaving like them at least now, if we want to be as rich as they are.Let us manage our goods and development! From Dubrovnik, through Bol, Novalja, Lika, Slavonia… all over Croatia! Author: Đuro Tomljenović, Turizmoteka.hr / Photo: Apartmanija.hr
LinkedIn Share on Twitter Powerful people respond quickly to unfair treatment when they are the victims, but they are less likely to notice injustice when they benefit or when others are victimized, according to new research published by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.In four experiments, participants who were primed to think of powerful situations perceived unfair treatment more quickly when it affected them and were more likely to take action to avoid disadvantageous situations than powerless people. The study findings didn’t differ for men or women. Most of the participants were white so the results weren’t analyzed based on race.In one online experiment with 227 participants, the high-power group wrote about a time when they had power over someone else while the low-power group wrote about an experience when someone had power over them. Each participant then played a computer game where their reaction times were measured in deciding the fairness of the distribution of coins between the participant and two computer-generated players. The high-power group responded more quickly than the low-power group when they were the victims of unfairness but not when they benefitted from an unfair distribution of the imaginary wealth. In a similar experiment, 265 participants observed the money-distribution game rather than being active players, and they watched as one computer-generated player repeatedly received fewer coins than the other players. The high-power group was significantly slower than a control group in perceiving unfair situations that affected others. In another experiment, the high-power group also was slower to perceive unfair situations when they directly benefited from them.“Powerful people are only faster to notice unfair situations when they’re the victims,” Sawaoka said. “Our findings also suggest that powerful people are slower to notice unfair situations that victimize other people, and this converges with other research demonstrating that the powerful are less empathetic to the plight of others.”In a final experiment, 100 participants played a game where they were either beneficiaries or victims of an unfair distribution of wages by an employer. When participants were treated unfairly, the high-power group switched more quickly to another employer, while the low-power group stayed with the same employer longer even though they had received lower wages.Since the writing exercise designed to make participants feel powerful or powerless only had temporary effects, the differences between powerful and powerless people are probably greater in the real world, where powerless people often are overwhelmed by injustices on a daily basis, Sawaoka said.The study findings help explain the persistence of income inequality and “white privilege” in American society, said lead researcher Takuya Sawaoka, a doctoral student in psychology at Stanford University.“Since whites tend to occupy powerful or advantaged positions in society, this fosters a sense of entitlement, and powerful people come to believe that they deserve better outcomes than others,” he said. “Thus, whites may be very quick to notice and respond to perceived injustices, but this entitlement also could make them less likely to notice injustices that victimize minorities.”“People who are repeatedly victimized by unfairness are going to end up with fewer resources and opportunities,” he said. “Effectively responding to unfair situations (e.g., by seeking out more equitable outcomes) could enable the powerful to maintain their higher social standing. In contrast, because powerless people are slower to perceive and respond to unfairness, they may become more vulnerable to exploitation. These processes could end up perpetuating gaps between the powerful and powerless.” Share on Facebook
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Pinterest Share on Facebook Share Share on Twitter The present study was based on a psychoanalytic theory, known as self psychology, developed by Heinz Kohut.“In Kohut’s formulation, caregivers are experienced as ‘selfobjects,’ or emerging parts of one’s sense of self,” the researchers explained. “When needs are unmet, the infant is left with impaired abilities to regulate self-esteem and may defensively avoid and disavow them. The end result of disavowed needs may therefore be the phenomenon now known as narcissistic vulnerability.”The study of 129 undergraduate students found emotional, physical neglect and abuse, and sexual abuse in childhood was associated with vulnerable narcissism. The researchers found two factors underlied the link between childhood maltreatment and narcissistic vulnerability: proneness to shame and the avoidance of selfobject needs.The avoidance of selfobject needs refers to the disavowal of the need to maintain self-cohesion by incorporating others (the selfobject) into the sense of oneself. Those who score high on measures of “avoidance of selfobject needs” are more likely to say that they don’t need positive feedback from others because they already know they are successful. They are also more likely to find it difficult to accept guidance, even from someone they respect. And they are less likely to feel successful because they are part of a successful group.“[O]ur data provide preliminary support for the roles of shame-proneness and selfobject need avoidance as individual and joint mechanisms through which exposure to [childhood maltreatment] leads to narcissistic vulnerability,” the researchers concluded.
Email New preliminary research published in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association suggests that maltreatment during childhood can lead to narcissistic vulnerability in adulthood by increasing a person’s sense of shame and constricting their sense of self.Previous research has found that narcissists can be divided into a “vulnerable” subtype and a “grandiose” subtype.Grandiose narcissists tend to be aggressive, domineering and immodest. They view themselves as superior to others and have an over-inflated self-esteem. Vulnerable narcissists — the lesser known subtype — tend to be defensive, insecure and inhibited. They are bitter that others do not treat them with the respect and admiration they think they deserve. Vulnerable narcissism is “marked by self-consciousness, shame, and helplessness,” the researchers said. LinkedIn
Email LinkedIn In both studies, Meredith Chivers (Psychology) showed that only heterosexual women who were exclusively attracted to men showed similar genital responses to both female and male sexual stimuli. Heterosexual women who also report some attraction to women, however, showed a different pattern of response; their genital responses were greater to female stimuli, similar to other sexually-diverse women.“Both exclusively and predominantly androphilic women (women attracted to men) showed sexual response patterns that differed from their self-reported sexual attractions. Sexually-diverse women showed genital and self-reported arousal responses that were more similar to their self-reported sexual attractions,” says Dr. Chivers. “As a whole, this research illustrates the complex relationship between sexual identity, sexual attraction, sexual arousal and genital responses to sexual stimuli.”Recently, research has misinterpreted this current study to suggest that heterosexuality doesn’t exist in women because heterosexual women show sexual responses to female stimuli. Read the story here.The current study highlights how this interpretation is incorrect; women’s sexual identity, attractions and patterns of sexual response are not interchangeable, such that a woman’s sexual desires and attractions cannot be deduced from her sexual response patterns.“Instead, this research provides a window of opportunity to understand how women’s sexual response relates to her experience of sexual attraction and desire, addressing gaps in contemporary models of sexual response,” says Dr. Chivers.Based on the findings that self-identified heterosexual women respond to both female and male sexual stimuli, researchers could next explore how exposure to mainstream sexual media, in which women are routinely objectified, and where sexual interactions between two women are becoming commonplace, affects patterns of sexual response.The results of the research were published in PLOS ONE. New research from of the Sexuality and Gender Laboratory at Queen’s University shows that heterosexual women have more diverse patterns of sexual response than previously reported.Research on women’s sexual orientation and patterns of sexual response has previously focused on women’s genital and subjective sexual arousal relative to their sexual identity, as heterosexual, bisexual or lesbian. Among women, however, there is significant diversity among women in their sexual attractions to other women and men, regardless of sexual identity. For example, a substantial minority of heterosexual women (20 per cent in some studies) also report some attraction to women.In the first study, women watched short videos, and in the second study, women listened to stories about interacting sexually with a woman or a man. Genital response was measured with a vaginal photoplethysmograph (a clear acrylic device that illuminates the capillary bed of the vaginal wall) and participants also self-reported their sexual arousal. Share on Facebook
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In decades of work, no treatment has been discovered for ALS that can do anything but prolong human survival less than a month. The mouse model used in this study is one that scientists believe may more closely resemble the human reaction to this treatment, which consists of a compound called copper-ATSM.It’s not yet known if humans will have the same response, but researchers are moving as quickly as possible toward human clinical trials, testing first for safety and then efficacy of the new approach.ALS was identified as a progressive and fatal neurodegenerative disease in the late 1800s, and gained international recognition in 1939 when it was diagnosed in American baseball legend Lou Gehrig. It’s known to be caused by the death and deterioration of motor neurons in the spinal cord, which in turn has been linked to mutations in copper, zinc superoxide dismutase.Copper-ATSM is a known compound that helps deliver copper specifically to cells with damaged mitochondria, and reaches the spinal cord where it’s needed to treat ALS. This compound has low toxicity, easily penetrates the blood-brain barrier, is already used in human medicine at much lower doses for some purposes, and is well tolerated in laboratory animals at far higher levels. Any copper not needed after use of copper-ATSM is quickly flushed out of the body.Experts caution, however, that this approach is not as simple as taking a nutritional supplement of copper, which can be toxic at even moderate doses. Such supplements would be of no value to people with ALS, they said.The new findings were reported by scientists from OSU; the University of Melbourne in Australia; University of Texas Southwestern; University of Central Florida; and the Pasteur Institute of Montevideo in Uruguay. The study is available as open access in Neurobiology of Disease.Using the new treatment, researchers were able to stop the progression of ALS in one type of transgenic mouse model, which ordinarily would die within two weeks without treatment. Some of these mice have survived for more than 650 days, 500 days longer than any previous research has been able to achieve.In some experiments, the treatment was begun, and then withheld. In this circumstance the mice began to show ALS symptoms within two months after treatment was stopped, and would die within another month. But if treatment was resumed, the mice gained weight, progression of the disease once again was stopped, and the mice lived another 6-12 months.In 2012, Beckman was recognized as the leading medical researcher in Oregon, with the Discovery Award from the Medical Research Foundation of Oregon. He is also director of OSU’s Environmental Health Sciences Center, funded by the National Institutes of Health to support research on the role of the environment in causing disease.“We have a solid understanding of why the treatment works in the mice, and we predict it should work in both familial and possibly sporadic human patients,” Beckman said. “But we won’t know until we try.”Familial ALS patients are those with more of a family history of the disease, while sporadic patients reflect the larger general population.“We want people to understand that we are moving to human trials as quickly as we can,” Beckman said. “In humans who develop ALS, the average time from onset to death is only three to four years.”The advances are based on substantial scientific progress in understanding the disease processes of ALS and basic research in biochemistry. The transgenic mice used in these studies have been engineered to carry the human gene for “copper chaperone for superoxide dismutase,” or CCS gene. CCS inserts copper into superoxide dismustase, or SOD, and transgenic mice carrying these human genes die rapidly without treatment.After years of research, scientists have developed an approach to treating ALS that’s based on bringing copper into specific cells in the spinal cord and mitochondria weakened by copper deficiency. Copper is a metal that helps to stabilize SOD, an antioxidant protein whose proper function is essential to life. But when it lacks its metal co-factors, SOD can “unfold” and become toxic, leading to the death of motor neurons.There’s some evidence that this approach, which works in part by improving mitochondrial function, may also have value in Parkinson’s disease and other conditions, researchers said. Research is progressing on those topics as well.The treatment is unlikely to allow significant recovery from neuronal loss already caused by ALS, the scientists said, but could slow further disease progression when started after diagnosis. It could also potentially treat carriers of SOD mutant genes that cause ALS. Share on Twitter Share Share on Facebook Pinterest
Email Researchers at Oregon State University announced today that they have essentially stopped the progression of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig’s disease, for nearly two years in one type of mouse model used to study the disease – allowing the mice to approach their normal lifespan.The findings, scientists indicate, are some of the most compelling ever produced in the search for a therapy for ALS, a debilitating and fatal disease, and were just published in Neurobiology of Disease.“We are shocked at how well this treatment can stop the progression of ALS,” said Joseph Beckman, lead author on this study, a distinguished professor of biochemistry and biophysics in the College of Science at Oregon State University, and principal investigator and holder of the Burgess and Elizabeth Jamieson Chair in OSU’s Linus Pauling Institute. LinkedIn
Email Share Pinterest Older adults might want to avoid a using class of drugs commonly used in over-the-counter products such as nighttime cold medicines due to their links to cognitive impairment, a research team led by scientists at Indiana University School of Medicine has recommended.Using brain imaging techniques, the researchers found lower metabolism and reduced brain sizes among study participants taking the drugs known to have an anticholinergic effect, meaning they block acetylcholine, a nervous system neurotransmitter.Previous research found a link between between the anticholinergic drugs and cognitive impairment and increased risk of dementia. The new paper published in the journal JAMA Neurology, is believed to be the first to study the potential underlying biology of those clinical links using neuroimaging measurements of brain metabolism and atrophy. Share on Facebook
Share on Twitter LinkedIn “These findings provide us with a much better understanding of how this class of drugs may act upon the brain in ways that might raise the risk of cognitive impairment and dementia,” said Shannon Risacher, Ph.D., assistant professor of radiology and imaging sciences, first author of the paper, “Association Between Anticholinergic Medication Use and Cognition, Brain Metabolism, and Brain Atrophy in Cognitively Normal Older Adults.”“Given all the research evidence, physicians might want to consider alternatives to anticholinergic medications if available when working with their older patients,” Dr. Risacher said.Drugs with anticholinergic effects are sold over the counter and by prescription as sleep aids and for many chronic diseases including hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.A list of anticholinergic drugs and their potential impact is at http://www.agingbraincare.org/uploads/products/ACB_scale_-_legal_size.pdf.Scientists have linked anticholinergic drugs cognitive problems among older adults for at least 10 years. A 2013 study by scientists at the IU Center for Aging Research and the Regenstrief Institute found that drugs with a strong anticholinergic effect cause cognitive problems when taken continuously for as few as 60 days. Drugs with a weaker effect could cause impairment within 90 days.The current research project involved 451 participants, 60 of whom were taking at least one medication with medium or high anticholinergic activity. The participants were drawn from a national Alzheimer’s research project — the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative — and the Indiana Memory and Aging Study.To identify possible physical and physiological changes that could be associated with the reported effects, researchers assessed the results of memory and other cognitive tests, positron emission tests (PET) measuring brain metabolism, and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans for brain structure.The cognitive tests revealed that patients taking anticholinergic drugs performed worse than older adults not taking the drugs on short-term memory and some tests of executive function, which cover a range of activities such as verbal reasoning, planning, and problem solving.Anticholinergic drug users also showed lower levels of glucose metabolism — a biomarker for brain activity — in both the overall brain and in the hippocampus, a region of the brain associated with memory and which has been identified as affected early by Alzheimer’s disease.The researchers also found significant links between brain structure revealed by the MRI scans and anticholinergic drug use, with the participants using anticholinergic drugs having reduced brain volume and larger ventricles, the cavities inside the brain.“These findings might give us clues to the biological basis for the cognitive problems associated with anticholinergic drugs, but additional studies are needed if we are to truly understand the mechanisms involved,” Dr. Risacher said.
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New research published in the scientific journal Social Psychological and Personality Science provides evidence that the prevalence of infectious diseases plays an important role in racial prejudices across the United States.The findings support the parasite-stress hypothesis, which holds that people exposed to diseases become more likely to adopt anti-pathogen behavioral strategies — such as avoiding and expressing more negative attitudes toward groups with dissimilar features.“I was surprised when a 2015 study found an association between exposure to black Americans and racial prejudice, such that white individuals living in U.S. states with more black people showed increased prejudice towards this group,” said study author Brian A. O’Shea, a EU Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska Curie Global Fellow based in the Psychology Department at both Harvard University and the University of Amsterdam. Share “The finding was counter to the extensive literature showing that contact with outgroups actually reduces prejudice. I suspected that the study was showing a spurious correlation and that perhaps infectious diseases might better explain variation in racial prejudice across the U.S. This epiphany likely occurred because I was lucky enough to have an office beside Corey Fincher while at Warwick University, who developed Parasite Stress theory, along with Randy Thornhill.”In their study, the researchers utilized 2006-2013 data from Harvard’s Project Implicit website, a nonprofit organization that collects data about people’s automatic, or implicit, attitudes toward different groups as well as their explicit biases.They were particularly interested in data from 355,000 white and 77,000 black respondents who completed a test of racial bias. This data was compared to disease rates across the 50 U.S. states.The study found “that at the aggregated group level, regions with more infectious diseases are likely to have higher intergroup racial tensions,” O’Shea told PsyPost.“Specifically, we found that if you’re a white or black person living in a U.S. state with more infectious diseases, you have a stronger feeling in favor of your in-group and/or a stronger opposition to your out-group, both consciously and unconsciously.”“These effects occur even if we control for individual factors like age, political ideology, religious belief, education and gender, and a number of state-level factors, including median income, inequality, race exposure and more. Importantly, even within areas with high infectious diseases, there is substantial individual variation in prejudice,” O’Shea explained.But the study only examined correlational data, preventing the researchers from establishing a causal link between disease prevalence and racial prejudice.To further solidify their findings, O’Shea and his colleagues set up in experiment in which 588 U.S. adults completed a test of racial bias after being randomly exposed to either images related to disease, terrorism, or buildings and furniture.White participants who showed greater aversion to germs tended to show increased explicit — but not implicit — prejudice toward black people after seeing the disease-related imagery.“Participants who strongly agreed with questions relating to germ aversion (i.e., ‘It really bothers me when people sneeze without covering their mouths and I prefer to wash my hands pretty soon after shaking someone’s hand’) showed the highest racial prejudice, but only after they were primed with images depicting disgusting content such as mold, feces, and an individual with chickenpox,” O’Shea told PsyPost.“We suspect that individuals with high germ aversion will be less willing to come in contact with racial outgroups, and this lack of exposure could increase racial tensions.”“Study 2 is experimental and offers some causal evidence that reminders of infectious disease, especially among those with high germ aversion, can increase racial prejudice. More work is needed to understand why some individuals show high germ aversion, while others in the same environment are less worried when coming into contact with germs. Family upbringing and an individual’s willingness to take more risks are potentially influential factors, but this paper does not directly address this issue,” O’Shea said.While the findings offer a new way of explaining intergroup prejudices, O’Shea said it also points to one possible way to combat them — by reforming health care.“This research indicates that restrictions in access to health care, due to costs or lack of insurance, could have a devastating impact on intergroup relations if it leads to higher infectious disease rates. To foster the right conditions for a cohesive and integrated community, policies must be put in place to ensure vulnerable groups in society have equal access to health care,” he told PsyPost.The study, “Infectious Disease Prevalence, Not Race Exposure, Predicts Both Implicit and Explicit Racial Prejudice Across the United States“, was authored by Brian A. O’Shea, Derrick G. Watson, Gordon D. A. Brown, and Corey L. Fincher.
Share Single individuals tend to have a lower desire for a romantic relationship when they are more socially satisfied and place their friends higher in their life priorities, according to new research published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships.“The population of singles is on the rise and very few seem to care. In the U.S. alone, Pew notes that the share of married adults age 18 and older has declined from 72% in 1960 to 50% in 2016. Of course, many talk about this shift per se, but very few discuss the characteristics of this growing population,” said researcher Elyakim Kislev of the School of Public Policy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.“I believe that it is important to study how relationship desire appears in singles’ lives, how their lives look like. Being single myself, I know that there are new communities of singles, new ways of life, and new patterns of behavior that we must acknowledge and research. In this particular research, I focused on the group of singles who are not seeking relationships. I estimate this group to be around 20% of the total population of singles.” Pinterest Share on Twitter Share on Facebook
Email LinkedIn For his study, Kislev examined data from the German Panel Analysis of Intimate Relationships and Family Dynamics (Pairfam), a longitudinal survey of more than 12,000 individuals and their partners, parents, and children. As part of the survey, single participants were asked the degree to which they agreed or disagreed with the statement “I would like to have a partner.”The survey also assessed how satisfied the participants were with their friends and level of social contact, and the relative importance of friends in their life.After controlling for factors such as age, health, education, employment, income satisfaction, and number of children, Kislev found that the importance of friends and social satisfaction were correlated with the degree of choosing singlehood.“My findings show that people that desire relationships at higher levels tend to assign their friends lower importance and are less satisfied with their social lives. And vice versa, singles with less relationship desire think their friends are more important and are also more satisfied with their social lives,” he told PsyPost.“In short, these results show that singles with low relationship desire are more social and derive greater support from their friends. These findings also defy common negative perceptions of singles with low relationship desire as having social difficulties.Longitudinally, single participants who reported an increase in their level of social satisfaction and the relative importance of friendships from one year to the following one showed a decrease in their desire to find a partner.In his book, “Happy Singlehood: The Rising Acceptance and Celebration of Solo Living“, Kislev finds that single people, especially those who have been single for a long time, have more extensive social networks than do their married peers, which can help buffer singles against feelings of loneliness.But there is still much to learn about the social life of singles.“I would be happy to know more about the social net of singles. It might well be that singles with low relationship desire transfer some of the assumed responsibilities of the nuclear family to their networks of friends and I want to know more about how it looks like and about what shapes communities of singles these days,” Kislev said.“We should ask how the ‘new singles’ create communities, how they derive social support from their friends and wider family, and how these new constructs relate to their overall well-being over their life span.”“I believe the population of singles deserves more attention as such. I will even dare to say that we need to accept and embrace solo living more. Chasing after having a partner is fine as long as it is in line with our true goals, not those of our family or the society around us,” Kislev added.The study, “How do relationship desire and sociability relate to each other among singles? Longitudinal analysis of the Pairfam survey“, was published June 24, 2020.(Image by Laura Smith from Pixabay)
Jul 27, 2011 (CIDRAP News) – Germany’s infectious disease institute has declared that the Escherichia coli O104:H4 outbreak is over, now that the incubation period for the most recently confirmed case with links to the sprout seed–related event has passed. The ECDC, in a Jul 8 risk assessment, warned that sporadic cases and new clusters would likely continue to be reported, because some of the contaminated seeds could still be on the market or in people’s homes, cross-contamination during food handling could occur, and foodborne transmission could be linked to people with asymptomatic infections. Jul 8 ECDC risk assessment Jul 27 ECDC outbreak update Omitting sprouts in the original case-control study was an error that German health officials made and that led to the spurious association with cucumbers, lettuce, and tomatoes, Hedberg said. The same mistake has been made in other outbreaks elsewhere, he said, which should be a lesson for future outbreak investigations. Craig Hedberg, PhD, a foodborne disease expert at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, said that though the outbreak might be considered “over,” there are still concerns about fenugreek seeds from potentially contaminated lots that have not been accounted for. Because of reporting delays, additional cases are still slowly trickling into the ECDC. Health officials are also still sorting out confirmed and probable cases. So far the ECDC has received reports of 3,910 infections, including 782 with hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS), a serious kidney complication. So far 46 deaths have been reported. He said the outbreak has taught some useful lessons and raised some issues that warrant follow-up discussion. See also: European officials seemed in a rush to publish preliminary data that suggested the outbreak involved an unusually virulent enterohemorrhagic E coli (EHEC) strain when the full extent of exposure to the implicated food wasn’t known, Hedberg said. “If we don’t know the size of the denominator, the numerator is just a number.” A few cases, most with links to German travel, were also reported in the United States and Canada. The Robert Koch Institute, the county’s federal disease control agency, released a statement in German yesterday saying that the 3-week incubation period had passed since the latest illness onset date—July 4—for a patient with an epidemiologic link to the outbreak, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) said today in its outbreak update. The agency said German officials are considering cases with onsets later than Jul 4 as having no epidemiologic links to the outbreak or no lab confirmation. Hedberg said the reason given for omitting sprouts from the first case-control study was that fewer than half of the sick patients reported eating them. “This is not acceptable, because sprouts are a known previous vehicle, thus should have been part of any case-control study,” he said. “And although they were reportedly eaten by fewer than half of cases, they were eaten by a higher proportion of cases than would have been anticipated, based on background rates of sprout consumption in the population.”