Intan ah Mohd Hashim

Bayesian network model of crowd emotion and negative behavior

The effects of overcrowding have become a major concern for event organizers. One aspect of this concern has been the idea that overcrowding can enhance the occurrence of serious incidents during events. As one of the largest Muslim religious gathering attended by pilgrims from all over the world, Hajj has become extremely overcrowded with many incidents being reported. The purpose of this study is to analyze the nature of human emotion and negative behavior resulting from overcrowding during Hajj events from data gathered in Malaysian Hajj Experience Survey in 2013. The sample comprised of 147 Malaysian pilgrims (70 males and 77 females). Utilizing a probabilistic model called Bayesian network, this paper models the dependence structure between different emotions and negative behaviors of pilgrims in the crowd. The model included the following variables of emotion: negative, negative comfortable, positive, positive comfortable and positive spiritual and variables of negative behaviors; aggressive and hazardous acts. The study demonstrated that emotions of negative, negative comfortable, positive spiritual and positive emotion have a direct influence on aggressive behavior whereas emotion of negative comfortable, positive spiritual and positive have a direct influence on hazardous acts behavior. The sensitivity analysis showed that a low level of negative and negative comfortable emotions leads to a lower level of aggressive and hazardous behavior. Findings of the study can be further improved to identify the exact cause and risk factors of crowd-related incidents in preventing crowd disasters during the mass gathering events.

Attachment Styles, Perceived Stress and Social Support in a Malaysian Young Adults Sample

The purpose of this research was to examine the validity of an adult attachment style questionnaire, to understand the relationships between the type of attachment style in relation to self-perceived stress and social support, and to investigate the influence of gender, ethnicity and religion on the above constructs. The participants were 308 university students from Malaysia. A demographic questionnaire and three self-report inventories were administrated in this study. The data indicated that the Relationship Scales Questionnaire (RSQ) is a multidimensional construct with nine factors: “dismissing,” “preoccupied with romance,” “preoccupied with close relationships,” “fearful,” “preoccupied with dependency,” “secure emotional,” “comfortable depending,” “preoccupied with mistrust” and “mutual secure.” Different attachment styles were positively or negatively correlated at a significant level with perceived stress and social support. Attachment styles were explained by 20 and 33% of the total variance in self-perceived stress and perceived social support, respectively. There were significant gender, ethnic and religious differences in attachment styles, perceived stress and social support.

Identifying social factors and representation for knowledge based coalition formation system

In order to form a collaborative team working on a specific task, we need to identify individuals that will be able to form groups and work together based on certain criteria such as their knowledge and personal role. Coalition formation is an approach dedicated to achieve optimal group arrangement. We are working in the direction of identifying strategies to build a coalition formation system taking into consideration the social factors. Computational cultural dynamics (CCD) is a research area that intertwines computer technology with behavioural and social sciences. We find that this research has potential to be further expanded to study and build a group setting. At the same time, the value of knowledge is seen as an important factor to determine the success of such coalition especially from the social aspect. Therefore, with the motivation to achieve a CCD perspective of a knowledge based coalition formation, social factors are studied, where the knowledge derived from this process will be identified, represented and stored. In this paper, we present a framework for the knowledge based coalition formation focusing on structuring the social factors chosen to initiate the knowledge process of the coalition formation system.