Consensus meetings will outperform integrative experiments.

We expect that consensus meetings, where researchers come together to discuss their theoretical viewpoints, prioritize the factors they agree are important to study, standardize their measures, and determine a smallest effect size of interest, will prove to be a more efficient solution to the lack of coordination and integration of claims in science than integrative experiments.

Development of the functional assessment of migraine scale using a patient guided approach.

PURPOSE: A better understanding of the multi-dimensional burden and impact of migraine has grown over recent years, yet the tools used to measure these concepts have not been updated to reflect such findings. Additionally, due to the increase in the number of both prophylactic and acute therapeutic options for migraine, a comprehensive assessment of treatment response is necessary. The goal of this project was to develop a patient guided outcome measure which evaluates patient identified efficacy factors when appraising migraine treatment response. METHODS: A group of patients with migraine (N = 10) were given an in-person semi-structured interview collecting information regarding a patient's perspective on meaningful response to headache and migraine treatment. Using the patient information collected during these interviews, a set of questions aimed at evaluating meaningful response were developed. Two additional groups (N = 100, 200) of patients with migraine then provided feedback on the drafted questions in an online setting. RESULTS: Interviews indicated thematic areas of interest to patients with migraine are not commonly assessed on popular measures. Over two hundred items were developed to assess thematic areas indicated by patients. Factor analysis used on the focus groups' results led to the development of an 18-item scale (Functional Assessment of Migraine Scale-Research: FAMS-R) that assesses the impact of migraine on a patient and shows the potential to measure treatment response. CONCLUSION: The FAMS portrays promising results at measuring a multi-faceted migraine treatment response and disease impact.

Breast Surgery Cost Savings Through Surgical Tray Instrument Reduction.

INTRODUCTION: Removing unnecessary instruments from surgical trays used in the operating room conserves resources and time. We aimed to assess the cost savings impact of breast surgical tray instrument reduction. METHODS: Breast surgeons at a single institution reviewed the standard surgical tray used for lumpectomies and mastectomies and removed underutilized instruments to create a breast-specific tray. This tray was used for all breast surgeries performed throughout the 2019 calendar year. Data for breast-specific tray usage, instrument reprocessing costs, and instrument maintenance costs for inspection, sharpening, aligning, and lubricating were retrospectively obtained. RESULTS: The breast-specific tray was reduced from 82 to 65 instruments. The cost of reprocessing each instrument is $1.69. After 30 tray sterilizations, each tray was sent for maintenance at a cost of $2.00 per instrument. With 10 breast-specific trays in circulation, the trays were used a total of 656 times during the calendar year. Each tray was sent for maintenance an average of two times during this time period. Thus, instrument reduction resulted in $18,847 in instrument reprocessing and $680.00 in maintenance savings, with total annual cost savings of $19,527. CONCLUSIONS: Optimizing surgical trays by removing unused instruments yields significant cost savings and contributes to improved efficiency in the sterile processing department. As efforts to eliminate wasteful practices and reduce costs within the health care system continue, opportunities remain for standardization of trays across all surgical departments and institutions.

The lrd package: An R package and Shiny application for processing lexical data.

Recall testing is a common assessment to gauge memory retrieval. Responses from these tests can be analyzed in several ways; however, the output generated from a recall study typically requires manual coding that can be time intensive and error-prone before analyses can be conducted. To address this issue, this article introduces lrd (Lexical Response Data), a set of open-source tools for quickly and accurately processing lexical response data that can be used either from the R command line or through an R Shiny graphical user interface. First, we provide an overview of this package and include a step-by-step user guide for processing both cued- and free-recall responses. For validation of lrd, we used lrd to recode output from cued, free, and sentence-recall studies with large samples and examined whether the results replicated using lrd-scored data. We then assessed the inter-rater reliability and sensitivity and specificity of the scoring algorithm relative to human-coded data. Overall, lrd is highly reliable and shows excellent sensitivity and specificity, indicating that recall data processed using this package are remarkably consistent with data processed by a human coder.

How the Presence of Others Affects Desirability Judgments in Heterosexual and Homosexual Participants.

Mate-choice copying is a mating strategy wherein women rely on contextual information to assist in securing accurate assessments of potential mates. Mate-choice copying has been extensively studied in non-human species and has begun to be examined in humans as well. Hill and Buss (2008) found evidence of opposing effects for men and women in desirability judgments based on the presence of other opposite-sex people. The current study successfully replicated these findings with 73 and 44 heterosexual men and women, respectively. Heterosexual men exhibited the desirability diminution effect, and heterosexual women exhibited the desirability enhancement effect. The current study also extended these findings to include 73 gay men and 32 lesbian women. Findings for gay and lesbian participants were inverted compared to heterosexual participants. Gay men exhibited the desirability enhancement effect, and lesbian women exhibited the desirability diminution effect, revealing sex differences in mate-choice copying spanning different sexual orientations.

Investigating the interaction of direct and indirect relation on memory judgments and retrieval.

This study examined the interactive relationship between two measures of association (direct and indirect associations) when predicting relatedness judgments and cued-recall performance. Participants were recruited from Amazon's Mechanical Turk and were given word pairs of varying relatedness to judge for their semantic, thematic, and associative strength. After completing a distractor task, participants then completed a cued-recall task. First, we sought to expand previous work on judgments of associative memory to include semantic- and thematic-based judgments (judgments of relatedness), while also replicating bias and sensitivity findings. Next, we tested for an interaction between direct and indirect association when predicting participant judgments while also expanding upon previous work by examining that interaction when predicting recall. The interaction between direct and indirect association was significant for both judgments and recall. For low indirect association, direct association was the primary predictor of both judgment strength and recall proportions. However, this trend reversed for high indirect association, as higher levels of indirect relation decreased the effectiveness of direct relation as a predictor. Overall, our findings indicate the degree to which the processing of similarity information impacts cognitive processes such as retrieval and item judgments, while also parsing apart the underlying, interactive relationship that exists between the norms used to represent concept information.

A practical primer on processing semantic property norm data.

Semantic property listing tasks require participants to generate short propositions (e.g., [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text]) for a specific concept (e.g., DOG). This task is the cornerstone of the creation of semantic property norms which are essential for modeling, stimuli creation, and understanding similarity between concepts. Despite the wide applicability of semantic property norms for a large variety of concepts across different groups of people, the methodological aspects of the property listing task have received less attention, even though the procedure and processing of the data can substantially affect the nature and quality of the measures derived from them. The goal of this paper is to provide a practical primer on how to collect and process semantic property norms. We will discuss the key methods to elicit semantic properties and compare different methods to derive meaningful representations from them. This will cover the role of instructions and test context, property preprocessing (e.g., lemmatization), property weighting, and relationship encoding using ontologies. With these choices in mind, we propose and demonstrate a processing pipeline that transparently documents these steps, resulting in improved comparability across different studies. The impact of these choices will be demonstrated using intrinsic (e.g., reliability, number of properties) and extrinsic measures (e.g., categorization, semantic similarity, lexical processing). This practical primer will offer potential solutions to several long-standing problems and allow researchers to develop new property listing norms overcoming the constraints of previous studies.

Risk factors for keratinocyte carcinoma skin cancer in nonwhite individuals: A retrospective analysis.

BACKGROUND: Because most of the US population will consist of nonwhite individuals by the year 2043, it is essential that both physicians and patients are educated about skin cancer in nonwhite persons. OBJECTIVE: To update the epidemiology, investigate specific risk factors, and facilitate earlier diagnosis and intervention of keratinocyte carcinoma in nonwhite individuals. METHODS: Institutional review board-approved retrospective chart review of all nonwhite patients who had received a biopsy-proven diagnosis of skin cancer at Drexel Dermatology during June 2008-June 2015. RESULTS: Squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) was the most commonly diagnosed skin cancer in black and Asian populations, and basal cell carcinoma was the most common skin cancer in Hispanics. Black persons exhibited the majority of their SCC lesions in sun-protected areas, particularly the anogenital area. On average, current smokers received skin cancer diagnoses 12.27 years earlier than former smokers and 9.36 years earlier than nonsmokers. LIMITATIONS: Single-center design and interpractitioner variability of skin examination. CONCLUSION: The importance of lesions in photoprotected areas in nonwhite individuals should not go overlooked. However, emphasis should also be placed on active examination of sun-protected areas in nonwhite persons and recognition of the relationship between human papillomavirus and genital SCC lesions. Smoking cessation should be integrated in dermatologic counseling of all patients. Interventions tailored to each of these ethnic groups are needed.

English semantic feature production norms: An extended database of 4436 concepts.

A limiting factor in understanding memory and language is often the availability of large numbers of stimuli to use and explore in experimental studies. In this study, we expand on three previous databases of concepts to over 4000 words including nouns, verbs, adjectives, and other parts of speech. Participants in the study were asked to provide lists of features for each concept presented (a semantic feature production task), which were combined with previous research in this area. These feature lists for each concept were then coded into their root word form and affixes (i.e., cat and s for cats) to explore the impact of word form on semantic similarity measures, which are often calculated by comparing concept feature lists (feature overlap). All concept features, coding, and calculated similarity information is provided in a searchable database for easy access and utilization for future researchers when designing experiments that use word stimuli. The final database of word pairs was combined with the Semantic Priming Project to examine the relation of semantic similarity statistics on semantic priming in tandem with other psycholinguistic variables.

LAB: Linguistic Annotated Bibliography - a searchable portal for normed database information.

This article presents the Linguistic Annotated Bibliography (LAB) as a searchable Web portal to quickly and easily access reliable database norms, related programs, and variable calculations. These publications were coded by language, number of stimuli, stimuli type (i.e., words, pictures, symbols), keywords (i.e., frequency, semantics, valence), and other useful information. This tool not only allows researchers to search for the specific type of stimuli needed for experiments but also permits the exploration of publication trends across 100 years of research. Details about the portal creation and use are outlined, as well as various analyses of change in publication rates and keywords. In general, advances in computational power have allowed for the increase in dataset size in the recent decades, in addition to an increase in the number of linguistic variables provided in each publication.

Evaluating the effectiveness of ecological momentary assessment and intervention targeting body checking behaviors.

This study investigated the efficacy of using ecological momentary assessment and intervention (EMA/EMI) to target body checking behaviors. Body checking has been shown to increase body dissatisfaction and play a role in eating disorders, but few treatments specifically targeting body checking have been empirically evaluated. Forty-four female undergraduates who reported engaging in frequent body checking behaviors participated in a five-day study wherein they were assessed five times a day via smart phone. On the final two days of the study, intervention messages were sent containing cognitive-behavioral strategies for decreasing body checking. Body checking behaviors increased within each day, but decreased across the five day intervention period. Pretest to posttest analyses found healthy improvements in a number of body image related constructs. These results highlight that 1) body checking appears to increase throughout the day, and 2) targeting body checking behaviors through brief EMA/EMI may be a useful clinical tool.

Methods to detect low quality data and its implication for psychological research.

Web-based data collection methods such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk (AMT) are an appealing option to recruit participants quickly and cheaply for psychological research. While concerns regarding data quality have emerged with AMT, several studies have exhibited that data collected via AMT are as reliable as traditional college samples and are often more diverse and representative of noncollege populations. The development of methods to screen for low quality data, however, has been less explored. Omitting participants based on simple screening methods in isolation, such as response time or attention checks may not be adequate identification methods, with an inability to delineate between high or low effort participants. Additionally, problematic survey responses may arise from survey automation techniques such as survey bots or automated form fillers. The current project developed low quality data detection methods while overcoming previous screening limitations. Multiple checks were employed, such as page response times, distribution of survey responses, the number of utilized choices from a given range of scale options, click counts, and manipulation checks. This method was tested on a survey taken with an easily available plug-in survey bot, as well as compared to data collected by human participants providing both high effort and randomized, or low effort, answers. Identified cases can then be used as part of sensitivity analyses to warrant exclusion from further analyses. This algorithm can be a promising tool to identify low quality or automated data via AMT or other online data collection platforms.

Prioritizing Harm.

In this study, we examined if a self-report of trait spite, the Spitefulness Scale, retains the same associations with dark personality traits in individuals with severe mental illness. We also examine if reports on the Spitefulness Scale are correlated with observed spiteful behavior in a game developed to offer opportunities for spite. One hundred twenty individuals clinically diagnosed with psychotic spectrum disorders and receiving inpatient treatment at a state hospital participated in this study and completed measures of personality. The Spitefulness Scale retained its associations with measures of dark personality traits in individuals with psychosis. Spitefulness Scale scores were also related to a performance measure of spite and spite was evidenced by a significant proportion of participants across measures (20.8%-26.7%). These data suggest the presence of spite as it is understood in the general population in a significant subset of individuals with psychosis. Spite could be considered an independent personality trait and part of the family of dark personality traits.

Do Concepts of Depression Predict Treatment Pathways? A Closer Look at Explanatory Models Among Clinical and Nonclinical Samples in Uganda.

OBJECTIVE: Explanatory models (EMs) are a collection of beliefs about a disorder that can help us understand help-seeking and treatment pathways in diverse contexts. In 2 related studies, we explore EMs about depression held among both clinical and nonclinical samples in Uganda. To explore the potential of EMs to predict help seeking, we assessed the relationship between 2 main aspects of the EM: problem conceptualization and treatment. METHOD: In Study 1, we interviewed and assessed EMs of depression for 135 lay community members and 111 professional practitioners using a vignette. In Study 2, we assessed actual EMs among 33 clinically depressed adults. We transcribed all interviews and analyzed and coded the content. In Study 1, we used logistic regression to examine the relationship of problem conceptualization and stigma to treatment choice; in Study 2, we used Fisher's exact tests to examine the relationship between conceptualization and treatment. Sociodemographics such as age, income, and language were also examined. RESULTS: Interviews elicited a diverse range of beliefs about the nature of depression and the types of treatment needed. However, problem conceptualization did not predict treatment in either group. Instead, education and interview language predicted treatment in clinical and nonclinical samples. CONCLUSION: Although EMs can be useful for both exploring mental health and treatment-related beliefs in clinical settings and developing mental health services, contextual factors may be more significant predictors of help seeking.

Assessment of Meaning in Adolescents Receiving Clinical Services in Mississippi Following the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill: An Application of the Purpose in Life Test-Short Form (PIL-SF).

OBJECTIVES: This study's purpose was to assess perceived meaning in adolescents. Specifically, our goals were to examine the psychometric properties of the Purpose in Life test-Short Form (PIL-SF) and its ability to predict psychological outcomes in an adolescent sample. METHOD: Aspects of well-being (self-efficacy, life satisfaction, and resilience) and psychological distress (posttraumatic stress, depression, anxiety, and general stress) were assessed in a sample of adolescents (N = 91; 58.2% female; mean age = 14.89) receiving clinical services following the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. RESULTS: Meaning was positively associated with life satisfaction, self-efficacy, and resilience, and negatively associated with posttraumatic stress and depression. Meaning was not significantly related to anxiety or general stress. Females reported significantly more meaning than males, while no significant differences were noted by race/ethnicity. CONCLUSIONS: The PIL-SF is a useful measure with adolescents. Moreover, meaning is an important concept to consider with respect to disasters.

Meaning, Resilience, and Traumatic Stress After the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill: A Study of Mississippi Coastal Residents Seeking Mental Health Services.

The present study examines the relationship between resilience, perceived meaning in life, and traumatic stress symptoms among coastal residents of Mississippi directly affected by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill (also known as the Gulf oil spill). The study was conducted as part of a larger project that assessed the spill's effect on the mental health of individuals seeking therapeutic services. Multiple regression analyses were conducted to determine if resilience and perceived meaning are significant predictors of scores from a measure of posttraumatic stress. Descriptive data, reliability coefficients, and correlations were also calculated. Higher levels of resilience and meaning together were predictive of fewer posttraumatic stress symptoms after controlling for the effect of the spill. Resilience and meaning appeared to be similar predictors of lower posttraumatic stress scores, and meaning appears to be an important facet of what makes a person resilient.

miRNAs and SAMHD1 regulation in vitro and in a model of HIV CNS disease.

Pilakka-Kanthikeel et al. recently reported higher levels of the retroviral restriction factor sterile alpha motif and histidine/aspartic acid domain-containing protein 1 (SAMHD1) in astrocytes than in microglia, suggesting that SAMHD1 levels might explain in part the relatively refractory nature of astrocytes to retroviral replication. These findings are consistent with our studies of simian and human immunodeficiency virus infection of astrocytes and macrophages. Similarly, a role for two host microRNAs in post-transcriptional regulation of SAMHD1 agrees with our in vitro results and those of others. However, data from an animal model of HIV neurologic disorders may not be consistent with robust miRNA-mediated regulation of SAMHD1 in vivo.

Development and psychometric investigation of an inventory to assess fight, flight, and freeze tendencies: the fight, flight, freeze questionnaire.

Fear is a psychological construct inherent in assessment of and reaction to threat. Its expression has been associated with individual differences in temperament, personality, and behavioral inhibition. Defining and subsequently assessing these individual differences in fear as a trait-like variable, however, have been largely neglected by researchers. Although there are well-established measures of fear, these primarily assess response to phobic stimuli rather than a reaction tendency to acute fear. As such, the goals of the present studies were to create, pilot, and revise a scale to assess the general construct of trait-like response to fear as it relates to underlying individual differences. Following guidelines for scale development, outlined by Haynes, Richard, and Kubany (1995 [Content validity in psychological assessment: A functional approach to concepts and methods. Psychological Assessment, 7, 238-247]) results of the current investigation provide strong, initial support for the factor structure, reliability, and construct validity of a new measure of trait-like fear: the Fight, Flight, Freeze questionnaire.