Scientists@Home: What Drives the Quantity and Quality of Online Citizen Science Participation?

Online citizen science offers a low-cost way to strengthen the infrastructure for scientific research and engage members of the public in science. As the sustainability of online citizen science projects depends on volunteers who contribute their skills, time, and energy, the objective of this study is to investigate effects of motivational factors on the quantity and quality of citizen scientists'' contribution. Building on the social movement participation model, findings from a longitudinal empirical study in three different citizen science projects reveal that quantity of contribution is determined by collective motives, norm-oriented motives, reputation, and intrinsic motives. Contribution quality, on the other hand, is positively affected only by collective motives and reputation. We discuss implications for research on the motivation for participation in technology-mediated social participation and for the practice of citizen science.     

Approach and Withdrawal Motivation in Schizophrenia: An Examination of Frontal Brain Asymmetric Activity

Although motivational disturbances are common in schizophrenia, their neurophysiological and psychological basis is poorly understood. This electroencephalography (EEG) study examined the well-established motivational direction model of asymmetric frontal brain activity in schizophrenia. According to this model, relative left frontal activity in the resting EEG reflects enhanced approach motivation tendencies, whereas relative right frontal activity reflects enhanced withdrawal motivation tendencies. Twenty-five schizophrenia outpatients and 25 healthy controls completed resting EEG assessments of frontal asymmetry in the alpha frequency band (8–12 Hz), as well as a self-report measure of behavioral activation and inhibition system (BIS/BAS) sensitivity. Patients showed an atypical pattern of differences from controls. On the EEG measure patients failed to show the left lateralized activity that was present in controls, suggesting diminished approach motivation. On the self-report measure, patients reported higher BIS sensitivity than controls, which is typically interpreted as heightened withdrawal motivation. EEG asymmetry scores did not significantly correlate with BIS/BAS scores or with clinical symptom ratings among patients. The overall pattern suggests a motivational disturbance in schizophrenia characterized by elements of both diminished approach and elevated withdrawal tendencies.     

Sex Attracts: Investigating Individual Differences in Attentional Bias to Sexual Stimuli

We investigated the impact of sexual stimuli and the influence of sexual motivation on the performance in a dot-probe task and a line-orientation task in a large sample of males and females. All pictures (neutral, erotic) were rated on the dimensions of valence, arousal, disgust, and sexual arousal. Additionally, questionnaires measuring sexual interest/desire/motivation were employed. The ratings of the sexual stimuli point to a successful picture selection because sexual arousal did not differ between the sexes. The stimuli were equally arousing for men and women. Higher scores in the employed questionnaires measuring sexual interest/desire/motivation led to higher sexual arousal ratings of the sex pictures. Attentional bias towards sex pictures was observed in both experimental tasks. The attentional biases measured by the dot-probe and the line-orientation task were moderately intercorrelated suggesting attentional bias as a possible marker for a sex-attention trait. Finally, only the sexual sensation seeking score correlated with the attentional biases of the two tasks. Future research is needed to increase the predictive power of these indirect measures of sexual interest.     

Inferring reputation promotes the evolution of cooperation in spatial social dilemma games

In realistic world individuals with high reputation are more likely to influence the collective behaviors. Due to the cost and error of information dissemination, however, it is unreasonable to assign each individual with a complete cognitive power, which means that not everyone can accurately realize others' reputation situation. Here we introduce the mechanism of inferring reputation into the selection of potential strategy sources to explore the evolution of cooperation. Before the game each player is assigned with a randomly distributed parameter p denoting his ability to infer the reputation of others. The parameter p of each individual is kept constant during the game. The value of p indicates that the neighbor possessing highest reputation is chosen with the probability p and randomly choosing an opponent is left with the probability 1-p. We find that this novel mechanism can be seen as an universally applicable promoter of cooperation, which works on various interaction networks and in different types of evolutionary game. Of particular interest is the fact that, in the early stages of evolutionary process, cooperators with high reputation who are easily regarded as the potential strategy donors can quickly lead to the formation of extremely robust clusters of cooperators that are impervious to defector attacks. These clusters eventually help cooperators reach their undisputed dominance, which transcends what can be warranted by the spatial reciprocity alone. Moreover, we provide complete phase diagrams to depict the impact of uncertainty in strategy adoptions and conclude that the effective interaction topology structure may be altered under such a mechanism. When the estimation of reputation is extended, we also show that the moderate value of evaluation factor enables cooperation to thrive best. We thus present a viable method of understanding the ubiquitous cooperative behaviors in nature and hope that it will inspire further studies to resolve social dilemmas.     

Affective responses by adults with autism are reduced to social images but elevated to images related to circumscribed interests

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) demonstrate increased visual attention and elevated brain reward circuitry responses to images related to circumscribed interests (CI), suggesting that a heightened affective response to CI may underlie their disproportionate salience and reward value in ASD. To determine if individuals with ASD differ from typically developing (TD) adults in their subjective emotional experience of CI object images, non-CI object images and social images, 213 TD adults and 56 adults with ASD provided arousal ratings (sensation of being energized varying along a dimension from calm to excited) and valence ratings (emotionality varying along dimension of approach to withdrawal) for a series of 114 images derived from previous research on CI. The groups did not differ on arousal ratings for any image type, but ASD adults provided higher valence ratings than TD adults for CI-related images, and lower valence ratings for social images. Even after co-varying the effects of sex, the ASD group, but not the TD group, gave higher valence ratings to CI images than social images. These findings provide additional evidence that ASD is characterized by a preference for certain categories of non-social objects and a reduced preference for social stimuli, and support the dissemination of this image set for examining aspects of the circumscribed interest phenotype in ASD.     

Expert video exchanges in bilingual biology lessons - student’s intrinsic motivation and subject-specific interest

ABSTRACT

This paper presents an instructional model to incorporate English-language communication between international practicing scientists and English learners into secondary science lessons. The aim was to identify a method that lets pupils practice English as the language of science and that elicits positive affective attitudes in the form of task-specific intrinsic motivation. As a central condition, the approach had to be feasible in realistic school settings. The pupils that participated in the two studies presented (total n = 218) were native German speakers and interacted with English-speaking experts in the curricular contexts of cytology and immunology via videos. We assessed pupils’ task-specific intrinsic motivation (as defined by their interest/enjoyment of the exchange and their relatedness to the expert) and compared it to their subject-specific interest in biology and English before and after the project. We further contrasted the motivational ratings of bilingually experienced and inexperienced groups of pupils. Both groups reported similar and remarkably high task-specific intrinsic motivation for the video exchange. Subject-specific interests remained constant before and after implementing the method and were correlated with interest/enjoyment in the standard, but not in the bilingually experienced classes. The applicability of the exchange model in different topics, subjects, and student groups is discussed.     

Selection of social traits in juvenile Japanese quail affects adults’ behaviour

The inability of animals to cope with their social environment in husbandry systems could be a major source of problems for both animal welfare management and economy. In this context, previous studies selected lines of domestic Japanese quail diverging for their level of social reinstatement, hypothesizing that quail with high levels of social motivation would adapt better to crowded social situations than quail with low levels of social motivation. However, these selections were based only on social motivation evaluated in young birds. As behavioural traits can vary with age, this study analysed the persistence of selected social traits into adulthood. With this in mind, we used several behavioural tests to estimate social motivation of adult females from selected lines for high social reinstatement (HSR, n = 24) and for low social reinstatement (LSR, n = 24). The tests were: open-field tests, emergence tests, separation tests, runway tests and confrontation tests. As birds’ behaviour in these tests can be influenced by the emotive characteristics of the subjects, we measured the emotional reactivity of quail not only during these tests but also in specific emotive tests: tonic immobility tests. Our results showed that the social motivation characteristics of birds persist in adulthood. Adult HSR females still presented a higher social motivation than adult LRS females: their response to social isolation was stronger and their motivation to reach conspecifics and to stay close to them was higher. However, the behavioural expression of social motivation appeared to be modified during development. Whereas vocal behaviour reflected the social motivation of chicks, in isolated contexts, this characteristic was not observed in adult quail.     

Obesity disease management opportunities and barriers

Disease management, a system of coordinated health care interventions and communications for chronically ill populations, relies on patient education and case management to engage individuals in the management of their condition. Disease management also aims to enhance the quality of interactions between doctors and patients and advance evidence-based medicine. Because these programs' interventions frequently include helping individuals who suffer comorbidities associated with obesity to reduce their BMI, adaptation of disease management to populations with obesity seems a viable option. A major barrier for implementing disease management for obesity, however, is the lack of proven return on investment, which limits health plan and disease management organization interest. Purchaser demand may overcome this reluctance. Further research is needed to objectively test whether disease management interventions would be clinically effective for obese populations, produce positive financial outcomes for insurers, and enhance workplace productivity.     

Secret Places: On the Management of Knowledge and Information About Landscape and Yields in Northern Norway

This article addresses strategies of secrecy and deception in hunters’ and fishers’ appropriation of land- and seascape-based resources in northern Norway. We argue that in their management of relevant environmental knowledge and information, hunters and fishers often seek to avoid competitors and free riders by hiding their trails, and are particularly careful about who they share their knowledge with. Strategies of secrecy are also integral to individual hunter’s and fisher’s social reputation. Reputation is achieved not only by successful trips and sharing of spoils, but also through role enactments that become the subject of evaluating commentaries and information exchange guided by socially sanctioned rules of appropriate deference. In some important ways structural and economic changes in the social environment also change the generic properties of the practices investigated, while secrecy as practice shows a strong cultural continuity in spite of such changes.     

How should we define goodness?--reputation dynamics in indirect reciprocity

Theory of indirect reciprocity is important in explaining cooperation between humans. Since a partner of a social interaction often changes, an individual should assess his partner by using social information such as reputation and make decisions whether to help him or not. To those who have 'good' social reputation does a player give aid as reciprocation, whereas he has to refuse to help those who have 'bad' reputation. Otherwise benefits of altruism is easily exploited by them. Little has been known, however, about the definition of 'goodness' in reputation. What kind of actions are and should be regarded as good and what kind of actions bad? And what sort of goodness enables sustaining exchange of altruism? We herein challenge this question with an evolutionary perspective. We generalize social reputation as 'Honor-score' (H-score) and examine the conditions under which individuals in a group stably maintain cooperative relationships based on indirect reciprocity. We examine the condition for evolutionarily stable strategies (ESSs) over 4096 possible cases exhaustively. Mathematical analysis reveals that only eight cases called 'leading eight' are crucial to the evolution of indirect reciprocity. Each in the leading eight shares two common characteristics: (i) cooperation with good persons is regarded as good while defection against them is regarded as bad, and (ii) defection against bad persons should be regarded as a good behavior because it works as sanction. Our results give one solution to the definition of goodness from an evolutionary viewpoint. In addition, we believe that the formalism of reputation dynamics gives general insights into the way social information is generated, handled, and transmitted in animal societies.     

Reputation,a universal currency for human social interactions

Decision rules of reciprocity include ‘I help those who helped me’ (direct reciprocity) and ‘I help those who have helped others’ (indirect reciprocity), i.e. I help those who have a reputation to care for others. A person''s reputation is a score that members of a social group update whenever they see the person interacting or hear at best multiple gossip about the person''s social interactions. Reputation is the current standing the person has gained from previous investments or refusal of investments in helping others. Is he a good guy, can I trust him or should I better avoid him as a social partner? A good reputation pays off by attracting help from others, even from strangers or members from another group, if the recipient''s reputation is known. Any costly investment in others, i.e. direct help, donations to charity, investment in averting climate change, etc. increases a person''s reputation. I shall argue and illustrate with examples that a person''s known reputation functions like money that can be used whenever the person needs help. Whenever possible I will present tests of predictions of evolutionary theory, i.e. fitness maximizing strategies, mostly by economic experiments with humans.     

The influence of postreliance detection on the deceptive efficacy of dishonest signals of intent: Understanding facial clues to deceit as the outcome of signaling tradeoffs

Evolutionary communication theory posits that signalers and receivers are in a coevolutionary arms race. Receivers attempt to predict the behavior of signalers, and signalers attempt to manipulate the behavior of receivers (often through the use of dishonest signals of intent). This has led to the perception that deceitful signalers prefer perfectly deceptive signals. However, it is often easy for receivers to determine that a signal of intent was dishonest after relying on it to their detriment. Even the best deceivers may then acquire a reputation for being dishonest. For instance, in Prisoner's Dilemma (PD)-like social situations, predictable defectors make better social partners than unpredictable defectors. When opportunities to engage in social interaction depend on one's reputation for predictability, those who are better at concealing their defecting intentions may suffer the most from the reputations they acquire. Deceivers then face a tradeoff between the short-term benefits of successful deception and the long-term costs to their reputations. A mathematical model is developed and it is shown that the tradeoff often favors signalers who produce imperfectly deceptive signals over perfectly honest or perfectly deceptive ones. Implications for understanding human facial expressions and sociopathy are drawn.     

Conflicts of interest in health care: who guards the guardians?

Conflicts of interest are rife in all areas of human endeavor, including medicine. Dealing with them is often difficult, because various disclosure remedies are sometimes too weak, while explicit prohibitions against participation in certain forms of research could block the needed synergies between scientists who work in universities, government, and industry. The situation is made still more difficult, because any effort to control one set of conflicts will necessarily generate another in its stead, as is well captured in Juvenal's famous question, "Who will guard the guardians?" That problem is more acute today, because many of our social watchdogs are in fact complex organizations that are rife with their own internal conflicts of interest. The problem is acute for the FDA, for example, which so fears the release of harmful drugs that it often keeps beneficial ones off the market. The problem can also arise in connection with the review of medical research by major journals, which is well illustrated by the recent effort of the New England Journal of Medicine to attack a Vioxx study it published in order to protect its own reputation.     

The long-term benefits of human generosity in indirect reciprocity

Among the theories that have been proposed to explain the evolution of altruism are direct reciprocity and indirect reciprocity. The idea of the latter is that helping someone or refusing to do so has an impact on one's reputation within a group. This reputation is constantly assessed and reassessed by others and is taken into account by them in future social interactions. Generosity in indirect reciprocity can evolve if and only if it eventually leads to a net benefit in the long term. Here, we show that this key assumption is met. We let 114 students play for money in an indirect and a subsequent direct reciprocity game. We found that although being generous, i.e., giving something of value to others, had the obvious short-term costs, it paid in the long run because it builds up a reputation that is rewarded by third parties (who thereby themselves increase their reputation). A reputation of being generous also provided an advantage in the subsequent direct reciprocity game, probably because it builds up trust that can lead to more stable cooperation.     

What Are Punishment and Reputation for?

Why did punishment and the use of reputation evolve in humans? According to one family of theories, they evolved to support the maintenance of cooperative group norms; according to another, they evolved to enhance personal gains from cooperation. Current behavioral data are consistent with both hypotheses (and both selection pressures could have shaped human cooperative psychology). However, these hypotheses lead to sharply divergent behavioral predictions in circumstances that have not yet been tested. Here we report results testing these rival predictions. In every test where social exchange theory and group norm maintenance theory made different predictions, subject behavior violated the predictions of group norm maintenance theory and matched those of social exchange theory. Subjects do not direct punishment toward those with reputations for norm violation per se; instead, they use reputation self-beneficially, as a cue to lower the risk that they personally will experience losses from defection. More tellingly, subjects direct their cooperative efforts preferentially towards defectors they have punished and away from those they haven’t punished; they avoid expending punitive effort on reforming defectors who only pose a risk to others. These results are not consistent with the hypothesis that the psychology of punishment evolved to uphold group norms. The circumstances in which punishment is deployed and withheld–its circuit logic–support the hypothesis that it is generated by psychological mechanisms that evolved to benefit the punisher, by allowing him to bargain for better treatment.     

Apatía postictus

Apathy is a motivational disturbance that can be defined as a quantitative reduction of goal-directed behaviour. Patients present with loss of motivation, concern, interest, and emotional response, resulting in a loss of initiative, decreased interaction with their environment, and a reduced interest in social life. Apathy not only appears to be common in stroke patients, but it has also been related to a wide range of negative consequences for the patients and their caregivers, including poor functional recovery, loss of social independence, and caregiver distress. Clear definition and consensus diagnostic criteria for apathy are needed to accomplish an accurate assessment and an individualised treatment plan. Although there have been reports of successful behavioural therapy treatment of apathetic states, there is a paucity of controlled clinical trials on the efficacy of apathetic behaviours using pharmacotherapy.     

以电子注册为手段, 推进高校学籍管理建设

学籍管理是高校教学管理工作的一项重要内容,是保证高校正常教学秩序,形成良好学风、教风和校风的重要保障。电子注册则是传统学籍管理工作在新形势下的延续和发展。实现电子注册,对保证高等教育质量,维护高校的社会形象和大学生的合法权益,起着很重要的保障作用。学籍管理是实施电子注册的基础,电子注册则是加强学籍管理的有效手段。     

Indirect reciprocity under incomplete observation

Indirect reciprocity, in which individuals help others with a good reputation but not those with a bad reputation, is a mechanism for cooperation in social dilemma situations when individuals do not repeatedly interact with the same partners. In a relatively large society where indirect reciprocity is relevant, individuals may not know each other's reputation even indirectly. Previous studies investigated the situations where individuals playing the game have to determine the action possibly without knowing others' reputations. Nevertheless, the possibility that observers of the game, who generate the reputation of the interacting players, assign reputations without complete information about them has been neglected. Because an individual acts as an interacting player and as an observer on different occasions if indirect reciprocity is endogenously sustained in a society, the incompleteness of information may affect either role. We examine the game of indirect reciprocity when the reputations of players are not necessarily known to observers and to interacting players. We find that the trustful discriminator, which cooperates with good and unknown players and defects against bad players, realizes cooperative societies under seven social norms. Among the seven social norms, three of the four suspicious norms under which cooperation (defection) to unknown players leads to a good (bad) reputation enable cooperation down to a relatively small observation probability. In contrast, the three trustful norms under which both cooperation and defection to unknown players lead to a good reputation are relatively efficient.     

Reform of Public Hospitals and the Main Role of Medical Staffs

The success of reforms to the public hospital system in China depends on the motivation and mobilization of medical staffs. Several factors are known to influence the motivation of health workers, including remuneration, acquisition of power and reputation, the ability to care for others, and the level of satisfaction. Obtaining recognition turns out to be a central factor in affecting motivation, while power and reputation fuel the health workers’ enthusiasm. Providing caring for others and level of satisfaction safeguards the enthusiasm of medical staffs. We found that the motivation of medical staffs was enhanced through institutionalized programs that reward, empower, and promote the reputation of individuals, and other factors. Through the implementation of these programs, the medical staffs of Xuzhou Central Hospital have been successfully mobilized, resulting in an improvement in performance securing the healthy growth of the hospital, which ultimately translated to better health care delivery for the people in the region.     

How can we improve information delivery to support conservation and restoration decisions?

Incorporating science into resource conservation and management is becoming increasingly important, but it is not yet clear how to provide information to decision makers most effectively. To evaluate sources of information used to support the management and conservation of California’s riparian bird habitat, we distributed a questionnaire to restoration practitioners and public and private land managers. We asked respondents to rate the importance and availability of different sources of information they use to inform their decisions. Synthetic reviews and peer-reviewed publications both received high importance and availability ratings. Web-based tools received low importance and availability ratings. One-on-one interactions between ecologists and decision makers received high importance ratings, similar to those of peer-reviewed publications and synthetic reviews, but their availability was rated lower than any other method of decision support. Our results suggest that the decision makers we surveyed are already using a wide variety of information, but that prioritizing one-on-one interactions between scientists and decision makers will enhance the delivery of all sources of information.