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Psychologists have long used schema questionnaires to measure maladaptive schemas, which are beliefs and emotions that shape how individuals interpret and engage with the world. By identifying an individual's dominant schema, interventions can be developed to improve their daily functioning and well-being. This study explores the Helsinki region's dominant schemas of international labor forces on their demographic characteristics and attributes. We analyze common schemas and investigate potential factors that influence the prevalence of these schemas among individuals and groups. Methods: A survey with tailored schema-based questions were developed and distributed to the intended population (N = 91). We conducted semi-structured interviews with individuals who had encountered covert discrimination in their workplaces. Participants were classified based on similarity in answers to questionnaires and schema profiles using advanced statistical methods and machine-learning models, identifying important maladaptive schemas and studying their correlation with demographic factors. Results: Our data analysis indicates that participants' demographic characteristics have minimal influence on their dominant schemas. Mistrust and entitlement emerge as the most significant schemas among participants. The primary contributors to variance are mistrusted, abandonment, emotional deprivation, and social isolation, suggesting a higher vulnerability to discrimination due to heightened sensitivity to trust-related issues. A smaller portion of variance is attributed to entitlement and failure schemas, indicating a tendency towards displaying discriminatory behavior based on a strong sense of entitlement and self-importance. The implication of our study: Our novel approach identifies distinct schema profiles within the participant population, offering new research opportunities for academics and enabling targeted interventions to address the specific attitudes and behaviors of individuals or groups, fostering a more inclusive and diverse society.

Oligosaccharides (carbohydrates) are a large class of biological molecules that are important as energy sources in the human body and have enormously varied biological functions. It is generally believed that biological activities of carbohydrates are related to their internal dynamics. The dynamic properties of some oligosaccharides in solution are studied in this thesis, by NMR relaxation. We have employed relaxation interference effects to investigate the conformational dynamics within oligosaccharides (in-tramolecular dynamics) and paramagnetic relaxation enhancement (PRE) as an experimental tool to study intermolecular dynamics. Most of the thesis concerns the dynamics of the methylene group in the two possibly mobile parts of the oligosaccharide: in the exocyclic hydroxymethyl moiety and in the glycosidic linkage position. To perform conformational dynamic studies, the more traditional auto-relaxation pa-rameters are combined with the relaxation interference terms or the cross-correlated relaxation rates (CCRRs). Some experimental schemes based on the initial-rate technique were developed for measuring CCRRs. The techniques are useful for labelled sugars as well as naturally abundant ones. Furthermore, various dynamical models ranging from the Lipari–Szabo approach to several more informative and complicated models such as the two-site jump model, restricted internal rotation and slowly relaxing local structure (SRLS), have been employed to interpret our experimental data. We have combined and com-pared different models; we have also developed a novel approach to existing models, by scaling dipolar coupling constants (DCC), to extract the dynamic behaviour and structural properties of the system. We found that the auto- and cross-correlated relaxation data analyses yield a consistent picture of the dynam-ics in all cases. Additionally, our investigations show that CCRRs are practically important for verifica-tion of certain dynamical and structural information that is difficult to be determined by other means. Moreover, the anisotropy of the carbon-13 chemical shielding tensor in the methylene group has been estimated, using the interference between dipole-dipole and chemical shift anisotropy. This thesis also discusses using the PRE to investigate sugar dynamics relative to a paramagnetic MRI contrast agent in solution, which might be important in medicine. We have studied the intramolecu-lar dynamics of the trisaccharide raffinose in the presence of a gadolinium complex. We also investigated the effect of translational diffusion instead of rotational diffusion, which is normally more important in NMR. The paramagnetically enhanced spin–lattice relaxation rates of aqueous protons over a wide range of magnetic fields and of carbon-13 and protons of the sugar at high fields have been measured. The nuclear magnetic relaxation dispersion of water protons and the PREs of proton and carbon in the sugar are interpreted in terms of the model recently developed in our laboratory, allowing both outer- and inner-sphere PREs for water protons, but allowing only the outer sphere PRE for nuclei in the sugar. We found that the relative diffusion has a stronger effect on the PRE than the electron spin relaxation.