Developing Methods for Assessing Mental Activity Using Human-Smartphone Interactions: Comparative Analysis of Activity Levels and Phase Patterns in General Mental Activities, Working Mental Activities, and Physical Activities.

BACKGROUND: Human biological rhythms are commonly assessed through physical activity (PA) measurement, but mental activity may offer a more substantial reflection of human biological rhythms. OBJECTIVE: This study proposes a novel approach based on human-smartphone interaction to compute mental activity, encompassing general mental activity (GMA) and working mental activity (WMA). METHODS: A total of 24 health care professionals participated, wearing wrist actigraphy devices and using the "Staff Hours" app for more than 457 person-days, including 332 workdays and 125 nonworkdays. PA was measured using actigraphy, while GMA and WMA were assessed based on patterns of smartphone interactions. To model WMA, machine learning techniques such as extreme gradient boosting and convolutional neural networks were applied, using human-smartphone interaction patterns and GPS-defined work hours. The data were organized by date and divided into person-days, with an 80:20 split for training and testing data sets to minimize overfitting and maximize model robustness. The study also adopted the M10 metric to quantify daily activity levels by calculating the average acceleration during the 10-hour period of highest activity each day, which facilitated the assessment of the interrelations between PA, GMA, and WMA and sleep indicators. Phase differences, such as those between PA and GMA, were defined using a second-order Butterworth filter and Hilbert transform to extract and calculate circadian rhythms and instantaneous phases. This calculation involved subtracting the phase of the reference signal from that of the target signal and averaging these differences to provide a stable and clear measure of the phase relationship between the signals. Additionally, multilevel modeling explored associations between sleep indicators (total sleep time, midpoint of sleep) and next-day activity levels, accounting for the data's nested structure. RESULTS: Significant differences in activity levels were noted between workdays and nonworkdays, with WMA occurring approximately 1.08 hours earlier than PA during workdays (P<.001). Conversely, GMA was observed to commence about 1.22 hours later than PA (P<.001). Furthermore, a significant negative correlation was identified between the activity level of WMA and the previous night's midpoint of sleep (ß=-0.263, P<.001), indicating that later bedtimes and wake times were linked to reduced activity levels in WMA the following day. However, there was no significant correlation between WMA's activity levels and total sleep time. Similarly, no significant correlations were found between the activity levels of PA and GMA and sleep indicators from the previous night. CONCLUSIONS: This study significantly advances the understanding of human biological rhythms by developing and highlighting GMA and WMA as key indicators, derived from human-smartphone interactions. These findings offer novel insights into how mental activities, alongside PA, are intricately linked to sleep patterns, emphasizing the potential of GMA and WMA in behavioral and health studies.

Habitual Expressive Suppression of Positive, but not Negative, Emotions Consistently Predicts Lower Well-being across Two Culturally Distinct Regions.

Habitual expressive suppression (i.e., a tendency to inhibit the outward display of one's emotions; hereafter suppression) is often conceptualized as a maladaptive emotion regulation strategy. Yet, is this equally true for suppression of positive and of negative emotions? Across three studies and seven samples (total N > 1300 people) collected in two culturally distinct regions (i.e., Taiwan and the US), we examined the separability and distinct well-being effects of suppressing positive vs. negative emotions. Results consistently showed that (a) people suppressed their positive (vs. negative) emotions less, (b) the construct of suppression of positive (vs. negative) emotions was conceptually farther away from that of suppression of emotions in general, (c) suppression of positive and of negative emotions were only moderately correlated, and (d) only suppression of positive, but not negative, emotions, predicted lower well-being. An internal meta-analysis (k = 52 effect sizes) showed that these associations were robust to the inclusion of age, gender, and region as covariates. Future research may further probe the respective links between suppression of positive and of negative emotions and well-being across more cultural regions and across the life-span.

Believe, express, and enjoy: utility beliefs about social emotion expression consistently predict satisfactory outcomes.

The present study investigates the association between people's beliefs about emotion and their overall satisfaction with a social interaction. We focus on three specific aspects to examine this association: (a) utility beliefs-a dimension of emotion beliefs; (b) emotion expression-an emotion channel; and (c) four social emotions-anger, other-embarrassment, gratitude, and other-pride. We examine whether people's utility beliefs about expressing a social emotion can predict their evaluation of a social interaction when they express (vs. suppress) their social emotion. Results (N = 209) consistently show that when people express their social emotion, their utility beliefs positively predict their satisfaction with an event. However, when people suppress their gratitude, their utility beliefs negatively predict their satisfaction, an effect not observed in the other three emotion events. These findings corroborate the claim that emotion beliefs impact people's emotional lives. Implications for research on emotion beliefs and motivated emotion regulation are discussed.

The role of dialecticism in objective and subjective attitudinal ambivalence.

Although attitudes are often considered positive or negative evaluations, people often have both positive and negative associations with a target object or issue, and when people are ambivalent, they are typically presumed to find the experience aversive because they are motivated to hold clear, univalent attitudes. Cross-cultural research, however, has shown cultural variation in the propensity for dialectical thinking, which is characterized by a tolerance for contradiction. Two studies examined the role of dialectical thinking tendencies in the occurrence of attitudinal ambivalence and how much people subjectively experience their state of ambivalence. Study 1 measured individual differences in dialectical thinking within a culture, and Study 2 compared participants across two cultures (United States and Taiwan) that differ in dialecticism. Across studies, greater dialectical thinking was associated with holding both positive and negative evaluations of the same topic (objective ambivalence) and weaker correlations between objective ambivalence and subjective reports of being conflicted (subjective ambivalence).

The multiple mediating effects of cancer threat appraisal and quality of life on the association between mindfulness and depression for colorectal cancer survivors.

OBJECTIVE: This study explored the multiple mediating effects of cancer threat appraisal, functional status, and symptom distress on the association between mindfulness and depression in colorectal cancer (CRC) patients at the transition stage after completing cancer treatments. METHODS: A total of 90 CRC survivors who received cancer treatments within 3 months participated in this cross-sectional study. The functional status and symptom distress (EORTC-C30 and EORTC CR29), dispositional mindfulness (Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire), cancer threat appraisal ( Constructed Meaning Scale), and depressive symptoms (Beck Depression Inventory-II scale) were collected. The mediation and moderation analyses were conducted using the PROCESS macros for SPSS. RESULTS: Survivors' dispositional mindfulness (γ = -0.49, p < 0.001) and cancer threat appraisal (γ = -0.59, p < 0.001) were significantly associated with depressive symptoms. Simple mediation analysis indicated that cancer threat appraisal mediated the relationship between dispositional mindfulness and depression (ß = -0.02, 95% CI = -0.04 to -0.001). The multiple mediated analysis identified the path between dispositional mindfulness and depression via cancer threat appraisal and colorectal symptom distress (ß = -0.01, 95% CI = -0.03 to -0.01). In the mediated moderation model, the path between dispositional mindfulness and depression via colorectal function was moderated by cancer threat appraisal (ß = -0.02, 95% CI = -0.05 to -0.004). CONCLUSIONS: The two cognitive mechanisms of reducing CRC survivors' depression are as follows: (1) dispositional mindfulness reducing the appraisal of cancer as a threat and increasing positive perceptions of CRC symptoms and (2) the cancer threat appraisal buffered the impacts of CRC's mindfulness and colorectal function on depressive symptoms. Developing mindfulness with cognitive training is recommended for improving depressive symptoms among CRC patients in the transition period.

Author Correction: Investigating the relationship between district-level socioeconomic status and individual obesity in Taiwanese adolescents: A large-scale cross-sectional analysis.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Investigating the relationship between district-level socioeconomic status and individual obesity in Taiwanese adolescents: A large-scale cross-sectional analysis.

The current study aimed to assess the prevalence of obesity and to explore the relationship between socioeconomic status and obesity among adolescents in Taiwan, a transitioning country. Data from the Taiwan School Physical Fitness Database on 1,875,627 Taiwanese adolescents aged 10-18 years were analyzed. The average family income per household in each district was collected from the national statistical institutional database. Descriptive statistics, Chi-square tests, Pearson correlation analysis, and mixed model analyses were used. The overall prevalence of combined overweight and obesity was 28.1%. The prevalence of overweight/obesity significantly differed according to gender and age. Furthermore, the average family income per household was negatively associated with the district-level prevalence of obesity. Additionally, when controlling for physical fitness, the average family income per household remained negatively associated with adolescent obesity. In addition, multilevel analysis was also applied to explore the relationship between district-level socioeconomic status and individual-level obesity to prevent the nested data structure from affecting the results. The results revealed that the average family income per household negatively correlated with individual obesity. These findings provide insight for public health officials into preventing and managing adolescent obesity.

Cultural distance between parents' and children's creativity: A within-country approach in Taiwan.

The present study adopted a within-country approach to investigate the relation of cultural distance to general creativity and math creativity in Taiwan. First, we conducted a pilot study of 201 young adolescents with parents from one of the 3 largest subethnic groups in Taiwan, namely Min-nan Taiwanese, Ha-kka Taiwanese, and Outside-Province Taiwanese. The results revealed that young Taiwanese adolescents perceived the cultural distance between Min-nan Taiwanese and Outside-Province Taiwanese as larger than the cultural distance between the other subethnic groups. The main study revealed that 610 young adolescents from large cultural distance families (i.e., those comprising 1 Min-nan Taiwanese parent and 1 Outside-Province Taiwanese parent) outperformed those from small cultural distance families (i.e., those comprising 2 Min-nan Taiwanese parents, and those comprising 1 Min-nan Taiwanese parent and 1 Ha-kka Taiwanese parent) on both general creativity and math creativity. This pattern remained even after controlling for family socioeconomic status, parents' education level, and adolescents' school mathematical performance. Implications and limitations are discussed.