10,720 research outputs found
Using a genetic algorithm to abbreviate the Psychopathic Personality Inventory–Revised (PPI-R)
No full textSome self-report measures of personality and personality disorders, including the widely used Psychopathic Personality Inventory–Revised (PPI-R), are lengthy and time-intensive. In recent work, we introduced an automated genetic algorithm (GA)-based method for abbreviating psychometric measures. In Study 1, we used this approach to generate a short (40-item) version of the PPI-R using 3 large-N German student samples (total N = 1,590). The abbreviated measure displayed high convergent correlations with the original PPI-R, and outperformed an alternative measure constructed using a conventional approach. Study 2 tested the convergent and discriminant validity of this short version in a fourth student sample (N = 206) using sensation-seeking and sensitivity to reward and punishment scales, again demonstrating similar convergent and discriminant validity for the PPI-R-40 compared with the full version. In a fifth community sample of North American participants acquired using Amazon Mechanical Turk, the PPI-R-40 showed similarly high convergent correlations, demonstrating stability across language, culture, and data-collection method. Taken together, these studies suggest that the GA approach is a viable method for abbreviating measures of psychopathy, and perhaps personality measures in general
Imsejhin ghall-qadi tal-komunita` Nisranija permezz tal-ministeru sacerdotali
No full textThe article focuses upon the call to service through the exercise of the priestly ministry. The point of departure of the study is the Johannine pericope which describes the washing of the disciples' feet by Jesus (Jn 13:1-20). The article describes how the celebration of the liturgy is a fount of vocations to the ordained ministry. The author then studies three documents of the Second Vatican Council -- Optatam Totius, Presbyterorum Ordinis and Christus Dominus -- in order to depict the centrality of service to priestly ministry. A number of evocative texts are referred to, as well as formation documents from the local Church of Malta. Furthermore, the respective contributions of Bishop Tonino Bello, Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis are also given pride of place, as more light is thrown on the theme of the article.peer-reviewe
Neurosynth core tools v0.3.1
No full text<p>Neurosynth is a Python package for large-scale synthesis of functional neuroimaging data.</p>
O holocausto judeu : espaços de evocação
No full textDissertação de mestrado integrado em Arquitectura, Universidade Lusíada de Lisboa, 2015.Exame público realizado em 23 de Setembro de 2015.Resumo:
A presente dissertação teve origem, primeiramente, nas minhas origens. Devido às mesmas, o tema do Holocausto Judeu esteve e estará sempre entranhado na minha existência. O gosto e estudo da arquitectura, unido à extrema necessidade da existência de um sentido, abriu portas à ideia de relacionar o papel da mesma nos efeitos sensoriais que a sua composição de elementos provoca, e qual a sua contribuição para o derradeiro objectivo dos espaços. Pretende-se dissecar a arquitectura no sentido de compreender de que modo e através de que elementos ou estratégias esta provoca determinados efeitos nos seus visitantes, ampliando o impacto da experiência. Esta ampliação irá certamente elevar o nível de aprendizagem e possivelmente atingir mais eficazmente a consciência dos visitantes, de modo a que este passado se mantenha na memória, presente e futura. Espera-se que ao manter a memória presente, se reduza a possibilidade de algo tão trágico voltar a acontecer. Para tal, todos os meios devem contribuir. A arquitectura não fica atrás e aqui se prova o seu potencial de sensibilizar o visitante para uma realidade que nunca nos deve abandonar. É uma necessidade absoluta, a humanidade depende disso. (Gal Yarkoni
Designing next-generation platforms for evaluating scientific output: What scientists can learn from the social web
No full textTraditional pre-publication peer review of scientific output is a slow, inefficient, and unreliable process. Efforts to replace or supplement traditional evaluation models with open evaluation platforms that leverage advances in information technology are slowly gaining traction, but remain in the early stages of design and implementation. Here I discuss a number of considerations relevant to the development of such platforms. I focus particular attention on three core elements that next-generation evaluation platforms should strive to emphasize, including (a) open and transparent access to accumulated evaluation data, (b) personalized and highly customizable performance metrics, and (c) appropriate short-term incentivization of the userbase. Because all of these elements have already been successfully implemented on a large scale in hundreds of existing social web applications, I argue that development of new scientific evaluation platforms should proceed largely by adapting existing techniques rather than engineering entirely new evaluation mechanisms. Successful implementation of open evaluation platforms has the potential to substantially advance both the pace and the quality of scientific publication and evaluation, and the scientific community has a vested interest in shifting towards such models as soon as possible
The Role of Strategy in Decision-Making under Risk: An fMRI Investigation
No full textWhen making decisions involving risk, people often deviate markedly from the predictions of normative choice models, and show a systematic tendency to minimize risk rather than maximizing expected value (EV). This bias is widely attributed to a tendency to assign greater emotional weight to negative prospects relative to positive prospects. However, it remains unclear to what extent such emotional responses are controllable and subject to strategic modulation. In this study, participants were scanned with fMRI while engaging in a standard gambling paradigm involving repeated choice between two probabilistic rewards (e.g., 70% of 400 vs. 30% of 1000). I experimentally manipulated the manner in which rewards were computed as well as the nature of the feedback participants received. Results provided strong evidence that strategy choice is a critical determinant of decision-making under risk. Behaviorally, participants consistently maximized EV under some reward schedules while exhibiting robust risk aversion under others. These differences persisted even when participants received no feedback about the outcome of their choices and stimuli were perceptually identical in all conditions. FMRI analyses identified qualitatively different patterns of activation associated with different decision-making strategies. Specifically, EV maximization strategies were associated with increased activation in frontoparietal regions implicated in numerical computation and visuospatial manipulation, whereas probability-maximizing heuristics were associated with increased activation in dorsal ACC and anterior insula when participants made risky choices. Collectively, these results suggest that risk aversion is a strategy-dependent phenomenon that can often be eliminated with little difficulty given appropriate environmental cues
Implicit realism impedes progress in psychology: Comment on Fried (2020)
No full textFried (in press) argues that progress in the factor and network modeling literatures is currently impeded by inadequate theory development. Here I take issue with this conclusion, focusing on two broad concerns. First, I argue that much of Fried's criticism of previous work (e.g., of general factor models) reflects a particular set of aesthetic preferences and priorities that other researchers are under no obligation to share. Second, I argue that Fried’s central argument tacitly assumes a strong realism about psychological constructs that is difficult to defend, and has deleterious practical consequences. When stripped of its realist commitments, Fried’s paper provides the reader with little reason to suppose that improved theory development would do much to facilitate progress in psychology. I suggest that applied psychologists may want to consider an alternative possibility---namely, that models constructed at a psychological level of description are simply not very conducive to the production of effective real-world predictions or interventions
The Generalizability Crisis
No full textMost theories and hypotheses in psychology are verbal in nature, yet their evaluation overwhelmingly relies on inferential statistical procedures. The validity of the move from qualitative to quantitative analysis depends on the verbal and statistical expressions of a hypothesis being closely aligned—that is, that the two must refer to roughly the same set of hypothetical observations. Here I argue that many applications of statistical inference in psychology fail to meet this basic condition. Focusing on the most widely used class of model in psychology—the linear mixed model—I explore the consequences of failing to statistically operationalize verbal hypotheses in a way that respects researchers' actual generalization intentions. I demonstrate that whereas the "random effect" formalism is used pervasively in psychology to model inter-subject variability, few researchers accord the same treatment to other variables they clearly intend to generalize over (e.g., stimuli, tasks, or research sites). The under-specification of random effects imposes far stronger constraints on the generalizability of results than most researchers appreciate. Ignoring these constraints can dramatically inflate false positive rates, and often leads researchers to draw sweeping verbal generalizations that lack a meaningful connection to the statistical quantities they are putatively based on. I argue that the failure to problems many of psychology's ongoing problems (e.g., the replication crisis), and conclude with a discussion of several potential avenues for improvement
Discovering Relations Between Mind, Brain, and Mental Disorders Using Topic Mapping
No full textRussell A. Poldrack is with UT Austin, Jeanette A. Mumford is with UT Austin, Tom Schonberg is with UT Austin, Donald Kalar is with the NASA Ames Research Center, Bishal Barman is with UT Austin, Tal Yarkoni is with Colorado University.Neuroimaging research has largely focused on the identification of associations between brain activation and specific mental functions. Here we show that data mining techniques applied to a large database of neuroimaging results can be used to identify the conceptual structure of mental functions and their mapping to brain systems. This analysis confirms many current ideas regarding the neural organization of cognition, but also provides some new insights into the roles of particular brain systems in mental function. We further show that the same methods can be used to identify the relations between mental disorders. Finally, we show that these two approaches can be combined to empirically identify novel relations between mental disorders and mental functions via their common involvement of particular brain networks. This approach has the potential to discover novel endophenotypes for neuropsychiatric disorders and to better characterize the structure of these disorders and the relations between them.This work was supported by NIH grant RO1MH082795 (to RAP) and F32NR012081 (to TY) and by the Texas Emerging Technology Fund. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Psycholog
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