The idea of animals possessing personalities was once dismissed by the scientific community, but has since gained traction with evidence for potential application to improve captive animal management and welfare. Although domestic cats are popular companion animals, research has tended to overlook the value of personality assessment for management and care of pet cats. The aim of this study was to investigate personality in a large sample of pet cats with a view to understanding practical implications for pet cats in the home. Personality of 2,802 pet cats, from South Australia and New Zealand, was rated by their owners utilising a survey measuring 52 personality traits. Five reliable personality factors were found using principal axis factor analysis: Neuroticism, Extraversion, Dominance, Impulsiveness and Agreeableness. Implications for the ‘Feline Five’ are discussed in relation to their potential application to improving the management and welfare of pet cats. Highly Impulsive cats for example, may be reacting to something stressful in their environment, whereas cats with low Agreeableness scores, showing irritability may indicate underlying pain or illness. Thus, the need for a systematic and holistic approach to personality that includes both the individual pet cat and its environment is recommended, and opens the door to future interdisciplinary intervention.

Objective: Self-kindness, which is thought to be part of self-compassion, has the potential to contribute to mental health, as well as serve as a focus for interventions. However, little attention has been given to the potential role of self-kindness specifically, especially in the context of mindful presence and available social support, in buffering distress. Method: Structural equation modelling was used to test a theoretically based model of how these factors relate to each other and psychological distress. Participants were 592 Australian university students. Results: Results confirmed our hypotheses, showing that: (a) receiving social support is important to the capacity for self-kindness both directly and indirectly through the ability to "be present," and (b) the relationship between social support and psychological distress is partially mediated by the practices of self-kindness and being present. The model of social support, being present, and self-kindness accounted for half the variance in psychological distress. With the addition of stressors, a regression model explained a total of 62% of the variance. Conclusions: These findings have implications for understanding the construct of self-kindness and its role in the development of interventions to improve student success.

Can creativity be used for evil (or simply bad or unethical) purposes? Much of the past research on this topic has emphasized how creative people are more likely to engage in socially undesirable or morally unethical behavior. Yet how do laypeople perceive this issue? This study presented 626 participants with 4 hypothetical situations and a total of 43 possible actions varying both in malevolence and creativity. A factor analysis of participant ratings of each action's malevolence revealed 5 levels of perceived malevolence (moral killing, legal, immoral/unethical, illegal/nonviolent, and illegal/violent). The per ceived creativity of these actions was nonlinear-actions that were morally complex or ambiguous were seen as being more creative.

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In a previous paper [5], two of the authors developed a method for ascribing a value to an extra unit of capacity on a telecommunications link. Specifically, they expressed the value of an extra unit of capacity as a function of current capacity, current occupancy and a planning horizon. The intention was to use this function as an ingredient in a bandwidth reallocation scheme for ensuring efficient operation of a telecommunications network. Unfortunately, direct evaluation of the function requires numerical inversion of a Laplace transform expressed in terms of Charlier polynomials, a task that is beyond the processing capabilities of typical switches in today's telecommunications networks. Because of this, it is desirable to have more easily computable methods of either calculating or approximating the capacity value function. We develop two approaches to this problem: the first is a recursive method of computing the Laplace transform of the capacity value function and the second is a linear approximation to the capacity value function itself.