Tomeito or Tomahto: Exploring consumer's accent and their engagement with artificially intelligent interactive voice assistants

Artificially intelligent interactive voice assistants (AIIVAs) are developed to understand language, but there is limited insight into their ability to understand accents. While there have been substantial advancements in understanding multiple languages by AIIVAs, having an understanding of variety of accents is an emerging concern. To address these concerns, we contextualised our study in India, one of the world's most populated and diverse countries with varying accents and dialects. Study 1 collected qualitative data through semi structured interviews with participants, data was subsequently thematically analysed, and a typology was developed with respect to the context of use and consumers' emotional and rational reactions towards AIIVAs when interacting with accents. For Study 2, we implemented the quantitative research method. This was done to reiterate the conceptual model formulated from the qualitative research findings. Findings suggest that positive emotional action has emerged as the most significant factor, followed by rational action and negative emotional action. This study contributes significantly to the theoretical understanding of future consumer behaviour and human-computer interaction trends. It provides practical implications for managers, tech developers, and other companies working and using speech-to-text automatic speech recognition to know that while they train their algorithms with languages, they should be mindful of the diverse accents of their consumers.     

The Question of Survival: The Death of Desire and the Weight of Life

This article aims to document the psychic injuries of torture. Psychic deadness, erasure of intersubjectivity, refusal of meaning-making, perversion of agency, and an inability to bear desire constitute the core features of the post-traumatic landscape of torture. The existential challenges in traumatized lives is examined, and questions are also raised about the ethics and unconscious defensive functions of the term "survival." Clinical materials with various torture patients are reported to explore the process of working through the losses and paradoxes of trauma. The role of unmourned loss and the defense of fetishizing the trauma are highlighted as the motivating force and the problem in the current preoccupation with trauma in modern Western culture.     

Please May I Have a Bike? Better Yet, May I Have a Hug? An Examination of Children’s and Adolescents’ Happiness

Academic research on children’s and adolescents’ happiness has been slow to develop. This research provides an empirical investigation to answer the question, “What makes children and adolescents happy?” We explore this question in two studies with a total of 300 participants ages 8–18. Study 1 asks participants to answer the open-ended question, “What makes me happy?” There were five emergent themes—“people and pets,” “achievements,” “material things,” “hobbies,” and “sports”. Study 2 also asks participants to answer the question, “What makes me happy?”, but uses two different measures (a semi-structured thought listing task and a collage task). Using three different happiness measures, we found consistent age differences in what children perceive to make them happy.     

Genetic Counseling Practice Analysis

The American Board of Genetic Counseling (ABGC) performed a genetic counseling practice analysis (PA) to determine the content of the certification examination. The ABGC-appointed PA Advisory Committee worked with psychometricians to develop a survey which was distributed to 2,038 genetic counselors in the United States and Canada. The survey was also accessible on the ABGC website. Multiple criteria were used to establish the significance of the tasks included in the survey. A total of 677 responses were used in the analysis, representing a 37.1% corrected response rate. Five major content domains with 143 tasks were identified in the PA. New certification test specifications were developed on the basis of PA results and will be used in developing future examination forms. In keeping with credentialing standards, ABGC plans to conduct a PA on a regular basis so that the content of the examination reflects current practice.     

The problem of delayed causation in a video game: Constant, varied, and filled delays

A first-person shooter video game was adapted for the study of causal decision making within dynamic environments. The video game included groups of three potential targets. Participants chose which of the three targets in each group was producing distal explosions. The actual source of the explosion effect varied in the delay between the firing of its weapon and the effect (from 0 to 2 s), whether these programed average delays were constant or varied from shot to shot, and whether the delays were unfilled or filled with an auditory event. In Experiment 1, participants’ choice accuracy was highest with shorter delays, but there was no effect of filling the delay and some beneficial effect of varying the delay. These results were re-examined in Experiment 2 but with participants experiencing the same average delay for seven subsequent decisions before the next average delay was introduced. In this experiment, men showed a strong and consistent benefit of filling a delay whereas women did not. Participants’ behavior is considered within the context of a model that assumes that choice behavior is driven by experienced contiguity for the target and foils.     

Exploring the impact of personality on performance: How time-on-task moderates the mediation by self-efficacy

Despite the widely acknowledged impact of dispositional traits on performance, little is known about how personality affects performance. We address this gap by investigating the relationships between the Big Five personality traits, self-efficacy, and academic performance in a moderated mediation model using time-on-task as the moderating variable. Results indicate that self-efficacy partially mediates the conscientiousness–performance relationship and that time-on-task moderates the mediating effect of self-efficacy. Time-on-task moderates the indirect effect of conscientiousness on course performance through self-efficacy such that the indirect effect is not significant at low levels of time-on-task, but becomes significant and stronger at higher levels of time-on-task.     

The role of stress mindset in support provision

To better understand the antecedents of support provision within relationships, this study examined the potential role of a novel individual difference; spouses' stress mindset (i.e., beliefs about whether stress‐is‐enhancing or stress‐is‐debilitating). As individuals with a stress‐is‐enhancing mindset often underestimate other's stress, we hypothesized that those with a stress‐is‐enhancing mindset will generally provide less and worse support compared to individuals with a stress‐is‐debilitating mindset. The results revealed few significant associations and the associations that were significant were contrary to predictions. For example, wives with a stress‐is‐enhancing mindset provided more support, and husbands who perceived their partner as having a more stress‐is‐enhancing mindset provided better support. Further research is needed to replicate these results and determine whether stress mindset has interpersonal consequences.