Ohio University – Chillicothe

About: Ohio University – Chillicothe is a education organization based out in Chillicothe, Ohio, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Health care & Nurse education. The organization has 35 authors who have published 50 publications receiving 616 citations.

The benefits of empathy: When empathy may sustain cooperation in social dilemmas

Abstract: Cooperation in social dilemmas is often challenged by negative noise, or unintended errors, such that the actual behavior is less cooperative than intended—for example, arriving later than intended for a meeting due to an unusual traffic jam. The present research was inspired by the notion that doing a little more for one's interaction partner, which may be movitvated by empathetic feelings, can effectively reduce the detrimental effects of “negative noise,” or unintended incidents of noncooperation. Consistent with hypotheses, negative noise exhibited detrimental effects on cooperation, but such effects were absent when empathy-motivated cooperation was present. We conclude that empathy has broad benefits for social interaction, in that it can be an effective tool for coping with misinterpreted behaviors, thereby maintaining or enhancing cooperation. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The stochastic U-line balancing problem

Abstract: A U-line arranges tasks around a U-shaped production line and organizes them into stations that can cross from one side of the line to the other. In addition to improving visibility and communication between operators on the line, which facilitates problem-solving and quality improvement, U-lines can reduce the total number of operators required on the line and make rebalancing the line easier compared to the traditional, straight production line. This paper studies the (type 1) U-line balancing problem when task completion times are stochastic. Stochastic completion times occur when differences between operators cause completion times to vary somewhat and when machine processing times vary. A recursive algorithm is presented for finding the optimal solution when completion times have any distribution function. An equivalent shortest path network is also presented. An improvement for the special case of normally distributed task completion times is given. A computational study to determine the characteristics of instances that can be solved by the algorithms shows that they are able to solve instances of practical size (like the 114 Japanese and U.S. U-lines studied in a literature review paper). © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2003