Browsing by Type "Controlled Vocabulary for Resource Type Genres::text::periodical::journal"

AbstractMourning constitutes an important human emotion, which might cause—among other things—major depressive symptoms when lasting for too long. To date, no study investigated whether mourning is related to specific psychophysiological activation patterns. Therefore, we examined physiological reactions induced by iconographic mourning-related stimuli in comparison to neutral and attachment stimuli in healthy adults (N = 77, mean age: 21.9). We evaluated pupillometric and eye-tracking parameters as well as heart rate variability (HRV) and skin conductance (EDA). Eye-tracking revealed a stronger dilated pupil during mourning in comparison to the neutral, but not to the attachment condition; furthermore, fixation patterns revealed less fixations on mourning stimuli. While HF HRV was reduced during mourning and attachment, we found no differences concerning EDA parameters between conditions. Results suggest specific eye-movement and pupil adaptations during representations of mourning, which might point toward inward cognition or avoidance, but no specific physiological pattern concerning HRV and EDA.

The Blockchain concept has recently emerged as an alternative approach for e-commerce payment, based on decentralized systems that do not rely on trusted institutions. Actually, since Blockchain was first proposed for use in cryptocurrencies, several solutions have appeared that employ this technology in a variety of domains, such as creating distributed registries of smart contracts. Whichever the target application domain, though, solutions implementing Blockchain use a set of well-known technologies, such as encryption, Merkle Trees, P2P networks, and consensus mechanisms. The latter are of particular research interest today, since most consensus mechanisms used in the early cryptocurrencies (e.g., Bitcoin) involve considerable computational power to ensure system consistency. Aiming to evaluate the state of the art on the area, this manuscript reviews Blockchain concepts and classifications, focusing specifically on the underlying consensus mechanisms and security aspects of the resulting solutions. We also describe a brief experiment using Ethereum and MultiChain, aiming to analyze security aspects of the Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) and Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus approaches.

AbstractDistributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks are one of the major causes of concerns for communication service providers. When an attack is highly sophisticated and no countermeasures are available directly, sharing hardware and defense capabilities become a compelling alternative. Future network and service management can base its operations on equally distributed systems to neutralize highly distributed DDoS attacks. A cooperative defense allows for the combination of detection and mitigation capabilities, the reduction of overhead at a single point, and the blockage of malicious traffic near its source. Main challenges impairing the widespread deployment of existing cooperative defense are: (a) high complexity of operation and coordination, (b) need for trusted and secure communications, (c) lack of incentives for service providers to cooperate, and (d) determination on how operations of these systems are affected by different legislation, regions, and countries. The cooperative Blockchain Signaling System (BloSS) defines an effective and alternative solution for security management, especially cooperative defenses, by exploiting Blockchains (BC) and Software-Defined Networks (SDN) for sharing attack information, an exchange of incentives, and tracking of reputation in a fully distributed and automated fashion. Therefore,BloSSwas prototyped and evaluated through a global experiment, without the burden to maintain, design, and develop special registries and gossip protocols.

AbstractThe rapid growth in the number of insecure portable and stationary devices and the exponential increase of traffic volume makes Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks a top security threat to services provisioning. Existing defense mechanisms lack resources and flexibility to cope with attacks by themselves, and by utilizing other’s companies resources, the burden of the mitigation can be shared. Emerging technologies such as blockchain and smart contracts allows for the sharing of attack information in a fully distributed and automated fashion. In this paper, the design of a novel architecture is proposed by combining these technologies introducing new opportunities for flexible and efficient DDoS mitigation solutions across multiple domains. Main advantages are the deployment of an already existing public and distributed infrastructure to advertise white or blacklisted IP addresses, and the usage of such infrastructure as an additional security mechanism to existing DDoS defense systems, without the need to build specialized registries or other distribution mechanisms, which enables the enforcement of rules across multiple domains.

Sneakers at a product launch, a leather jacket when heads of state meet, sunglasses at a formal reception. While popular media relishes leaders who catch the eye by way of such distinctive fashion, we know little about how this salient daily practice of dress specifically affects perceptions of leaders in their daily business. Addressing this gap, we investigated how dress impacts perceptions and approval of a leader. Firstly, we found formal attire to lead to ascriptions of prototypicality but not charisma (Study 1). Secondly, leaders' charisma and approval were higher when a person's clothing style contrasted their organization's culture (Study 2). Lastly, we replicated the impact of informal clothing on both leader approval and charisma in a sample of CEOs of Fortune 1000 companies (Studies 3 and 4). Findings lend support to the notion that leaders can manipulate their style of attire to actively shape their followers' impressions of themselves.

The rapid pace of digitalization in the workplace confronts leaders and followers with the demand to get accustomed to digital ways of communication. The prevalent digital media platforms, like e-mail and messenger services, however, are less broad in informational depth, omitting nonverbal cues and usually adopting a more stifled and factual tonality. This constitutes a substantial challenge for leaders, as the transferal of emotions, mostly driven by a message's nonverbal delivery, constitutes one of the key pathways for their effectiveness. Quasi-nonverbal signals, like emoji, could be a means to re-enrich written leader communication with affect. We conducted two experiments to gain insights into the benefits and risks of emoji in leader communication. Our findings reveal the potential of positive emoji to enhance followers' ascriptions of desirable leader attributes, approval of the leader, and their other-regarding behaviour, however only in certain organisational contexts. Conversely, negative emoji substantially undermined the leader's standing, leading to various undesirable outcomes. Our findings thus allow for inferences on how followers will likely react to specific quasi-nonverbal displays and provide leaders with recommendations for adapting their affective signalling to elicit desired responses.

Charismatic leadership significantly influences organizational performance, with recent research emphasizing the pivotal role of leader behavior in conveying charisma to employees. In two studies we explore the underexplored concept of eye-directed gaze as a charismatic leadership signal and its impact on team leadership effectiveness. The first study employed mobile eye-tracking during interactive negotiations, while the second relied on observer reports in leader-follower groups. Consistently, our results indicate that leaders exhibiting more pronounced eye-directed gaze are perceived as charismatic, dominant, assertive, and competent by their employees. Furthermore, these leaders receive higher approval from their followers and inspire them to surpass performance expectations. In conclusion, our findings underscore the effectiveness of employing eye-directed gaze as a tactic for charismatic leadership, empowering leaders to amplify their influence and message reception within their teams.

This article discusses the ideas about gender contained in the Enseñanzas Sufíes Para Los Tiempos Actuales, a text by Abdul Rauf Felpete, the leader of the Naqshbandiyya Haqqaniyya in Latin America, probably the largest Sufi group in the continent. I analyse these ideas against the backdrop context in which they were produced: on the one hand, a conservative Sufi Islamic frame inspired by Nazim al-Haqqani’s ideas, and on the other, an Argentinian society that was incurring profound gender-related societal changes at the time when the shaykh delivered the sermons contained in the book. This historical moment was characterised by a growing feminist and LGTBQ+ activism and the arrival of a progressive government in Argentina, which over time, positioned this Latin American country in the vanguard of gender and sexual equality rights in the Spanish speaking world. In this context, Rauf Felpete proposes a gender model inspired in a Haqqani form of Islamic conservatism as a remedy to address what he perceives as the threat of civilizational decadence brought about by these changes. I discuss Rauf Felpete’s family ideology, a set of moral norms based on gender determinism and pronatalism, articulated through two key concepts, first, domesticity, understood as a way to regulate female behaviour and, second, motherhood, viewed as a Godly ordained natural instinct. In order to put into practice these gender norms, the devout Haqqani is called to move to the countryside; rural communes are presented as the only possible way of living a pious and authentically Islamic life, a mode of living that implies profound reconfigurations of gender (and of lifestyle, more generally) for his Latin American followers.

IntroductionExtraversion and its facets of assertiveness and sociability were identified as stable predictors for leader emergence and effectiveness. However, recent research suggested that extraversion may lie in the eyes of the beholder; it might not be the leader’s possession but their followers’ attribution of the trait that shapes these criteria of leader success.MethodsIn our study, we reverse-engineered this relationship and assessed the effects of effective leadership behaviors on personality perceptions. More specifically, we created scenarios of a leader responding to coordination challenges with passive-avoidant, transactional, or transformational leadership behaviors. We presented 204 participants with these scenarios and assessed how extraverted, assertive, and sociable they perceived the leader to be.ResultsInterestingly, and not fully meeting our expectations, ascriptions of extraversion and its facets of assertiveness and sociability did not directly relate to the effectiveness of the behaviors, as the moderately effective transactional leadership style garnered the highest ascriptions of extraversion and its facets. Further, ascriptions of extraversion to the transformational behavior of intellectual stimulation were remarkably low, matched only by the laissez-faire dimension of the passive-avoidant leadership style.DiscussionWe integrate and contrast these unexpected but explainable findings with current research, discuss potential associations between introversion and empowering leadership practices and provide suggestions for future discourse, illustrating the potential of investigating the presence of an introverted leadership advantage in the workplace of tomorrow.