Psychological research suggests that, other things being equal, the desire for or exercise of control over consequences is advantageous to the individual. However, in the context of relationships where the needs and welfare of another person are salient, the preference and enactment of control may be more problematic. Furthermore, although considerable research attention has been devoted to issues of control in general, the more contextualized, relationship-specific conceptualization of control has remained relatively unexplored in the literature, and the relevant research that does exist is limited by measurement problems. The primary purpose of this project was to advance the study of control in relationships through the development and validation of a self-report instrument specifically designed to measure it. An initial pool of 82 items was written and subsequently refined using both Likert analysis and factor analysis in a study involving college student dating relationship participants (n = 240). The subsequent version of the Control in Relationships (CIR) measure consisted of 26 items, which showed good internal consistency and reliability over time. Furthermore, the factor structure of the 26 items was interpretable and suggested a coherent underlying structure of the CIR construct. Subsequently, the validity of the measure was assessed, indicating that CIR was significantly related to pertinent measures of control, and three separate measures of relationship satisfaction, as well as measures of partner trust and risk of intimacy. The validation portion of this study suggested the negative characteristics of the CIR construct that might be detrimental not only to the individual, but also to the relationship. Results supported the utility of CIR as a measure of control in relationships and also suggested several directions for future research.

Psychological research suggests that, other things being equal, the desire for or exercise of control over consequences is advantageous to the individual. However, in the context of relationships where the needs and welfare of another person are salient, the preference and enactment of control may be more problematic. Furthermore, although considerable research attention has been devoted to issues of control in general, the more contextualized, relationship-specific conceptualization of control has remained relatively unexplored in the literature, and the relevant research that does exist is limited by measurement problems. The primary purpose of this project was to advance the study of control in relationships through the development and validation of a self-report instrument specifically designed to measure it. An initial pool of 82 items was written and subsequently refined using both Likert analysis and factor analysis in a study involving college student dating relationship participants (n = 240). The subsequent version of the Control in Relationships (CIR) measure consisted of 26 items, which showed good internal consistency and reliability over time. Furthermore, the factor structure of the 26 items was interpretable and suggested a coherent underlying structure of the CIR construct. Subsequently, the validity of the measure was assessed, indicating that CIR was significantly related to pertinent measures of control, and three separate measures of relationship satisfaction, as well as measures of partner trust and risk of intimacy. The validation portion of this study suggested the negative characteristics of the CIR construct that might be detrimental not only to the individual, but also to the relationship. Results supported the utility of CIR as a measure of control in relationships and also suggested several directions for future research.

<p> Depression is associated with higher severity of memory disorders and has been shown to predict lower levels of cognitive functioning in those diagnosed with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) or dementia. Yet, little is known about this association cross-culturally, particularly between Hispanics and European Americans.</p><p> This study demonstrates that although levels of depression differed significantly across diagnostic group, Hispanics and European Americans were similar in levels of depression at each diagnosis. However, only for the European American group did depression levels predict lower scores in confrontational naming and semantic memory. Additionally, exploratory analyses of the entire sample demonstrated that lower depression predicted less likelihood of MCI or dementia diagnoses. This could indicate that there is a need for intervention and treatment of depression, in particular for later stages of MCI and dementia, that should be culturally catered to individual ethnicities. </p><p>

<p>RL has been transformative for neuroscience by providing a normative anchor for interpreting neural and behavioral data. End-to-end RL methods have scored impressive victories with minimal compromises in autonomy, hand-engineering, and generality. The cost of this minimalism in practice is that model-free RL methods are slow to learn and generalize poorly. Humans and animals exhibit substantially improved flexibility and generalize learned information rapidly to new environment by learning invariants of the environment and features of the environment that support fast learning rapid transfer in new environments. An important question for both neuroscience and machine learning is what kind of ``representational objectives'' encourage humans and other animals to encode structure about the world. This can be formalized as ``representation feature learning,'' in which the animal or agent learns to form representations with information potentially relevant to the downstream RL process. We will overview different representational objectives that have received attention in neuroscience and in machine learning. The focus of this overview will be to first highlight conditions under which these seemingly unrelated objectives are actually mathematically equivalent. We will use this to motivate a breakdown of properties of different learned representations that are meaningfully different and can be used to inform contrasting hypotheses for neuroscience. We then use this perspective to motivate our model of the hippocampus. A cognitive map has long been the dominant metaphor for hippocampal function, embracing the idea that place cells encode a geometric representation of space. However, evidence for predictive coding, reward sensitivity, and policy dependence in place cells suggests that the representation is not purely spatial. We approach the problem of understanding hippocampal representations from a reinforcement learning perspective, focusing on what kind of spatial representation is most useful for maximizing future reward. We show that the answer takes the form of a predictive representation. This representation captures many aspects of place cell responses that fall outside the traditional view of a cognitive map. We go on to argue that entorhinal grid cells encode a low-dimensional basis set for the predictive representation, useful for suppressing noise in predictions and extracting multiscale structure for hierarchical planning.

<p> The main goal of this project was to develop and provide validity evidence for a diseasespecific quality of life survey to be used with pediatric localized scleroderma (LS) patients. This new survey, called the Localized Scleroderma Quality of Life Instrument (LoSQI), incorporated unique features associated with the disease, not captured by current surveys. As a secondary goal, the feasibility and usefulness of anchoring vignettes with pediatric patients were examined. The project included three phases; content domain development and item generation, a pilot study, and a field test. Validity evidence was gathered from multiple sources including test content, internal structure, and in relation to other variables. Overall, there was initial support for use of the LoSQI with pediatric LS patients. Patients indicated general understanding and readability of the items, and there was qualitative evidence for content validity. Exploratory factor analysis suggested the utility of reporting a total score along with two subscale scores, (1) Pain and Physical Functioning and (2) Body Image and Social Support. Reliability of both the subscale and total scores was acceptable. There was less evidence for use of anchoring vignettes in this context, as there was a high frequency of ties in rankings, which limited the utility of statistical models. Despite limitations from a small sample size and skewed response distributions, the pilot study and the field test provided promising initial evidence that the LoSQI can be used to capture HRQoL in LS patients ages 10-20 years. Future studies should examine responsiveness of the scores to change and optimal capture of HRQoL in patients &lt;10 years of age.</p><p>

<p> This study will help to clarify how interactions with dolphins affect people. It examines human well-being and experiential responses to scuba diving with bottlenose dolphins, <i>Tursiops truncatus</i>, and compares this to participation in a scuba dive without this interaction. Ninety-nine adults were split between an intervention and a control group in a mixed methods convergent parallel quasi-experimental design. Before and after the activity participants completed an emotional well-being scale (Positive and Negative Affect Schedule; PANAS) and only afterward received a researcher-designed qualitative questionnaire targeting peak experiences. For the PANAS, a <i> t</i>-test found a significant difference in negative affect change scores between groups, <i>t</i>(97) = &ndash;2.135, <i>p</i> = .035, <i>d</i> = 0.43. The intervention group experienced a larger decrease in negative affect than the control group at a small-medium effect size. Qualitative themes endorsed more by the control group are self-confidence; level of difficulty; novelty; transformation or overcoming; nature; and physical, mental, or emotional stress or discomfort. For the intervention group, more participants expressed tranquility; numinosity; and connection to nature, themselves, or the Divine. Themes mentioned approximately equally include ineffability, presence in the moment, comfort and safety, desiring to continue, good or extraordinary experience, and freedom. Twelve intervention and 9 control group participants appeared to have a peak experience, as defined by Maslow. This indicates that a peak experience during a scuba dive, with and without dolphins, is a relatively common occurrence. This study demonstrates the importance of rigorous studies in human-dolphin interaction research. Studies on human-dolphin interaction published to date have neglected to impose appropriate controls, which has led to the misattribution of all pre- to postintervention differences to dolphin interaction. Both groups have intriguing results; the presence of dolphins led to a larger decrease in negative affect and greater likelihood of tranquility, numinosity, connection, and peak experiences.</p><p>

Decreases in overall well-being and daily functioning result from unpleasant and uncomfortable symptoms associated with physical health and mental health disorders. Neurofeedback training, rooted in the theory of operant conditioning, presents the possibility of increasing brain wave regulation, decreasing symptoms experienced from abnormal brain wave activity, and increasing overall well-being and daily functioning. The efficacy of neurofeedback for physical and mental health outcomes is unclear, contributing to confusion about the treatment and any potential benefits. In order to assess the efficacy of neurofeedback in the alleviation of physical health and mental health symptoms, a systematic review and meta-analysis of neurofeedback using a random effects model to generate the effect sizes was conducted on 21 studies with 22 comparisons that used neurofeedback to treat patients. The results showed that neurofeedback can be effective for physical and mental health outcomes, including for autism with an effect size of 0.29, tinnitus with an effect size of 0.77, schizophrenia with an effect size of 0.76, depression with an effect size of 0.28, insomnia with an effect size of 0.52, obesity with an effect size of 0.40, intellectual disability with an effect size of 0.73, and pain with an effect size of 0.30. Well-being and daily functioning for those with physical and mental health disorders can be improved. These findings have implications for clinical practice to help patients in treatment for physical and mental health problems, and also for social change by providing evidence for alternative health care options.

The purposes of this study were to evaluate the effect of different rest interval activities in distributed practice (DP) upon the rate of learning a PA task, to evaluate the effectiveness of different rest interval activities in controlling rehearsal, and to investigate the role of rehearsal in DP performance. Three experiments compared three different pairs of rest interval activities. One pair of activities, color naming (CN) and sequential addition (SA), was machine paced (MFA). A second pair, cartoon reading (CR) and symbol cancellation (SC), was self-paced (SPA). The third pair required no formal activity (NFA), Ss were instructed to rehearse (R) or not to rehearse (NR). Besides different rest interval activities two other independent variables were manipulated. The length of the intertrial period was set at either 30 or 60 seconds. Two lists differed in items but were constructed to be comparable. The dependent variables were the number of trials required to learn the list to a criterion of one perfect trial and the responses of Ss to a questionnaire on the amount and method of rehearsal. Ss were 240 college students. Data from the three experiments were analyzed separately by analysis of variance and then combined to make an overall comparison with analysis of variance with tasks considered as nested factors. After completing the paired associates (PA) task, each S was administered a questionnaire to determine if he had rehearsed and if so the amount, time, and method of rehearsal. Analysis of the data showed the ON, SA, CR, and SO produced no significant difference in rate of learning, nor did NR and R differ. Overall comparison showed that NR and R produced faster learning than the OR and SO. The analysis of the questionnaire showed that the different tasks varied in amount of control of rehearsal, but there were no differences in rate of learning related to amount of rehearsal reported. The conclusions drawn were that the facilitative affect of rehearsal is unproven, that requiring formal activity produces slower learning than having no formal rest interval task and that the SA should be used to nearly eliminate rehearsal.

Introduction: How individuals deal with outcomes under unknown risks (I.e. ambiguity) can be important for understanding decisions in the real world. One commonly applied model for ambiguous decisions, maxmin expected utility (MMEU), suggests that people only focus on the range of probabilities. However, other models, including subjective recursive expected utility (SREU), suggest that instead of thinking about the range, people construct a belief about the probabilities as a distribution, based on their experiences or intuition. MMEU has been used to relate ambiguity preferences to clinical disorders, including autism spectrum disorder. However, if SREU models are a better reflection of decisions under ambiguity, these differences may be related to beliefs instead of preferences. Methods: To investigate the role of beliefs in ambiguous decisions, we collected choice and personality data from an online sample (N=298) utilizing a novel task. In our task, participants make decisions under ambiguity after learning about the distribution of probabilities during a previous decision task. We test if variance in beliefs influences decisions under ambiguity, interacts with reward feedback, and accounts for individual differences related to a clinical variable, the Autism Quotient (AQ) to explore the bounds of the MMEU model. Results: Participants preferred ambiguous stimuli associated with high variance distributions and made larger changes in response to feedback information when applied to high variance distributions. We did not replicate results showing that ambiguity aversion decreased with AQ but did find AQ decreased with the believed variance of probabilities. Conclusions: Our results provide experimental evidence that decisions under ambiguity are influenced by beliefs, violating a key axiom of MMEU, suggesting previous results should be revisited by incorporating beliefs to better understand the mechanisms of ambiguous choice. / Psychology

<p> The purpose of this quantitative research study is to analyze the relationship between individual cognitive, behavioral, and motivational characteristics and sales quota attainment for three industrial sales organizations in West Virginia. The intent of the study is to learn more about organizational efforts to implement an effective system for hiring to identify top performing talent in order to accomplish sales goals. From a human performance improvement perspective, this research study applies both the Behavior Engineering Model (Gilbert, 1978) and the Human Performance Improvement / HPT Model (Van Tiem, Moseley, &amp; Dessinger, 2012). The Behavior Engineering Model allowed the researcher to determine which individual characteristics are relevant for the purpose of this study. The Human Performance Improvement/HPT Model further allowed the researcher to define the issue of the recruiting approach of sales as a performance gap. Individual cognitive, behavioral, and motivational characteristics of 238 sales representatives were assessed using a psychometric assessment tool, the ProfileXT&copy; (Profiles International, I, 2007). A stepwise multiple regression was conducted to evaluate which ProfileXT&copy; scale scores were most effective at predicting sales performance. The only factor significantly related to sales performance was Independence, F (1,236) = 18.286, p &lt; .001, with a multiple correlation coefficient of .268, indicating that approximately 7.18% of the variance in sales performance could be accounted for by independence alone. Further analysis indicated no other significant predictor variables from the ProfileXT&copy; scales. The researcher concluded with recommendations for future research.</p>