Using structural topic modeling to understand ethnicity-related narratives.

OBJECTIVE: Narrative identity is a promising approach for understanding the content of individuals' ethnic identities but can be limited by the time-intensive nature of human coding and the reliance on preestablished coding systems. BACKGROUND: The aim of our preregistered study is to elucidate the content of individuals' ethnicity-related experiences using a novel statistical approach. METHOD: We applied structural topic modeling (STM), a natural language processing tool, to narratives written by an ethnically diverse sample of 1149 young adults about a moment they felt aware of their ethnicity. RESULTS: We identified 14 topics within ethnicity narratives and analyzed how each topic related to both the participant's ethnicity and the human-coded themes of agency and communion. For example, the topic Gained perspective of structural inequality was associated with greater agency, whereas Peer dynamics was associated with greater communion. Ethnic/cultural celebration was associated with both. CONCLUSIONS: This study introduces STM as a useful tool for extracting topic content in narrative data and demonstrates how the multi-method assessment of ethnicity narratives provides greater insight into the content of ethnic experiences. These findings contribute to our understanding of contextualized aspects of personality, including the innovative ways we might examine them.

Scaling a common assessment of associative ability: Development and validation of a multiple-choice compound remote associates task.

The assessment of creativity as an individual difference has historically focused on divergent thinking, which is increasingly viewed as involving the associative processes that are also understood to be a key component of creative potential. Research on associative processes has proliferated in many sub-fields, often using Compound Remote Associates (CRA) tasks with an open response format and relatively small participant samples. In the present work, we introduce a new format that is more amenable to large-scale data collection in survey designs, and present evidence for the reliability and validity of CRA measures in general using multiple large samples. Study 1 uses a large, representative dataset (N = 1,323,480) to demonstrate strong unidimensionality and internal consistency (α = .97; ωt = .87), as well as links to individual differences in temperament, cognitive ability, occupation, and job characteristics. Study 2 uses an undergraduate sample (N = 685) to validate the use of a multiple-choice format relative to the traditional approach. Study 3 uses a crowdsourced sample (N = 357) to demonstrate high test-retest reliability of the items (r =.74). Finally, Study 4 uses a sample that overlaps with Study 1 (N = 1,502,922) to provide item response theory (IRT) parameters for a large set of high-quality CRA items that use a multiple-choice response mode, thus facilitating their use in future research on creativity, insight, and related topics.

Associations for Sense of Purpose with Smoking and Health Outcomes Among Adults with Diabetes.

BACKGROUND: Health complications from diabetes place major strain on individuals, financially and emotionally. The onset and severity of these complications are largely driven by patients' behaviors, making psychosocial factors that influence behaviors key targets for interventions. One promising factor is sense of purpose or the degree to which a person believes their life has direction. METHOD: The current study investigated whether sense of purpose predicts self-rated health, cardiovascular disease, and smoking status among adults with diabetes concurrently and prospectively. Moreover, it tested whether these associations held across multiple samples and cultures. Coordinated analysis using 12 datasets cross-sectionally and eight longitudinally (total N = 7277) estimated the degree to which sense of purpose is associated with subjective health, smoking status, and cardiovascular disease among adults with diabetes. Coordinated analysis allows for greater generalizability of results across cultures, time periods, and measurement instruments. Datasets were included if they concurrently included a measure of sense of purpose and diabetes status and at least one health measure: self-rated health, current smoking status, or heart condition status. RESULTS: Sense of purpose was associated with higher self-rated health, smoking status, and cardiovascular disease cross-sectionally and self-rated health prospectively. Purpose was unassociated with changes in health over time. CONCLUSION: These results highlight the relationship of a key individual difference, sense of purpose, to the behaviors and outcomes of adults with diabetes. While more research is needed to determine the boundaries of this relationship, it seems sense of purpose may be considered in the future as a potential target for intervention.

Working toward a purpose: Examining the cross-sectional and longitudinal effects of work characteristics on sense of purpose.

OBJECTIVE: Employment appears to influence employees' sense of purpose, insofar as work roles can provide life direction and allow individuals to fulfill meaningful aims or have regular goal-related activity engagement. However, research is needed on which specific characteristics of the work predict employees' sense of purpose. The current study sought to quantitate the degree to which specific work characteristics, including skill variety, autonomy, coworker support, and supervisor support, were associated with initial levels and changes in purpose. Additionally, we examine positive and negative work-home spillover as moderators of these relationships. METHODS: We examined hypothesized relationships in a subsample (N = 4,963) of a nationally representative panel study which included between two and three assessments of work characteristics, spillover, and sense of purpose, each roughly 10 years apart. RESULTS: Using multilevel models to assess within-person associations and lagged effects, we found that greater skill variety and coworker support but not autonomy or supervisor support, were associated with higher levels of purpose. Moreover, increases in purpose were associated with higher initial levels of skill variety. These relationships were not moderated by spillover. CONCLUSION: Individuals with skill variety and coworker support at work appear to experience the strongest levels of sense of purpose.

Personality traits predict dietary habits in middle-to-older adults.

Personality traits are consistently associated with health behaviors, but little research has examined the role of personality on eating habits among middle-to-older adults. The current study (n = 665) examined the associations between traits and dietary habits and whether healthy eating predicted health at age 60, with the Hawaii Personality and Health Cohort. Eating healthy foods was associated with higher agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness, and predicted better self-rated health and lower BMI. Eating unhealthy foods was associated with lower agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness, and predicted lower self-rated health. Results were not moderated by SES.

No Evidence of "healthy neuroticism" in the Hawaii Personality and Health Cohort.

BACKGROUND: Heterogeneity in the effects of trait neuroticism on mortality has inspired recent theories of "healthy neuroticism," or the possibility that neuroticism can lead people down either healthy or unhealthy behavioral pathways. The logical extension of this theory is that some construct-perhaps another trait, financial resource, or health-relevant situation-changes the relationship between neuroticism and health. The other possibility is that different components of neuroticism lead to different health behaviors and therefore different outcomes. PURPOSE: The current study systematically examines the relationship between child and adult neuroticism and various health indicators including perceptions of health, behaviors, health outcomes, and biomarkers of health. Finally, we examine both potential moderators of the associations with neuroticism and examine its facet structure. METHODS: The current study utilizes data from the Hawaii Longitudinal Study of Personality and Health, which includes both adult (IPIP-NEO) and childhood (teacher-reported) measures of personality and socioeconomic status, as well as a variety of health outcomes, from self-reported health and health behavior to biological markers, such as cholesterol and blood glucose levels. Sample sizes range from 299 to 518. RESULTS: The relationship between neuroticism and health was not consistently moderated by any other variable, nor were facets of neuroticism differentially related to health. CONCLUSIONS: Despite a systematic investigation of the potential "paths" which may differentiate the relationship of neuroticism to health, no evidence of healthy neuroticism was found.

Evaluating eight-year trajectories for sense of purpose in the health and retirement study.

OBJECTIVES: Though cross-sectional research has suggested that sense of purpose declines into older adulthood, it remains unclear whether inter-individual variability occurs in these trajectories, and what factors predict these trajectories. The current study provides one of the first longitudinal investigations into how individuals' sense of purpose fluctuates in older adulthood. METHOD: Participants from the Health and Retirement Study (n = 4,234, mean age = 65 years), completed assessments of sense of purpose over three years, along with multiple potential predictors (health, personality, demographics) at the start. RESULTS: Second-order latent growth models demonstrated both mean-level declines on purpose over time, as well as the capacity for inter-individual variability in change patterns for retired adults. Among this cohort, health status, educational attainment, and marital status were significant predictors of purpose trajectories over time, though broad personality trait dimensions failed to uniquely predict change in sense of purpose. However, measurement invariance tests suggest that the scale did not operate similarly across work status groups. CONCLUSION: Findings advance the previous literature by demonstrating inter-individual variability in sense of purpose for those participants who had retired. Future research should consider that purpose inventories may operate differently for those in the workplace versus retired adults.

Meta-analytic techniques reveal that corvid causal reasoning in the Aesop's Fable paradigm is driven by trial-and-error learning.

The classic Aesop's fable, Crow and the Pitcher, has inspired a major line of research in comparative cognition. Over the past several years, five articles (over 32 experiments) have examined the ability of corvids (e.g., rooks, crows, and jays) to complete lab-based analogs of this fable, by requiring them to drop stones and other objects into tubes of water to retrieve a floating worm (Bird and Emery in Curr Biol 19:1-5, 2009b; Cheke et al. in Anim Cogn 14:441-455, 2011; Jelbert et al. in PLoS One 3:e92895, 2014; Logan et al. in PLoS One 7:e103049, 2014; Taylor et al. in Gray R D 12:e26887, 2011). These researchers have stressed the unique potential of this paradigm for understanding causal reasoning in corvids. Ghirlanda and Lind (Anim Behav 123:239-247, 2017) re-evaluated trial-level data from these studies and concluded that initial preferences for functional objects, combined with trial-and-error learning, may account for subjects' performance on key variants of the paradigm. In the present paper, we use meta-analytic techniques to provide more precise information about the rate and mode of learning that occurs within and across tasks. Within tasks, subjects learned from successful (but not unsuccessful) actions, indicating that higher-order reasoning about phenomena such as mass, volume, and displacement is unlikely to be involved. Furthermore, subjects did not transfer information learned in one task to subsequent tasks, suggesting that corvids do not engage with these tasks as variants of the same problem (i.e., how to generate water displacement to retrieve a floating worm). Our methodological analysis and empirical findings raise the question: Can Aesop's fable studies distinguish between trial-and-error learning and/or higher-order causal reasoning? We conclude they cannot.

A Comparison of Human Narrative Coding of Redemption and Automated Linguistic Analysis for Understanding Life Stories.

The majority of life narrative research is performed using trained human coders. In contrast, automated linguistic analysis is oft employed in the study of verbal behaviors. These two methodological approaches are directly compared to determine the utility of automated linguistic analysis for the study of life narratives. In a study of in-person interviews (N = 158) and a second study of life stories collected online (N = 242), redemption scores are compared to the output of the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (Pennebaker, Francis & Booth, 2001). Additionally, patterns of language are found using exploratory principal components analysis. In both studies, redemption scores are modestly correlated with some LIWC categories and unassociated with the components. Patterns of language do not replicate across samples, indicating that the structure of language does not extend to a broader population. Redemption scores and linguistic components are independent predictors of life satisfaction up to 3 years later. These studies converge on the finding that human-coded redemption and automated linguistic analysis are complementary and nonredundant methods of analyzing life narratives, and considerations for the study of life narratives are discussed.

The person-environment fit of immigrants to the United States: A registered report.

There are notable parallels between processes leading to person-environment fit (PE-fit) and processes of selection and acculturation among U.S. immigrants. Thus, a natural question is: Do immigrants benefit from fitting their new environments? PE-fit appears to have uniformly positive effects in the education, career, and personality literatures, but it is unclear whether this would be the case for immigrants. The present study evaluated the PE-fit of U.S. immigrants (N = 39,195) to their new host communities (9,925 Zip Code Tabulation Areas [ZCTAs]). PE-fit varied across immigrants. On average, immigrant PE-fit was lower (b = 0.23 and b = 0.35) than the PE-fit of U.S. natives (b = 0.47; N = 122,339 from 2,374 ZCTAs). Immigrants more closely matched their community's profile when they were older, more educated, from Western countries, or from countries with French or German as the official language. PE-fit was positively associated with immigrant traits of Honesty, Introspection, Creativity, and Industry. Immigrants experienced better PE-fit when they resided in communities with more educated residents, with residents born abroad-particularly in the same world region-or with residents with a similar ethnic background. Finally, immigrant PE-fit was associated with well-being and self-reported health. We discuss the implications for the study of U.S. immigrants and the field of acculturation and propose future directions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Longitudinal associations among the Big Five personality traits and healthcare utilization in the U.S.

OBJECTIVE: One critical component of individual and public health is healthcare utilization, or the extent to which individuals have routine check-ups, schedule treatments, or use emergency services. However, we know little about who uses healthcare services and what types, the conditions that exacerbate utilization, or the factors that explain why people seek out services. The present study fills these gaps in the literature by investigating the role of personality factors in predicting various forms of healthcare utilization, how these associations vary by age, socioeconomic resources, and chronic conditions, as well as one potential psychological mediating mechanism (i.e., sense of control). METHODS: We use data from a large longitudinal sample of Americans (N = 7108), with three assessments spanning 20 years. Participants reported on their Big Five personality traits using the Midlife Development Inventory, healthcare utilization across three domains (routine visits, scheduled treatment, urgent care), age, income, insurance, chronic conditions, and sense of control. RESULTS: Multilevel models showed that people who were more agreeable and neurotic tended to use more healthcare services. Moreover, on occasions when people were more extraverted and open, they tended to use more healthcare services. There were several nuances in personality-healthcare utilization associations depending on the type of healthcare service, age, and socioeconomic resources. Longitudinal mediation analyses demonstrated sense of control as one mechanism linking personality traits to healthcare utilization in the U.S. CONCLUSIONS: We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of interactions between individuals and structural systems for promoting the health of aging U.S. Americans.

Personality traits and health care use: A coordinated analysis of 15 international samples.

Some people use health care services more than others. Identifying factors associated with health care use has the potential to improve the effectiveness, efficiency, and equity of health care. In line with the Andersen behavioral model of health care utilization and initial empirical findings, personality traits may be key predisposing factors associated with health care use. Across 15 samples, the present study examined cross-sectional and prospective associations between Big Five personality traits and the likelihood of dental visits, general medical practitioner visits, and hospitalizations. Using coordinated data analysis, we estimated models within each of 15 samples individually (sample Ns ranged from 516 to 305,762), and then calculated weighted mean effect sizes using random-effects meta-analysis across samples (total N = 358,803). According to the synthesized results, people higher in conscientiousness, agreeableness, extraversion, and openness, and lower in neuroticism were more likely to visit the dentist; people higher in neuroticism were more likely to visit general medical practitioners; and people lower in conscientiousness and agreeableness and higher in neuroticism were more likely to be hospitalized. Associations tended to be small with odds ratios around 1.20 (rs ≈ .05). These findings provide evidence across 15 international samples for small but consistent associations between personality traits and health care use and demonstrate that personality-health care associations differ by type of care. We discuss directions for future research, including examining more specific personality facets (e.g., productiveness vs. responsibility) as well as important dimensions of health care (e.g., preventative vs. reactive care; acute vs. chronic care). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Personality traits and mental health care utilization: Longitudinal findings from the MIDUS.

Underutilization of mental health services is prevalent in the U.S., and an understanding of utilization patterns can inform interventions to enhance treatment use. The current study investigated longitudinal associations between changes in mental health care utilization (MHCU) and Big Five personality traits. Data included three waves (4,658 adult participants) of the Midlife Development in the United States (MIDUS) study. 1,632 participants provided data at all three waves. Second-order latent growth curve models showed that MHCU level predicted an increase in emotional stability, and emotional stability level predicted a decrease in MHCU. Increases in emotional stability, extraversion, and conscientiousness predicted decreases in MHCU. These results indicate that personality is associated with MHCU over time and may inform interventions to increase MHCU.

Data overuse in aging research: Emerging issues and potential solutions.

Aging and lifespan development researchers have been fortunate to have public access to many longitudinal datasets. These data are valuable and see high utilization, yet this has a considerable downside. Many of these are heavily overused. Overuse of publicly available datasets creates dependency among published research papers giving the false impression of independent contributions to knowledge by reporting the same associations over multiple papers. This is a potentially serious problem in the aging literature given the high use of a relatively small number of well-known studies. Any irregularities or sampling biases in this relatively small number of samples have outsize influence on perceived answers to key aging questions. We detail this problem, focusing on issues of dependency among studies, sampling bias and overfitting, and contradictory estimates of the same effect from the same data in independent publications. We provide solutions, including greater use of data sharing, pre-registrations, holdout samples, split-sample cross-validation, and coordinated analysis. We argue these valuable datasets are public resources that are being diminished by overuse, with parallels in environmental science. Taking a conservation perspective, we hold that these practices (pre-registration, holdout samples) can preserve data resources for future generations of researchers. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Prospective self- and informant-personality associations with inflammation, health behaviors, and health indicators.

OBJECTIVE: Personality influences many aspects of the health process. It is unclear to what extent self- and informant-reports of the Big Five offer incremental validity for the prediction of inflammatory biomarkers and whether inflammation provides a unique pathway between personality and indicators of physical health, independent of health behaviors. METHOD: Using data from older adults (N = 1,630) enrolled in the St. Louis Personality and Aging Network study, we tested whether self- and informant-reported Big Five traits show unique associations with inflammation (IL-6, CRP, TNF-α). Further, we tested whether inflammation and health behaviors indirectly link personality to health-related quality of life, body mass index, and chronic disease burden using longitudinal mediation in a structural equation modeling framework. RESULTS: Self-reports, informant-reports, and general trait factors of personality predicted future inflammatory biomarker levels (unstandardized regression coefficients ranged -.08 to .07 for self, -.13 to -.10 for informants, and -.16 to -.11 for general). Additionally, all assessment methods of personality were associated with the indicators of physical health through biomarker and health behavior pathways. Effects were primarily found for conscientiousness and neuroticism; IL-6 and CRP were the biomarkers with the most indirect effects; and indirect paths overall emerged more frequently through health behaviors, but this varied by outcome. CONCLUSIONS: Self- and informant-reports provided unique predictive validity of inflammatory biomarkers. Findings highlight the benefits of using of multiple assessments of personality and the importance of examining multiple, distinct pathways by which personality might influence health to understand the mechanisms underlying this relationship more fully. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Coordinated data analysis: Knowledge accumulation in lifespan developmental psychology.

Coordinated analysis is a powerful form of integrative analysis, and is well suited in its capacity to promote cumulative scientific knowledge, particularly in subfields of psychology that focus on the processes of lifespan development and aging. Coordinated analysis uses raw data from individual studies to create similar hypothesis tests for a given research question across multiple datasets, thereby making it less vulnerable to common criticisms of meta-analysis such as file drawer effects or publication bias. Coordinated analysis can sometimes use random effects meta-analysis to summarize results, which does not assume a single true effect size for a given statistical test. By fitting parallel models in separate datasets, coordinated analysis preserves the heterogeneity among studies, and provides a window into the generalizability and external validity of a set of results. The current article achieves three goals: First, it describes the phases of a coordinated analysis so that interested researchers can more easily adopt these methods in their labs. Second, it discusses the importance of coordinated analysis within the context of the credibility revolution in psychology. Third, it encourages the use of existing data networks and repositories for conducting coordinated analysis, in order to enhance accessibility and inclusivity. Subfields of research that require time- or resource- intensive data collection, such as longitudinal aging research, would benefit by adopting these methods. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Mapping Individual Differences on the Internet: Case Study of the Type 1 Diabetes Community.

BACKGROUND: Social media platforms, such as Twitter, are increasingly popular among communities of people with chronic conditions, including those with type 1 diabetes (T1D). There is some evidence that social media confers emotional and health-related benefits to people with T1D, including emotional support and practical information regarding health maintenance. Research on social media has primarily relied on self-reports of web-based behavior and qualitative assessment of web-based content, which can be expensive and time-consuming. Meanwhile, recent advances in natural language processing have allowed for large-scale assessment of social media behavior. OBJECTIVE: This study attempts to document the major themes of Twitter posts using a natural language processing method to identify topics of interest in the T1D web-based community. We also seek to map social relations on Twitter as they relate to these topics of interest, to determine whether Twitter users in the T1D community post in "echo chambers," which reflect their own topics back to them, or whether users typically see a mix of topics on the internet. METHODS: Through Twitter scraping, we gathered a data set of 691,691 tweets from 8557 accounts, spanning a date range from 2008 to 2020, which includes people with T1D, their caregivers, health practitioners, and advocates. Tweet content was analyzed for sentiment and topic, using Latent Dirichlet Allocation. We used social network analysis to examine the degree to which identified topics are siloed within specific groups or disseminated through the broader T1D web-based community. RESULTS: Tweets were, on average, positive in sentiment. Through topic modeling, we identified 6 broad-bandwidth topics, ranging from clinical to advocacy to daily management to emotional health, which can inform researchers and practitioners interested in the needs of people with T1D. These analyses also replicate prior work using machine learning methods to map social behavior on the internet. We extend these results through social network analysis, indicating that users are likely to see a mix of these topics discussed by the accounts they follow. CONCLUSIONS: Twitter communities are sources of information for people with T1D and members related to that community. Topics identified reveal key concerns of the T1D community and may be useful to practitioners and researchers alike. The methods used are efficient (low cost) while providing researchers with enormous amounts of data. We provide code to facilitate the use of these methods with other populations.

Psychosocial factors associated with preventive pediatric care during the COVID-19 pandemic.

BACKGROUND: Identifying the factors that predict non-adherence to recommended preventive pediatric care is necessary for the development of successful interventions to improve compliance. PURPOSE: Given the substantial decline in well-child visits and influenza vaccinations, we sought to examine sociodemographic (i.e., parent age, education, employment status, child age, insurance coverage, household size, race and ethnicity, income, COVID-19 incidence in state) and psychosocial (i.e., child temperament, parent mental health, parent personality traits) factors associated with preventative pediatric care (well-child visits, influenza vaccines) during the COVID-19 pandemic. METHODS: As part of a larger, ongoing study, 1875 parents (96% mothers, 65% age 35 or younger, 58% with a college degree) reported whether they had missed any recommended or scheduled well-child visits since the pandemic and whether they had vaccinated their child against the flu. Using data collected during fall 2020, we examine differences in these health outcomes across social/demographic factors and psychological profiles. In addition, we use lasso logistic regression models to (1) estimate the accuracy with which we can predict adherence from these characteristics and (2) identify factors most strongly, independently associated with adherence. RESULTS: Parent psychological factors were associated with outcomes above and beyond known demographic and social factors. For example, parent industriousness and orderliness were associated with greater likelihoods of attending well-child visits and vaccinating children, while parent conservatism and creativity were associated with lower rates. We also replicate prior work documenting that health insurance, income, and household size are major factors in receiving adequate pediatric care. CONCLUSIONS: Adherence to preventive pediatric care varies as a function of psychological factors, suggesting that the current system of pediatric care favors some psychological profiles over others. However, the specific traits associated with non-adherence point to potentially fruitful interventions, specifically around increasing functional proximity.