The effect of a collision warning system on the driving performance of young drivers at intersections

This study investigated the manner in which the driving performance of young people was affected by a collision warning system when they encountered a driver running a red light at an intersection. Furthermore, the causal relationship among driving performance, traffic factors and intersection accidents was examined using Path Analysis. Participants drove a driving simulator with an intersection collision warning system (ICWS) in a simulated urban area. The driving performance measures recorded were reaction time, speed, lateral position deviation and crash events. Experimental results indicated that drivers who drove a vehicle with an ICWS audio signal at an intersection had a shorter reaction time, a lower speed and a reduced accident rate than those observed while driving a vehicle without ICWS audio signal. Furthermore, Path Analysis showed that the ICWS had an indirect effect on accident rate reduction through improved driving performance. The location of intersection accident had both direct and indirect effects on the accident rate. The number of driving days per week had a direct effect on accident rate reduction.     

An Interaction Between the Effects of Bilingualism and Cross-linguistic Similarity in Balanced and Unbalanced Bilingual Adults’ L2 Mandarin Word-Reading Production

We conducted three experiments investigating in more detail the interaction between the two effects of bilingualism and L1–L2 similarity in the speech performance of balanced and unbalanced bilinguals. In Experiment 1, L1 Mandarin monolinguals and two groups of Hakka and Minnan balanced bilinguals (Hakka: more similar to Mandarin) performed a non-contextual single-character reading task in Mandarin, which required more inhibitory control. The two bilingual groups outperformed the monolinguals, regardless of their L1 background. However, the bilingual advantage was not found in a contextual multi-word task (Experiment 2), but instead the effect of cross-linguistic similarity emerged. Furthermore, in Experiment 3, the Hakka unbalanced bilinguals showed an advantage in the non-contextual task, while their Minnan counterparts did not, and the impact of L1–L2 similarity emerged in both tasks. These results unveiled the way the two effects dynamically interplayed depending on the task contexts and the relative degrees of using L1 and L2.     

Bridging the partisan divide: Self-affirmation reduces ideological closed-mindedness and inflexibility in negotiation

Three studies link resistance to probative information and intransigence in negotiation to concerns of identity maintenance. Each shows that affirmations of personal integrity (vs. nonaffirmation or threat) can reduce resistance and intransigence but that this effect occurs only when individuals' partisan identity and/or identity-related convictions are made salient. Affirmation made participants' assessment of a report critical of U.S. foreign policy less dependent on their political views, but only when the identity relevance of the issue rather than the goal of rationality was salient (Study 1). Affirmation increased concession making in a negotiation over abortion policy, but again this effect was moderated by identity salience (Studies 2 and 3). Indeed, although affirmed negotiators proved relatively more open to compromise when either the salience of their true convictions or the importance of remaining faithful to those convictions was heightened, the reverse was true when the salient goal was compromise. The theoretical and applied significance of these findings are discussed.     

Nurturing and Enhancing Creativity of Nursing Students in Taiwan: A Quasi-Experimental Study

Creativity and innovation are considered important measures of core competence in Taiwan for students of all levels, including nursing students. Integrating creativity with interdisciplinary teaching modules could increase creativity for nursing students; however, this has not been empirically determined. The purpose of this study was to determine if incorporating interdisciplinary teaching into a teaching for creativity module (TCM) could enhance creative thinking and creative abilities of nursing students. Students enrolled in a capstone nursing course for the development of healthcare-related products were divided into 2 groups. Both groups participated in the 18-week course; however, one group received creativity training with interdisciplinary teaching during the course, which was taught by nursing faculty who completed a TCM workshop. Students who received the interdisciplinary TCM intervention scored significantly higher than controls on measures of creative thinking. Our findings suggest a TCM program, which incorporates interdisciplinary teaching, and instruction in techniques for creativity, such as brainstorming, attribute listing, assessment matrix, and paired comparison, can stimulate divergent thinking abilities of nursing students.     

Adaptation effects in facial expression recognition

The effect of adaptation on facial expression recognition was investigated by measuring how identification performance of test stimuli falling along a particular expression continuum was affected after adapting to various prototype emotional faces or a control pattern. The results showed that for recognition of fear, happiness, and sadness, inhibition effects were observed on recognition of test expressions following 5 s adaptation to the same emotion, suggesting different neural populations tuned for the encoding of fearful, happy, and sad expressions. Facilitation of recognition of test stimuli differing in emotion to the adapting stimulus was also sometimes observed. The nature of these adaptation effects was investigated by introducing a size transformation or a delay between adapting and test stimuli and was found to survive these changes. The results of a further experiment argued against a criterion effect being the major source by demonstrating the importance of adapting time in generating the effects. Overall, the present study demonstrates the utility of adaptation effects for revealing functional characteristics of facial expression processing.     

Feasibility of a Self-Determination Theory-based exercise intervention promoting Healthy at Every Size with sedentary overweight women: Project CHANGE

ObjectivesTo examine feasibility, acceptability and preliminary results of a Self-Determination Theory (SDT) -based exercise intervention with a Healthy at Every Size (HAES) orientation for sedentary overweight/obese women.DesignProject CHANGE was an 8-week randomized controlled trial with follow-up at 4-week.MethodTwenty-five sedentary, overweight women (BMI = 25–34.9) were randomized to either the SDT-based intervention with a HAES orientation (S/H) or exercise only (EX) intervention. The S/H group received exercise training and a weekly behavioral intervention while the EX group received only traditional supervised exercise training. Information about acceptability and feasibility was collected from process evaluation (i.e., participants' satisfaction and feedback) and objective data (e.g., retention, attendance, adherence to the PA goal). Assessments of PA participation and physical/psychological variables were obtained at baseline, post-intervention, and 4-week follow-up.ResultsParticipants reported high levels of satisfaction. Participation in the S/H group averaged 95%. Retention was high for both groups (S/H = 83.3% vs. EX = 84.6%), while adherence to the PA goal was better for the S/H group at follow-up (S/H = 60% vs. EX = 36.4%). The S/H intervention also resulted in larger effect sizes for changes in key motivational variables, including self-determination, autonomy, as well as goal-setting, planning and scheduling self-efficacy.ConclusionThe 8-week SDT-based intervention promoting Healthy at Every Size is feasible and acceptable and may result in better exercise adherence and improvements in motivational variables relative to traditional supervised exercise. These results support conducting additional research to determine the efficacy of this approach for promoting PA in sedentary, overweight women.     

The probabilistic analysis of language acquisition: theoretical, computational, and experimental analysis

There is much debate over the degree to which language learning is governed by innate language-specific biases, or acquired through cognition-general principles. Here we examine the probabilistic language acquisition hypothesis on three levels: We outline a novel theoretical result showing that it is possible to learn the exact generative model underlying a wide class of languages, purely from observing samples of the language. We then describe a recently proposed practical framework, which quantifies natural language learnability, allowing specific learnability predictions to be made for the first time. In previous work, this framework was used to make learnability predictions for a wide variety of linguistic constructions, for which learnability has been much debated. Here, we present a new experiment which tests these learnability predictions. We find that our experimental results support the possibility that these linguistic constructions are acquired probabilistically from cognition-general principles.