1,720,963 research outputs found
Does technological nature make us smarter: testing the impact of nature on cognition
Get PDFSpending time in nature can improve mood, reduce stress and anxiety, decrease post-operative recovery time, and improve cognition (e.g., Berger & Tiry, 2012; Kaplan, 1995; Ottosson & Grahn, 2005). Unfortunately, because American adults spend ninety-three percent of their lives indoors, and American children watch roughly 30 hours of television per week, many people are not reaping the benefits of nature (Environmental Protection Agency, 2016). Simulated natural environments, known as technological nature, have been shown to improve mood and decrease stress (e.g., Ulrich, Lundén & Eltinge, 1993). Technological nature, a type of simulated natural environment, is nature that is provided through technology, such as screensavers and artificial windows. While some benefits of technological nature have been found for measures of psychological wellbeing, the impacts on cognition are not well understood. Thus, the present study aimed to explore the impact of technological nature on cognition; specifically, on tasks that measure text comprehension, attention, short-term memory, long-term memory, health perceptions, and decision-making. Participants were asked to complete five tasks measuring these cognitive functions and were assigned to one of five conditions (nature, technological nature, color-control condition, white control condition, time-control condition). Those in the nature condition completed the tasks alongside plants that were placed throughout the room. In addition, these participants had a view of trees through a nearby window. Those in the technological nature condition viewed a slideshow of plants on a computer screen while completing the tasks. Participants in the color-control condition, viewed a slideshow of colors of the plants on a computer screen, and participants in the white color control and time control conditions viewed a white computer screen. We hypothesized that participants in the nature and technological nature conditions would perform better than those in the control conditions. In addition, we expected better performance for participants in the nature condition relative to those in the technological nature condition. The applications of this work to health and policy will be discussed.Includes bibliographical references (pages 35-39)California State University, Northridge. Department of Psychology
The mechanisms behind feature-based stereotyping: an empirical test
Get PDFPrevious studies have found evidence for "feature-based stereotyping" (FBS), in which the more "prototypic" an individual's features are of their social group, the more that individual will be stereotyped. Both categorization and a direct association between features and stereotypes (Blair, 2006) have been proposed to mediate of this process. The current study provides an empirical test of the mechanisms underlying FBS by employing verbal interference, which has been used in previous studies to disrupt categorical perception (the advantage for discriminating between objects from different categories, relative to objects from the same category).We predicted that if categorization mediates FBS, verbal interference will eliminate the use of features in stereotyping. If features are directly associated with stereotypes, categorization should be unnecessary and verbal interference will have no effect on FBS. Although no evidence was found to support the differential effects of interference on FBS, analyses suggest that our interference tasks did not work as intended.Includes bibliographical references (pages 43-50)California State University, Northridge. Department of Psychology
The erffect of nutritional information format on consumer understanding and decision-making: contrasts between entire-package nutritional information and single-serving size information
No full textThe purpose of this study, modeled after a study conducted by Antonuk and Block (2006), was to investigate how the indication of the format and total caloric/nutrition contents of an entire food package on the food label affects consumers' understanding of nutritional information and their dietary decision-making. The 100 undergraduate students who participated in this study were randomly assigned to one of six conditions. The first independent variable was the healthiness of the snack, featuring a healthy snack or a less healthy snack. The second independent variable was the label type on the package, consisting of the dual-column label, single-column label, and no-label formats. The dual-column label format contains both single- serving nutritional information as well as entire-package nutritional information, while the single-column nutrition fact label contains only single-serving nutritional information. The study involved five dependent variables: 1) comprehension level; 2) characteristic awareness level; 3) level of motivation to process the labels in the single-column and dual-column label conditions; 4) nutrition fact label format favorability; and 5) dietary choice. Each participant received a bag containing a snack as well as a questionnaire that contained a copy of the nutrition fact label from the snack. In addition, the participants were given a series of questions regarding the snacks' nutritional information presented on the labels, and they were instructed to pay attention to the nutrition fact labels to fill out the questionnaire. After this initial exercise, the participants watched a short comedy video clip and proceeded to answer the post-test questionnaire. As was hypothesized, the dual-column nutrition label performed significantly better in terms of accurately estimating calorie and protein counts compared to those with the single-column and the no-label formats. However, the use of dual-column labels was not effective in terms of helping the participants to estimate accurate serving sizes or fat and fiber counts; thus, these findings did not support the hypothesis. In addition, unlike the initial hypothesis, the dual-column arrangement did not have a significant effect in reference to increasing the level of motivation of participants to evaluate the labels. In addition, the participants who were given the dual-column label did not eat a significantly smaller amount of snacks compared to the participants with the other label formats. The results in the current study suggest that the dual-column label format, which supplies good situational cues, is partially effective in the estimation of nutritional content but failed to show effectiveness in other areas. Future studies should assess the dual-column label's limitations while examining the effectiveness of the dual-column label combined with other graphical and/or pictorial cues that may improve the effectiveness of the dual-column label.California State University, Northridge. Department of Psychology.Includes bibliographical references (pages 52-56
The effects of impulsivity and depleted self-control on temporal discounting
Get PDFAlthough the combination of impulsivity and depleted self-control could have unique effects on financial decision-making and temporal discounting, their combined influence has not been empirically tested. The present research addresses this gap by examining the effects of hunger-induced impulsivity and depleted self-control on intertemporal choice. The results suggest the combined influence of impulsivity and depleted self-control has no effect on temporal discounting specifically. However, depleted self-control did influence intertemporal choice in a way inconsistent with most previous studies: depleted participants displayed less myopic preferences.Includes bibliographical references (pages 40-46)California State University, Northridge. Department of Psychology
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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