Scenarios have been widely applied to the problems of process analysis, software design and requirements engineering. The success of scenarios lies in their coupling of expressiveness with a natural narrative structure that makes them an ideal format for communicating ideas between analysts and laypeople. In requirements engineering, scenarios have been applied to the problems of requirements e...

BACKGROUND intelligibility of phonological disorder. AIM to compare the intelligibility of phonological disorder analyzed by three distinct groups of judges. METHOD the research consisted of two samples: one sample was composed by 30 individuals with phonological disorder (assessed individuals) and the other sample was composed by the judges (speech-language therapists, laypeople and mother...

Studies of visual esthetic preference have shown that people without art training generally prefer representational paintings to abstract paintings. This, however, is not always the case: preferences can sometimes go against this usual tendency. We aimed to explore this issue, investigating the relationship between "unusual responses" and reaction time in an esthetic appreciation task. Results ...

This paper proposes to analyse the discursive construction of Portuguese national identity in the semi-public (media) discourse, namely how two apparently competing discourses on national identity (that of the elite and that of laypeople) represent and reframe the country’s national identity. I am interested in how these different types of participants coconstruct and negotiate (national) ident...

Personal Health Records (PHRs), patient-controlled information systems, are believed to be a key to transform healthcare. We argue that a single system, no matter how it is designed, is highly unlikely to have the power to reconfigure a whole sectors. PHRs are not merely technical objects that exist on their own but they should be considered as socio-technical arrangements of systems and users ...

The aim of this article is to show a phenomenological hermeneutic understanding of the experience of those who think of suicide. We begin this study by assuming an unnatural attitude towards the phenomenon, that is, by avoiding the interpretations that are naturally established about suicide, such as illness, suffering, and despair, among others. These characteristics attributed to the one who ...

Laypeople and scientists alike believe that they know anger, or sadness, or fear, when they see it. These emotions and a few others are presumed to have specific causal mechanisms in the brain and properties that are observable (on the face, in the voice, in the body, or in experience)-that is, they are assumed to be natural kinds. If a given emotion is a natural kind and can be identified obje...

Solid Freeform Fabrication (SFF) of food has the potential to drastically impact both culinary professionals and laypeople; the technology will fundamentally change the ways we produce and experience food. Several imposing barriers to food-SFF have been overcome by recent opensource printing projects. Now, materials issues present the greatest challenge. While the culinary field of molecular ga...

Of this article's seven experiments, the first five demonstrate that virtually no Americans know the basic global warming mechanism. Fortunately, Experiments 2-5 found that 2-45 min of physical-chemical climate instruction durably increased such understandings. This mechanistic learning, or merely receiving seven highly germane statistical facts (Experiment 6), also increased climate-change acc...

Three studies examine the extent to which laypeople endorse Hobbes’s (1651/1960) view of life as ‘‘nasty, brutish, and short’’ and explore the relationships between this philosophy and well-being. Participants answered two binary choice questions: Is life short or long? And, is life easy or hard? Across a series of studies, the majority of participants indicated that they believed that life is ...