Inoculation against conspiracy theories: A consumer side approach to India's fake news problem

We attempt to replicate Roozenbeek and van der Linden's Western-based study in India by employing the Bad News Game, an online game, in which players take on the role of a misinformation tycoon. They are exposed to weakened doses of the strategies employed in conspiracy and fake news production with the aim to cognitively inoculate them against misinformation. The proliferation of inexpensive mobile connections coupled with a lack of digital literacy has resulted in a conspiratorial pandemic in developing countries like India. We test the game's impact on an Indian sample (n = 1002) using a within-subject design. We provide evidence of significant improvement in the ability of participants to identify the misinformation produced using Conspiracy, Impersonation, and to a lesser extent, the Discrediting technique, while observing greater truth discernment in correctly identifying true news. We also conduct sub-sample analyses. These findings have positive implications for methods that protect users from malignant online content.     

Together Helping Reduce Youth Violence for Equity (ThrYve): Examining the Development of a Comprehensive Multisectoral Approach to Youth Violence Prevention

Comprehensive approaches to youth violence prevention are needed to simultaneously address multiple risk factors across socioecological levels. ThrYve (Together Helping Reduce Youth Violence for Equity) is a collaborative initiative focused on addressing broader factors influencing youth violence, including social determinants of health. Using a participatory approach, the development of ThrYve is examined through an empirical case study. Through a Systems Advisory Board (SAB), ThrYve deploys multiple strategies that support cross-sector collaboration involving over 40 partners across 13 community sectors. Based on the Institute of Medicine’s model for public health action in communities, the SAB identified 87 change levers (i.e., program, policy, practice changes) to support community and systems-level improvements. As a result of the collaborative process, in the first couple of years, ThrYve facilitated 85 community actions and changes across sectors. The changes aligned with identified risk and resilience needs of the youth served in the community. The findings further support prior research, which suggests disparities related to gender may influence risk and resilience factors for youth violence. The study also indicates the importance of continuing to examine academic performance as a factor related to youth resilience.     

Mobility,Adaptability, and Accessibility: “Cute” Hanumān Figures Among Surinamese Hindu Children in The Netherlands

International Journal of Hindu Studies - This article asks how the popular deity Hanumān has become one of the central figures for mobilizing a Surinamese Dutch Hindu “devotional...     

Accommodating an Uninvited Guest: Perspectives of Researchers in Switzerland on ‘Honorary’ Authorship

Science and Engineering Ethics - The aim of this paper is to analyze the attitudes and reactions of researchers towards an authorship claim made by a researcher in a position of authority who has...     

The formation of a generalized categorization repertoire: effect of training with multiple domains,samples, and comparisons

The present experiment explored the effects of three variables on the spontaneous categorization of stimuli in perceptually distinct and novel domains. Each of six stimulus domains was created by morphing two images that were the domain endpoints. The endpoints of the domains were male and female faces, two abstract drawings, a car and a truck, two banded-elevation satellite land images, a tree and a cat, and two false-color satellite images. The stimulus variants at each end of a domain defined two potential perceptual classes. Training was conducted in a matching-to-sample format and used stimuli from one or two domains, one or three variants per class as samples, and one or three variants per class as comparisons. The spontaneous categorization of stimuli in the untrained stimulus domains showed the emergence of a generalized categorization repertoire. The proportion of spontaneously categorized stimuli in the new domains was positively related to the number of domains and samples used in training, and was inversely related to the number of comparisons used in training. Differential reaction times demonstrated the discriminability of the stimuli in the emergent classes. This study is among the first to provide an empirical basis for a behavior-analytic model of the development of generalized categorization repertoires in natural settings.     

Parental Divorce, Familial Risk for Depression, and Psychopathology in Offspring: A Three-Generation Study

Research suggests a link between parental divorce and negative child outcomes; however, the presence of parental depression may confound this relationship. Studies exploring the simultaneous effects of depression and parents’ divorce on the adjustment of their children are scarce and rarely have a longitudinal design. This is the first three-generation study of the relative effects of depression and divorce on offspring psychopathology, based on data from a 25-year longitudinal study with families at high and low risk for depression. One hundred seventy-eight grandchildren (mean age?=?13.9?years) of depressed and nondepressed parents and grandparents were evaluated by raters blind to their parents’ and grandparents’ clinical status. We found that in both low and high-risk children, divorce had a limited impact on child adjustment over and above familial risk for depression. Divorce had a significant effect on child outcomes only among high-risk grandchildren with a depressed grandparent and non-depressed parents, with this group showing a threefold risk for anxiety disorders. Results support previous findings suggesting that familial risk for depression largely overshadows the effect of parental divorce on child psychopathology. Possible reasons for the lack of association between divorce and child psychopathology among low-risk offspring are discussed.     

Emotional Disclosure in Day-to-Day Living and Subjective Well Being

There is a large body of empirical research on emotional disclosure and its relationship to health and well being. However, emotional disclosure has been examined largely in the context of illness or trauma. Beneficial outcomes of emotional disclosure in day-to-day living have not been consistently observed in non-experimental studies, although a large proportion of individuals do report perceived benefits. The present study aimed at exploring the association of emotional disclosure with selected intrapersonal and interpersonal variables and their role in prediction of subjective well being in day-to-day living. The sample comprised of 209 adults who did not report presence of any major stressor in the recent past. In hierarchical regression analysis, lower affect intensity, higher emotional clarity, lower trait rumination, higher perceived support and higher emotional disclosure predicted higher subjective well being. In addition, trait rumination emerged as a significant moderator of the relationship between emotional disclosure and subjective well being.     

Control of Integrated Task Sequences Shapes Components of Reaching

Reaching toward an object usually consists of a sequence of elemental actions. Using a reaching task sequence, the authors investigated how task elements of that sequence affected feedforward and feedback components of the reaching phase of the movement. Nine right-handed adults performed, with their dominant and nondominant hands, 4 tasks of different complexities: a simple reaching task; a reach-to-grasp task; a reach-to-grasp and lift object task; and a reach-to-grasp, lift, and place object task. Results showed that in the reach-to-grasp and lift object task more time was allocated to the feedforward component of the reach phase, while latency between the task elements decreased. We also found between-hand differences, supporting previous findings of increased efficiency of processing planning-related information in the preferred hand. The presence of task-related modifications supports the concept of contextual effects when planning a movement.     

Debiasing Using Decomposition: The Case of Memory‐Based Credit Card Expense Estimates

This article develops a conceptual framework to examine how consumers incorporate memory‐based and context‐based cues in estimating past and future credit card expenses. Focusing on memory‐based information, in this framework we suggest that past credit card expenses may be recalled as holistic totals or episodic individual expenses depending on the accessibility of each form of expense. We tested the conceptual framework with 3 studies. Study 1 showed that the recency of past expenses and frequency of credit card usage moderated the extent to which past expenses were used in estimating future expenses. Study 1 also showed that self‐awareness of estimation bias affected consumers’ estimates of future expenses. Study 2 showed that a decomposition strategy (unbundling a total into subcategories), which serves to make episodic individual expenses more accessible, was effective in reducing sampling‐based bias. Study 3 provided a validity check and showed that decomposition cues reduced estimation errors and affected estimates of future expense. In this article, we demonstrate the manner in which memory‐based information is used to make estimates, and we also demonstrate the effectiveness of decomposition as a debiasing technique for past and future estimates.