More Than Just Movement: Exploring Embodied Group Synchrony During Seated Dance for Older Adults Living in Residential Aged Care Communities.

One in six people in Australia are aged over 65, with many older adults currently living in residential aged care communities (RACC). Fostering meaningful human connection through social activities, such as dance, is imperative to maintain or improve the quality of life in these settings. Drawing from an embodied cognition framework, this mixed-methods study explored synchrony during a seated dance program with 15 older adults living in a RACC. Qualitative video content analysis was used to code movement, language and music cooccurrences, resulting in five group synchrony labels. Hierarchical Cluster Analysis (HCA) was then employed to distil ten higher-order forms of embodied group synchrony. Using existing neurocognitive evidence, we detail the therapeutic and interpersonal implications of the most prominent forms of embodied group synchrony. These findings can be used to choreograph therapeutic forms of embodied group synchrony in dance programs with older adults.

Respect, interaction, immediacy and the role community plays in registering an organ donation decision.

BACKGROUND: Registering a donation decision is fundamental to increasing the number of people who donate the organs and tissues essential for transplantation, but the number of registered organ donors is insufficient to meet this demand. Most people in Australia support organ donation, but only a third have registered their decision on the Australian Organ Donor Register (AODR). We addressed this paradox by investigating how feelings of community, engendered through an ethic of hospitality and care and a non-proselytizing dialogue about organ donation, facilitated the decision to register. METHODS: An Immediate Registration Opportunity was set up in a large public hospital in NSW, Australia. The public was approached and invited to engage in an open, respectful dialogic interaction that met people where their beliefs were and allowed their concerns and fears about donation to be discussed. This included a survey that measured positive and negative beliefs about organ donation, mood, atmosphere, and feelings of community coupled with an on-the-spot opportunity to register their donation decision. RESULTS: Over four days, we interacted with 357 participants; 75.5% (210) of eligible-to-register participants registered on the AODR. Generalized Structural Equation Modelling highlighted that as connection to community increased, so did the salience of positive beliefs about organ donation. Positive beliefs, in turn, were negatively correlated with negative beliefs about donation and, as the strength of negative beliefs decreased, the probability of registration on the AODR increased. Participants who registered on the AODR reported stronger connection to the broader community than participants who did not register. CONCLUSION: A respectful non-judgmental interaction that allows beliefs and concerns about organ donation to be discussed, coupled with an immediate opportunity to register, encouraged registration. Within this framework, feelings of belonging to a community were a key determinant that enabled many to make the decision to register.

Mosquito-Borne Diseases: Social Representations of a University Community in Endemic Outbreaks.

(1) Background: Studying social representations as lay theories allows for a better understanding of the common sense knowledge constructed around mosquito-borne diseases and the impact this may have on attitudes and behaviors. (2) Methods: A hierarchical evocation questionnaire was circulated through an Australian academic community and analyzed by prototypical analysis and correspondence factor analysis. (3) Results: Representational areas are regulated by participant age and whether or not they had contracted a mosquito-borne disease. (4) Conclusions: Collecting and understanding social representations has the potential to help social actors implement strategies that encourage people to access information and adopt behaviors in line with the scientific reality of the phenomenon, rather than limiting lay theories.

Facebook and older adults: Fulfilling psychological needs?

Self-determination theory posits that feeling related, competent, and autonomous is central to wellbeing. However, meeting these psychological needs can become difficult as adults age. Facebook use has been associated with enhanced relatedness, competence, and autonomy in a student population, but the effect of Facebook use on the psychological needs in older adults has yet to be investigated. Drawing from self-determination theory, we investigated whether Facebook use facilitated older adults' relatedness, competence, and autonomy needs, and the relationship between these psychological needs and levels of mobility. One hundred and twenty-seven adults (Mage = 71), completed an online survey that measured Facebook use, relatedness, competence, autonomy, and levels of mobility. More frequent Facebook users reported significantly higher levels of relatedness compared to less frequent Facebook users, and less mobile participants reported significantly lower levels of autonomy and used Facebook significantly more frequently than more mobile participants. The potential of Facebook as a tool to help older adults meet their relatedness needs is discussed.

Respect, Interaction, and Immediacy: Addressing the Challenges Associated With the Different Religious and Cultural Approaches to Organ Donation in Australia.

Australia is a multicultural society of just over 25 million people, with approximately 310 different ancestries, 300 languages, and 150 religions. This diversity suggests that Australia's people might hold a multiplicity of beliefs regarding organ donation. Research shows that most people in Australia have a strong, positive perception of organ donation; they believe that organ donation helps others and benefits society. However, the current rate of 21.6 donors per million population is below expectations and below the demand for organs needed for transplantation. This has led us to ask whether donation consent rates are differentiated by religious and cultural affiliation. We present a case study of New South Wales, Australia, to address this issue. New South Wales is the most populous state in Australia and is also religiously and culturally diverse. Donation consent data (2016-2019) by ethnicity and by religion show that donation consent rates have improved but not across all groups. Initiatives to increase awareness and support for organ and tissue donation among culturally and linguistically diverse and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities are discussed. Research is also presented that investigates whether registration rates on the Australian Organ Donor Register can be increased and the implications of this for increasing consent for donation. This research underscores the importance of respecting the diversity of beliefs held regarding organ donation, both positive and negative; offering all people a face-to-face interaction opportunity to consider their beliefs about organ donation, ask questions, and raise concerns without judgment; and providing people with an immediate opportunity to register their donation decision on the Australian Organ Donor Register. The challenges associated with adopting these initiatives are considered along with the role of religious and cultural leaders within the context of organ donation and registration; the unspoken concerns of cultural and religious groups are also addressed. In conclusion, we propose that the rich diversity of Australian society is more of a backdrop than a barrier to organ donation.

Utilizing a Hospital-based Setting to Increase Organ Donor Registrations.

BACKGROUND: Shortages of organs for transplantation are a concern for many countries. In Australia's "opt-in" system, people register their donation decision on the Australian Organ Donor Register (AODR) in their own time, yet <30% of the population have done so. Consent registrations are honored by the next-of-kin in 90% of cases, so increasing registrations will increase donated organs for transplantation. This study investigated the efficacy of offering an immediate registration opportunity in 2 hospitals, and the role that beliefs about organ donation play in registration behavior. METHODS: An immediate registration opportunity was offered at a public and a private hospital in New South Wales, Australia. Participants (N = 168) categorized as medical/healthcare (eg, doctor and nurse) and nonhealthcare (eg, teacher and chef) completed a measure of beliefs about organ donation, were encouraged to discuss their fears and concerns about organ donation, and given an immediate opportunity to register on the AODR. RESULTS: A total of 81.5% of medical/healthcare participants who were eligible registered, and 71.5% of all eligible participants registered on the spot. Beliefs about the negative consequences of donation and concerns over the medical care given to potential donors predicted (non)registration. Medical/healthcare participants reported lower levels of fears and concerns than nonhealthcare participants. Although both groups reported strong positive beliefs about donation, these did not predict registration. CONCLUSIONS: Offering an immediate registration opportunity in 2 hospitals notably increased the number of registrations on the AODR, suggesting this is a strategy that could potentially increase registrations in opt-in donation systems.

Translation strategies, contradiction, and the theory of social representations: Why discussing needles may improve blood donor retention.

Retaining blood donors is a cost-effective way of ensuring a safe blood supply, yet despite the plethora of research, only 5.1% of the eligible population in Australia donate blood and 40% of these do not make a second donation. We offer an alternative to traditional approaches by conceptualizing blood donation within social representations theory as socially derived symbolic knowledge with a specific focus on cognitive polyphasia and Guimelli's (1998) normative and functional dimensions. An online survey, completed by 703 residents from NSW Australia, comprised a blood donation word association task, Likert-style questions constructed from previous word association data and contextualized blood donation statements. Individual difference scaling analysis revealed all donor groups (including non-donors) associated blood donation with a few central, albeit contradictory ideas/beliefs. Exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis performed on a split data set of the Likert-style items reiterated this finding. Interpreted through Guimelli's dichotomy, all donor groups were aware of these contradictory normative and functional ideas/beliefs but when explicitly asked, it was the functional aspect that differentiated the groups. We argue the key to retaining donors is understanding the interdependence between how blood donation is socially understood at the societal level of discourse and donor behaviour. Translational strategies for recruitment and retention are discussed.

"Heroes" and "villains" of world history across cultures.

Emergent properties of global political culture were examined using data from the World History Survey (WHS) involving 6,902 university students in 37 countries evaluating 40 figures from world history. Multidimensional scaling and factor analysis techniques found only limited forms of universality in evaluations across Western, Catholic/Orthodox, Muslim, and Asian country clusters. The highest consensus across cultures involved scientific innovators, with Einstein having the most positive evaluation overall. Peaceful humanitarians like Mother Theresa and Gandhi followed. There was much less cross-cultural consistency in the evaluation of negative figures, led by Hitler, Osama bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein. After more traditional empirical methods (e.g., factor analysis) failed to identify meaningful cross-cultural patterns, Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) was used to identify four global representational profiles: Secular and Religious Idealists were overwhelmingly prevalent in Christian countries, and Political Realists were common in Muslim and Asian countries. We discuss possible consequences and interpretations of these different representational profiles.

Editorial political cartoons in Australia: social representations & and the visual depiction of essentialism.

Six million migrants from over 170 countries have resettled in Australia since 1945 ensuring religious diversity is now a hallmark of Australia's population. However, not all religious groups are perceived in the same way. In this paper, we explore how representational processes differentially essentialise religious groups, in particular how some groups are ascribed an underlying nature that irrevocably defines who they are and how they will behave, whilst other groups are conveyed merely as coherent entities with similarity in goals and structure. We elucidate this through an analysis of the depiction of religious markers in Australian Editorial political cartoons. We mirror the near-exclusive focus on the Muslim and Christian religions, in the religious cartoons we sampled, to present an analysis of 6 exemplar cartoons. Drawing from visual analysis techniques (van Leeuwen 2001) and social representations theory (Moscovici 1984) we highlight how essentialist perceptions of religious groups are unwittingly fostered in everyday media communications. We discuss the implications of our analysis for the transnationalisation of religion.

Social representations and themata: the construction and functioning of social knowledge about donation and transplantation.

This study extends previous research investigating the social representation of organ donation and transplantation (Moloney & Walker, 2000, 2002) by exploring the accommodation of contradiction (Wagner, Duveen, Verma, & Thelmel, 2000) within consensual reality (Rose et al., 1995), and the role of themata (Markova, 2000) in a representation. The study employed a mail-out questionnaire embedded with eight experimental conditions, which manipulated two tasks, scenario rating scale and word association. WMDS (INDSCAL) analyses demonstrated that the dialectical concepts of life and death are generative of a contradictory representational field that is maintained through the differential elicitation of the normative and functional dimensions (Guimelli, 1998) of the representation in accordance with social context.

Talking about transplants: social representations and the dialectical, dilemmatic nature of organ donation and transplantation.

In many westernized countries, organ donation rates are low in comparison with the need for life-saving organ transplants, and are at odds with generally high community endorsement of organ donation. This is particularly true for Western Australia, the location of this study. This contradiction between endorsement and donation is investigated within a framework that draws from Moscovici's (1984) theory of Social Representations, Guimelli's (1998) differentiation between normative and functional dimensions of the central core, and Billig's (1988) rhetorical position on the role of argumentation in discourse. Four focus group discussions on organ donation and transplantation were conducted. Analysis of the discourse suggests that the social representation of organ donation and transplantation can be understood best as a representational field organized around two dialectically 'opposed' images-the gift of life and the mechanistic removal and replacement of body parts. The normative and functional expression of these two images as a pro-donation stance and a qualified pro-donation stance is discussed, as is the role of argumentation in the production of a social representation.