Homesickness in social context: An ecological momentary assessment study among 1st-year university students

Homesickness is common among university students and associated with mental health problems. Most previous studies assessed homesickness as a summary of the past weeks. However, there may be significant fluctuations across situations. At the current residence, homesickness may especially be triggered during (phone) interactions with attachment figures. Dutch and international 1st-year students (n = 92) completed the Utrecht Homesickness Scale and subsequently used a smartphone application to record social interactions for 14 days (ecological momentary assessment [EMA]). For each interaction they reported the social context (e.g. location, contact type) and their affective state, including homesickness. Homesickness in the past weeks and momentary homesickness were both higher in international students than in Dutch students. Feeling homesick was highest at participants' current residency, when interacting with parents, or when using video-chat. When participants felt more homesick, they reported less pleasant and more unpleasant affect. In conclusion, EMA provided insight in cross-situational variations in homesickness.     

Looking behaviour and preference for artworks: The role of emotional valence and location

The position of an item influences its evaluation, with research consistently finding that items occupying central locations are preferred and have a higher subjective value. The current study investigated whether this centre-stage effect (CSE) is a result of bottom-up gaze allocation to the central item, and whether it is affected by item valence. Participants (n = 50) were presented with three images of artistic paintings in a row and asked to choose the image they preferred. Eye movements were recorded for a subset of participants (n = 22). On each trial the three artworks were either similar but different, or were identical and with positive valence, or were identical and with negative valence. The results showed a centre-stage effect, with artworks in the centre of the row preferred, but only when they were identical and of positive valence. Significantly greater gaze allocation to the central and left artwork was not mirrored by equivalent increases in preference choices. Regression analyses showed that when the artworks were positive and identical the participants' last fixation predicted preference for the central art-work, whereas the fixation duration predicted preference if the images were different. Overall the result showed that item valence, rather than level of gaze allocation, influences the CSE, which is incompatible with the bottom-up gaze explanation. We propose that the centre stage heuristic, which specifies that the best items are in the middle, is able to explain these findings and the centre-stage effect.     

“Piensa” twice: On the foreign language effect in decision making

In this article, we assess to what extent decision making is affected by the language in which a given problem is presented (native vs. foreign). In particular, we aim to ask whether the impact of various heuristic biases in decision making is diminished when the problems are presented in a foreign language. To this end, we report four main studies in which more than 700 participants were tested on different types of individual decision making problems. In the first study, we replicated Keysar et al.’s (2012) recent observation regarding the foreign language effect on framing effects related to loss aversion. In the second section, we assessed whether the foreign language effect is present in other types of framing problems that involve psychological accounting biases rather than gain/loss dichotomies. In the third section, we studied the foreign language effect in several key aspects of the theory of decision making under risk and uncertainty. In the fourth study, we assessed the presence of a foreign language effect in the cognitive reflection test, a test that includes logical problems that do not carry emotional connotations. The absence of such an effect in this test suggests that foreign language leads to a reduction of heuristic biases in decision making across a range of decision making situations and provide also some evidence about the boundaries of the phenomenon. We explore several potential factors that may underlie the foreign language effect in decision making.     

Number processing of Arabic and Hebrew bilinguals: Evidence supporting the distance effect

In the current study, a direct assessment of the effect of language lexical‐syntactic structure and magnitude semantic access on numerical processing was made by contrasting the performance of Arabic/Hebrew bilinguals in a digital (Hindi‐digits/Arabic‐digits) and verbal numerical comparison task (Arabic, an inverted language: Units‐Decades, Hebrew, a non‐inverted language: Decades‐Units). Our data revealed in the digital presentation format (Experiment 1) a regular distance effect in Arabic language‐Hindi digits and Hebrew language‐Arabic digits, characterized by an inverse relation between reaction times and numerical distance with no difference in the mean reaction times of participants in Arabic‐L1 and Hebrew‐L2. This indicates that both lexical digits of two‐digit numbers in L1 and L2 are similarly processed and semantically accessed. However in the verbal presentation format (Experiment 2) a similar pattern of distance effect was found, but the mean reaction times in Arabic were lower than in Hebrew in each numerical distance. This indicates that the processing of two‐digit number words in L1 and L2 is semantically accessed and determined by the syntactic structure of each language.     

The Others Will Help: The Presence of Multiple Video Game Characters Reduces Helping After the Game Is Over

The bystander effect refers to the phenomenon that individuals are less likely to help if there are potential other helpers present. For instance, past research revealed that participants were less likely to help computer-controlled characters if there were other computer-controlled characters present. Research has also shown that the bystander effect occurs if the presence of others is merely imagined. The present research examined the idea that the presence of multiple characters within a video game reduces the player's helping behavior even after the video game is over. In fact, participants who played a video game with multiple characters present were less likely to devote time to assisting in a future study than participants who had played the same video game with only a single character present.     

Automatic Extraction of Property Norm‐Like Data From Large Text Corpora

Traditional methods for deriving property‐based representations of concepts from text have focused on either extracting only a subset of possible relation types, such as hyponymy/hypernymy (e.g., car is‐a vehicle ) or meronymy/metonymy (e.g., car has wheels ), or unspecified relations (e.g., car — petrol ). We propose a system for the challenging task of automatic, large‐scale acquisition of unconstrained, human‐like property norms from large text corpora, and discuss the theoretical implications of such a system. We employ syntactic, semantic, and encyclopedic information to guide our extraction, yielding concept‐relation‐feature triples (e.g., car be fast , car require petrol , car cause pollution ), which approximate property‐based conceptual representations. Our novel method extracts candidate triples from parsed corpora (Wikipedia and the British National Corpus) using syntactically and grammatically motivated rules, then reweights triples with a linear combination of their frequency and four statistical metrics. We assess our system output in three ways: lexical comparison with norms derived from human‐generated property norm data, direct evaluation by four human judges, and a semantic distance comparison with both WordNet similarity data and human‐judged concept similarity ratings. Our system offers a viable and performant method of plausible triple extraction: Our lexical comparison shows comparable performance to the current state‐of‐the‐art, while subsequent evaluations exhibit the human‐like character of our generated properties.     

To change or not to change: A matter of decision maker’s role

The status quo effect derived from loss aversion is common in decision making. However, we propose that advisors (vs. personal decision makers) are less susceptible to such an effect because they are less loss-averse. The difference in loss aversion between personal decision makers and advisors is reflected in both the query order and content. Compared to advisors, personal decision makers produce more queries favoring the status quo, at an earlier time, than those favoring the new option. As hypothesized, the status quo effect was observed among personal decision makers, but not among advisors (Studies 1 and 2). Query order and content were found to mediate the impact of decision maker’s role on the status quo effect (Study 2). When personal decision makers and advisors made queries in the same order (Study 3) or of the same content (Studies 4a and 4b), the difference between self–other decision making disappeared.     

Is There Life After DEBI? Examining Health Behavior Maintenance in the Diffusion of Effective Behavioral Interventions Initiative

The evidence-based interventions that are identified, packaged, and disseminated by the Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as part of the Diffusion of Effective Behavioral Interventions (DEBI) initiative—commonly referred to the "DEBIs"—currently represent a primary source of HIV prevention interventions for community-based providers. To date, little attention has focused on whether the intended outcomes of the DEBIs, i.e., reductions in HIV-related risk behaviors, are maintained over time. This review summarized evidence for the sustainability of the effects of the DEBIs on HIV sexual risk behavior and intravenous drug use from studies of original and adapted DEBIs. Evidence of intervention decay or a lack of any intervention effect was identified in several original and adapted versions of the DEBIs included in this review. Recommendations include modifications to current criteria for inclusion in the DEBI portfolio, in addition to the development of remediation strategies to address intervention decay. Further, theoretical models that specify the processes that underlie the maintenance of health behaviors over time should be used in developing HIV prevention interventions.