Social Sciences

At the same time as many urban economies are developing into 24-hour societies, it is becoming increasingly popular amongst shift workers to compress their working hours. This is done by working longer shifts and/or restricting free time in-between shifts. The advantage is longer consecutive periods of days off. The disadvantage is lack of recovery during work periods.

John Axelsson has in his thesis at the Department of Psychology at Stockholm University and at the Institute of

Researchers delving into today’s complicated range of family set-ups must recognise that ‘brother and sister’ relationships are now about far more than blood ties and living in the same home, warns a new study sponsored by the ESRC.

As 21st Century children and young people create their own, complex understandings of who and what is a sibling, the important social implications need to be taken on board, says a working paper from a team led by Professor Rosalind Edwards of th

Maku is a family of languages spoken by Indians in the Amazon rainforest. Dutch-funded researcher Valteir Martins has reconstructed the sound structure of an ancestral Maku language and has demonstrated that the Maku languages are genetically related to the Arawak languages.

Martins compared the results of existing studies into the Maku languages and for many years he also worked with speakers of these various languages. The Brazilian researcher established that the modern M

A fresh report that assessed the treatment at three youth homes run by the National Board of Institutional Care, abbreviated SiS in Swedish, shows that two thirds of the boys do fairly well. On the other hand, the choice of methods used does not appear to be crucial. The key factor is the competence and commitment of the staff and the boys’ relationship with their contact persons.

SiS has 35 specialized youth homes. The adolescents who are placed there often have serious pr

While some psychologists still argue that people perform better when they do something because they want to – rather than for some kind of reward, such as money — Steven Reiss suggests we shouldn’t even make that distinction.

Reiss, a professor of psychology at Ohio State University , argues that a diverse range of human motivations can’t be forced into these categories of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Psycholgists say intrinsic motivations are those that ar

Many studies have shown that children living in a single-parent family tend to do worse academically and receive less intellectual stimulation than children living with married parents. Having a grandparent in the home, however, appears to buffer some of these negative effects, according to a new Cornell University study.

“When looking at children’s test scores, we find that children who live with a single mom and a grandparent fare just as well as children living with marrie