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Social Processes in Daily Life
Michael Roche and his coauthors studied social processes and how they play out in daily life. In their study, college students with a high-dependency or a low-dependency personality reported how agentic (dominant vs. submissive) and communally (friendly vs. unfriendly) they behaved towards others, and how agentic and communally others behaved towards them during a one week period. High-dependency and low-dependency participants were similarly agentic towards interaction partners that were highly communal, but high-dependency participants were much less agentic than low-dependency participants to interaction partners that were less communal.
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Grit Versus Aptitude: Relative Influence of Effort and Intelligence in Academic Success
In educational research, an age-old question has remained unanswered: Does IQ or hard work matter more in predicting success in school? Intellectual gifts have been studied extensively, but other non-cognitive factors contributing to success have been less carefully examined. One factor is “grit”, defined by Duckworth et al (2007), as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals.” This research studies the impact of grit, or perseverance for long-term goals and intelligence on middle school students’ GPAs. We hypothesized that change in grit over a span of two years would be a better predictor of GPA than aptitude (New York State Education Department Exams).
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Social Networking in a Graduate Industrial/Organizational Program
While social networks proliferate, insight is lacking about how graduate students, faculty, and administration collaboratively engage such networks. In early 2011, University of Phoenix rolled out what has become the world’s largest, single institution, educational social networking site, PhoenixConnect. The authors examined graduate student, faculty, and administrator contributions and interactions within this university social network. Participants from the graduate program in Industrial/Organizational (I/O) Psychology were given qualitative interviews during bimonthly face-to-face classes to investigate the ways participants from different cohorts used social networking.
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Developing a Clinical Decision Support System
A Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) is an application that analyzes complex patient data to help healthcare providers make better clinical decisions. While these tools have been successfully used to reduce medical errors and improve healthcare efficiency, they have not always been embraced by providers. David Albert of Columbia University describes the development of a CDSS designed to help dentists and dental hygienists provide tobacco cessation counseling in the dental office.
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Failure to Replicate the Mehta and Zhu (2009) Color Effect
Mehta and Zhu (2009) reported several studies in Science on the effects of the colors red and blue over a series of cognitive tasks. Red was hypothesized to induce a state of avoidance motivation which would cause people to become more vigilant and risk-averse in a task. Blue was hypothesized to induce a state of approach motivation which would cause people to use more innovative or risky strategies. Studies appear in high-impact journals, like Science, often because they report novel or far-reaching effects. Such studies need to be replicated in order to determine whether the finding is reliable.
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Race/Ethnicity Moderates Associations Between Childhood Weight Status and Early Substance Use
Identification of risk-factors for early drinking, smoking, and illicit drug use is essential for targeted substance abuse prevention. Few studies have examined associations between weight during childhood and early substance use, with mixed results. Some research has linked childhood obesity to higher rates of alcohol, cigarette, and/or cannabis use during adolescence, while others have found no associations. The present study examined the role of race/ethnicity as a potential moderator of relationships between childhood weight status and early use (by age 15) of alcohol, cigarettes, and cannabis.
