Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Your Teaching Strategy Matters: How Engagement Impacts Application In Health Information Literacy Instruction, Heather A. Johnson, Laura C. Barrett

Dartmouth Scholarship

The purpose of this study was to compare two pedagogical methods, active learning and passive instruction, to determine which is more useful in helping students to achieve the learning outcomes in a one-hour research skills instructional session.

Multimodal Frontostriatal Connectivity Underlies Individual Differences In Self-Esteem, Robert S. Chavez, Todd F. Heatherton

Dartmouth Scholarship

A heightened sense of self-esteem is associated with a reduced risk for several types of affective and psychiatric disorders, including depression, anxiety and eating disorders. However, little is known about how brain systems integrate self-referential processing and positive evaluation to give rise to these feelings. To address this, we combined diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to test how frontostriatal connectivity reflects long-term trait and short-term state aspects of self-esteem. Using DTI, we found individual variability in white matter structural integrity between the medial prefrontal cortex and the ventral striatum was related to trait measures of …

Preempting Performance Challenges: The Effects Of Inoculation Messaging On Attacks To Task Self-Efficacy, Ben Jackson, Josh Compton, Ryan Whiddett, David R. Anthony, James A. Dimmock

Dartmouth Scholarship

Although inoculation messages have been shown to be effective for inducing resistance to counter-attitudinal attacks, researchers have devoted relatively little attention toward studying the way in which inoculation theory principles might support challenges to psychological phenomena other than attitudes (e.g., self-efficacy). Prior to completing a physical (i.e., balance) task, undergraduates (N = 127, M_age = 19.20, SD = 2.16) were randomly assigned to receive either a control or inoculation message, and reported their confidence in their ability regarding the upcoming task. During the task, a confederate provided standardized negative feedback to all participants regarding their performance, and following …

Launching A Virtual Decision Lab: Development And Field-Testing Of A Web-Based Patient Decision Support Research Platform, Aubri S. Hoffman, Hilary A. Llewellyn-Thomas, Anna N. A. Tosteson, Annette M. Oconnor

Dartmouth Scholarship

Over 100 trials show that patient decision aids effectively improve patients’ information comprehension and values-based decision making. However, gaps remain in our understanding of several fundamental and applied questions, particularly related to the design of interactive, personalized decision aids. This paper describes an interdisciplinary development process for, and early field testing of, a web-based patient decision support research platform, or virtual decision lab, to address these questions.

Naturally Occurring Peer Support Through Social Media: The Experiences Of Individuals With Severe Mental Illness Using Youtube, John A. Naslund, Stuart W. Grande, Kelly A. Aschbrenner, Glyn Elwyn

Dartmouth Scholarship

Increasingly, people with diverse health conditions turn to social media to share their illness experiences or seek advice from others with similar health concerns. This unstructured medium may represent a platform on which individuals with severe mental illness naturally provide and receive peer support. Peer support includes a system of mutual giving and receiving where individuals with severe mental illness can offer hope, companionship, and encouragement to others facing similar challenges. In this study we explore the phenomenon of individuals with severe mental illness uploading videos to YouTube, and posting and responding to comments as a form of naturally occurring …

Acute Aerobic Exercise: An Intervention For The Selective Visual Attention And Reading Comprehension Of Low-Income Adolescents, Michele Tine

Dartmouth Scholarship

There is a need for feasible and research-based interventions that target the cognitive performance and academic achievement of low-income adolescents. In response, this study utilized a randomized experimental design and assessed the selective visual attention (SVA) and reading comprehension abilities of low-income adolescents and, for comparison purposes, high-income adolescents after they engaged in 12-min of aerobic exercise. The results suggest that 12-min of aerobic exercise improved the SVA of low- and high-income adolescents and that the benefit lasted for 45-min for both groups. The SVA improvement among the low-income adolescents was particularly large. In fact, the SVA improvement among the …

Socially Excluded Individuals Fail To Recruit Medial Prefrontal Cortex For Negative Social Scenes, Katherine E. Powers, Dylan D. Wagner, Catherine J. Norris, Todd F. Heatherton

Dartmouth Scholarship

Converging behavioral evidence suggests that people respond to experiences of social exclusion with both defensive and affiliative strategies, allowing them to avoid further distress while also encouraging re-establishment of positive social connections. However, there are unresolved questions regarding the cognitive mechanisms underlying people's responses to social exclusion. Here, we sought to gain insight into these behavioral tendencies by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the impact of social exclusion on neural responses to visual scenes that varied on dimensions of sociality and emotional valence. Compared to socially included participants, socially excluded participants failed to recruit dorsomedial prefrontal cortex …

The Dartmouth Database Of Children’S Faces: Acquisition And Validation Of A New Face Stimulus Set, Kirsten A. Dalrymple, Jesse Gomez, Brad Duchaine

Dartmouth Scholarship

Facial identity and expression play critical roles in our social lives. Faces are therefore frequently used as stimuli in a variety of areas of scientific research. Although several extensive and well-controlled databases of adult faces exist, few databases include children’s faces. Here we present the Dartmouth Database of Children’s Faces, a set of photographs of 40 male and 40 female Caucasian children between 6 and 16 years-of-age. Models posed eight facial expressions and were photographed from five camera angles under two lighting conditions. Models wore black hats and black gowns to minimize extra-facial variables. To validate the images, independent raters …

Mapping Disease At An Approximated Individual Level Using Aggregate Data: A Case Study Of Mapping New Hampshire Birth Defects, Xun Shi, Stephanie Miller, Kevin Mwenda, Akikazu Onda

Dartmouth Scholarship

Limited by data availability, most disease maps in the literature are for relatively large and subjectively-defined areal units, which are subject to problems associated with polygon maps. High resolution maps based on objective spatial units are needed to more precisely detect associations between disease and environmental factors. Method: We propose to use a Restricted and Controlled Monte Carlo (RCMC) process to disaggregate polygon-level location data to achieve mapping aggregate data at an approximated individual level. RCMC assigns a random point location to a polygon-level location, in which the randomization is restricted by the polygon and controlled by the background (e.g., …

Self-Regulatory Depletion Increases Emotional Reactivity In The Amygdala, Dylan D. Wagner, Todd F. Heatherton

Dartmouth Scholarship

The ability to self-regulate can become impaired when people are required to engage in successive acts of effortful self-control, even when self-control occurs in different domains. Here, we used functional neuroimaging to test whether engaging in effortful inhibition in the cognitive domain would lead to putative dysfunction in the emotional domain. Forty-eight participants viewed images of emotional scenes during functional magnetic resonance imaging in two sessions that were separated by a challenging attention control task that required effortful inhibition (depletion group) or not (control group). Compared to the control group, depleted participants showed increased activity in the left amygdala to …

Implicitly Priming The Social Brain: Failure To Find Neural Effects, Katherine E. Powers, Todd F. Heatherton

Dartmouth Scholarship

Humans have a fundamental need for social relationships. Rejection from social groups is especially detrimental, rendering the ability to detect threats to social relationships and respond in adaptive ways critical. Indeed, previous research has shown that experiencing social rejection alters the processing of subsequent social cues in a variety of socially affiliative and avoidant ways. Because social perception and cognition occurs spontaneously and automatically, detecting threats to social relationships may occur without conscious awareness or control. Here, we investigated the automaticity of social threat detection by examining how implicit primes affect neural responses to social stimuli. However, despite using a …

Tree Climbing And Human Evolution, Vivek V. Venkataraman, Thomas S. Kraft, Nathaniel J. Dominy

Dartmouth Scholarship

Paleoanthropologists have long argued—often contentiously—about the climbing abilities of early hominins and whether a foot adapted to terrestrial bipedalism constrained regular access to trees. However, some modern humans climb tall trees routinely in pursuit of honey, fruit, and game, often without the aid of tools or support systems. Mortality and morbidity associated with facultative arboreality is expected to favor behaviors and anatomies that facilitate safe and efficient climbing. Here we show that Twa hunter–gatherers use extraordinary ankle dorsiflexion (>45°) during climbing, similar to the degree observed in wild chimpanzees. Although we did not detect a skeletal signature of dorsiflexion …

Resilience In The Face Of Disaster: Prevalence And Longitudinal Course Of Mental Disorders Following Hurricane Ike, Robert H. Pietrzak, Melissa Tracy, Sandro Galea, Dean G. Kilpatrick, Kenneth J. Ruggiero, Jessica L. Hamblen, Steven M. Southwick, Fran H. Norris

Dartmouth Scholarship

Objectives: Natural disasters may increase risk for a broad range of psychiatric disorders, both in the short- and in the medium-term. We sought to determine the prevalence and longitudinal course of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), panic disorder (PD), depression, and suicidality in the first 18 months after Hurricane Ike.

Methods: Six hundred fifty-eight adults representative of Galveston and Chambers Counties, Texas participated in a random, population-based survey. The initial assessment was conducted 2 to 5 months after Hurricane Ike struck Galveston Bay on September 13, 2008. Follow-up assessments were conducted at 5 to 9 and 14 …

Unfakeable Facial Configurations Affect Strategic Choices In Trust Games With Or Without Information About Past Behavior, Constantin Rezlescu, Brad Duchaine, Christopher Y. Olivola, Nick Chater

Dartmouth Scholarship

Background:

Many human interactions are built on trust, so widespread confidence in first impressions generally favors individuals with trustworthy-looking appearances. However, few studies have explicitly examined: 1) the contribution of unfakeable facial features to trust-based decisions, and 2) how these cues are integrated with information about past behavior.

Methodology/Principal Findings:

Using highly controlled stimuli and an improved experimental procedure, we show that unfakeable facial features associated with the appearance of trustworthiness attract higher investments in trust games. The facial trustworthiness premium is large for decisions based solely on faces, with trustworthy identities attracting 42% more money (Study 1), and remains …

Regional Gray Matter Correlates Of Perceived Emotional Intelligence, Nancy S. Koven, Robert M. Roth, Matthew A. Garlinghouse, Laura A. Flashman, Andrew J. Saykin

Dartmouth Scholarship

Coping with stressful life events requires a degree of skill in the ability to attend to, comprehend, label, communicate and regulate emotions. Individuals vary in the extent to which these skills are developed, with the term ‘alexithymia’ often applied in the clinical and personality literature to those individuals most compromised in these skills. Although a frontal lobe model of alexithymia is emerging, it is unclear whether such a model satisfactorily reflects brain-related patterns associated with perceived emotional intelligence at the facet level. To determine whether these trait meta-mood facets (ability to attend to, have clarity of and repair emotions) have …

Bold Signal In Both Ipsilateral And Contralateral Retinotopic Cortex Modulates With Perceptual Fading, Po-Jang Hsieh, Peter U. Tse

Dartmouth Scholarship

Under conditions of visual fixation, perceptual fading occurs when a stationary object, though present in the world and continually casting light upon the retina, vanishes from visual consciousness. The neural correlates of the consciousness of such an object will presumably modulate in activity with the onset and cessation of perceptual fading.

Method: In order to localize the neural correlates of perceptual fading, a green disk that had been individually set to be equiluminant with the orange background, was presented in one of the four visual quadrants; Subjects indicated with a button press whether or not the disk was subjectively visible …

Microsaccade Rate Varies With Subjective Visibility During Motion-Induced Blindness, Po-Jang Hsieh, Peter U. Tse

Dartmouth Scholarship

Motion-induced blindness (MIB) occurs when a dot embedded in a motion field subjectively vanishes. Here we report the first psychophysical data concerning effects of microsaccade/eyeblink rate upon perceptual switches during MIB. We find that the rate of microsaccades/eyeblink rises before and after perceptual transitions from not seeing to seeing the dot, and decreases before perceptual transitions from seeing it to not seeing it. In addition, event-related fMRI data reveal that, when a dot subjectively reappears during MIB, the blood oxygen-level dependent (BOLD) signal increases in V1v and V2v and decreases in contralateral hMT+. These BOLD signal changes observed upon perceptual …

Switching Language Switches Mind: Linguistic Effects On Developmental Neural Bases Of ‘Theory Of Mind’, Chiyoko Kobayashi, Gary H. Glover, Elise Temple

Dartmouth Scholarship

Theory of mind (ToM)—our ability to predict behaviors of others in terms of their underlying intentions—has been examined through false-belief (FB) tasks. We studied 12 Japanese early bilingual children (8−12 years of age) and 16 late bilingual adults (18−40 years of age) with FB tasks in Japanese [first language (L1)] and English [second language (L2)], using fMRI. Children recruited more brain regions than adults for processing ToM tasks in both languages. Moreover, children showed an overlap in brain activity between the L1 and L2 ToM conditions in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). Adults did not show such a convergent activity …

Detecting Agency From The Biological Motion Of Veridical Vs Animated Agents, Raymond A. Mar, William M. Kelley, Todd F. Heatherton, C. Neil Macrae

Dartmouth Scholarship

The ability to detect agency is fundamental for understanding the social world. Underlying this capacity are neural circuits that respond to patterns of intentional biological motion in the superior temporal sulcus and temporoparietal junction. Here we show that the brain's blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) response to such motion is modulated by the representation of the actor. Dynamic social interactions were portrayed by either live-action agents or computer-animated agents, enacting the exact same patterns of biological motion. Using an event-related design, we found that the BOLD response associated with the perception and interpretation of agency was greater when identical physical …

Medial Prefrontal Activity Differentiates Self From Close Others, Todd F. Heatherton, Carrie L. Wyland, C. Neil Macrae, Kathryn E. Demos, Bryan T. Denny, William M. Kelley

Dartmouth Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Medial Prefrontal Dissociations During Processing Of Trait Diagnostic And Nondiagnostic Person Information, Jason P. Mitchell, Jasmin Cloutier, Mahzarin R. Banaji, C Neil Macrae

Dartmouth Scholarship

Previous research has suggested that perceivers spontaneously extract trait-specific information from the behaviour of others. However, little is known about whether perceivers spontaneously engage in the same depth of social-cognitive processing for all person information or reserve such processing specifically for information that conveys diagnostic clues about another person's dispositions. Moreover, a question remains as to whether the processing of such nondiagnostic information can be affected by perceivers’ explicit goal to consider another's dispositions or not. To examine processing of diagnostic and nondiagnostic social information as a function of perceivers’ explicit social-cognitive goals, participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) …