Behavior In Different Domains Research Articles

Comparison of neurocognitive and quality-of-life outcomes in pediatric craniopharyngioma patients treated with partial resection and radiotherapy versus gross-total resection only.

The optimal management of pediatric craniopharyngioma patients remains controversial, shifting from radical resection (gross-total resection [GTR]) to a more conservative approach with partial resection/biopsy followed by radiotherapy (PR+RT). To the authors' knowledge, no previous studies have compared neurocognitive and quality-of-life (QOL) outcomes between the two main treatments. In this study, the authors compared changes in intellectual, adaptive, and QOL scores in children treated for craniopharyngioma with GTR and those treated with PR+RT. Patients underwent annual neurocognitive and QOL evaluations for up to 10 years posttreatment, including the Full-Scale IQ, Verbal Comprehension Index (VCI), Perceptual Reasoning Index (PRI), Working Memory Index (WMI), and Processing Speed Index (PSI). Child- and parent-reported QOL scores and adaptive behavior in different domains were assessed. General linear mixed models were used to examine change in scores over time by treatment group with adjustment for significant covariates. Scores from 43 patients treated between 2009 and 2019 (21 GTR, 22 PR+RT) were examined. Within the PR+RT group, 9 patients had intensity-modulated RT and 13 had proton beam therapy. The treatment groups were similar in sex (44% male) and age (median 7.3 years). There were no significant differences in the trajectory of intellectual functioning or QOL scale scores between the two groups. However, patients who underwent GTR exhibited significant improvement over time in overall adaptive behavior (p = 0.04) and conceptual skills (p = 0.01), which was not observed in patients treated with PR+RT. Long-term pediatric craniopharyngioma survivors treated with GTR and PR+RT have similar intellectual function and QOL. Larger studies are needed to explore small but clinically significant differences between the two groups.

Tracking of physical activity and sedentary behavior of adolescents in different domains

This study aimed to verify the tracking of physical activity and sedentary behavior in different domains during adolescence. This longitudinal study involved 265 subjects (boys: 52.8%) with an initial mean age of 13.9 (± 1.2) years. Physical activity and sedentary behavior were verified using a questionnaire. The achievement of ≥ 150 min. week-1 of moderate-to-vigorous intensity sport and/or physical exercise for ≥ 1 month was adopted as sufficiently active. The data were collected on 2 occasions, with an average interval of 3 years. The description of the results used the relative frequency and Binary Logistic Regression was used to estimate the crude and adjusted odds ratios (95% confidence intervals). Current physical activity (adjusted odds ratios = 3.05; 95% confidence intervals: 1.77 - 5.26) and sedentary behavior (adjusted odds ratios = 1.81; 95% confidence intervals: 1.03 - 3.19) appear to be significantly influenced by previous behavior, except for light-intensity physical activity. Only 12.8% of the participants remained sufficiently active for sport and/or physical exercise. Practice for at least one month of sport and/or physical exercise at baseline was a predictor of practice in the follow-up, both considering participation for at least one month (adjusted odds ratios = 2.81; 95% confidence intervals: 1.37 - 5.79) and for four months (adjusted odds ratios = 2.47; 95% confidence intervals: 1.17 - 5.24) in the follow-up. Being sufficiently active at baseline increased the chance of being sufficiently active in the follow-up during adolescence. Interventions providing sufficient sport and/or physical exercise could positively influence the chances of practice in the future. For light-intensity physical activity interventions, strategies targeting adherence seem especially relevant

Behavioral paradigms for studying pro-environmental behavior: A systematic review.

In view of global environmental deterioration and climate change, researchers from multiple fields of the behavioral sciences examine the determinants of pro-environmental behavior. Research on pro-environmental behavior is dominated by the use of self-report measures, which relates to critical validity problems. Some of these problems can be addressed by studying consequential behavior in behavioral paradigms (i.e., systematically arranged situations of actual environmental relevance). However, pro-environmental behavior paradigms have been scattered across disciplines, and many researchers may not be aware of the wealth of available paradigms. The present review aims to acquaint researchers across disciplinary borders with the behavioral paradigms developed to study pro-environmental behavior in different domains. A systematic literature search revealed 99 ad hoc paradigms and five validated paradigms of pro-environmental behavior. I review how different authors have succeeded in implementing the consequences of pro-environmental behavior in standardized field, laboratory, or online situations, point to caveats in the use of behavioral paradigms, and illustrate how researchers can select a paradigm for their own research.

BlockREV: Blockchain-Enabled Multi-Controller Rule Enforcement Verification in SDN

Compared with the classical structure with only one controller in software-defined networking (SDN), multi-controller topology structure in SDN provides a new type of cross-domain forwarding network architecture with multiple centralized controllers and distributed forwarding devices. However, when the network includes multiple domains, lack of trust among the controllers remains a challenge how to verify the correctness of cross-domain forwarding behaviors in different domains. In this paper, we propose a novel secure multi-controller rule enforcement verification (BlockREV) mechanism in SDN to guarantee the correctness of cross-domain forwarding. We first adopt blockchain technology to provide the immutability and privacy protection for forwarding behaviors. Furthermore, we present an address-based aggregate signature scheme with appropriate cryptographic primitives, which is provably secure in the random oracle model. Moreover, we design a verification algorithm based on hash values of forwarding paths to check the consistency of forwarding order. Finally, experimental results demonstrate that the proposed BlockREV mechanism is effective and suitable for multi-controller scenarios in SDN.

The role of perceived social support in the theory of planned behavior in predicting entrepreneurial intention: Evidence from a Nigerian university

Despite the usefulness of the theory of planned behavior in predicting intention and behavior in different domains, the sufficiency of its use in predicting and determining intention has been debated by many scholars. This paper extended the theory of planned behavior by including social support as a possible determinant of intention in the entrepreneurship domain while looking at one of the largest universities in Nigeria. Data were collected from 432 final year students of Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria using a simple random sampling technique. Structural equation modeling was adopted using partial least square technique for data analysis. Perceived social support, attitude towards entrepreneurship, and perceived behavioral control all were found to have a significant effect on entrepreneurial intention, while subjective norms had an insignificant effect. The study found perceived social support to be an important social influence factor in the theory of planned behavior because of its influence on entrepreneurial intention. Hence, perceived social support is recommended to be included as a major construct in the theory of planned behavior.

Sentiment prediction based on analysis of customers assessments in food serving businesses

Human activities and behaviour in different domains are usually influenced by other people’s actions and opinion. Nowadays, it is evident that there is a growing research interest in sentiment analysis, evaluation and prediction. Content from web sources and social media is frequently used when people want to see others’ opinion about different things. Our research is focused on ML-based sentiment analysis of food services reviews data. The comparison of several regression models with regards to prediction of customer satisfaction of restaurant and food services is presented. The experimental data collected from food serving businesses located in Shanghai Lujiazui Commercial Zone includes keywords extracted from the customers’ written reviews. Additionally, the data are spatially labelled enabling to conduct separate analyses for different geographical regions. As a conclusion, the keywords extracted from the customer’s reviews were suitable for the prediction of three observed satisfaction criteria: food taste, service, and environment.

ATLRec: An Attentional Adversarial Transfer Learning Network for Cross-Domain Recommendation

Entity linking is a new technique in recommender systems to link users’ interaction behaviors in different domains, for the purpose of improving the performance of the recommendation task. Linking-based cross-domain recommendation aims to alleviate the data sparse problem by utilizing the domain-sharable knowledge from auxiliary domains. However, existing methods fail to prevent domain-specific features to be transferred, resulting in suboptimal results. In this paper, we aim to address this issue by proposing an adversarial transfer learning based model ATLRec, which effectively captures domain-sharable features for cross-domain recommendation. In ATLRec, we leverage adversarial learning to generate representations of user-item interactions in both the source and the target domains, such that the discriminator cannot identify which domain they belong to, for the purpose of obtaining domain-sharable features. Meanwhile each domain learns its domain-specific features by a private feature extractor. The recommendation of each domain considers both domain-specific and domain-sharable features. We further adopt an attention mechanism to learn item latent factors of both domains by utilizing the shared users with interaction history, so that the representations of all items can be learned sufficiently in a shared space, even when few or even no items are shared by different domains. By this method, we can represent all items from the source and the target domains in a shared space, for the purpose of better linking items in different domains and capturing cross-domain item-item relatedness to facilitate the learning of domain-sharable knowledge. The proposed model is evaluated on various real-world datasets and demonstrated to outperform several state-of-the-art single-domain and cross-domain recommendation methods in terms of recommendation accuracy.

Reliability of a multi-domain sedentary behaviour questionnaire and comparability to an overall sitting time estimate

ABSTRACTThis study evaluated the test–retest reliability of a questionnaire assessing five domains of sedentary behaviour, and compared an overall indicator of sitting time with measures obtained by a multi-domain questionnaire, among adults living in Brazil. Data from two different studies carried out in Pelotas, Brazil, were used. Study A: evaluated 7-day reliability of a multi-domain sedentary behaviour questionnaire among 78 adults (≥18 years). Study B was a population-based study (n = 2,871 adults aged 20+ years) where a score of sedentary behaviour based on time spent sitting in five domains was compared with overall sitting time. Lin’s Concordance Correlation coefficients (CCC) and Bland–Altman plots were used to assess agreement between measures. The 7-day reliability of multi-domain questionnaire did not show marked differences in the median of minutes spent in each domain (Study A). For the total score, the Lin’s CCC was 0.87. When sitting time was measured by a single question, participants reported on average less sedentary time compared to the multiple-domain questionnaire (Study B). There was a slightly greater difference between measures among participants who reported higher sedentary time. Assessing sedentary behaviour in different domains would appear to be preferable to employing a general question on the total time spent sitting per day.

Studying Human Habits in Societal Context: Examining Support for a Basic Stimulus–Response Mechanism

Human habits are considered to be an important root of societal problems. The significance of habits has been demonstrated for a variety of behaviors in different domains, such as work, transportation, health, and ecology, suggesting that habits have a pervasive impact on human life. Studying and changing habits in societal context requires a broad view of behavior, which poses a challenge for applying basic models to complex human habits. We address the conceptualization and operationalization of habits in the current literature and note that claims about the role of habits in societal context rarely agree with the basic definition of habits as goal-independent behavior. We consider future directions that are important for making progress in the study of habit change in societal context.

Green behavioral (in)consistencies: are pro-environmental behaviors in different domains substitutes or complements?

Households’ consumption patterns and behaviors have profound influence on natural resources and environmental quality. This paper explores whether environmental behaviors and willingness to pay (WTP) in the household domains transport, energy consumption and water consumption are substitutes or complements. Using a cross-country data set from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Survey on Environmental Attitudes and Behavior from 2008, a random-effects (ordered) probit model is used to answer this question for the following countries: Australia, Canada, France, Mexico, Italy, and South Korea. It is found that in most countries, actual environmental behaviors are substitutes, while WTP for environmental public goods in different domains is mostly complementary. Grounding in these results, policies aiming to encourage overall environmentally friendly lifestyles should therefore be all-encompassing of several public domains, instead of individual ones, to avoid the risk of negative spillovers.

Leveraging Transitive Trust Relations to Improve Cross-Domain Recommendation

Cross-domain recommendation has become increasingly popular because it can determine dependencies and correlations among different domains. However, this type of recommendation still suffers from data sparsity limitations. Social trust relationship helps alleviate this problem. Existing cross-domain recommendation algorithms focus on modeling user behavior in different domains but disregard the social trust relationship among users. In this paper, we propose a transitive trust-aware cross-domain recommendation model that incorporates the context dependence and transitivity of social trust relations. First, we construct a different transitive trust network for each single domain. Then, we develop a novel probabilistic matrix factorization model for each domain that utilizes the transitive trust-aware model to mine social trust. Finally, we present a nonlinear user–vector mapping algorithm to bridge the feedback of different domains. Experimental results indicate that our method significantly outperforms several state-of-the-art methods, produces higher rating prediction accuracy, and exhibits better recommendation performance on several real-world recommendation tasks.

The Impact of Values, Gender and Education on Creative Behaviour in Different Domains in Russian Regions

This paper presents results of the research into different types of creative behaviour and their predictors in the Central and North-Caucasus federal districts of Russia (N=2046). The revised PVQ-R questionnaire of Schwartz for values measurement and the modified Creative Behaviour Inventory (CBI) of Dollinger for creative behaviour measurement were used. The model with five different domains of creative behaviour: visual art, literature, craft, performance, organizational creativity and generalized creativity was confirmed in a simultaneous CFA in both regions. This model with values, gender and level of education as predictors was tested using structural equation modelling with AMOS 19.0. Values, education and gender influence creative behaviour in different domains. The value of Openness to Change positively, and the value of Conservation negatively influence creative behaviour in different domains in both the regions. The impacts of gender and education on creativity have domain and regional specifics: craft is a ‘female’ domain of creativity whereas organizational creativity is a ‘male’ one; higher education promotes organizational and visual creativity in both regions and literature creativity in the North Caucasus.

Socio-cognitive influences on the domain-specificity of prosocial behavior in the second year

The main aim of this study was to explain the domain-specificity of early prosocial behavior in different domains (i.e., helping, comforting, and cooperation) by simultaneously assessing specific socio-cognitive factors (i.e., self-other-differentiation and joint attentional skills) that were hypothesized to be differentially related to the three domains of prosocial behavior. Based on a longitudinal study design, observational and parental report data were collected when toddlers (N=42) from German urban middle-class families were 15 and 18 months of age. At 15 months, regression analyses indicated differential relationships between socio-cognitive development and prosocial behavior (i.e., joint attentional skills were positively related with helping and, as hypothesized, both joint attentional skills and self-other differentiation were positively related with cooperation). Furthermore, self-other differentiation at 15 months predicted increases in coordination between 15 and 18 months. Finally, between 15 and 18 months, parental reports of socio-cognitive measures increased significantly while behavioral measures of both socio-cognitive concepts and prosocial behavior were stable across time. In sum, these results support the theoretical assumption of domain-specific socio-cognitive influences that constitute differential development of prosocial behavior. Implications of the results for theory and future studies are discussed from different perspectives with a focus on an interference interpretation calling for the integration of socialization approaches to the study of prosocial development.

Morningness–Eveningness and Risk Taking

ABSTRACT. Depending on individual differences in biological rhythms and diurnal preferences, people have long been described as either “larks” or “owls.” Larks and owls differ greatly in personality aspects, but from the behavioral perspective it is unclear whether they have significant differences in terms of risky behaviors. Whether morning types or evening types are consistently more risk-taking or risk-averse in different domains remains unknown. This study adopted a general American adult sample to systematically investigate the relationship between chronotype and individuals’ risky behaviors in different domains. By using different methods to measure risky behaviors in different domains, the current research obtained convergent results that morningness was negatively related only to financially risky behaviors for American adults. More specifically, by using the composite scale of morningness and the domain-specific risk attitude scale, Study 1 showed that for American adults, morning types were less likely than evening types to engage in financially risky behaviors (N = 212). In Study 2, after scenario-based methods were used to measure risky behavior, results showed that that participants engaged less in risky behaviors in the domains of gambling and investment (N = 187). A mediator test showed that the negative relationship between morningness and financially risky behaviors was partly mediated by individuals’ self-control ability (self-control scale, Study 1).

Clustering of physical inactivity in leisure, work, commuting and household domains among Brazilian adults

ObjectivesTo identify the clustering of physical inactivity in leisure, work, commuting and household contexts, and the sociodemographic factors associated with the clustering of inactive behaviour in different domains among Brazilian adults. Study designCross-sectional population-based study. MethodsThe study was performed in Florianopolis, capital of Santa Catarina, one of the southern states of Brazil, from September 2009 to January 2010. Adults aged 20–59 years were interviewed. Physical inactivity in each domain was defined as non-participation in specific physical activities, using a validated Brazilian questionnaire. Clustering of physical inactivity was identified by the ratio between observed prevalence and expected prevalence of 16 different combinations. Multinomial logistic regression was used in the analysis of sociodemographic factors associated with clustering of physical inactivity. ResultsOf the 1720 interviewees, the greatest differences between the observed and expected proportions were observed in simultaneous physical inactivity in the leisure and household domains for men, and physical inactivity in the leisure domain alone for women (59% and 88%, respectively); these differences were higher than expected if the behaviours were independent. Physical inactivity in two or more domains was observed more frequently in men and in individuals with a higher per-capita family income. Ageing was associated with physical inactivity in three or four domains. ConclusionsPhysical inactivity was observed in different domains according to gender. Men and older individuals with a higher per-capita family income were more likely to exhibit physical inactivity when all domains were considered together.

A plan classifier based on Chi-square distribution tests

To make good decisions in a social context, humans often need to recognize the plan underlying the behavior of others, and make predictions based on this recognition. This process, when carried out by software agents or robots, is known as plan recognition, or agent modeling. Most existing techniques for plan recognition assume the availability of carefully hand-crafted plan libraries, which encode the a-priori known behavioral repertoire of the observed agents; during run-time, plan recognition algorithms match the observed behavior of the agents against the plan-libraries, and matches are reported as hypotheses. Unfortunately, techniques for automatically acquiring plan-libraries from observations, e.g., by learning or data-mining, are only beginning to emerge. We present an approach for automatically creating the model of an agent behavior based on the observation and analysis of its atomic behaviors. In this approach, observations of an agent behavior are transformed into a sequence of atomic behaviors (events). This stream is analyzed in order to get the corresponding behavior model, represented by a distribution of relevant events. Once the model has been created, the proposed approach presents a method using a statistical test for classifying an observed behavior. Therefore, in this research, the problem of behavior classification is examined as a problem of learning to characterize the behavior of an agent in terms of sequences of atomic behaviors. The experiment results of this paper show that a system based on our approach can efficiently recognize different behaviors in different domains, in particular UNIX command-line data, and RoboCup soccer simulation.

A macroscopic damage‐plastic constitutive law for modeling quasi‐brittle fracture and ductile behavior of concrete

SUMMARYA new phenomenological macroscopic constitutive model for the numerical simulation of quasi‐brittle fracture and ductile concrete behavior, under general triaxial stress conditions, is presented. The model is particularly addressed to simulate a wide range of confinement stress states, as also, to capture the strong influence of the mean stress value in the concrete failure mechanisms.The model is based on a two‐surface damage‐plastic formulation. The mechanical behavior in different domains of the stress space is separately described by means of a quasi‐brittle or ductile material response: (i) For positive values of the mean stress (tensile states), an isotropic continuum damage model with strain softening is considered. In this context, and in order to avoid the Boundary Value Problem ill‐posedness induced by the softening law, a regularization technique based on the Continuum Strong Discontinuity Approach (CSDA) is adopted, which results equivalent to a damage model with embedded cohesive cracks providing anisotropic responses. (ii) A plastic model governs the material behavior when the mean stress is negative (confinement states). It is based on the classical plastic flow theory. In particular, a yield criterion similar to that of Willam and coauthors, which depends on the three stress invariants, is used. Additional features defining the plastic response are: an isotropic strain hardening law and a non‐associative flow rule.The paper presents the numerical implementation of the model using an efficient integration algorithm, namely, the Impl‐Ex scheme. Several widely known experimental tests (such as uniaxial, biaxial and triaxial tests) carried out on concrete specimens are used to calibrate and validate the performance of the proposed formulation. Finally, a classical 2D reinforced concrete beam example is analyzed in order to show the predictive capability of the model in structural analysis applications. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Redistributive policies with heterogeneous social preferences of voters

There is growing evidence on the roles of fairness and other-regarding preferences as fundamental human motives. Call voters with fair preferences, as in Fehr and Schmidt (1999), fair-voters. By contrast, traditional political economy models are based on selfish-voters who derive utility solely from “own” payoff. In a general equilibrium model with endogenous labor supply, a mixture of fair and selfish voters choose optimal policy through majority voting. First, we show that majority voting produces a unique winner in pairwise contests over feasible policies (the Condorcet winner). Second, we show that a preference for greater fairness leads to greater redistribution. An increase in the number of fair voters can also lead to greater redistribution. Third, we show that in economies where the majority are selfish-voters, the decisive policy could be chosen by fair-voters, and vice versa. Fourth, while choosing labor supply, even fair voters behave exactly like selfish voters. We show how this apparently inconsistent behavior in different domains (voting and labor supply) can be rationalized within the model.

Special function related to the concave convex boundary problem of the diffraction theory

The concave–convex boundary problem of the diffraction theory is studied. It corresponds to the scattering of a whispering gallery mode on the point of inflection of the boundary. A new special function related to this boundary problem is introduced and its particular properties are discussed. This special function is defined as a contour integral on the complex plane and its behaviour in different domains of parameters is considered.

Relaxation in glassforming liquids and amorphous solids

The field of viscous liquid and glassy solid dynamics is reviewed by a process of posing the key questions that need to be answered, and then providing the best answers available to the authors and their advisors at this time. The subject is divided into four parts, three of them dealing with behavior in different domains of temperature with respect to the glass transition temperature, Tg, and a fourth dealing with “short time processes.” The first part tackles the high temperature regime T>Tg, in which the system is ergodic and the evolution of the viscous liquid toward the condition at Tg is in focus. The second part deals with the regime T∼Tg, where the system is nonergodic except for very long annealing times, hence has time-dependent properties (aging and annealing). The third part discusses behavior when the system is completely frozen with respect to the primary relaxation process but in which secondary processes, particularly those responsible for “superionic” conductivity, and dopart mobility in amorphous silicon, remain active. In the fourth part we focus on the behavior of the system at the crossover between the low frequency vibrational components of the molecular motion and its high frequency relaxational components, paying particular attention to very recent developments in the short time dielectric response and the high Q mechanical response.