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Fire is the fundamental element of most people’s lives, and when not controlled, the same fire can lead to several catastrophes in homes, offices, schools, lives and other public places with severe repercussions. Hence, this study aims to examine the adequacy and extent of the application of fire suppression systems in residential and commercial property in Ghana.

This study adopts a sequential mixed-mode design comprising quantitative and qualitative research strategies to analyse factors to produce findings. The target population for this study includes shop occupiers, end users of office buildings, and residents in the Accra Central of Ghana. Systematic random sampling was used for the quantitative research, and a sample size of 385 was obtained using a multi-stage and cluster sampling method. A structured survey and semi-structured interviews were used to collect the primary data. The quantitative data were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics, whereas the qualitative data were analysed using content analysis.

From an empirical literature review and the analysis, the three main factors contributing to fire breakouts are equipment malfunction, improper use of heat sources and human mistakes. According to the respondents, fire suppression systems were also inadequate, as most of the suppression systems prescribed in the building code were unavailable. Regarding the ability to manually operate fire suppression systems, most property occupiers stated that they are generally unaware of these suppression systems.

This study will aid policymakers in developing interventions for fire safety enforcement by ensuring that fire safety regulations are consistently followed by design team members and property developers, resulting in a positive effect on public building structures performing their required functions. It is also critical to provide end users with education and training on how to operate the fire suppression system as well as effective handling of firefighting installations in the event of a fire.

The findings of this investigation contribute to knowledge and comprehension of the effect of fire suppression systems on building users and may serve as a precursor to the development of a “As Built” certification system for ascertaining the adequacy of fire suppression systems for new and existing residential and commercial property.

The authors investigate when and why a subordinate's expressive suppression facilitates workplace creativity, building on the conservation of resources theory and considering the effect of the supervisor's expressive suppression and time pressure as boundary conditions.

Multisource data were collected from 132 teams in northwestern China, including 132 supervisors and 648 subordinates. Hierarchical regression analyses were used to test the effects.

The subordinate’s expressive suppression was positively related to their workplace creativity. Challenge time pressure was positively related to workplace creativity, and the subordinate’s expressive suppression was positively related to workplace creativity when challenge time pressure was lower and the supervisor's expressive suppression was higher. Hindrance time pressure was negatively related to workplace creativity, and a positive relationship between a subordinate's expressive suppression and workplace creativity was also found with less hindrance time pressure and greater expressive suppression by their supervisor.

By examining the role of the supervisor as a source of downward spillovers in various time pressure contexts, the study explains why a subordinate’s suppression facilitates workplace creativity from the conservation of resources perspective.

Gender relations in organisations remain contested and unresolved. While researchers increasingly focus on how gender is articulated, there is also a need to examine gender suppression, or how gender is deliberately not expressed in organisations. The purpose of this research is to examine gender suppression within regional sports trusts (RSTs) in New Zealand (NZ).

Surveys were sent to all 17 chief executive officers of RSTs in NZ, of which ten replied. Of these, six agreed to a phone interview. The data were transcribed and coded.

There was evidence of gender suppression within the RSTs articulated through four organisational practices, which were: employing the “best person for the job”; the importance of gender balance; gender equity policies; and the role of external funders influencing gender relations.

The examination of gender suppression provides one area of analysis within the multiple elements of gender relations. Areas for future research are addressed.

In order to de‐stabilise the gendered status quo within the RSTs, employees and other organisational members may be encouraged in future to discuss gender relations. Suggestions for how this may be achieved are proposed.

Gender suppression has not been widely analysed in its own right in organisational analysis, this study represents a theoretical and empirical engagement with this concept in order to further understandings of gender relations.

The purpose of this paper is to describe two studies that investigate the suppression of negative emotions in the context of elder care, including the emotional job demands that may, together with display rules, elicit negative suppression (Study 1) and the association between negative suppression and job attitudes (Study 2).

Group interviews were conducted to understand the emotional demands of elder care (Study 1), and a survey was administered to direct care providers that included measures of negative suppression, job satisfaction, and job stress (Study 2).

Difficult events with patients (e.g. deterioration) are an emotional demand that may interact with display rules to elicit negative suppression (Study 1). Negative suppression is generally associated with less favorable job attitudes, controlling for individual differences in affectivity (Study 2).

This investigation is the first both to qualitatively examine the emotional demands of elder care (Study 1) and to empirically demonstrate links between negative suppression and job attitudes (Study 2).

Practitioners face difficulties with recruitment and retention in elder care; the results suggest that negative suppression is a possible point of intervention.

There is a shortage of direct care providers in the context of elder care, and the results of the present investigation potentially suggest how to improve working conditions.

The focus on negative suppression in the context of elder care is unique.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the associations between personal sense of power (PSP) and compliance as a function of the interaction between negative emotion intensity and emotion regulation tactics.

First, hypotheses linking PSP to different emotional reactions and to different levels of compliance with two types of conflict management styles were formulated. Subsequently, data were collected in three waves with a five-week interval between them to test the hypotheses.

Results based on principle component analysis and confirmatory factor analysis indicated that workers with high PSP reported lower internalized negative emotions (negative emotions directed to the self) in the workplace and were less inclined to comply with harsh tactics, in comparison to workers with low PSP. The importance of emotional components (suppression and negative emotions in the workplace) was underscored by the moderated mediation model: internalized negative emotions mediated the association between PSP and compliance with harsh tactics as a function of level of suppression such that the link between negative affect and compliance was negative only under high suppression, but not under low suppression.

The findings point to the deleterious influence of high emotional suppression of negative emotions on study behaviors, especially for employees with a low sense of power. Because the data were collected from a single source, which could raise concerns about common method variance and social desirability bias, future study should examine other-reports.

Recruitment and training of employees and managers should aim to create an open and safe organizational environment that encourages emotional expression and lessens emotional suppression.

The findings can help develop empowering interventional programs to coach employees to use suppression in an adaptive manner.

The current study sheds new light on the relationships between PSP and compliance from the emotion regulation perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the active suppression of the nonlinear aeroelastic vibrations of ailerons caused by freeplay by robust H_∞ and linear quadratic Gauss (LQG) methods of control in case of incomplete measurements of the state of the system.

The flexible wing with nonlinear aileron with freeplay is treated as a plant-controller system with H_∞ and LQG controllers used to suppress the aeroelastic vibrations. The simulation approach was used for analyzing the impact of completeness of measurements on the efficiency and robustness of the controllers.

The analysis shows that the H_∞ method can be effectively used for suppression of nonlinear aeroelastic vibrations of aileron, although its efficiency depends essentially on completeness and types of measurements. The LQG method is less effective, but it is also able to prevent aileron vibrations by reducing their amplitudes to acceptable, safe level.

Only numerical analysis was carried out for the problem described; thus, the proposed solution is of theoretical value at this stage of analysis, and its application to the real suppression of aeroelastic vibrations requires further research.

The work presents a potentially useful solution to the problem of interest and results are a theoretical basis for further research.

This work may lead to a hot debate on the advantages and drawbacks of the active suppression of vibrations in the aeroelasticians community.

The work raises the important questions of practical stabilizability of the nonlinear aeroelastic systems, their dependence on completeness and types of measurements and robustness of the controllers.

The aim of this paper was to investigate the role of emotion regulation and age in reactions to psychological contract breach towards positive and negative affect. The authors expected that in the context of contract breach, reappraisal emotion regulation mitigate the negative relation with affect. Moreover, based on lifespan theory, suppression emotion regulation was expected to be important for younger workers, because older workers have learned how to express themselves appropriately at the workplace. Consequently, suppression would mitigate the relations of contract breach with well‐being only among younger workers, while it strengthened the relation for older workers.

Data were collected among 163 employees working in various Dutch organizations. Moderated regression analyses were used to test the hypotheses.

Reappraisal mitigated the relation of contract breach with positive affect, and suppression mitigated the relations of contract breach with positive affect only among younger workers, while for older workers with high suppression the relations were accentuated. It was also found that contract breach was more strongly related to negative affect for younger workers than for older workers.

Reactions towards psychological contract breaches are influenced by the emotion regulation strategies people employ. Especially reappraisal is important to maintain optimal levels of affect, while suppression is detrimental especially for older workers.

This paper is the first study in which emotion regulation strategies are investigated in the context of psychological contract breaches. The paper presents novel insights into how reactions to contract breaches are modified through emotion regulation strategies and age.

The effects of stigmatisation regarding sex abuse and rape crimes have rarely been studied. This present study explores the effects of social stigma by examining coping style, thought suppression, depression and anxiety in those falsely accused of sex crimes compared with those convicted of sex crimes. A total of 60 males volunteered to complete a questionnaire. The questionnaires were given to participants from organisations that support people falsely accused and people who have been found guilty of sexual offending. The findings indicate that falsely accused individuals employ an emotion‐focused coping strategy significantly more than convicted sex offenders.

Industrial robots are extensively used in the robotic assembly of rigid objects, whereas the assembly of flexible objects using the same robot becomes cumbersome and challenging due to transient disturbance. The transient disturbance causes vibration in the flexible object during robotic manipulation and assembly. This is an important problem as the quick suppression of undesired vibrations reduces the cycle time and increases the efficiency of the assembly process. Thus, this study aims to propose a contactless robot vision-based real-time active vibration suppression approach to handle such a scenario.

A robot-assisted camera calibration method is developed to determine the extrinsic camera parameters with respect to the robot position. Thereafter, an innovative robot vision method is proposed to identify a flexible beam grasped by the robot gripper using a virtual marker and obtain the dimension, tip deflection as well as velocity of the same. To model the dynamic behaviour of the flexible beam, finite element method (FEM) is used. The measured dimensions, tip deflection and velocity of a flexible beam are fed to the FEM model to predict the maximum deflection. The difference between the maximum deflection and static deflection of the beam is used to compute the maximum error. Subsequently, the maximum error is used in the proposed predictive maximum error-based second-stage controller to send the control signal for vibration suppression. The control signal in form of trajectory is communicated to the industrial robot controller that accommodates various types of delays present in the system.

The effectiveness and robustness of the proposed controller have been validated using simulation and experimental implementation on an Asea Brown Boveri make IRB 1410 industrial robot with a standard low frame rate camera sensor. In this experiment, two metallic flexible beams of different dimensions with the same material properties have been considered. The robot vision method measures the dimension within an acceptable error limit i.e. ±3%. The controller can suppress vibration amplitude up to approximately 97% in an average time of 4.2 s and reduces the stability time up to approximately 93% while comparing with control and without control suppression time. The vibration suppression performance is also compared with the results of classical control method and some recent results available in literature.

The important contributions of the current work are the following: an innovative robot-assisted camera calibration method is proposed to determine the extrinsic camera parameters that eliminate the need for any reference such as a checkerboard, robotic assembly, vibration suppression, second-stage controller, camera calibration, flexible beam and robot vision; an approach for robot vision method is developed to identify the object using a virtual marker and measure its dimension grasped by the robot gripper accommodating perspective view; the developed robot vision-based controller works along with FEM model of the flexible beam to predict the tip position and helps in handling different dimensions and material types; an approach has been proposed to handle different types of delays that are part of implementation for effective suppression of vibration; proposed method uses a low frame rate and low-cost camera for the second-stage controller and the controller does not interfere with the internal controller of the industrial robot.

The purpose of this paper is to propose two operators for diversity and mutation control in artificial immune systems (AISs).

The proposed operators are applied in substitution to the suppression and mutation operators used in AISs. The proposed mechanisms were tested in the opt-aiNet, a continuous optimization algorithm inspired in the theories of immunology. The traditional opt-aiNet uses a suppression operator based on the immune network principles to remove similar cells and add random ones to control the diversity of the population. This procedure is computationally expensive, as the Euclidean distances between every possible pair of candidate solutions must be computed. This work proposes a self-organizing suppression mechanism inspired by the self-organizing criticality (SOC) phenomenon, which is less dependent on parameter selection. This work also proposes the use of the q-Gaussian mutation, which allows controlling the form of the mutation distribution during the optimization process. The algorithms were tested in a well-known benchmark for continuous optimization and in a bioinformatics problem: the rigid docking of proteins.

The proposed suppression operator presented some limitations in unimodal functions, but some interesting results were found in some highly multimodal functions. The proposed q-Gaussian mutation presented good performance in most of the test cases of the benchmark, and also in the docking problem.

First, the self-organizing suppression operator was able to reduce the complexity of the suppression stage in the opt-aiNet. Second, the use of q-Gaussian mutation in AISs presented better compromise between exploitation and exploration of the search space and, as a consequence, a better performance when compared to the traditional Gaussian mutation.