•Anticipatory and reactive stressors elevated salivary cortisol.•Anticipatory stressor elevated salivary alpha amylase.•Saccade latency was shortest for food images.•Reactive stressor increased gaze ...duration on food images.•Stressor effects on gaze duration not mediated by cortisol.
Stressor exposure affects food intake as well as the preference for high or low palatability foods, but little is known about how stressor types impact the visual attention to food images. We used eye tracking methodology in humans to determine if activation of the hypothalamus–pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis and sympathetic nervous system is associated with changes in attention to food images as determined by measuring changes in oculomotor activity. Specifically, we tested two questions: 1) Do categorically distinct stressors alter aspects of visual attention to food images as determined by oculomotor activity (i.e., saccade latency, gaze duration, and saccade bouts)? 2) Do categorically distinct stressors differentially affect visual attention to food images of high or low palatability? A total of sixty participants were randomly divided into one of three test groups: controls, an anticipatory stressor group, or a reactive stressor group. We measured salivary cortisol and salivary alpha-amylase (sAA) before and after stressor exposure to confirm activation of the HPA axis and sympathetic nervous system, respectively. Following stressor exposure participants performed an eye-tracking test using a standardized food picture database (Food-pics). We analyzed saccade latency, gaze duration, and saccade bouts in balanced pairs of food and non-food images. Salivary cortisol was elevated by both stressors, although the elevation in salivary cortisol to the reactive stressor was driven by women only. sAA was elevated only by the anticipatory stressor. There were main effects of image type for all three eye-tracking variables, with initial saccades of shorter latency to food images and longer gaze duration and more saccade bouts with food images. Participants exposed to the reactive stressor reduced gaze duration on food images relative to controls, and this affect was not linked to palatability or salivary cortisol levels. We conclude that the reactive stressor decreased time spent looking at food, but not non-food, images. These data are partly consistent with the idea that reactive stressors reduce attention to non-critical visual signals.
Concerns about the veracity of psychological research have been growing. Many findings in psychological science are based on studies with insufficient statistical power and nonrepresentative samples, ...or may otherwise be limited to specific, ungeneralizable settings or populations. Crowdsourced research, a type of large-scale collaboration in which one or more research projects are conducted across multiple lab sites, offers a pragmatic solution to these and other current methodological challenges. The Psychological Science Accelerator (PSA) is a distributed network of laboratories designed to enable and support crowdsourced research projects. These projects can focus on novel research questions or replicate prior research in large, diverse samples. The PSA’s mission is to accelerate the accumulation of reliable and generalizable evidence in psychological science. Here, we describe the background, structure, principles, procedures, benefits, and challenges of the PSA. In contrast to other crowdsourced research networks, the PSA is ongoing (as opposed to time limited), efficient (in that structures and principles are reused for different projects), decentralized, diverse (in both subjects and researchers), and inclusive (of proposals, contributions, and other relevant input from anyone inside or outside the network). The PSA and other approaches to crowdsourced psychological science will advance understanding of mental processes and behaviors by enabling rigorous research and systematic examination of its generalizability.
This manuscript, based upon previous work related to the dynamic processing of emotional trajectories, investigated how variable trajectories of emotional content can elicit motivational activation ...over time. Specifically, five emotional trajectories were examined: pleasant, unpleasant, pleasant and unpleasant simultaneously, pleasant leading to unpleasant, and unpleasant leading to pleasant. The resources available for encoding were indexed via secondary task reaction times, and memory was assessed via audio and video recognition. The results indicated that audio recognition improves as activation increases in the appetitive system while visual recognition improves as activation in the aversive system increases. The implications of these results are discussed in terms of communication theory and practice.
The open science movement, although not new to social science broadly, has gained momentum recently within communication science. In response, journals in our field have begun encouraging open ...science practices, from data and materials sharing to submitting preregistered research reports. However, this momentum has also led to some confusion over what is and is not considered open science and what the value of open sciences practices is. In this editorial we lay out an "onion model" of open science that describes increasing levels of transparency and suggests how open science practices can be understood less as a revolutionary concept but more as a logical extension of some of the historical pillars of scientific norms. Through this model, we provide tangible steps for how scholars may begin thinking about how to introduce open science practices into their current and future empirical efforts.
Social media is becoming one of the most common deployment methods for antidrug and risk message campaigns. This is largely due to the low cost and high distribution that social media affords. This ...article argues that the social media approach to antidrug messaging also results in greater attention to the message over time. This article reports results from a study that examined how the combination of a short gain-or-loss framed text message interacts with a subsequent pleasant or unpleasant antidrug video message to influence motivational activation and information processing. Based on previous work investigating how different emotional trajectories in public service announcements (PSAs) elicit different patterns of motivational activation and cognitive processing, it was predicted, and found, that emotionally incongruent combinations of the text frame and video content resulted in the coactivation of the motivational systems. Placing a gain frame before a video message affects the overall processing of the subsequent message such that even an unpleasant message is rated more positively and results in a pattern of resource availability more like what we see for pleasant messages. Motivational activation and the subsequent effects on cognitive and emotional reactions are discussed within the context of multi-modal anti-drug campaigns.
This study investigates the role of crowd noise in the elicitation of social facilitation, mental imagery, arousal, and cognitive resource allocation. Participants (N = 60) listened to 8 total songs, ...4 where artificial crowd noise was used to simulate a live recording and 4 that were the untouched studio recordings. Results indicate that crowd noise does not elicit greater enjoyment or mental imagery, but it does elicit greater allocation of cognitive resources and lower arousal over time, indicative of social facilitation. These results indicate that crowd noise is better defined as a content feature rather than a structural feature.
•Persons with aphasia face barriers to healthcare due to poor patient education.•Augmented Input (AI) is effective for educating persons with aphasia.•Digital applications can utilize AI to educate ...PWA with minimal training.•Digital applications foster internal cognitive processing of health information.
Persons with aphasia (PWA) face additional barriers to proper healthcare due to inadequate patient education by health professionals unequipped to use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). The current study examines a digital application that evokes and sustains health information processing through AAC specifically aimed at increasing comprehension with augmented input (AI).
A digital application designed to educate PWA about their health condition was compared to a video-recorded doctor providing oral-only education. Sixteen PWA received both education interventions in a crossover manner. Health information processing was assessed through heart rate (HR) and skin conductance levels (SCL), which were collected continually during each administration of education interventions.
PWA demonstrated greater cognitive processing of health information via HR and SCL indices during the digital application compared to the typical oral-only education intervention. The oral-only intervention led PWA to disengage with health information.
By combining visuographic materials and adapted language into a customizable narrative structure, digital applications can utilize AI to educate PWA about basic health information (i.e., diagnosis and prognosis).
The current study’s AAC requires minimal training and can be used as an aided support in conjunction with other techniques that increase PWA’s access to health information.
The Limited Capacity Model of Motivated Mediated Message Processing (LC4MP) aims to understand message processing dynamics. Despite 20 years of research, no meta-analysis has assessed LC4MP effects. ...We conducted a meta-analysis of the model to examine three theoretical research domains in the LC4MP: cognitive load, motivation, and memory. Results from 142 articles and 683 effects demonstrate that pooled effect sizes for research domain range from r = .314-.398. Effect sizes vary by measurement modality with self-report resulting in the largest pooled effect size, followed by behavioral, and finally psychophysiological measures. We did not detect evidence of publication bias. These findings offer meta-analytic support for LC4MP research domains and are discussed in terms of falsifiability, predictive and explanatory power.
Abstract
Flow is thought to occur when both task difficulty and individual ability are high. Flow experiences are highly rewarding and are associated with well-being. Importantly, media use can be a ...source of flow. Communication scholars have a long history of theoretical inquiry into how flow biases media selection, how different media content results in flow, and how flow influences media processing and effects. However, the neurobiological basis of flow during media use is not well understood, limiting our explanatory capacity to specify how media contribute to flow or well-being. Here, we show that flow is associated with a flexible and modular brain-network topology, which may offer an explanation for why flow is simultaneously perceived as high-control and effortless, even when the task difficulty is high. Our study tests core predictions derived from synchronization theory, and our results provide qualified support for the theory while also suggesting important theoretical updates.
The case study presented in this article developed an improved intervention for visually communicating with persons diagnosed with a communication disorder known as aphasia. The Visual Interactive ...Narrative Intervention (VINI) assists health-care providers in educating post-stroke persons with aphasia (PWA) about their stroke, symptoms, rehabilitation options, and quality of life issues. Visual communication is under-utilized to convey health information to PWA despite its ability to capitalize on their intact cognitive and visual processing. The current Reflections on Practice summarizes visual guidelines from previous research, discusses visual design principles to achieve these guidelines, and presents a case study of creating visual stimuli for PWA based on these considerations and initial pilot testing with PWA. The case study demonstrates the creative process, the visual design considerations, and the interdisciplinary effort (i.e. health professionals, artists, and communication scholars) necessary for visually communicating with PWA.
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