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This trial aims to test the effects of an app-based Christian and Islamic meditation, compared to secular mindfulness and a waitlist, using a randomised controlled trial. If the results yield positive outcomes, this study will support the efficacy of these contemplations, offering practitioners a way to enhance their well-being within their religious framework.
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A long-standing objective in the study of consciousness is to characterize the neural signatures of perceived compared with unperceived sensory stimuli. In particular, the role of different cortical areas in generating consciousness is an active debate. Here the researchers combined electrophysiological and modeling studies to investigate the mechanistic role of individual connections between brain regions in the generation of the activity patterns observed during conscious report. They found that, while frontal areas initiate report-related activity, the parietal cortex acts as a gate to determine whether such activity will propagate back to the visual cortex. This division of labor between prefrontal and parietal cortices is unexplained by current theoretical models of consciousness and will impact mechanistic neural models of conscious report.
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Change blindness is a phenomenon characterized by observers’ failure to notice seemingly obvious changes in their visual input. In most cases of change blindness in the literature, such unnoticed changes coincide with other visual transients. This research team studied slow change blindness, a related phenomenon that occurs even in the absence of visual disruptions when the change occurs sufficiently slowly, to determine whether it could be explained by conclusions from classic change blindness. Across three different slow change blindness experiments the team found that observers who consistently failed to notice the change had access to at least two memory representations of the changing display. One representation was precise but short lived: a detailed representation of the more recent stimulus states, but fragile. The other representation lasted longer but was fairly general: stable but too coarse to differentiate the various stages of the change. These findings suggest that, although multiple representations are formed, the failure to compare hypotheses might not explain slow change blindness; even if a comparison were made, the representations would be too sparse (longer term stores) or too fragile (short-lived stores) for such comparison to inform about the change.
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Politics and the media in the United States are increasingly nationalized, and this changes how we talk about politics. Instead of reading the local news and discussing local events, people are more often consuming national media and discussing national issues. Unlike local politics, which can rely on shared concrete knowledge about the region, national politics must coordinate large groups of people with little in common. To provide this coordination, this research finds that national-level political discussions rely upon different themes than local-level discussions, using more abstract, moralized, and power-centric language. The higher prevalence of abstract, moralized, and power-centric language in national vs. local politics was found in political speeches, politician Tweets, and Reddit discussions. These national-level linguistic features lead to broader engagement with political messages, but they also foster more anger and negativity. These findings suggest that the nationalization of politics and the media may contribute to rising partisan animosity.
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The team first identifies a variety of benefits of doing replication studies. Next, they argue that it is often necessary to improve aspects of the original study, even if that means deviating from the original protocol. Thirdly, they argue that replication studies highlight the importance of and need for more transparency of the research process, but also make clear how difficult that is. Fourthly, they underline that it is worth trying out replication in the humanities. They finish by formulating recommendations regarding reproduction and replication research, aimed specifically at funders, editors and publishers, and universities and other research institutes
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Many fields—including psychology, sociology, communications, political science, and computer science—use computational methods to analyze text data. However, existing text analysis methods have a number of shortcomings. Dictionary methods, while easy to use, are often not very accurate when compared to recent methods. Machine learning models, while more accurate, can be difficult to train and use. This research demonstrates that the large-language model GPT is capable of accurately detecting various psychological constructs (as judged by manual annotators) in text across 12 languages, using simple prompts and no additional training data. GPT thus overcomes the limitations present in existing methods. GPT is also effective in several lesser-spoken languages, which could facilitate text analysis research from understudied contexts.
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Sub-Saharan Africa bears the greatest burden of HIV, with comorbid mental conditions highly prevalent in people living with HIV. It is important to evaluate the mental health of adolescents and young adults living with HIV (AYALHIV) comprehensively by measuring both negative and positive psychological constructs. There has been a proliferation of interest in positive psychological outcome measures, but the evidence of their psychometric robustness is fragmented. This review sought to: 1) Identify positive psychological outcomes and corresponding outcome measures used in AYALHIV in sub-Saharan Africa. 2) Critically appraise the psychometrics of the identified outcome measures.
Projects
Two early career scholars affiliated with the ISSBD will be awarded grants to pursue research exploring the science of caring and character strengths related to caring across the world.