Current research in behavioral sciences最新文献

Objective

A randomized controlled trial was conducted to determine the unique role of the arts as a proactive mental health strategy for college students in Generation Z. Using a web-based approach, mindfulness-based art therapy, mindfulness only, and arts only are compared to a non-intervention control group to determine if arts-related interventions activate unique and distinguishable mechanisms of change.

Participants

A sample of 109 college students were enrolled.

Methods

Participants were randomized into a mindfulness-based art therapy, neutral clay task, mindfulness only, or a control condition for the 5-week intervention. Standardized measures of anxiety, somatic symptoms, mindfulness, stress, depression, and sleep, as well as biological saliva markers were obtained.

Results

A main effect of time (pre- versus post-intervention) was found for all three interventions on perceived stress, depression and sleep, but not anxiety, somatic symptoms, or mindfulness. Analyses of difference scores across the study period demonstrated significant differences of all intervention groups from the control group in perceived stress. Additionally, the degree of change for MBAT and NCT groups significantly differed from the control group on depression. Lastly, MBAT and NCT groups had significantly different degrees of change in sleep.

Conclusion

The results suggest promise for online interventions as a proactive mental health strategy for reducing stress, depression and improving sleep quality.

Previous research has investigated characteristics of individuating information, stereotypes, and evaluative circumstances that moderate reliance on social category information and individuating information in implicit person perception. However, possibly no research has examined characteristics of perceivers that may be involved in these processes. In four studies (N = 1545), the present research tested the effects of six individual differences on application of race and gender stereotypes in implicit perceptions of individuals and the potential moderating effects of diagnosticity of individuating information. We found that individuating information affected implicit person similarly regardless of the diagnosticity of the individuating information, the target group, and—largely—individual differences. Although these findings involved several null results, these results are nonetheless informative because they provide evidence that individuating information is a promising means of bias reduction given its consistent effects.

Perceptually rich visualizations can overburden learners with too many details. As some learning tasks depend on realism and details, techniques that facilitate the cognitive processing of such visualizations are sought after. Concreteness fading has been proposed as an instructional method in which learners are first presented with a detailed visualization that is later replaced with a schematic version. A second technique that is thought to help learners is guidance fading, in which tasks get successively more difficult. In the first experiment (n = 125), fading the concreteness of an anatomical visualization, however, had a negative effect on learning, while using guidance fading during testing (realized by increasing the difficulty of the tests over time) had no effect. The second experiment (n = 107) was conducted to assess whether guidance fading implemented by first showing a complex model with color cues and later removing these hints can foster learning. The study revealed that this form of guidance fading had no effect on learning. The results have implications for the design of instructional visualizations and animations as they outline how changing the style of a visualization can interfere with building mental models. Based on the findings, educators should carefully consider whether they need to show visualizations that differ in their visual style in quick succession during a lecture or in an animation.

A prior study showed that popular names are given less frequently to babies in individualistic countries in European, Anglo-American (North American), and Oceanian cultures. However, the samples of the previous study were limited, and it did not examine other cultures, leaving it unclear whether the relationship is still found even when other cultures are included. It is important to confirm validity of indices cross-culturally. Thus, the present study included two unexamined cultures in the analyses: East Asian culture and Latin American culture. Following the previous study, I calculated the rates of popular baby names in Japan and Puerto Rico, and examined how the addition of these two regions affected the results. Analyses showed that the negative relationships between the rates of popular names and individualism scores were still salient. Therefore, this study further confirmed the validity of unique names as an indicator of individualism in more diverse cultural contexts.

Previous studies have found that loneliness of one person can be judged quite accurately by a close friend or partner. Yet, it is unclear whether there are specific behavioral cues the other-ratings are based on. In the present study, 54 female friendship dyads were videotaped during a guided conversation and behavioral cuesl were coded using the SPAFF coding system. The results indicated that loneliness was negatively associated with one's own and the friend's overall friendship satisfaction and their satisfaction with the interaction. However, with the exception of an inconsistent mediation effect found for sadness, none of the coded behavioral cues were found to mediate the association between loneliness and interaction quality. Nevertheless, the results of the present study may help to understand why it is so difficult to identify people at risk for experiencing loneliness and draws attention to other processes through which loneliness may become visible to others.

UK-based national surveys and international longitudinal studies have shown that around a third of parents experience chronic or persistent loneliness. There is limited research about the experience of loneliness in parenthood, however blogs authored by parents, sharing their personal experiences about loneliness offer a potential rich data source. The purpose of this study was to identify and analyse blog narratives written by parents who had experienced loneliness to increase understanding of their experiences. One hundred and ninety-six relevant blog posts were identified, of which 157 had contact details to request permission to use the blog post in the study. Twenty-two parent bloggers gave their permission. Thematic network analysis was used to open code the blogs and 4 organising themes and subthemes emerged, which centred on a global theme of disconnection. Disconnection underpinned themes relating to a sense that being a parent was overwhelming, changes in identity linked to becoming a parent, difficulties in sharing feelings of loneliness with others, and a need for social connection. Findings point to parents being unprepared for the transition to parenthood, with implications for perinatal education and support, including further opportunities for parents to connect to reduce social isolation.

In an fMRI passive viewing task made in a 7T scanner, Harvey et al (2013) asked adult participants to passively view dots on a screen and reported a topographical map of quantities in the human intraparietal sulcus (IPS), suggesting that quantities are directly perceived, and their cortical organization may be fundamental to human abilities in mathematics. This paper, which was published in Science, got lots of attention and was cited 469 times since. In a later Neuroimage paper (2017), the authors analyzed the response to the visual features of the stimuli and suggested that the neural responses do not reflect the processing of visual features. I raise several reasons to restrict these conclusions. (1) the study design emphasized quantity over continuous magnitudes such as density and area. This may be problematic since neural activity can be influenced by attending to a specific dimension. (2) Poor control over continuous magnitudes. (3) The conclusions should be restricted to small quantities. (4) Task context influences neural activity, and (5) When the analysis is restricted to a specific cortical area, the conclusion should be restricted as well.