Mental illness is quickly becoming one of the most prevalent public health problems worldwide. Social network platforms, where users can express their emotions, feelings, and thoughts, are a valuable ...source of data for researching mental health, and techniques based on machine learning are increasingly used for this purpose.
The objective of this review was to explore the scope and limits of cutting-edge techniques that researchers are using for predictive analytics in mental health and to review associated issues, such as ethical concerns, in this area of research.
We performed a systematic literature review in March 2017, using keywords to search articles on data mining of social network data in the context of common mental health disorders, published between 2010 and March 8, 2017 in medical and computer science journals.
The initial search returned a total of 5386 articles. Following a careful analysis of the titles, abstracts, and main texts, we selected 48 articles for review. We coded the articles according to key characteristics, techniques used for data collection, data preprocessing, feature extraction, feature selection, model construction, and model verification. The most common analytical method was text analysis, with several studies using different flavors of image analysis and social interaction graph analysis.
Despite an increasing number of studies investigating mental health issues using social network data, some common problems persist. Assembling large, high-quality datasets of social media users with mental disorder is problematic, not only due to biases associated with the collection methods, but also with regard to managing consent and selecting appropriate analytics techniques.
Over the last century hundreds of studies have demonstrated that testing is an effective intervention to enhance long-term retention of studied knowledge and facilitate mastery of new information, ...compared with restudying and many other learning strategies (e.g., concept mapping), a phenomenon termed the testing effect. How robust is this effect in applied settings beyond the laboratory? The current review integrated 48,478 students' data, extracted from 222 independent studies, to investigate the magnitude, boundary conditions, and psychological underpinnings of test-enhanced learning in the classroom. The results show that overall testing (quizzing) raises student academic achievement to a medium extent (g = 0.499). The magnitude of the effect is modulated by a variety of factors, including learning strategy in the control condition, test format consistency, material matching, provision of corrective feedback, number of test repetitions, test administration location and timepoint, treatment duration, and experimental design. The documented findings support 3 theories to account for the classroom testing effect: additional exposure, transfer-appropriate processing, and motivation. In addition to their implications for theory development, these results have practical significance for enhancing teaching practice and guiding education policy and highlight important directions for future research.
Public Significance Statement
Testing (class quizzing) yields a variety of learning benefits, even though learners, instructors, and policymakers tend to lack full metacognitive insight into the virtues of testing. The current meta-analysis finds a reliable advantage of testing over other strategies in facilitating learning of factual knowledge, concept comprehension, and knowledge application in the classroom. Overall, testing is not only an assessment of learning but also an assessment for learning.
The ideal behind ego depletion is that willpower draws on a limited mental resource, so that engaging in an act of self-control impairs self-control in subsequent tasks. To present ego depletion as ...more than a convenient metaphor, some researchers have proposed that glucose is the limited resource that becomes depleted with self-control. However, there have been theoretical challenges to the proposed glucose mechanism, and the experiments that have tested it have found mixed results. We used a new meta-analytic tool, p-curve analysis, to examine the reliability of the evidence from these experiments. We found that the effect sizes reported in this literature are possibly influenced by publication or reporting bias and that, even within studies yielding significant results, the evidential value of this research is weak. In light of these results, and pending further evidence, researchers and policymakers should refrain from drawing any conclusions about the role of glucose in self-control.
The scientific community has witnessed growing concern about the high rate of false positives and unreliable results within the psychological literature, but the harmful impact of false negatives has ...been largely ignored. False negatives are particularly concerning in research areas where demonstrating the absence of an effect is crucial, such as studies of unconscious or implicit processing. Research on implicit processes seeks evidence of above-chance performance on some implicit behavioral measure at the same time as chance-level performance (that is, a null result) on an explicit measure of awareness. A systematic review of 73 studies of contextual cuing, a popular implicit learning paradigm, involving 181 statistical analyses of awareness tests, reveals how underpowered studies can lead to failure to reject a false null hypothesis. Among the studies that reported sufficient information, the meta-analytic effect size across awareness tests was
d
z
= 0.31 (95 % CI 0.24–0.37), showing that participants’ learning in these experiments was conscious. The unusually large number of positive results in this literature cannot be explained by selective publication. Instead, our analyses demonstrate that these tests are typically insensitive and underpowered to detect medium to small, but true, effects in awareness tests. These findings challenge a widespread and theoretically important claim about the extent of unconscious human cognition.
Enthusiasm for research on the brain and its application in education is growing among teachers. However, a lack of sufficient knowledge, poor communication between educators and scientists, and the ...effective marketing of dubious educational products has led to the proliferation of numerous 'neuromyths.' As a first step toward designing effective interventions to correct these misconceptions, previous studies have explored the prevalence of neuromyths in different countries. In the present study we extend this applied research by gathering data from a new sample of Spanish teachers and by meta-analyzing all the evidence available so far. Our results show that some of the most popular neuromyths identified in previous studies are also endorsed by Spanish teachers. The meta-analytic synthesis of these data and previous research confirms that the popularity of some neuromyths is remarkably consistent across countries, although we also note peculiarities and exceptions with important implications for the development of effective interventions. In light of the increasing popularity of pseudoscientific practices in schools worldwide, we suggest a set of interventions to address misconceptions about the brain and education.
Impaired procedural learning has been suggested as a possible cause of developmental dyslexia (DD) and specific language impairment (SLI). This study examined the relationship between measures of ...verbal and non‐verbal implicit and explicit learning and measures of language, literacy and arithmetic attainment in a large sample of 7 to 8‐year‐old children. Measures of verbal explicit learning were correlated with measures of attainment. In contrast, no relationships between measures of implicit learning and attainment were found. Critically, the reliability of the implicit learning tasks was poor. Our results show that measures of procedural learning, as currently used, are typically unreliable and insensitive to individual differences. A video of this article can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnvV-BvNWSo
This study investigated the relationships between measures of verbal and non‐verbal declarative and procedural learning and attainment in language skills in a large unselected sample of children. We found that verbal declarative memory skills correlated with language ability. However, the procedural memory tasks were found to be unreliable and correlated poorly with each other and with measures of language skills.
Several classic studies have concluded that the accuracy of identifying uncontrollable situations depends heavily on depressive mood. Nondepressed participants tend to exhibit an optimistic illusion ...of control, whereas depressed participants tend to better detect a lack of control. Recently, we suggested that the different activity levels (measured as the probability of responding during a contingency learning task) exhibited by depressed and nondepressed individuals is partly responsible for this effect. The two studies presented in this paper provide further support for this mediational hypothesis, in which mood is the distal cause of the illusion of control operating through activity level, the proximal cause. In Study 1, the probability of responding, P(R), was found to be a mediator variable between the depressive symptoms and the judgments of control. In Study 2, we intervened directly on the mediator variable: The P(R) for both depressed and nondepressed participants was manipulated through instructions. Our results confirm that P(R) manipulation produced differences in the participants' perceptions of uncontrollability. Importantly, the intervention on the mediator variable cancelled the effect of the distal cause; the participants' judgments of control were no longer mood dependent when the P(R) was manipulated. This result supports the hypothesis that the so-called depressive realism effect is actually mediated by the probability of responding.
In the past decade, several studies have examined the effects of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on long-term episodic memory formation and retrieval. These studies yielded conflicting ...results, likely due to differences in stimulation parameters, experimental design and outcome measures.
In this work we aimed to assess the robustness of tDCS effects on long-term episodic memory using a meta-analytical approach.
We conducted four meta-analyses to analyse the effects of anodal and cathodal tDCS on memory accuracy and response times. We also used a moderator analysis to examine whether the size of tDCS effects varied as a function of specific stimulation parameters and experimental conditions.
Although all selected studies reported a significant effect of tDCS in at least one condition in the published paper, the results of the four meta-analyses showed only statistically non-significant close-to-zero effects. A moderator analysis suggested that for anodal tDCS, the duration of the stimulation and the task used to probe memory moderated the effectiveness of tDCS. For cathodal tDCS, site of stimulation was a significant moderator, although this result was based on only a few observations.
To warrant theoretical advancement and practical implications, more rigorous research is needed to fully understand whether tDCS reliably modulates episodic memory, and the specific circumstances under which this modulation does, and does not, occur.
•We conducted four meta-analyses to assess the effects of tDCS on episodic memory.•We examined the effects of anodal and cathodal tDCS.•We found no effects of tDCS on episodic memory accuracy or response times.•Specific stimulation parameters moderated the effects of tDCS.
Objectives
Over the last years, mindfulness meditation has been claimed to be effective in enhancing several cognitive domains, including executive control. However, these claims have been mostly ...based on findings pertaining to case-control and cross-sectional studies, which are by nature unable to reveal causal relationships. Aiming to address this issue, we set out to conduct the first quantitative assessment of the literature concerning mindfulness meditation as an enhancer for executive control considering only randomized controlled studies.
Methods
We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis covering experimental studies testing the effect of mindfulness meditation training on at least one executive control function (working memory, inhibitory control, or cognitive flexibility) in adult samples. Four databases were examined, resulting in the identification of 822 candidate references. After a systematic filtering process, a set of 16 studies was retained for evaluation, of which 13 could be included in a subsequent meta-analysis.
Results
We found an average effect size of
g
= 0.34 0.16, 0.51, indicating a small-to-medium effect of mindfulness meditation training in enhancing executive control. Effect sizes for individual functions were
g
= 0.42 0.10, 0.74 for working memory,
g
= 0.42 0.20, 0.63 for inhibitory control, and
g
= 0.09 −0.13, 0.31 for cognitive flexibility. Funnel plot asymmetry analysis revealed no evidence of publication bias.
Conclusions
Taken together, our findings provide preliminary and moderate yet positive evidence supporting the enhancing effects of mindfulness meditation on executive control. Shortcomings of included studies and considerations for future empirical and meta-analytical research are discussed.
Because of the features provided by an abundance of specialized experimental software packages, personal computers have become prominent and powerful tools in cognitive research. Most of these ...programs have mechanisms to control the precision and accuracy with which visual stimuli are presented as well as the response times. However, external factors, often related to the technology used to display the visual information, can have a noticeable impact on the actual performance and may be easily overlooked by researchers. The aim of this study is to measure the precision and accuracy of the timing mechanisms of some of the most popular software packages used in a typical laboratory scenario in order to assess whether presentation times configured by researchers do not differ from measured times more than what is expected due to the hardware limitations. Despite the apparent precision and accuracy of the results, important issues related to timing setups in the presentation of visual stimuli were found, and they should be taken into account by researchers in their experiments.
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