Internal health locus of control predicts willingness to track health behaviors online and with smartphone applications

Given rising technology use across all demographic groups, digital interventions offer a potential strategy for increasing access to health information and care. Research is lacking on identifying individual differences that impact willingness to use digital interventions, which may affect patient engagement. Health locus of control, the amount of control an individual believes they have over their own health, may predict willingness to use mobile health (mHealth) applications (‘apps’) and online trackers. A cross-sectional study (n = 276) was conducted to assess college students’ health locus of control beliefs and willingness to use health apps and online trackers. Internal and powerful other health locus of control beliefs predicted willingness to use health apps and online trackers while chance health locus of control beliefs did not. Individuals with internal and powerful other health locus of control beliefs are more willing than those with chance health locus of control beliefs to utilize a form of technology to monitor or change health behaviors. Health locus of control is an easy-to-assess patient characteristic providers can measure to identify which patients are more likely to utilize mHealth apps and online trackers.     

On the emergence of American analytic philosophy

This paper is concerned with the reasons for the emergence and dominance of analytic philosophy in America. It closely examines the contents of, and changing editors at, The Philosophical Review, and provides a perspective on the contents of other leading philosophy journals. It suggests that analytic philosophy emerged prior to the 1950s in an environment characterized by a rich diversity of approaches to philosophy and that it came to dominate American philosophy at least in part due to its effective promotion by The Philosophical Review’s editors. Our picture of mid-twentieth-century American philosophy is different from existing ones, including those according to which the prominence of analytic philosophy in America was basically a matter of the natural affinity between American philosophy and analytic philosophy and those according to which the political climate at the time was hostile towards non-analytic approaches. Furthermore, our reconstruction suggests a new perspective on the nature of 1950s analytic philosophy.     

Leading to Stimulate Employees' Ideas: A Quantitative Review of Leader–Member Exchange,Employee Voice,Creativity, and Innovative Behavior

Through social exchange, leaders can offer relational support or resources to facilitate employees' proactive attempts to bring positive change (voice) or novel ideas (creativity) and behaviors (innovative behavior) to their work. We consider these three outcomes under the same nomological network as they all represent employees' idea contribution to the organisation. The present paper thus meta‐analytically reviews the findings of research relating leader–member exchange (LMX) to voice (37 samples), creativity (53 samples), and innovative behavior (29 samples). Results show that LMX positively predicts voice, creativity, and innovative behavior. Moreover, LMX is more strongly related with creativity than with voice or innovative behavior, a significant difference maintained even after controlling for study characteristics that may act as confounding variables. Implications of our findings and directions for future research are also discussed.     

Stocks and losses, items and interference: A reply to Oberauer and Süß (2000)

Results of a recent study of spatial working memory are presented in support of the claim by Jenkins and her colleagues (Jenkins, Myerson, Hale, &; Fry, 1999) that secondary tasks produce larger interference effects in individuals with higher simple spans than in individuals with lower simple spans. Because spans and interference effects were assessed independently, this study refutes the claim by Oberauer and Süß (2000) that the relation between span and interference effect size is merely an artifact of regression to the mean. In contrast with the present findings, Oberauer and Süß did not find evidence of larger interference effects in higher span individuals, but the reason for this may be straightforward: The secondary tasks that they used did not produce significant interference. Recent findings by Logie and his colleagues indicate that phonological similarity and word length effects are larger in individuals with higher word spans (Logie, Della Sala, Laiacona, Chalmers, &; Wynn, 1996). These results, those of Jenkins, Myerson, et al. (1999), and the results reported here suggest that, across individuals, the absolute effect size for many manipulations that decrease memory span is an increasing function of simple span.     

Recognition memory for source and occurrence: The importance of recollection

Previous recognition memory studies indicate that when both recollection and familiarity are expected to contribute to recognition performance (e.g., discriminating studied items from nonstudied items) the dual-process and the unequal-variance signal detection models provide comparable accounts of performance. When familiarity is not expected to be useful (e.g., when items from two equally familiar sources are discriminated between), the dual-process model provides a significantly better account of performance. In the present study, source recognition was tested under conditions in which familiarity could have been used to perform a list-discrimination task; participants were required to discriminate between strong studied items, weak studied items, and new items. The dual-process model provided a better account of performance than did the unequal-variance model. Moreover, the results indicated that the unequal-variance assumption in a single-process signal detection model was not a valid substitution for recollection and that recollection was used to make recognition judgments even when assessments of familiarity were useful.     

Minimizing error in measurement of error: a proposed method for calculation of error in a two-dimensional motor task

Traditional one-dimensional error scores are still consistently used in research on motor learning to quantify two-dimensional error; however, the inherent differences in two-dimensional tasks render that application inappropriate and often misleading. Consequently, the purpose of this paper was to propose a novel method of presenting errors, which more precisely represents the accuracy, direction, and variability of error in two-dimensional settings. Although closely related to several alternatives for representing errors, the methodology used and the results obtained provide a more accurate procedure for pinpointing critical trends in what have been commonly referred to as AE (absolute error), VE (variable error), CE (constant error), and E (total variability). The proposed measurements of AVE (adjusted variable error), DE (directional error), TSE (total spread of error), and RE (radial error) provide composite error scores carrying a variety of information about performance on two-dimensional tasks. Formulas and examples are provided to facilitate computation and enhance understanding of the proposed scores.     

The relationship between social anxiety and social support in adolescents: a test of competing causal models

This study compared the strength of competing causal models in explaining the relationship between perceived support, enacted support, and social anxiety in adolescents. The social causation hypothesis postulates that social support causes social anxiety, whereas the social selection hypothesis postulates that social anxiety causes social support. The reciprocal model combines the two hypotheses by arguing that the causal relationship between social support and social anxiety is largely reciprocal. This study tests a modification of the reciprocal model by specifying perceptions of support as a mediating construct. Two waves of data with an interval of three months were collected on 357 college students. Structural equation modeling was used to compare the reciprocal and mediated reciprocal causal models. The study found some support for the mediated reciprocal model, but the magnitude of the relationships were weaker than expected. Limitations and suggestion for future research are discussed.     

Accuracy of self-reports of alcohol offenders in a rural midwestern county

Self-reports of drinking are of doubtful accuracy as heavy drinkers tend to underreport consistently amounts drunk as well as other alcohol-related data. A sample of 60 people cited for DWI in a rural midwestern county in southeast Nebraska during routine alcohol-dependency evaluations indicated that 10% underreported their Breath Alcohol Content at the time of arrest and 38% their previous number of DWI citations. Subjects were grouped by age (over and under 30) and by accuracy (accurate and inaccurate reporters). A 2 x 2 analysis of variance of later DWI arrests was significant as younger subjects showed greater risk. Those who underreported number of past DWI citations were significantly lower on their self-reported BAC at the time of arrest than accurate reporters. Age and underreporting alcohol-related data are as important for practitioners to attend to as scores on the Michigan Alcoholism Screening Test or SCID measuring alcoholic tendencies.     

Children learn when their teacher's gestures and speech differ

Teachers gesture when they teach, and those gestures do not always convey the same information as their speech. Gesture thus offers learners a second message. To determine whether learners take advantage of this offer, we gave 160 children in the third and fourth grades instruction in mathematical equivalence. Children were taught either one or two problem-solving strategies in speech accompanied by no gesture, gesture conveying the same strategy, or gesture conveying a different strategy. The children were likely to profit from instruction with gesture, but only when it conveyed a different strategy than speech did. Moreover, two strategies were effective in promoting learning only when the second strategy was taught in gesture, not speech. Gesture thus has an active hand in learning.