A Randomized Controlled Trial of A Theory-Based Concussion Education Video for NCAA Division I Athletes.

A large body of research demonstrates that concussions are exceedingly common and extremely difficult to detect. Despite medical efforts to develop sophisticated tools to detect concussions, research continues to demonstrate that proper detection relies on prompt and thorough symptom reporting from the injured athlete. In the context of sports, such reporting requirements are complicated by systems that reward athletic performance. This study seeks to provide student athletes who play NCAA Division I high-contact sports with a theoretically driven intervention to improve their attitudes and behavior toward concussion reporting. Division I student athletes (N = 345) viewed one of three conditions: an NCAA handout consistent with current practices, the experimental video, or a non-treatment control video, then responded to questions regarding attitudes and behaviors toward concussion reporting. Overall, results support the video's effectiveness in changing perceptions of concussion injuries. Nuances of the findings lead to a discussion for practical implications to transform concussion-reporting attitudes and behaviors among athletes.

Labeling Avoidance in Healthcare Decision-Making: How Stakeholders Make Sense of Concussion Events through Sport Narratives.

This study documents how cultural sport narratives influence athletic team member sensemaking during concussion events. Analysis of macro-level sport culture narratives and interviews (N = 93) with collegiate athletes and athletic trainers from eleven large universities within the United States revealed that participants utilized five cultural sport narratives when making sense of a concussion event (i.e., Play-through-pain, Commodification, Big leagues, Masculine-Warrior, and Need-for-safety). These narratives functioned in two specific ways as athletic team members made sense of concussion events (i.e., as extracted cues and identity defenses). The study presents the concept of labeling avoidance (e.g., avoiding a formal concussion diagnosis) to describe how athletes retrospectively rationalized their non-disclosure of a severe head impact. Theoretical and practical implications of the study findings are discussed.

Socioecological influences on concussion reporting by NCAA Division 1 athletes in high-risk sports.

Concussion among athletes is an issue of growing concern, with efforts underway to improve detection, diagnosis, and treatment. Success depends on communication by athletes, as brain-related symptoms are often not outwardly visible. Education programs to increase reporting behavior have not been successful to date. In accordance with the socioecological approach to health, we argue that multiple levels of influence on student athletes must be addressed, and report a multi-dimensional, mixed-methods research project conducted to identify possible points of intervention into changing the culture of concussion-injury reporting among collegiate athletes. Using quantitative, qualitative and interpretive methods, we examine the individual-level vested interests athletes have in reporting or not reporting concussion symptoms, and how these interests interact with community-level team culture and interpersonal relationships, and social-level cultural narratives to influence concussion-reporting behavior. Our findings confirm the viability of this approach, identifying immediacy, separation of responsibility and pain-enduring story systems as particularly salient elements. We conclude that competing performance versus safety value structures, reflected in cultural narratives and team culture, create mixed-messages for athletes, which are resolved in favor of performance because athletes perceive concussion injuries to be of low immediacy.

Vested Interests and Perceived Risk of Concussion Consequences among Power-5 College Athletes.

Concussion injuries among young athletes are a growing public health concern; concussion injuries pose threats to both short-term and long-term brain health. Significant, multidisciplinary efforts are underway to improve detection, diagnosis and treatment. Concussion symptoms are ambiguous and not outwardly visible; successful detection and diagnosis efforts depend on veridical athlete communication with health practitioners. To date, education programs to enhance reporting behaviors have not been successful. This research reports findings from the first phase of a project designed to understand athlete's perceived risk of concussion consequences with the goal of informing theory-based motivational and educational interventions. Using a novel theoretical approach, this research examines the vested interests of 435 collegiate athletes from 12 universities, participating in six Division I level, high concussion-risk sports, sanctioned by a Power-5 conference. Our findings confirm that the vestedness model predicts a consequential amount of variance in perceived concussion risk, perceived levels of concussion education, and recalled head impacts. The model identifies several opportunities to craft theory-based messages that can motivate reporting behaviors. This research contributes to the literature on concussion safety by offering a unique theoretical framework that accounts for factors influencing risk perception and takes a step in a call for deliberate, theory-based optimization and translation of concussion education for high-risk athletes.

Structural neural predictors of Farsi-English bilingualism.

The neurobiology of bilingualism is hotly debated. The present study examines whether normalized cortical measurements can be used to reliably classify monolinguals versus bilinguals in a structural MRI dataset of Farsi-English bilinguals and English monolinguals. A decision tree classifier classified bilinguals with an average correct classification rate of 85%, and monolinguals with a rate of 71.4%. The most relevant regions for classification were the right supramarginal gyrus, left inferior temporal gyrus and left inferior frontal gyrus. Larger studies with carefully matched monolingual and bilingual samples are needed to confirm that features of these regions can reliably categorize monolingual and bilingual brains. Nonetheless, the present findings suggest that a single structural MRI scan, analyzed with measures readily available using default procedures in a free open-access software (Freesurfer), can be used to reliably predict an individual's language experience using a decision tree classifier, and that Farsi-English bilingualism implicates regions identified in previous group-level studies of bilingualism in other languages.

Exploring Evolving Media Discourse Through Event Cueing.

Online news, microblogs and other media documents all contain valuable insight regarding events and responses to events. Underlying these documents is the concept of framing, a process in which communicators act (consciously or unconsciously) to construct a point of view that encourages facts to be interpreted by others in a particular manner. As media discourse evolves, how topics and documents are framed can undergo change, shifting the discussion to different viewpoints or rhetoric. What causes these shifts can be difficult to determine directly; however, by linking secondary datasets and enabling visual exploration, we can enhance the hypothesis generation process. In this paper, we present a visual analytics framework for event cueing using media data. As discourse develops over time, our framework applies a time series intervention model which tests to see if the level of framing is different before or after a given date. If the model indicates that the times before and after are statistically significantly different, this cues an analyst to explore related datasets to help enhance their understanding of what (if any) events may have triggered these changes in discourse. Our framework consists of entity extraction and sentiment analysis as lenses for data exploration and uses two different models for intervention analysis. To demonstrate the usage of our framework, we present a case study on exploring potential relationships between climate change framing and conflicts in Africa.

Modeling high-resolution broadband discourse in complex adaptive systems.

Numerous researchers and practitioners have turned to complexity science to better understand human systems. Simulation can be used to observe how the microlevel actions of many human agents create emergent structures and novel behavior in complex adaptive systems. In such simulations, communication between human agents is often modeled simply as message passing, where a message or text may transfer data, trigger action, or inform context. Human communication involves more than the transmission of texts and messages, however. Such a perspective is likely to limit the effectiveness and insight that we can gain from simulations, and complexity science itself. In this paper, we propose a model of how close analysis of discursive processes between individuals (high-resolution), which occur simultaneously across a human system (broadband), dynamically evolve. We propose six different processes that describe how evolutionary variation can occur in texts-recontextualization, pruning, chunking, merging, appropriation, and mutation. These process models can facilitate the simulation of high-resolution, broadband discourse processes, and can aid in the analysis of data from such processes. Examples are used to illustrate each process. We make the tentative suggestion that discourse may evolve to the "edge of chaos." We conclude with a discussion concerning how high-resolution, broadband discourse data could actually be collected.