Search results for " Behavioral Sciences"
showing 10 items of 124 documents
Unfair play? Video games as exploitative monetized services: An examination of game patents from a consumer protection perspective
2019
Video games as a consumer product have changed significantly with the advent of in-game purchasing systems (e.g., microtransactions, ‘loot boxes’). This review examines consumer protections related to in-game purchasing by anticipating some of the potential design strategies that might contribute to higher risk consumer behavior. Attention was directed towards the analysis of patents for potential in-game purchasing systems, with 13 identified on Google Patents. The design features were analysed in relation to the consumer rights and guarantees described in the terms of use agreements of the patent assignees. The analysis revealed that some in-game purchasing systems could be characterized …
Symptoms and the body: Taking the inferential leap
2017
The relationship between the conscious experience of physical symptoms and indicators of objective physiological dysfunction is highly variable and depends on characteristics of the person, the context and their interaction. This relationship often breaks down entirely in the case of "medically unexplained" or functional somatic symptoms, violating the basic assumption in medicine that physical symptoms have physiological causes. In this paper, we describe the prevailing theoretical approach to this problem and review the evidence pertaining to it. We then use the framework of predictive coding to propose a new and more comprehensive model of the body-symptom relationship that integrates ex…
Spanish validation of the Sexual Addiction Screening Test.
2018
Background and aims Sexual addiction is a pathological behavior characterized by a combination of excessive sexual desire and impaired ability to control it. Its incidence ranges between 1.2% and 32.2%, although this number may vary depending on the screening tool used. This wide variability is largely due to the use of non-validated instruments (e.g., structural validity relying on exploratory analyses, instruments translated without an additional validation process, or instruments validated in another format). To deal with these limitations, this study tested the psychometric properties of the Spanish paper-and-pencil and online versions of the Sexual Addiction Screening Test (SAST). Met…
Worker Personality and Its Association with Spatially Structured Division of Labor
2014
Division of labor is a defining characteristic of social insects and fundamental to their ecological success. Many of the numerous tasks essential for the survival of the colony must be performed at a specific location. Consequently, spatial organization is an integral aspect of division of labor. The mechanisms organizing the spatial distribution of workers, separating inside and outside workers without central control, is an essential, but so far neglected aspect of division of labor. In this study, we investigate the behavioral mechanisms governing the spatial distribution of individual workers and its physiological underpinning in the ant Myrmica rubra. By investigating worker personali…
The role of left supplementary motor area in grip force scaling
2013
Skilled tool use and object manipulation critically relies on the ability to scale anticipatorily the grip force (GF) in relation to object dynamics. This predictive behaviour entails that the nervous system is able to store, and then select, the appropriate internal representation of common object dynamics, allowing GF to be applied in parallel with the arm motor commands. Although psychophysical studies have provided strong evidence supporting the existence of internal representations of object dynamics, known as "internal models", their neural correlates are still debated. Because functional neuroimaging studies have repeatedly designated the supplementary motor area (SMA) as a possible …
Effects of self-efficacy on healthy eating depends on normative support: a prospective study of long-haul truck drivers
2017
Purpose Fruit and vegetable intake (FV) is insufficient in industrialized nations and there is excess of discretionary food choices (DC; foods high in fat, sugar, and salt). Long-haul truck drivers are considered a particularly at-risk group given the limited food choices and normatively reinforced eating habits at truck rest-stops. Self-efficacy and normative support are key determinants of eating behavior yet the processes underlying their effects on behavior are not well understood. We tested the direct and interactive effects of self-efficacy and normative support on healthy eating behaviors in long-haul truck drivers in a prospective correlational study. Method Long-haul truck drivers …
openSNP–A Crowdsourced Web Resource for Personal Genomics
2014
Genome-Wide Association Studies are widely used to correlate phenotypic traits with genetic variants. These studies usually compare the genetic variation between two groups to single out certain Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) that are linked to a phenotypic variation in one of the groups. However, it is necessary to have a large enough sample size to find statistically significant correlations. Direct-To-Consumer (DTC) genetic testing can supply additional data: DTC-companies offer the analysis of a large amount of SNPs for an individual at low cost without the need to consult a physician or geneticist. Over 100,000 people have already been genotyped through Direct-To-Consumer genet…
Coordinated Interpersonal Behaviour in Collective Dance Improvisation: The Aesthetics of Kinaesthetic Togetherness
2018
International audience; Collective dance improvisation (e.g., traditional and social dancing, contact improvisation) is a participatory, relational and embodied art form which eschews standard concepts in aesthetics. We present our ongoing research into the mechanisms underlying the lived experience of "togetherness" associated with such practices. Togetherness in collective dance improvisation is kinaesthetic (based on movement and its perception), and so can be simultaneously addressed from the perspective of the performers and the spectators, and be measured. We utilise these multiple levels of description: the first-person, phenomenological level of personal experiences, the third-perso…
Expressive timing facilitates the neural processing of phrase boundaries in music: Evidence from event-related potentials
2013
The organization of sound into meaningful units is fundamental to the processing of auditory information such as speech and music. In expressive music performance, structural units or phrases may become particularly distinguishable through subtle timing variations highlighting musical phrase boundaries. As such, expressive timing may support the successful parsing of otherwise continuous musical material. By means of the event-related potential technique (ERP), we investigated whether expressive timing modulates the neural processing of musical phrases. Musicians and laymen listened to short atonal scale-like melodies that were presented either isochronously (deadpan) or with expressive tim…
Interindividual Differences in Treatment Effects based on Structural Equation Models with Latent Variables: An EffectLiteR Tutorial
2019
The investigation of interindividual differences in the effects of a treatment is challenging, because many constructs-of-interest in psychological research such as depression or anxiety are latent variables and modeling heterogeneity in treatment effects requires interactions and potentially nonlinear relationships. In this paper, we present a tutorial of the EffectLiteR approach (Mayer, Dietzfelbinger, Rosseel, & Steyer, 2016) that allows for estimating individual treatment effects based on latent variable models. We describe step by step how to apply the approach using the EffectLiteR software package with data from the multicenter randomized controlled trial of the Social Phobia…