Changing emotional engagement with running through communal self-tracking: the implications of 'teleoaffective shaping' for public health.

Emerging research explores the role of self-tracking in supporting healthy behaviour. Self-tracking comprises a number of interrelated practices; some individual some communal. In this article, we focus on practices that enable interaction between self-trackers through data sharing and communication around personal data. For public health, communal self-tracking has been explored for the additional benefits it provides in addition to self-knowledge. However, under-explored is the emotional entanglement of self-tracking and tracked activities, or the role of practitioners in the dynamic evolution of tracked practices. Qualitative, mixed methods data were collected from leisure-time runners in the SW England who self-track using social fitness app 'Strava', and were interpreted through the lens of practice theory. We find that communal self-tracking affords the active shaping of the emotion and purpose of running. This 'teleoaffective shaping' allows practitioners to negotiate and reconstitute appealing meanings associated with running to protect their practice loyalty. We identify three mechanisms for teleoaffective shaping afforded by Strava: labelling, reward and materialising effort. Findings advance our understanding of how social fitness apps work to retain practitioners of physically active leisure practices. Future research should further explore the multiple ways that associations with tracked physical activity evolve through entanglement with self-tracking practices.

A simple location-tracking app for psychological research.

Location data gathered from a variety of sources are particularly valuable when it comes to understanding individuals and groups. However, much of this work has relied on participants' active engagement in regularly reporting their location. More recently, smartphones have been used to assist with this process, but although commercial smartphone applications are available, these are often expensive and are not designed with researchers in mind. To overcome these and other related issues, we have developed a freely available Android application that logs location accurately, stores the data securely, and ensures that participants can provide consent or withdraw from a study at any time. Further recommendations and R code are provided in order to assist with subsequent data analysis.

A dyadic stimulus set of audiovisual affective displays for the study of multisensory, emotional, social interactions.

We describe the creation of the first multisensory stimulus set that consists of dyadic, emotional, point-light interactions combined with voice dialogues. Our set includes 238 unique clips, which present happy, angry and neutral emotional interactions at low, medium and high levels of emotional intensity between nine different actor dyads. The set was evaluated in a between-design experiment, and was found to be suitable for a broad potential application in the cognitive and neuroscientific study of biological motion and voice, perception of social interactions and multisensory integration. We also detail in this paper a number of supplementary materials, comprising AVI movie files for each interaction, along with text files specifying the three dimensional coordinates of each point-light in each frame of the movie, as well as unprocessed AIFF audio files for each dialogue captured. The full set of stimuli is available to download from: http://motioninsocial.com/stimuli_set/ .

Look at those two!: The precuneus role in unattended third-person perspective of social interactions.

Human beings often observe other people's social interactions without being a part of them. Whereas the implications of some brain regions (e.g. amygdala) have been extensively examined, the implication of the precuneus remains yet to be determined. Here we examined the implication of the precuneus in third-person perspective of social interaction using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Participants performed a socially irrelevant task while watching the biological motion of two agents acting in either typical (congruent to social conventions) or atypical (incongruent to social conventions) ways. When compared to typical displays, the atypical displays elicited greater activation in the central and posterior bilateral precuneus, and in frontoparietal and occipital regions. Whereas the right precuneus responded with greater activation also to upside down than upright displays, the left precuneus did not. Correlations and effective connectivity analysis added consistent evidence of an interhemispheric asymmetry between the right and left precuneus. These findings suggest that the precuneus reacts to violations of social expectations, and plays a crucial role in third-person perspective of others' interaction even when the social context is unattended.

Digital traces of offline mobilization.

Since 2009, there has been an increase in global protests and related online activity. Yet, it is unclear how and why online activity is related to the mobilization of offline collective action. One proposition is that online polarization (or a relative change in intensity of posting mobilizing content around a salient grievance) can mobilize people offline. The identity-norm nexus and normative alignment models of collective action further argue that to be mobilizing, these posts need to be socially validated. To test these propositions, across two analyses, we used digital traces of online behavior and data science techniques to model people's online and offline behavior around a mass protest. In Study 1a, we used Twitter behavior posted on the day of the protest by attendees or nonattendees (759 users; 7,592 tweets) to train and test a classifier that predicted, with 80% accuracy, who participated in offline collective action. Attendees used their mobile devices to plan logistics and broadcast their presence at the protest. In Study 1b, using the longitudinal Twitter data and metadata of a subset of users from Study 1a (209 users; 277,556 tweets), we found that participation in the protest was not associated with an individual's online polarization over the year prior to the protest, but it was positively associated with the validation ("likes") they received on their relevant posts. These two studies demonstrate that rather than being low cost or trivial, socially validated online interactions about a grievance are actually key to the mobilization and enactment of collective action. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The Bumps and BaBies Longitudinal Study (BaBBLeS): a multi-site cohort study of first-time mothers to evaluate the effectiveness of the Baby Buddy app.

BACKGROUND: Health mobile applications (apps) have become very popular, including apps specifically designed to support women during the ante- and post-natal periods. However, there is currently limited evidence for the effectiveness of such apps at improving pregnancy and parenting outcomes. This study aims to assess the effectiveness of a pregnancy and parenting app, Baby Buddy, in improving maternal self-efficacy at 3 months post-birth. METHODS: Participants were 16 years old or over, first-time mothers, 12-16 weeks gestation, recruited by midwives from five English study sites. The Tool to Measure Parenting Self-Efficacy (TOPSE) (primary outcome) was used to compare mothers at 3 months post-birth who had downloaded the Baby Buddy app with those who had not downloaded the app, controlling for confounding factors. RESULTS: Four hundred and eighty-eight participants provided valid data at baseline (12-16 weeks gestation), 296 participants provided valid data at 3 months post-birth, 114 (38.5%) of whom reported that they had used the Baby Buddy app. Baby Buddy app users were more likely to use pregnancy or parenting apps (80.7% vs. 69.6%, P=0.035), more likely to have been introduced to the app by a healthcare professional (P=0.005) and have a lower median score for perceived social support (81 vs. 83, P=0.034) than non-app users. The Baby Buddy app did not elicit a statistically significant change in TOPSE scores from baseline to 3 months post-birth [adjusted odds ratio (OR) 1.12, 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.59 to 2.13, P=0.730]. Finding out about the Baby Buddy app from a healthcare professional appeared to grant no additional benefit to app users compared to all other participants in terms of self-efficacy at 3 months post-birth (adjusted OR 1.16, 95% CI: 0.60 to 2.23, P=0.666). There were no statistically significant differences in the TOPSE scores for the in-app data, in terms of passive use of the app between high and low app users (adjusted OR 0.82, 95% CI: 0.21 to 3.12, P=0.766), nor in terms of active use (adjusted OR 0.47, 95% CI: 0.12 to 1.86, P=0.283). CONCLUSIONS: This study is one of few, to date, that has investigated the effectiveness of a pregnancy and early parenthood app. No evidence for the effectiveness of the Baby Buddy app was found. New technologies can enhance traditional healthcare services and empower users to take more control over their healthcare but app effectiveness needs to be assessed. Further work is needed to consider: (I) how we can best use this new technology to deliver better health outcomes for health service users and, (II) methodological issues of evaluating digital health interventions.

Can Programming Frameworks Bring Smartphones into the Mainstream of Psychological Science?

Smartphones continue to provide huge potential for psychological science and the advent of novel research frameworks brings new opportunities for researchers who have previously struggled to develop smartphone applications. However, despite this renewed promise, smartphones have failed to become a standard item within psychological research. Here we consider the key issues that continue to limit smartphone adoption within psychological science and how these barriers might be diminishing in light of ResearchKit and other recent methodological developments. We conclude that while these programming frameworks are certainly a step in the right direction it remains challenging to create usable research-orientated applications with current frameworks. Smartphones may only become an asset for psychology and social science as a whole when development software that is both easy to use and secure becomes freely available.

Corrigendum: Can Programming Frameworks Bring Smartphones into the Mainstream of Psychological Science?

[This corrects the article on p. 1252 in vol. 7, PMID: 27602010.].

Audiovisual integration of emotional signals from others' social interactions.

Audiovisual perception of emotions has been typically examined using displays of a solitary character (e.g., the face-voice and/or body-sound of one actor). However, in real life humans often face more complex multisensory social situations, involving more than one person. Here we ask if the audiovisual facilitation in emotion recognition previously found in simpler social situations extends to more complex and ecological situations. Stimuli consisting of the biological motion and voice of two interacting agents were used in two experiments. In Experiment 1, participants were presented with visual, auditory, auditory filtered/noisy, and audiovisual congruent and incongruent clips. We asked participants to judge whether the two agents were interacting happily or angrily. In Experiment 2, another group of participants repeated the same task, as in Experiment 1, while trying to ignore either the visual or the auditory information. The findings from both experiments indicate that when the reliability of the auditory cue was decreased participants weighted more the visual cue in their emotional judgments. This in turn translated in increased emotion recognition accuracy for the multisensory condition. Our findings thus point to a common mechanism of multisensory integration of emotional signals irrespective of social stimulus complexity.

Beyond Self-Report: Tools to Compare Estimated and Real-World Smartphone Use.

Psychologists typically rely on self-report data when quantifying mobile phone usage, despite little evidence of its validity. In this paper we explore the accuracy of using self-reported estimates when compared with actual smartphone use. We also include source code to process and visualise these data. We compared 23 participants' actual smartphone use over a two-week period with self-reported estimates and the Mobile Phone Problem Use Scale. Our results indicate that estimated time spent using a smartphone may be an adequate measure of use, unless a greater resolution of data are required. Estimates concerning the number of times an individual used their phone across a typical day did not correlate with actual smartphone use. Neither estimated duration nor number of uses correlated with the Mobile Phone Problem Use Scale. We conclude that estimated smartphone use should be interpreted with caution in psychological research.

Empirical evaluation of the uncanny valley hypothesis fails to confirm the predicted effect of motion.

The uncanny valley hypothesis states that the acceptability of an artificial character will not increase linearly in relation to its likeness to human form. Instead, after an initial rise in acceptability there will be a pronounced decrease when the character is similar, but not identical to human form (Mori, 1970/2012). Moreover, it has been claimed but never directly tested that movement would accentuate this dip and make moving characters less acceptable. We used a number of full-body animated computer characters along with a parametrically defined motion set to examine the effect of motion quality on the uncanny valley. We found that improving the motion quality systematically improved the acceptability of the characters. In particular, the character classified in the deepest location of the uncanny valley became more acceptable when it was animated. Our results showed that although an uncanny valley was found for static characters, the deepening of the valley with motion, originally predicted by Mori (1970/2012), was not obtained.