Important Social Outcomes Research Articles

Recurrent Neural Networks in Mobile Sampling and Intervention.

The rapid rise and now widespread distribution of handheld and wearable devices, such as smartphones, fitness trackers, or smartwatches, has opened a new universe of possibilities for monitoring emotion and cognition in everyday-life context, and for applying experience- and context-specific interventions in psychosis. These devices are equipped with multiple sensors, recording channels, and app-based opportunities for assessment using experience sampling methodology (ESM), which enables to collect vast amounts of temporally highly resolved and ecologically valid personal data from various domains in daily life. In psychosis, this allows to elucidate intermediate and clinical phenotypes, psychological processes and mechanisms, and their interplay with socioenvironmental factors, as well as to evaluate the effects of treatments for psychosis on important clinical and social outcomes. Although these data offer immense opportunities, they also pose tremendous challenges for data analysis. These challenges include the sheer amount of time series data generated and the many different data modalities and their specific properties and sampling rates. After a brief review of studies and approaches to ESM and ecological momentary interventions in psychosis, we will discuss recurrent neural networks (RNNs) as a powerful statistical machine learning approach for time series analysis and prediction in this context. RNNs can be trained on multiple data modalities simultaneously to learn a dynamical model that could be used to forecast individual trajectories and schedule online feedback and intervention accordingly. Future research using this approach is likely going to offer new avenues to further our understanding and treatments of psychosis.

The Shared Genetic Basis of Educational Attainment and Cerebral Cortical Morphology.

Individual differences in educational attainment are linked to differences in intelligence, and predict important social, economic, and health outcomes. Previous studies have found common genetic factors that influence educational achievement, cognitive performance and total brain volume (i.e., brain size). Here, in a large sample of participants from the UK Biobank, we investigate the shared genetic basis between educational attainment and fine-grained cerebral cortical morphological features, and associate this genetic variation with a related aspect of cognitive ability. Importantly, we execute novel statistical methods that enable high-dimensional genetic correlation analysis, and compute high-resolution surface maps for the genetic correlations between educational attainment and vertex-wise morphological measurements. We conduct secondary analyses, using the UK Biobank verbal-numerical reasoning score, to confirm that variation in educational attainment that is genetically correlated with cortical morphology is related to differences in cognitive performance. Our analyses relate the genetic overlap between cognitive ability and cortical thickness measurements to bilateral primary motor cortex as well as predominantly left superior temporal cortex and proximal regions. These findings extend our understanding of the neurobiology that connects genetic variation to individual differences in educational attainment and cognitive performance.

Transdisciplinary research methods in community energy development and governance in Indonesia: Insights for sustainability science

Community renewable energy can contribute to important social and environmental outcomes, and in less industrialised countries may be a means of achieving development priorities as well as climate mitigation goals. The complexity of such initiatives – involving regulatory, technological, financial, and governance issues – demands ways to integrate technical expertise, local cultural and environmental characteristics, and other relevant factors into development processes. This article reflects on a transdisciplinary project that investigated how renewable energy could be implemented to meet the needs and aspirations of rural and remote Indonesian communities. We discuss the sustainability science approach taken and how the transdisciplinary methodology was applied. The article addresses themes of language and communication, methods of knowledge production, legitimacy, planning and time management, and the role and impacts of social and technical disciplines in the research. The paper highlights specific challenges in these areas, and appropriate strategies to mitigate them. Our conclusions propose useful principles for this type of transdisciplinary work: preparation, common understandings, flexibility, shared responsibility, respect, and lightheartedness and humour. The manuscript identifies important empirical and methodological future research priorities, and offers insights to inform social research dimensions of applied research methods in the context of complex development initiatives and the multi-scale socio-economic and political systems in which they take place.

We Are What We Do: Adult Basic Education Should Be About More Than Employability

AbstractIn this commentary, the authors review one area of federal policy, adult basic education policy, since its inception in the 1960s as an example of how educational policy can drift from its broad purpose as it responds to political, social, and economic forces. The authors argue that its current narrow focus on workforce development underestimates the challenges of improving employment and earnings outcomes. More important, it undercuts the value and benefits of skill gains that can accrue before participants are able to attain jobs that can improve their economic outlook. Analysis of adult skill assessments indicate that even small skill increases can have a significant impact on other important social outcomes. Thus, the authors call for broadening the goal of federal adult basic education programs from primarily workforce development to helping participants more effectively fulfill a range of adult roles and responsibilities.

A broader perspective on social outcomes in transport

While the importance of including the interface between transport and the social environment has been acknowledged in the past few decades, application of this remains limited in transport policy and project evaluations. At present, consideration is largely given to impacts of the infrastructure construction and future operation on people living in the vicinity, without looking at social outcomes in terms of personal/societal wellbeing, nor the economic impact of the changes in these conditions. New research has added a further dimension to the social impact of transport, the value that may be added in rural communities. This relates to the leadership role adopted by some bus operators, and their willingness to support the good functioning and vibrancy of their local communities, with important social and economic outcomes that should be included in both CBA evaluations and taken into account in bus service contracts. The authors argue that it is important that these wider benefits are taken into account in transport evaluations, broadening the potential value to both encompass social and associated economic outcomes.

Modern physiognomy: an investigation on predicting personality traits and intelligence from the human face

The human behavior of evaluating other individuals with respect to their personality traits and intelligence by evaluating their faces plays a crucial role in human relations. These trait judgments might influence important social outcomes in our lives such as elections and court sentences. Previous studies have reported that human can make valid inferences for at least four personality traits. In addition, some studies have demonstrated that facial trait evaluation can be learned using machine learning methods accurately. In this work, we experimentally explore whether self-reported personality traits and intelligence can be predicted reliably from a facial image. More specifically, the prediction problem is separately cast in two parts: a classification task and a regression task. A facial structural feature is constructed from the relations among facial salient points, and an appearance feature is built by five texture descriptors. In addition, a minutia-based fingerprint feature from a fingerprint image is also explored. The classification results show that the personality traits Rule-consciousness and Vigilance can be predicted reliably, and that the traits of females can be predicted more accurately than those of male. However, the regression experiments show that it is difficult to predict scores for individual personality traits and intelligence. The residual plots and the correlation results indicate no evident linear correlation between the measured scores and the predicted scores. Both the classification and the regression results reveal that Rule-consciousness and Tension can be reliably predicted from the facial features, while Social boldness gets the worst prediction results. The experiments results show that it is difficult to predict intelligence from either the facial features or the fingerprint feature, a finding that is in agreement with previous studies.

Readying a region: temporally exploring the development of an Australian regional quadruple helix

Understanding how innovation drives regional development has important economic and social outcomes. Models such as Smart Specialisation and the quadruple helix are increasingly adopted given their sensitivity to place‐based contexts. But although innovation processes are dynamic and facilitated by individuals’ interactions, our understanding of how these connections are developed and sustained during helix collaboration development remains under‐investigated. This research adopts an action research approach, focused on a regional Australian case study, to test a multi‐disciplinary conceptual framework exploring key human‐centred, micro‐processes driving quadruple helix development: trust building; power relationships; regional readiness; and time and sphere centrality. The findings demonstrate the interactive nature of these processes, with trust‐building facilitating the deployment of power bases by critical innovation agents which then foments regional readiness for change, subsequently driving the helix spheres towards overlap. These processes were also driven by changing sphere centrality and unique regional temporal structures. Practically, these outcomes offer insights into the human capital dynamics of regional helix collaborations, particularly for identifying the key individuals required to drive their development.

The Evolutionary Psychology of War: Offense and Defense in the Adapted Mind.

The study of warfare from an evolutionary perspective has expanded rapidly over the last couple of decades. However, it has tended to focus on the ancestral origins, prevalence, and instruments of war rather than adaptationist analyses of its underlying psychology. I argue that our evolved coalitional psychology may contain a set of distinct evolved heuristics designed specifically for offensive and defensive coalitional aggression. Data from two survey experiments are presented, in which subjects were given scenarios depicting offensive or defensive aggression and were told to make decisions, for example, regarding their willingness to participate in the conflict, their opinions of others who did not choose to participate, and their expectations benefit. The results indicate that humans do indeed distinguish readily between these two domains and that their willingness to participate, as well as their emotional responses toward others, is highly contingent upon this informational cue in adaptively relevant ways. In addition, and consistent with parental investment theory, data reveal a range of sex differences in attitudes toward coalitional aggression in the two conflict domains. Beyond the study of warfare, this project has implications for our understanding of the relationship between individual behavior and group dynamics, as well as for our understanding of the mechanisms by which the psychological framing of political events can lead to important social outcomes.

At the intersection of criminal justice involvement and sexual orientation: Dynamic networks and health among a population-based sample of young Black men who have sex with men

Mass incarceration of young Black men has a significant impact on their network composition and stability that, in turn, may have major implications for health and well-being. A sub-group of young Black men with criminal justice involvement (CJI) identify as gay, bisexual or are non-identified men who have sex with men (hereafter MSM). This paper focuses on the potential effects of CJI on the composition of Black MSM social and sexual networks, their stability over time, and concomitant health and social outcomes. We use data from the UConnect study, a population-based cohort of young Black MSM 16–29 years of age (n=618) selected using respondent-driven sampling in Chicago from 2013 to 2016. Both confidant and sexual network name generators and interpreters were administered at 9-month intervals over three waves of data collection. Ego and dyadic-level data were collected on behaviors prevalent among MSM and including factors associated with network CJI, network stability, and health outcomes. Generalized Structural Equation Models (GSEM) were utilized to determine the relationship between CJI network composition, network stability and behaviors prevalent among young Black MSM and their networks. In the UConnect cohort, 46% had at least once been detained, arrested or spent time in jail or prison. In addition, 20% of participants reported incident CJI over the study period. Respondents with a history of CJI were significantly more likely to have CJI homophily in their confidant and sexual networks. Multivariate analyses demonstrate that the association between one’s history of CJI, housing instability and drug use is partially explained by one’s network CJI. In addition, a higher prevalence of network CJI is associated with increased turnover in the confidant network, and this network instability is also related to important health and social outcomes. This analysis describes the networks of criminal justice involved men among a representative sample of young Black MSM and demonstrates the relationship between CJI network homophily, network stability and their impact on several key health and social outcomes relevant to this population.

Second-order ethnic diversity: The spatial pattern of diversity, competition and cooperation in Africa

Ethnic diversity has been linked to important social outcomes such as economic underperformance and civil war, yet its study is still hampered by conceptual difficulties and imprecise measurement. In this paper, a modified understanding of ethnic diversity is developed. Ethnic diversity is disaggregated into two components—first- and second-order ethnic diversity—which have opposing consequences for collective outcomes. While first-order ethnic diversity—the diversity of a local community—is theorized to undermine cooperation, second-order ethnic diversity—the ethnic diversity of the hinterland of a community—is theorized to induce ethnic competition, thereby reinforcing cooperation. Relating data from over 100,000 individuals interviewed at 2,942 locations in 33 African countries to novel sub-national indicators of first- and second-order ethno-linguistic diversity, the theory is tested and its basic tenets confirmed. In a next step, I show that it is indeed ethnic competition that accounts for the positive association between second-order diversity and increased cooperation: second-order ethnic diversity is a much better predictor of cooperation in regions where contemporary or historical factors have exacerbated interethnic tensions. The paper sheds new light on the debate on the consequences of ethnic diversity for cooperation and contributes to our understanding of the origins of the global ‘geography of social capital’.

Making Progress? Reproducing Hegemony Through Discourses of “Sustainable Development” in the Australian News Media

ABSTRACTWhile numerous studies have investigated discourses of “sustainable development” in a variety of institutional and academic contexts, media discourses on this issue have remained largely unexamined. But considering the intertwined nature of media and society, the construction of sustainable development in the news may be an important factor shaping future ecological and social outcomes. Proceeding from the thesis that the news is a site in which hegemony may be reproduced, this paper critically analyses discourses used to construct sustainable development in news texts published over the 10-year period 2004–2013 across the eight most widely circulated newspapers in Australia. The findings show that sustainable development news is confined to a narrow range of discourses that largely serve to perpetuate the status quo, which is broadly consistent with the media hegemony thesis. Finally, I discuss the implications of these findings, propose possible explanations, and explore avenues for future research.

A group-mediated physical activity intervention in older knee osteoarthritis patients: effects on social cognitive outcomes.

The objective of the present study was to compare a group-mediated cognitive behavioral (GMCB) physical activity intervention with traditional exercise therapy (TRAD) upon select social cognitive outcomes in sedentary knee osteoarthritis (knee OA) patients. A total of 80 patients (mean age=63.5years; 84% women) were recruited using clinic and community-based strategies to a 12-month, single-blind, two-arm, randomized controlled trial. Mobility-related self-efficacy, self-regulatory self-efficacy (SRSE), and satisfaction with physical function (SPF) were assessed at baseline, 3, and 12months. Results of intent-to-treat 2 (Treatment: GMCB and TRAD)×2 (Time: 3 and 12month) analyses of covariance yielded significantly greater increases in SRSE and SPF (P<0.01) relative to TRAD. Partial correlations revealed that changes in SRSE and SPF were significantly related (P<0.05) to improvements in physical activity and mobility at 3 and 12-months. The GMCB intervention yielded more favorable effects on important social cognitive outcomes than TRAD; these effects were related to improvements in physical activity and mobility.

A Computer Adaptive Measure of Delay Discounting.

Delay discounting has been linked to important behavioral, health, and social outcomes, including academic achievement, social functioning and substance use, but thoroughly measuring delay discounting is tedious and time consuming. We develop and consistently validate an efficient and psychometrically sound computer adaptive measure of discounting. First, we develop a binary search-type algorithm to measure discounting using a large international data set of 4,190 participants. Using six independent samples ( N = 1,550), we then present evidence of concurrent validity with two standard measures of discounting and a measure of discounting real rewards, convergent validity with addictive behavior, impulsivity, personality, survival probability; and divergent validity with time perspective, life satisfaction, age and gender. The new measure is considerably shorter than standard questionnaires, includes a range of time delays, can be applied to multiple reward magnitudes, shows excellent concurrent, convergent, divergent, and discriminant validity-by showing more sensitivity to effects of smoking behavior on discounting.

Do the Big-Five Personality Traits Predict Empathic Listening and Assertive Communication?

As personality traits can influence important social outcomes, the current research investigated whether the Big-Five had predictive influences on communication competences of active-empathic listening (AEL) and assertiveness. A sample of 245 adults of various ages completed the self-report scales. Both Agreeableness and Openness uniquely predicted AEL. Extraversion had the biggest influence on assertiveness but did not uniquely explain AEL variance. Conscientiousness and Neuroticism had small predictive influences on assertiveness. Further investigation into the pathways linking Big-Five facets to the different components of these communication competences is proposed and practical implications including understanding personality traits for successful leadership is discussed.

A Dual Identity Approach for Conceptualizing and Measuring Children's Gender Identity.

The goal was to test a new dual identity perspective on gender identity by asking children (n=467) in three grades (Mage =5.7, 7.6, 9.5) to consider the relation of the self to both boys and girls. This change shifted the conceptualization of gender identity from one to two dimensions, provided insights into the meaning and measurement of gender identity, and allowed for revisiting ideas about the roles of gender identity in adjustment. Using a graphical measure to allow assessment of identity in young children and cluster analyses to determine types of identity, it was found that individual and developmental differences in how similar children feel to both genders, and these variations matter for many important personal and social outcomes.

Conspiracy Theories in a Networked World

ABSTRACTThe arrangements characteristic of systems of networked governance are likely to generate conspiracy theories because they rely on informal rather than formal structures of power. A formal hierarchy may be resented, but it is understood by those affected by it; in network systems, by contrast, it is often hard to determine who is in charge, even though such systems can heavily influence or even determine important social outcomes. While conspiracy theories may be motivated by many factors, in a world in which informal norms and the decisions of networked elites play a large role, we should expect to see a continued and increasing preoccupation with alleged conspiracies. Some allegations of conspiracy may even function as cognitive shortcuts—“as-if” conspiracies—which apply a cui bono style of reasoning to make sense of otherwise opaque modes of social control.

Development of a mathematical equation for post-traumatic stress index with and without physician intervention for the general population

This paper describes the formulation of a post-traumatic stress syndrome index (PTSDI) for the general population based on factors associated with post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD). Additionally, the paper estimates the reduction in the PTSDI subsequent to a clinical intervention such as multimodal group therapy. The relationship between the PTSDI and important psychological and social outcomes such as substance abuse, self-medication, divorce, and suicide is evaluated using correlation and regression analyses. The limitations of this study and avenues for future research are discussed in the concluding remarks.

Personality Traits in Childhood and Adolescence

Like adults, children and adolescents can be described in terms of personality traits: characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving. We review recent research examining how youths’ specific behavioral tendencies cohere into broader traits, how these traits develop across childhood and adolescence, and how they relate to important biological, social, and health outcomes. We conclude that there are both key similarities and key differences between youth and adult personality traits, that youths’ personality traits help shape the course of their lives, and that a full understanding of youth personality traits will require additional research at the intersection of personality, developmental, and clinical psychology.

Classical and Molecular Genetic Research on General Cognitive Ability.

Arguably, no psychological variable has received more attention from behavioral geneticists than what has been called "general cognitive ability" (as well as "general intelligence" or "g"), and for good reason. GCA has a rich correlational network, implying that it may play an important role in multiple domains of functioning. GCA is highly correlated with various indicators of educational attainment, yet its predictive utility is not limited to academic achievement. It is also correlated with work performance, navigating the complexities of everyday life, the absence of various social pathologies (such as criminal convictions), and even health and mortality. Although the causal basis for these associations is not always known, it is nonetheless the case that research on GCA has the potential to provide insights into the origins of a wide range of important social outcomes. In this essay, our discussion of why GCA is considered a fundamentally important dimension of behavior on which humans differ is followed by a look at behavioral genetics research on CGA. We summarize behavioral genetics research that has sought to identify and quantify the total contributions of genetic and environmental factors to individual differences in GCA as well as molecular genetic research that has sought to identify genetic variants that underlie inherited effects.

Regional personality differences in Great Britain.

Recent investigations indicate that personality traits are unevenly distributed geographically, with some traits being more prevalent in certain places than in others. The geographical distributions of personality traits are associated with a range of important political, economic, social, and health outcomes. The majority of research on this subject has focused on the geographical distributions and macro-level correlates of personality across nations or regions of the United States. The aim of the present investigation was to replicate and extend that past work by examining regional personality differences in Great Britain. Using a sample of nearly 400,000 British residents, we mapped the geographical distributions of the Big Five Personality traits across 380 Local Authority Districts and examined the associations with important political, economic, social, and health outcomes. The results revealed distinct geographical clusters, with neighboring regions displaying similar personality characteristics, and robust associations with the macro-level outcome variables. Overall, the patterns of results were similar to findings from past research.