Publications by authors named "Brett Ford"

Article Synopsis
  • Valuing happiness too much can actually make people unhappy, especially in relationships.
  • Some people try hard to make others happy but can become intolerant of their feelings, making things worse.
  • The study found that those who want to be happy are better at helping loved ones with their emotions compared to those who just worry about being happy.
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Previous work suggests that sometimes the more people value happiness, the less happy they are. For whom and why is this the case? To answer these questions, we examined a model of happiness pursuit that disentangles two previously conflated individual differences related to valuing happiness. The first individual difference operates at the strength of the value itself and involves viewing happiness as a very important goal (i.

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The current research examined three related questions in a 21-month longitudinal study of a diverse sample of U.S. participants ( = 504): (a) How did Big Five traits change during the COVID-19 pandemic? (b) What factors were associated with individual differences in trait change? and (c) How was Big Five trait change associated with downstream well-being, mental health, and physical health? On average, across the 21-month study period, conscientiousness increased slightly, and extraversion decreased slightly.

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Characterisation and genetic mapping of a key gene defining root morphology in bread wheat. Root morphology is central to plants for the efficient uptake up of soil water and mineral nutrients. Here we describe a conditional mutant of hexaploid wheat (Triticum aestivum L.

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Unlabelled: Most research on emotion regulation has focused on understanding individual emotion regulation strategies. Preliminary research, however, suggests that people often use several strategies to regulate their emotions in a given emotional scenario (polyregulation). The present research examined who uses polyregulation, when polyregulation is used, and how effective polyregulation is when it is used.

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Reappraisal is a frequently used and often successful emotion regulation strategy. However, its underlying cognitive mechanisms are not well understood. In this paper, we seek to clarify these mechanisms by expanding upon our recently proposed reAppraisal framework.

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Politics and its controversies have permeated everyday life, but the daily impact of politics on the general public is largely unknown. Here, we apply an affective science framework to understand how the public experiences daily politics in a two-part examination. We first used longitudinal, daily diary methods to track two samples of U.

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Semidwarfing genes have greatly increased wheat yields globally, yet the widely used gibberellin (GA)-insensitive genes and have disadvantages for seedling emergence. Use of the GA-sensitive semidwarfing gene avoids this pleiotropic effect. Here, we show that encodes a () gene.

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For better or worse, the people one lives with may exert a powerful influence on one's mental health, perhaps especially during times of stress. The COVID-19 pandemic-a large-scale stressor that prompted health recommendations to stay home to reduce disease spread-provided a unique context for examining how the people who share one's home may shape one's mental health. A seven-wave longitudinal study assessed mental health month to month before and during the pandemic (February through September 2020) in two diverse samples of U.

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Objectives: Heavy demands upon dementia caregivers can lead to a number of poor health outcomes including declines in physical, mental, and brain health. Although dementia affects people from all backgrounds, research in the US has largely focused on European American caregivers. This has made providing culturally-competent care more difficult.

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Inhibition is considered a process essential to goal pursuit and as a result has become a central construct in many disciplines in psychology and adjacent fields. Despite a century's worth of debate, however, there is little consensus about what inhibition actually is. We suggest that it is time to abandon the concept of inhibition as it currently stands, given that its definition has been problematic.

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Article Synopsis
  • Major stressors, like the COVID-19 pandemic, initially harm emotional well-being by increasing negative emotions and decreasing positive emotions.
  • Research shows that while average negative emotions return to baseline quickly, positive emotions remain lower than normal even after six months, suggesting limits to resilience.
  • Individual emotional responses vary significantly based on socio-demographic factors and levels of stress exposure, highlighting the need for more nuanced approaches to understanding emotional well-being post-stressor.
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To address anti-Black Racism, systemic change across many domains in American life will be necessary. There are many barriers to change, however, and progress requires identifying these barriers and developing tools to overcome them. Given that White individuals disproportionately occupy "gatekeeping" positions of power, one key barrier to systemic change is rooted in White individuals' emotional (and emotion-regulatory) responses when considering their own role in racism (e.

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Background: Emotion regulation is a key transdiagnostic risk factor for a range of psychopathologies, making it a prime target for both prevention and treatment interventions in childhood. Existing interventions predominantly rely on workshops or in-person therapy-based approaches, limiting the ability to promote emotion regulation competence for children in everyday settings and at scale. Purrble is a newly developed, inexpensive, socially assistive robot-in the form of an interactive plush toy-that uses haptic feedback to support in-the-moment emotion regulation.

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Background: Barriers to assessing depression in advanced dementia include the presence of informant and patient recall biases. Ecological momentary assessment provides an improved approach for mood assessment by collecting observations in intervals throughout the day, decreasing recall bias, and increasing ecological validity.

Objective: This study aims to evaluate the feasibility, reliability, and validity of the modified 4-item Cornell Scale for Depression in Dementia for Momentary Assessment (mCSDD4-MA) tool to assess depression in patients with advanced dementia.

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How people respond to health threats can influence their own health and, when people are facing communal risks, even their community's health. We propose that people commonly respond to health threats by managing their emotions with cognitive strategies such as reappraisal, which can reduce fear and protect mental health. However, because fear can also motivate health behaviors, reducing fear may also jeopardize health behaviors.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study aimed to identify personality traits that predict compliance with COVID-19 health measures like social distancing and masks, as many people did not follow these guidelines.
  • Among various traits, agreeableness, particularly compassion, was found to be the strongest predictor for compliance, even when controlling for other factors.
  • The findings suggest that health messages could be more effective if tailored to individuals who are less agreeable, highlighting the importance of applying psychological theories in real-world health crises.
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Structural variations (SVs) represent a large fraction of all genetic diversity, but how this genetic diversity is translated into phenotypic and organismal diversity is unclear. Explosive diversification of dog coat color and patterns after domestication can provide a unique opportunity to explore this question; however, the major obstacle is to efficiently collect a sufficient number of individuals with known phenotypes and genotypes of hundreds of thousands of markers. Using customer-provided information about coat color and patterns of dogs tested on a commercial canine genotyping platform, we identified a genomic region on chromosome 38 that is strongly associated with a mottled coat pattern (roaning) by genome-wide association study.

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In many ways, dogs are an ideal model for the study of genetic erosion and population recovery, problems of major concern in the field of conservation genetics. Genetic diversity in many dog breeds has been declining systematically since the beginning of the 1800s, when modern breeding practices came into fashion. As such, inbreeding in domestic dog breeds is substantial and widespread and has led to an increase in recessive deleterious mutations of high effect as well as general inbreeding depression.

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The induced dwarf mutant Rht12 was previously shown to have agronomic potential to replace the conventional DELLA mutants Rht-B1b/Rht-D1b in wheat. The Rht12 dwarfing gene is not associated with reduced coleoptile length (unlike the DELLA mutants) and it is dominant, characteristics which are shared with the previously characterized dwarfing genes Rht18 and Rht14. Using the Rht18/Rht14 model, a gibberellin (GA) 2-oxidase gene was identified in the Rht12 region on chromosome 5A.

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There has been extensive discussion about gender gaps in representation and career advancement in the sciences. However, psychological science itself has yet to be the focus of discussion or systematic review, despite our field's investment in questions of equity, status, well-being, gender bias, and gender disparities. In the present article, we consider 10 topics relevant for women's career advancement in psychological science.

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Recurring glacial cycles through the Quaternary period drastically altered the size and distribution of natural populations of North American flora and fauna. The "southerly refugia model" has been the longstanding framework for testing the effects of glaciation on contemporary genetic patterns; however, insights from ancient DNA have contributed to the reconstruction of more complex histories for some species. The American badger, , provides an interesting species for exploring the genetic legacy of glacial history, having been hypothesized to have postglacially emerged from a single, southerly refugium to recolonize northern latitudes.

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Understanding the function of genes within staple crops will accelerate crop improvement by allowing targeted breeding approaches. Despite their importance, a lack of genomic information and resources has hindered the functional characterisation of genes in major crops. The recent release of high-quality reference sequences for these crops underpins a suite of genetic and genomic resources that support basic research and breeding.

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Using molecular genetic information to guide population management can improve the sustainability of species in captivity. However, empirical population genetics has not been commonly applied to species management programs in zoos. One limitation may be the availability of genetic resources (e.

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