Browse
Recent Submissions
- ItemOpen AccessSupplementary online materials for “Evidence of Delayed, Recursive Benefits of Self-Affirmation on Anxiety in Socially Anxious University Students”(Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 2021) O'Brien, Karen; Sukovieff, Alyse; Johnson, Edward A.The following supplementary materials are presented in the order in which they appeared within the study entitled "Evidence of Delayed, Recursive Benefits of Self-Affirmation on Anxiety in Socially Anxious University Students". Please see Appendix A for a visual representation of the phases and the materials that were presented during each phase.
- ItemOpen AccessModel-Based Recursive Partitioning of Extended Redundancy Analysis with an Application to Nicotine Dependence among US adults(2021) Kim, Sunmee; Hwang, HeungsunExtended redundancy analysis (ERA) is used to reduce multiple sets of predictors to a smaller number of components and examine the effects of these components on a response variable. In various social and behavioral studies, auxiliary covariates (e.g., gender, ethnicity, etc.) can often lead to heterogeneous subgroups of observations, each of which involves distinctive relationships between predictor and response variables. ERA is currently unable to consider such covariate-dependent heterogeneity to examine whether the model parameters vary across subgroups differentiated by covariates. To address this issue, we combine ERA with model-based recursive partitioning in a single framework. This combined method, MOB-ERA, aims to partition observations into heterogeneous subgroups recursively based on a set of covariates while fitting a specified ERA model to data. Upon the completion of the partitioning procedure, one can easily examine the difference in the estimated ERA parameters across covariate-dependent subgroups. Moreover, it produces a tree diagram that aids in visualizing a hierarchy of partitioning covariates, as well as interpreting their interactions. In the analysis of public data concerning nicotine dependence among US adults, the method uncovered heterogeneous subgroups characterized by several sociodemographic covariates, each of which yielded different directional relationships between three predictor sets and nicotine dependence.
- ItemOpen AccessWorkplace violence and mental health of paramedics and firefighters(2019-04) Setlack, Jennifer; Glenwright, Melanie (Psychology); Johnson, Edward (Psychology) Brais, Nicolas (Psychology)Paramedics and firefighters are at a higher risk for developing psychopathologies due to frequent exposure to traumatic incidents inherent within their work. In addition, current research shows that this population also experiences high levels of workplace violence due to their often unpredictable and dangerous work environments. The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship of workplace violence and traumatic events to psychopathology in emergency services workers with the secondary aim of investigating how coping styles and self-compassion may moderate this relationship. A convenience sample of firefighters (N = 117) and paramedics (N = 129) were recruited from the Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service. Participants completed a series of online self-report questionnaires on Qualtrics, measuring PTSD, depression, anxiety, stress, burnout, workplace violence, self-compassion and coping skills. The study used a cross-sectional design to determine the influence of workplace violence on psychopathologies. Workplace violence was shown to have pervasive impacts on psychopathology and burnout in paramedics, but not in firefighters. Self-compassion is generally protective for both groups, but it is particularly helpful for paramedics that have experienced greater workplace violence. Behavioral disengagement and self-blame were associated with higher levels of PTSD for firefighters and paramedics. The implications of this research, understanding the relationship between workplace violence and mental health, may inform emergency services departmental policies. These policies may act to protect current firefighters and paramedics and may have the potential to improve working conditions and career longevity for future practitioners in this field.
- ItemOpen AccessDo Questions Get Infants Talking? Infant Vocal Responses to Questions and Declaratives in Maternal Speech(Wiley, 2017) Reimchen, Melissa; Soderstrom, MelanieMaternal questions play a crucial role in early language acquisition by virtue of their special grammatical, prosodic and lexical forms, and their abundance in the input. Infants are able to discriminate questions from other sentence types and produce rising intonations in their own requests. This study examined whether caregiver questions were related to the quantity of infant vocalizations. Thirty-six infants aged 10 and 14 months participated in a laboratory play session with their mothers. In separate blocks, mothers were instructed to ask questions and to refrain from asking questions. Both block-level and utterance-level analyses found no evidence that maternal questions affected the amount of infant-response vocalizations. Mothers of 14-month-olds (but not 10-month-olds) tended to repeat questions.
- ItemOpen AccessGrasping in a Cluttered Environment: Avoiding Obstacles Under Memory Guidance(2019) Abbas, Hana H; Marotta, Jonathan JHumans often reach to remembered objects, such as when picking up a coffee cup from behind our morning paper. When reaching to previously seen, now out-of-view objects, we rely on our perceptual memory of the scene, to guide our actions (Milner & Goodale, 1995). Based in relative coordinates, encoded perceptual representations may likely exaggerate the risk associated with nearby obstacles. For instance, a cereal bowl next to our coffee cup may be judged as larger than it really is under memory-guided conditions, resulting in a more cautious obstacle avoidance approach to best prevent a messy collision. In contrast, when visual information is available up to the point when a reach is initiated, the precise positions of objects relative to the self are likely to be computed and incorporated into a motor plan, allowing for finely tuned eye-hand maneuvers around positioned obstacles. The objective of this study was to examine obstacle avoidance during memory-guided grasping. Eye-hand coordination was monitored as subjects had to reach through a pair of obstacles in order to grasp a 3D target. The availability of visual information underwent a between-subjects manipulation, such that reaches occurred either with continuous visual information (visually-guided condition), immediately in the absence of visual feedback (memory-guided no-delay condition), or after a 2-s delay in the absence of visual feedback (memory-guided delay condition). The positions and widths of obstacles were manipulated, though their inner edges remained a constant distance apart. We expected the memory-guided delay group to exhibit exaggerated avoidance strategies, particularly around wider obstacles. Results revealed subjects were able to effectively avoid obstacles in the visually-guided and memory-guided no-delay conditions, though overall performance was poorer in the no-delay group, resulting from the inability to use visual information for the online control of action. Still, subjects in these groups consistently altered the paths of the index finger and wrist and adjusted the index finger position on the target object to accommodate obstacles that obstructed the reach path to different degrees. Contrary to expectation, the memory-guided delay group resorted to a more moderate strategy, with fewer instances of altered index finger and wrist paths or adjusted index finger positions on the target object in response to positioned obstacles, though successful grasps were still seen. In other words, subjects reaching to remembered objects tended to use a “good enough” approach for avoiding obstacles. In conclusion, obstacle avoidance behaviour, driven by our stored perceptual representations of a scene, appears to adopt a more moderate, rather than exaggerative, strategy. This work was funded by Research Manitoba, NSERC CGSM, and NSERC Discovery Grant.