Six-Year Sustainability of Evidence-Based Intervention Implementation Quality by Community-University Partnerships: The PROSPER Study

There is a knowledge gap concerning how well community-based teams fare in implementing evidence-based interventions (EBIs) over many years, a gap that is important to fill because sustained high quality EBI implementation is essential to public health impact. The current study addresses this gap by evaluating data from PROSPER, a community-university intervention partnership model, in the context of a randomized-control trial of 28 communities. Specifically, it examines community teams' sustainability of implementation quality on a range of measures, for both family-focused and school-based EBIs. Average adherence ratings approached 90% for family-focused and school-based EBIs, across as many as 6 implementation cohorts. Additional indicators of implementation quality similarly showed consistently positive results. Correlations of the implementation quality outcomes with a number of characteristics of community teams and intervention leaders were calculated to explore their potential relevance to sustained implementation quality. Though several relationships attained statistical significance at particular points in time, none were stable across cohorts. The role of PROSPER's continuous, proactive technical assistance in producing the positive results is discussed.     

A Qualitative Analysis of Power Differentials in Ethical Situations in Academia

Power and organizational hierarchies are ubiquitous to social institutions that form the foundation of modern society. Power differentials may act to constrain or enhance people’s ability to make good ethical decisions. However, little scholarly work has examined perceptions of this important topic. The present effort seeks to address this issue by interviewing academics about hypothetical ethical problems that involve power differences among those involved. Academics discussed what they would do in these scenarios, often drawing on their own experiences. Using a think-aloud protocol, participants were prompted to discuss their reasoning and thinking behind their ethical decisions. These interview data were content analyzed using a semantic analysis program that identified a number of distinct ways that academics think about power differences and abuses in ethical situations. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

Rational Choice and Moral Decision Making in Research

University psychology and sociology researchers rated the likelihood they would engage in misconduct as described in 9 research scenarios, while also making moral judgments and rating the likelihood of discovery and sanctions. Multiple regression revealed significant effects across various scenarios for moral judgment as well as shame and embarrassment on reducing misconduct. The effects on misconduct of the perceived probability of sanctions were conditioned on moral judgments in some scenarios. The results have implications for how universities address the prevention, detection, and sanctioning of research misconduct.     

What a feeling! Touching sexually laden stimuli makes women seek rewards

We argue that women's previously documented unresponsiveness to sexual primes when making economic decisions may be a consequence of the specific types of primes that have been used (i.e., visual primes). In three studies we show that presenting women with tactile sexual cues does influence their decisions about economic rewards. Similar to the effect found in men, the first study demonstrates that touching a pair of boxer shorts leads to a craving for monetary rewards in women. In the second study it is shown that touching a pair of boxers makes women less loss averse for both money and food. The third study explicitly focuses on the relative effectiveness of tactile versus visual sexual cues in altering women's economic decisions, and reveals that women's willingness-to-pay for economic rewards increases only when the sexual cue is tactile. We suggest that touching (vs. seeing) sexually laden stimuli prompts pre-programmed consummatory Pavlovian responses that promote approaching economic rewards.     

Eye tracking research and technology: Towards objective measurement of data quality

Two methods for objectively measuring eye tracking data quality are explored. The first method works by tricking the eye tracker to detect an abrupt change in the gaze position of an artificial eye that in actuality does not move. Such a device, referred to as an artificial saccade generator, is shown to be extremely useful for measuring the temporal accuracy and precision of eye tracking systems and for validating the latency to display change in gaze contingent display paradigms. The second method involves an artificial pupil that is mounted on a computer controlled moving platform. This device is designed to be able to provide the eye tracker with motion sequences that closely resemble biological eye movements. The main advantage of using artificial motion for testing eye tracking data quality is the fact that the spatiotemporal signal is fully specified in a manner independent of the eye tracker that is being evaluated and that nearly identical motion sequence can be reproduced multiple times with great precision. The results of the present study demonstrate that the equipment described has the potential to become an important tool in the comprehensive evaluation of data quality.     

A rapid effect of stimulus quality on the durations of individual fixations during reading

We developed a variant of the single fixation replacement paradigm (Yang & McConkie, 2001, 2004) in order to examine the effect of stimulus quality on fixation duration during reading. Subjects' eye movements were monitored while they read passages of text for comprehension. During critical fixations, equal changes to the luminance of the background produced either an increase (Up-Contrast) or a decrease (Down-Contrast) of the contrast of the text. The durations of critical fixations were found to be lengthened in the Down-Contrast but not the Up-Contrast condition. Ex-Gaussian modelling of the distributions of fixation durations showed that the reduction in stimulus quality lengthened the majority of fixations, and a survival analysis estimated the onset of this effect to be approximately 141 ms following fixation onset. Because the stimulus quality of the text during critical fixations could not be predicted or parafoveally previewed prior to foveation, the present effect can be attributed to an immediate effect of stimulus quality on fixation duration.     

A critical review of relationship quality measures: Is a fresh start needed? An agenda to move forward

Social relationships in and around work are a fundamental building block of organizational life. According to a number of relationship theories, the quality of those relationships is a critical aspect of their influence on a variety of employee and organizational outcomes. Relationship quality is, therefore, one of the most commonly studied constructs in management research. Our paper critically reviews the landscape of relationship quality measures used in management studies, identifying critical issues with how the construct has been conceptualized and measured. To help advance research on the subject and improve measurement, we identify and evaluate 21 relationship quality measures that have been developed for, or used in, management research. Overall, we find that the instruments used to measure relationship quality in management research have significant limitations associated with their conceptualizations and operationalizations. Many of these limitations stem from the fact that most of the measures used to assess the construct were not originally designed to measure relationship quality, which impedes research clarity and implications. We offer a future research agenda and several recommendations for the advancement of management research on relationship quality.     

A method in modeling interactive pedestrian crossing and driver yielding decisions during their interactions at intersections

Investigating pedestrian crossing and driver yielding decisions should be an important focus considering the high risks of pedestrians in exposed to motorized traffic. Limitations, however, exist in previous studies – variables considered previously have been limited; how their behavior affect each other (defined as interactive impacts) were not sufficiently considered. This paper aims to provide a methodological approach for pedestrian crossing and driver yielding decisions during their interactions, considering of different variable types including interactive impact variables, traffic condition variables, road design variables, and environment variables. A Distance-Velocity (DV) framework proposed in an earlier study is introduced for definitions and concepts in studying pedestrian-vehicle interactions. Logistic regression, support vector machines, neural networks and random forests, are introduced as candidate models. A case study involving six crosswalk locations is conducted, focusing on interactions between pedestrians and right-turn vehicles. The proposed methodological approach is applied, with the performance of the four machine learning methods compared in terms of model generalization and confusion matrix. The model with the best performance is further compared to the typical gap-based model. Results show that random forest and logistic regression models performed the best in modeling pedestrian crossing and driver yielding decisions respective, in terms of model generalization. Besides, the DV-based modeling method (average accuracy of over 90% for pedestrians and 80% for drivers) outperformed the traditional gap-based method in all test seeds. As a key finding, interactive impacts from each other (the pedestrian and the driver) act as a key contributing variable on their decisions.     

自我同情和睡眠质量的关系：积极和消极情绪与自我控制的中介作用

为探究积极和消极情绪与自我控制在自我同情与睡眠质量间的中介机制,采用问卷法对477名成人进行调查,建立结构方程模型对中介效应进行检验。结果发现：（1）自我同情、积极情绪、自我控制和睡眠质量两两之间均为显著正相关,而上述变量与消极情绪均为显著负相关;（2）自我同情可分别以积极情绪、消极情绪和自我控制为中介来预测睡眠质量;还可依靠消极情绪与自我控制的链式中介效应来间接预测睡眠质量;但是,自我同情对睡眠质量的直接效应不显著。该研究结果为改善睡眠质量提供了新的干预视角。     

计算机化分类测验终止规则的类别、特点及应用

计算机化分类测验(Computerized Classification Testing, CCT)能够高效地对被试进行分类, 已广泛应用于合格性测验及临床心理学中。作为CCT的重要组成部分, 终止规则决定测验何时停止以及将被试最终划分到何种类别, 因此直接影响测验效率及分类准确率。已有的三大类终止规则(似然比规则、贝叶斯决策理论规则及置信区间规则)的核心思想分别为构造假设检验、设计损失函数和比较置信区间相对位置。同时, 在不同测验情境下, CCT的终止规则发展出不同的具体形式。未来研究可以继续开发贝叶斯规则、考虑多维多类别情境以及结合作答时间和机器学习算法。针对测验实际需求, 三类终止规则在合格性测验上均有应用潜力, 而临床问卷则倾向应用贝叶斯规则。