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Sensory modulation is an emerging approach that aims to reduce distress and agitation in mental health service users and potentially avoid the necessity for coercive practices such as seclusion and restraint. Despite the growing use of this intervention, there has been limited research exploring the implementation of sensory modulation at an organisational level, both internationally and within the New Zealand context. The purpose of this study is to investigate the implementation of a sensory modulation programme in two New Zealand inpatient mental health services using an exploratory organisational case study design.

Organisational case study design methodology was used to explore the implementation of a sensory modulation programme in two New Zealand acute adult inpatient mental health services. This study explored how key organisational and staff factors (including policies and practices related to de-escalation and seclusion reduction) influence sensory modulation implementation. Cases were described and examined the pattern of findings.

Strategies found to support implementation were identified at environmental, organisational, group and individual staff levels. Aspects highlighted as being particularly important included taking an inter-professional approach in leadership and training, rostering flexibility and leeway in staffing levels to support training attendance and responsiveness to crises.

The facilitators and strategies highlighted in this study may be used to support the design and implementation of future sensory modulation programmes in New Zealand and internationally.

The complexity of factors that influenced the implementation of the sensory modulation approach within an inpatient setting made determining the effectiveness of the approach challenging. However, the general principles and strategies identified in this study offer useful insights for the design and implementation of future sensory modulation programmes.

Sensory modulation intervention involves using calming and grounding sensory stimuli to support coping with distress and intense emotions. Evaluating the impact of sensory modulation is challenging in inpatient settings due to the numerous variables influencing outcomes in ward environments. This study aims to determine the impact of sensory modulation across all organisational levels including service users, staff confidence and attitudes, ward climate and seclusion events.

Organisational case studies were conducted in two Aotearoa New Zealand inpatient mental health services, using qualitative and quantitative data to explore the effects of a sensory modulation programme.

Results showed that sensory modulation enhanced staff knowledge and confidence in fostering therapeutic relationships and reducing restrictive practices, positively impacted ward climate and provided service users with sensory strategies to use in everyday life.

The findings captured the complexity of implementation and impact of sensory modulation programmes at individual, group and organisational levels. It is important to recognise the influencing factors and impact of sensory modulation across all levels of service delivery.

Organisational case study methodology offered a unique approach to evaluating the impact of sensory modulation within inpatient mental health services. Data analysis suggests that in addition to managing acute service user distress, sensory modulation impacts broader staff, team and service level outcomes.

To understand the nature of young people’s relationship with technology and to endeavour to explode a few myths about their affection for it.

The research took four stages; desk research; interviews with four experts; quant through Synovate’s online panel; qual research groups.

It was found that the majority of young people do not love technology – they love communication and entertainment, and technology is just the facilitator for these; it was also found that a surprisingly large number of young people dislike and actively avoid using technology, particularly those from lower SEGs.

Marketers always presume that young people are very plugged into technology and that they all love it. This article shows this is clearly not the case and the amount of affection and time they spend using information technology has been overstated.

This paper aims to review the need for and development of specialist deaf secure mental health services.

The paper is a review article; it begins by giving a brief overview of deafness and the relationship between deafness, mental health problems and offending. Following this, relevant literature and Department of Health (DoH) guidance is summarised and a description of the current UK services is given.

In 2001, Young et al. highlighted the needs of deaf mentally disordered offenders and the requirement for specialist forensic mental health services for this group. Since then several DoH guidance documents have been published that, amongst other things, highlighted the need to develop deaf forensic mental health services. There have now been substantial service developments in this area but substantial gaps remain – most notably, a lack of specialist mental health provision for deaf prisoners.

The paper offers insights into the development and future of deaf forensic mental health services.

Over the last ten years, increasing attention has been given to employees' displays of emotions to customers during service transactions and particularly to how organisations try to control these emotional displays (Adelmann, 1989; Ashforth & Humphrey, 1993; Hochschild, 1983; Rafaeli & Sutton, 1987, 1989; Wharton & Erickson, 1993). The act of expressing organisationally‐desired emotions during service interactions has been labelled emotional labour (Ashforth & Humphrey, 1993; Hochschild, 1983). The issue in emotional labour research which has received the most focus has been “emotional dissonance”, that is, the state of discomfort generated in employees when they have to express emotions which they do not genuinely feel (Middleton, 1989). In large part, this attention to emotional dissonance has been based on the potential negative consequences that emotional dissonance can have for workers psychological well being (Hochschild, 1983; Erickson, 1991; Rafaeli & Sutton, 1987; Wharton, 1993). This study seeks to extend previous empirical research on when emotional dissonance is most likely to result in these negative consequences and, especially, the importance of role internalisation as a mediating variable in the emotional dissonance‐psychological well‐being relationship.

Developments in the social neurosciences over the past two decades have rendered problematic the main knowledge elicitation techniques currently in use by strategy researchers, as a basis for revealing actors’ mental representations of strategic knowledge. Extant elicitation techniques were advanced during an era when cognitive scientists and organizational researchers alike were preoccupied with the basic information of processing limitations of decision makers and means of addressing them, predicated on an outmoded conception of strategists as affect-free, cognitive misers. The need to adapt these techniques to enable the investigation of the emotional content and structure of actors’ mental representations is now a pressing priority for the advancement of theory, research, and practice pertaining to several interrelated areas of strategic management, from dynamic capabilities development, to upper echelons theory, to strategic consensus formation. Accordingly, in this chapter, we report the findings of two studies that investigated the feasibility of adapting the repertory grid, a robust method, widely known and well used in strategic management, for this purpose. Study 1 elicited a series of commonly mentioned strategic issues (the elements) from a sample of senior managers similar in composition to the sample recruited to the second study. Study 2 participants evaluated the elements elicited in Study 1 in relation to a series of researcher-supplied bipolar attributes (the constructs), based on the well-known affective circumplex model of human emotions. In line with expectations, a series of vector-based multivariate analyses revealed a number of interesting similarities and variations among participants in terms of the basic structure and emotional salience of the issues under consideration.

The present data illustrate the effectiveness of utilizing theoretically guided models to develop consumer-based micro-segmentation strategies. The results provide marketers with a powerful discriminant function calculated from six variables to profile consumers and make informed decisions regarding promotional content and channel delivery to stimulate processing of marketing communication. The function also enables marketers to carve out casual, moderate, and loyal market segments with 74.3 per cent accuracy utilizing only 18 survey questions.

The purpose of this paper is to report upon research into developing a biologically inspired target‐tracking system (TTS) capable of acquiring quality images of a known target type for a robotic inspection application.

The approach used in the design of the TTS hearkens back to the work on adaptive learning by Oliver Selfridge and Chris J.C.H. Watkins and the work on the classification of objects by Zdzislaw Pawlak during the 1980s in an approximation space‐based form of feedback during learning. Also, during the 1980s, it was Ewa Orlowska who called attention to the importance of approximation spaces as a formal counterpart of perception. This insight by Orlowska has been important in working toward a new form of adaptive learning useful in controlling the behaviour of machines to accomplish system goals. The adaptive learning algorithms presented in this paper are strictly temporal difference methods, including Q‐learning, sarsa, and the actor‐critic method. Learning itself is considered episodic. During each episode, the equivalent of a Tinbergen‐like ethogram is constructed. Such an ethogram provides a basis for the construction of an approximation space at the end of each episode. The combination of episodic ethograms and approximation spaces provides an extremely effective means of feedback useful in guiding learning during the lifetime of a robotic system such as the TTS reported in this paper.

It was discovered that even though the adaptive learning methods were computationally more expensive than the classical algorithm implementations, they proved to be more effective in a number of cases, especially in noisy environments.

The novelty associated with this work is the introduction of an approach to adaptive adaptive learning carried out within the framework of ethology‐based approximation spaces to provide performance feedback during the learning process.