Privacy-preserving decentralized learning methods for biomedical applications.

In recent years, decentralized machine learning has emerged as a significant advancement in biomedical applications, offering robust solutions for data privacy, security, and collaboration across diverse healthcare environments. In this review, we examine various decentralized learning methodologies, including federated learning, split learning, swarm learning, gossip learning, edge learning, and some of their applications in the biomedical field. We delve into the underlying principles, network topologies, and communication strategies of each approach, highlighting their advantages and limitations. Ultimately, the selection of a suitable method should be based on specific needs, infrastructures, and computational capabilities.

Is it gossip or feedback? Surgical attendings' perceptions of gossip within residency.

OBJECTIVE: Gossip-evaluative talk about an absent third party-exists in surgical residency programs. Attending surgeons may engage in gossip to provide residents with feedback on performance, which may contribute to bias. Nevertheless, the perspectives of attending surgeons on gossip has not been studied. DESIGN: In this qualitative study, semi-structured interviews about gossip in surgical training were conducted with attending surgeons. We performed a reflexive thematic analysis of transcripts with a grounded theory approach to describe attendings' perceptions of their role in gossip within surgical residency. SETTING: Interviews were conducted from September 23, 2023, to November 27, 2023 via Zoom™. PARTICIPANTS: Eighteen surgery attendings associated with 7 surgical training programs were interviewed. RESULTS: Six themes were developed: 1) Attendings typically view gossip with a negative lens; thus, well-intended conversations about resident performance that meet the academic definition of gossip are not perceived as gossip; 2) Gossip can damage attendings' reputations as surgeons and educators; 3) Mitigating the negative impacts of gossip by maintaining accurate and objective standards of honest communication is hard; 4) Attendings express concerns about hearing other attendings' impressions of residents prior to formulating their own opinion; 5) The surgical hierarchy restricts the volume and content of gossip that reaches attendings, which may limit their knowledge of program culture; and 6) It is very difficult to mitigate gossip at the program level. Ultimately, attendings utilize gossip (e.g. triangulating their experience) with the goal of providing residents feedback. CONCLUSIONS: Defining important conversations about resident performance as gossip should not discourage these critically important conversations but rather underscore the importance of combating harmful gossip through 3 behaviors: 1) committing to objective communication; 2) limiting or reframing information about resident performance that is shared with attendings who have yet to formulate their own opinions; and 3) regulating gossip in particular high-stakes microenvironments (e.g. the operating room).

Workplace gossip erodes proactive work behavior: anxiety and neuroticism as underlying mechanisms.

PURPOSE: Services organizations highly value proactive employees. Managers are interested in promoting frontline employees' proactive behavior because proactivity is crucial for organizational success. The mechanism of negative workplace gossip on workplace prosocial behavior is unclear. This research investigates the factors hindering this valuable behavior, specifically focusing on negative workplace gossip and employee anxiety, through the lens of the conservation of resources theory. DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH: Data were collected from a sample of 352 female frontline employees across diverse service organizations using a two-wave design. Statistical analyses were conducted using appropriate software (e.g., SPSS, AMOS) to test the hypothesized relationships. FINDINGS: The study's findings reveal that negative workplace gossip reduces employees' proactive work behavior, and anxiety mediates the relationship between NWGS and proactive work behavior. Further, Neuroticism strengthens the relationship between NWGS and anxiety. These results offer a novel perspective on the detrimental consequences of gossip in services sector. PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS: Originality/value While research on negative gossip exists, this study specifically examines its impact on frontline service employees, a crucial but under-studied group in service organizations.

Gossip and coping with social isolation: the case of migrant truck drivers in Western Europe.

This article examines how employees use gossip as a resource to cope with social isolation. Building on a qualitative study with 32 truck drivers in a Western European company, our research identified gossip in close relationships and gossip in distant relationships as distinct patterns playing a different role in coping with social isolation, and a third pattern in which gossip was not beneficial. First, gossiping with close friends at work helped drivers engage in emotion-focused coping by reducing stress and loneliness. Second, gossiping with distant colleagues helped drivers engage in problem-focused coping by exchanging knowledge involving people in the organization. Third, gossip avoidance occurred in distant relationships, where drivers limited gossip exchanges going beyond instrumentally useful information. Overall, these findings show that drivers relied on different layers of their social network to cope with social isolation. Enriching previous research, this study shows that gossip represents an essential resource for emotion-focused and problem-focused coping.

Children are sensitive to the number of sources when relying on gossip.

Gossip allows children to effectively identify cooperative or trustworthy partners. However, the risk of being deceived must be faced because gossip may be false. One clue for determining gossip's veracity is the number of its sources since multiple informants spreading identical reputational information about others might imply that another's moral traits are viewed unanimously among members of a social group. We investigated whether 7-year-olds (N = 108) would trust gossip from multiple independent sources. In our study, they received multiple pieces of positive/negative reputational information about one agent and neutral information about another agent by gossip from either single or multiple informants. Then they allocated rewards to and chose rewards from the gossip targets. The 7-year-olds acted upon positive gossip from multiple informants and did not rely on positive gossip from a single informant. By contrast, they relied on negative gossip regardless of the number of informants. In either valence, however, they were more likely to allocate rewards based on gossip from multiple informants than a single informant. This result indicates they are sensitive to an objective index, specifically the number of sources, for judging the veracity of gossip.

When do gossip receivers assess negative gossip as justifiable? A goal framing approach.

Negative gossip is a double-edged sword, which can harm group members but also protect them from harmful others. Current theory proposes that gossip receivers assess gossipers' selfish and prosocial intentions based on different social cues, to determine whether the negative gossip behavior is morally justifiable. However, assessing gossipers' moral intentions does not fully clarify when and how justifiability of negative gossip is assessed by receivers. Using goal framing theory, I propose a parsimonious way of understanding when gossip receivers will be interested in determining whether sharing the negative gossip was justifiable, and how they assess justifiability. In line with predictions, results of two scenario experiments showed that in a hedonic and gain goal frame gossip justifiability was similar to a baseline level, suggesting that receivers had no particular concerns regarding gossip justifiability. However, in a normative frame receivers assessed negative gossip to be less justifiable when social cues indicated that the gossiper was motivated to harm others for self-interest compared to when such cues were absent (Study 1). In Study 2, gossip was more justified when social cues indicated that that the target broke the salient social norm and signaled that the gossiper has low motivation to harm. Moreover, in a normative frame, participants were more interested in further establishing gossip truthfulness compared to participants in a gain, hedonic, or control condition in Study 1, and in a hedonic condition in Study 2. These results show that individuals' goal frame determine their interest in gossip justifiability and how they assess it. This may help solve the paradox of negative gossip by drawing from goal framing theory to understand individuals can be avid gossip consumers, while holding widely disapproving attitudes towards this behavior.

Mistreatment of nurses by patients and its impact on their caring behaviors: The roles of psychological detachment and supervisor positive gossip.

BACKGROUND: Mistreatment by patients is a detrimental phenomenon predominant in healthcare organizations. However, there is a lack of nursing literature regarding the underlying mechanisms and boundary conditions that exist between mistreatment by patients and its detrimental consequences. AIM: By integrating the Job Demands-Resources Model and the Conservation of Resources Theory, the study aimed to unveil the mediating role of psychological detachment from work in the relationship between mistreatment by patients and nurses' caring behaviors, as well as the moderating effect of supervisor positive gossip. METHODS: This multicenter, cross-sectional study involved 341 nurses from five hospitals across two cities in Egypt. Data were collected using an introductory information form, the Mistreatment by Patients Scale, the Psychological Detachment Scale, the Caring Behaviors Scale, and the Supervisor Positive Gossip Scale. The study's hypotheses were tested using the PROCESS macro. RESULTS: The results showed that mistreatment by patients was negatively related to nurses' caring behaviors via an increased psychological detachment. Further, higher levels of supervisor positive gossip were shown to weaken the direct effect of mistreatment by patients in increasing nurses' psychological detachment, as well as the indirect negative effect of mistreatment by patients on nurses' caring behaviors via psychological detachment. CONCLUSIONS: Mistreatment by patients contributes to nurses' psychological detachment and decreased caring behaviors; however, these negative outcomes can be mitigated by supervisor positive gossip. IMPLICATION FOR NURSING POLICYMAKING: Nursing managers should adopt strategies to deter the rise of mistreatment by patients, and utilize positive gossip to support nurses exposed to such mistreatment to alleviate its consequences.

Gossip-based distributed stochastic mirror descent for constrained optimization.

This paper considers a distributed constrained optimization problem over a multi-agent network in the non-Euclidean sense. The gossip protocol is adopted to relieve the communication burden, which also adapts to the constantly changing topology of the network. Based on this idea, a gossip-based distributed stochastic mirror descent (GB-DSMD) algorithm is proposed to handle the problem under consideration. The performances of GB-DSMD algorithms with constant and diminishing step sizes are analyzed, respectively. When the step size is constant, the error bound between the optimal function value and the expected function value corresponding to the average iteration output of the algorithm is derived. While for the case of the diminishing step size, it is proved that the output of the algorithm uniformly approaches to the optimal value with probability 1. Finally, as a numerical example, the distributed logistic regression is reported to demonstrate the effectiveness of the GB-DSMD algorithm.

Why Talking Is Not Cheap: Adverse Events and Informal Communication.

Healthcare management faces significant challenges related to upward communication. Sharing information in healthcare is crucial to the improvement of person-centered, safe, and effective patient care. An adverse event (AE) is an unintended or unexpected incident that causes harm to a patient and may lead to temporary or permanent disability. Learning from adverse events in healthcare is crucial to the improvement of patient safety and quality of care. Informal communication channels represent an untapped resource with regard to gathering data about the development of AEs. In this viewpoint paper, we start by identifying how informal communication played a key factor in some high-profile adverse events. Then, we present three Critical Challenge points that examine the role of informal communication in adverse events by (1) understanding how the prevailing trends in healthcare will make informal communication more important, (2) explaining how informal communication is part of the group-level sensemaking process, and (3) highlighting the potential role of informal communication in "breaking the silence" around critical and adverse events. Gossip, as one of the most important sources of informal communication, was examined in depth. Delineating the role of informal communication and adverse events within the healthcare context is pivotal to understanding and improving team and upward communication in healthcare organizations. For clinical leaders, the challenge is to cultivate a climate of communication safety, whereby informal communication channels can be used to collect soft intelligence that are paths to improving the quality of care and patient safety.

Explaining the evolution of gossip.

Gossip, the exchange of personal information about absent third parties, is ubiquitous in human societies. However, the evolution of gossip remains a puzzle. The current article proposes an evolutionary cycle of gossip and uses an agent-based evolutionary game-theoretic model to assess it. We argue that the evolution of gossip is the joint consequence of its reputation dissemination and selfishness deterrence functions. Specifically, the dissemination of information about individuals' reputations leads more individuals to condition their behavior on others' reputations. This induces individuals to behave more cooperatively toward gossipers in order to improve their reputations. As a result, gossiping has an evolutionary advantage that leads to its proliferation. The evolution of gossip further facilitates these two functions of gossip and sustains the evolutionary cycle.

From the dual-dimensional perspective of employee mindfulness and superior trust, explore the influence mechanism of negative workplace gossip on work engagement.

Introduction: As a common phenomenon of workplace negative gossip in organizations, how it affects employees' work engagement is not yet clear, nor what methods can be used to mitigate its negative impact on employees' work engagement. Methods: Based on Conservation of Resource Theory, this study obtained 334 valid employee samples from mainland China enterprises through a three-time lagged research design and explored the mechanism of negative workplace gossip on work engagement from the dual perspectives of employees and supervisors. Results: The results show that: (1) Negative workplace gossip negatively affects employee work engagement. (2) Professional commitment plays a mediating role between negative workplace gossip and employee work engagement. (3) Employee mindfulness negatively moderates the negative impact of workplace negative gossip on professional commitment; superior trust negatively moderates the negative impact of workplace negative gossip on professional commitment. (4) Employee mindfulness and superior trust are further weakened to moderate the negative indirect impact of workplace negative gossip on employee work engagement through professional commitment, and this negative indirect impact is weaker when employees have a higher degree of mindfulness and higher trust in superiors. Discussion: It proposes effective strategies for managing workplace gossip to harness its positive influence and offer practical guidance to enhance employee work engagement.

Supportive psychotherapy: Gossip therapy.

Supportive psychotherapy is one of the most widely used psychotherapies. The need for therapists for mental health treatment, especially anxiety and depression, is increasing all over the world. However, therapists are insufficient in terms of quantity and quality in societies with low socioeconomic and sociocultural levels. At this point, I am reporting an extraordinary social observation that a group of people in a city with a low sociocultural level unknowingly establish a secret "therapist-client" relationship with each other to find solutions to their mental health problems.

How Does Abusive Supervision Affect Organisational Gossip? Understanding the Mediating Role of the Dark Triad.

According to the trait activation theory (TAT), personality characteristics are dormant until contextual elements stir them into action. Personality traits are expected to be activated in the context of abusive supervision. From this perspective, our paper examines whether abusive supervision affects organisational gossiping behaviour through the dark triad. To this end, this study examines the mediating effects of the dark triad on the relationship between abusive supervision and organisational gossip based on cross-sectional data gathered from two separate samples. Using the results from structural equation modelling, it is evident that abusive supervision activates the dark triad, and its context influences organisational gossip in line with the TAT. In addition, our results show that abusive supervision positively affects gossip for information gathering and relationship building, with the dark triad proving to be completely mediating. This finding implies that abusive supervision is a contextual factor, and as such, behaviours such as consistent ill treatment and non-violent, verbal or non-verbal hostile acts will have long-term and lasting effects on organisational communication in many organisations. This study offers significant policy implications concerning behavioural issues within education-centred organisations.

On power and its corrupting effects: the effects of power on human behavior and the limits of accountability systems.

Power is an all-pervasive, and fundamental force in human relationships and plays a valuable role in social, political, and economic interactions. Power differences are important in social groups in enhancing group functioning. Most people want to have power and there are many benefits to having power. However, power is a corrupting force and this has been a topic of interest for centuries to scholars from Plato to Lord Acton. Even with increased knowledge of power's corrupting effect and safeguards put in place to counteract such tendencies, power abuse remains rampant in society suggesting that the full extent of this effect is not well understood. In this paper, an effort is made to improve understanding of power's corrupting effects on human behavior through an integrated and comprehensive synthesis of the neurological, sociological, physiological, and psychological literature on power. The structural limits of justice systems' capability to hold powerful people accountable are also discussed.

The relationship between negative workplace gossip and thriving at work among Chinese kindergarten teachers: the roles of psychological contract breach and bianzhi.

Introduction: Exploring the influencing factors and functioning mechanisms of thriving at work is of practical significance both for teachers and kindergartens. Based on the socially embedded model of thriving at work, this study aimed to examine the association between negative workplace gossip and thriving at work. The mediating role of psychological contract breach and the moderating role of bianzhi were also examined. Methods: A total of 1105 Chinese kindergarten teachers were chosen to complete a questionnaire on negative workplace gossip, psychological contract breach, and thriving at work. Results: The results demonstrated that negative workplace gossip was positively associated with psychological contract breach and negatively associated with thriving at work. In addition, psychological contract breach was negatively associated with thriving at work. According to the mediation model test, psychological contract breach was a mediating factor between negative workplace gossip and thriving at work. The impact of psychological contract breach on thriving at work could be further moderated by bianzhi. Conclusion: This study complements knowledge systems about the influential factors and functional mechanisms of thriving at work. In practical terms, this study offers a fresh and innovative perspective for kindergartens seeking to enhance teachers' thriving at work.

Don't Shoot the Messenger? A Morality- and Gender-Based Model of Reactions to Negative Workplace Gossip.

We conducted three studies to examine how the recipients of negative workplace gossip judge the gossip sender's morality and how they respond behaviorally. Study 1 provided experimental evidence that gossip recipients perceive senders as low in morality, with female recipients rating the sender's morality more negatively than male recipients. In a follow-up experiment (Study 2), we further found that perceived low morality translates into behavioral responses in the form of career-related sanctions by the recipient on the gossip sender. A critical incident study (Study 3) enhanced the external validity and extended the moderated mediation model by showing that gossip recipients also penalize senders with social exclusion. We discuss the implications for practice and research on negative workplace gossip, gender differences in attributions of morality, and gossip recipients' behavioral responses. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10551-023-05355-7.

Does first-hand evidence undermine young children's initial trust in positive gossip? Evidence from 5- to 6-year-old children.

What happens when children have formed an impression of a peer based on prior gossip, but later learn from direct observation that the gossip is untrue? We interviewed seventy 5- and 6-year-old children in Zhejiang, China. They first heard conflicting positive and negative gossip about an absent third party, and subsequently learned which piece of gossip was true. Initially, both 5- and 6-year-old children tended to endorse the positive rather than the negative gossip. However, when they learned about the inaccuracy of the positive gossip based on their own direct observation, 6-year-old children subsequently doubted it, whereas 5-year-old children showed no such shift. Taken together, the results show that when children decide what gossip to believe, they are initially swayed by its valence but with age they increasingly weigh gossip in relation to their own direct observation.

Nasty and Noble Notes: Interdependence Structures Drive Self-Serving Gossip.

Much information people receive about others reaches them via gossip. But is this gossip trustworthy? We examined this in a scenario study (Nsenders = 350, Nobservations = 700) and an interactive laboratory experiment (Nsenders = 126; Nobservations = 3024). In both studies, participants played a sequential prisoner's dilemma where a gossip sender observed a target's (first decider's) decision and could gossip about this to a receiver (second decider). We manipulated the interdependence structure such that gossipers' outcomes were equal to targets' outcomes, equal to receivers' outcomes, or independent. Compared to no interdependence, gossip was more often false when gossipers were interdependent with targets but not when interdependent with receivers. As such, false positive gossip (self-serving when interdependent with targets) increased but false negative gossip (self-serving when interdependent with receivers) did not. In conclusion, the interdependence structure affected gossip's trustworthiness: When gossipers' outcomes were interdependent with targets, gossip was less trustworthy.

Explicating Evolutionary Epistemological Concerns on Gossip and Cyberbullying.

Gossip and bullying have psychosocial concerns and are usually considered as vice, bad, hence, non-virtuous. This paper deals with a plausible modest account for them to be considered not as bad, rather significant behavioral and epistemic tools from evolutionary and epistemological points of view. It adheres to a relationship between gossip and bullying in real (sociobiological-psychological domains) and within cyberspaces. Considering the formation of social relations and orders in reality and virtual platforms, it attempts to understand the issues and advantages gossip poses to societies from a reputational perspective. While evolutionary explanations of complex social behavior are not only difficult, but controversial too, this paper aims to present an evolutionary epistemological perspective to the act of gossiping, to understand the vantage it may have or provide. Usually, gossip and bullying are considered as having a negative connotation, but these are explicated as epistemic access tools for regulation, social order, knowledge gain, and niche construction. Consequently, gossip is showcased as an evolutionary epistemic achievement and virtuous enough to deal with the partly unknown features of the World.

Distribution of the Age of Gossip in Networks.

We study a general setting of gossip networks in which a source node forwards its measurements (in the form of status updates) about some observed physical process to a set of monitoring nodes according to independent Poisson processes. Furthermore, each monitoring node sends status updates about its information status (about the process observed by the source) to the other monitoring nodes according to independent Poisson processes. We quantify the freshness of the information available at each monitoring node in terms of Age of Information (AoI). While this setting has been analyzed in a handful of prior works, the focus has been on characterizing the average (i.e., marginal first moment) of each age process. In contrast, we aim to develop methods that allow the characterization of higher-order marginal or joint moments of the age processes in this setting. In particular, we first use the stochastic hybrid system (SHS) framework to develop methods that allow the characterization of the stationary marginal and joint moment generating functions (MGFs) of age processes in the network. These methods are then applied to derive the stationary marginal and joint MGFs in three different topologies of gossip networks, with which we derive closed-form expressions for marginal or joint high-order statistics of age processes, such as the variance of each age process and the correlation coefficients between all possible pairwise combinations of age processes. Our analytical results demonstrate the importance of incorporating the higher-order moments of age processes in the implementation and optimization of age-aware gossip networks rather than just relying on their average values.