Objective: Lower sensitivity to the acute effects of alcohol is known to confer risk for the development of alcohol use disorder. Alcohol sensitivity, or level of response to alcohol's subjective effects, is heritable but also can change as a result of persistent alcohol exposure (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBr J Math Stat Psychol
February 2024
We propose a novel nonparametric Bayesian item response theory model that estimates clusters at the question level, while simultaneously allowing for heterogeneity at the examinee level under each question cluster, characterized by a mixture of binomial distributions. The main contribution of this work is threefold. First, we present our new model and demonstrate that it is identifiable under a set of conditions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPerspect Psychol Sci
January 2024
Conducting research with human subjects can be difficult because of limited sample sizes and small empirical effects. We demonstrate that this problem can yield patterns of results that are practically indistinguishable from flipping a coin to determine the direction of treatment effects. We use this idea of random conclusions to establish a baseline for interpreting effect-size estimates, in turn producing more stringent thresholds for hypothesis testing and for statistical-power calculations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGlobal climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the spread of misinformation on social media are just a handful of highly consequential problems affecting society. We argue that the rough contours of many societal problems can be framed within a "wisdom of crowds" perspective. Such a framing allows researchers to recast complex problems within a simple conceptual framework and leverage known results on crowd wisdom.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFirearm violence remains a public health crisis in marginalized, urban communities, with Black adolescents bearing the burden of firearm homicides and injuries. As such, the prevention of firearm violence among adolescents has moved to a high priority of the U.S.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Approximately 28 million individuals engage in alcohol-impaired driving (AID) every year. This study investigated individuals' AID decision making strategies under intoxication, their variability across the breath alcohol concentration (BrAC) curve, and the association between strategy and AID attitudes, intentions, and behavior.
Method: Seventy-nine adults (mean 23.
Paul Meehl's famous critique detailed many of the problematic practices and conceptual confusions that stand in the way of meaningful theoretical progress in psychological science. By integrating many of Meehl's points, we argue that one of the reasons for the slow progress in psychology is the failure to acknowledge the . This problem arises whenever we attempt to measure quantities that are not directly observable but can be inferred from observable variables.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFConventional cancer chemotherapies are not fully efficacious and do not target tumors, leading to significant treatment-related morbidities. A number of genetically attenuated cancer-targeting bacteria are being developed to safely target tumors . Here we report the toxicological, tumor-targeting, and efficacy profiles of serovar Typhimurium CRC2631 in a syngeneic and autochthonous TRAMP model of aggressive prostate cancer.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground And Aims: Despite widespread negative perceptions, the prevalence of alcohol-impaired driving (AID) in the United States remains unacceptably high. This study used a novel decision task to evaluate whether individuals considered both ride service cost and alcohol consumption level when deciding whether or not to drive, and whether the resulting strategy was associated with engagement in AID.
Design: A two-sample study, where sample 1 developed a novel AID decision task to classify participants by decision strategy.
Rationale: Alcohol intoxication produces effects that can impair judgment and increase engagement in risky behaviors, including alcohol-impaired driving (AID). Real-world AID decisions are informed by contextual circumstances and judgments of associated risk. How individuals vary in their AID decision-making across contexts and whether subjective alcohol responses (stimulation, sedation, acute tolerance) differentially affect AID decisions are critical, but under-studied research questions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe present a general method for setting prior distributions in Bayesian models where parameters of interest are re-parameterized via a functional relationship. We generalize the results of Heck and Wagenmakers (2016) by considering the case where the dimension of the auxiliary parameter space does not equal that of the primary parameter space. We present numerical methods for carrying out prior specification for statistical models that do not admit closed-form solutions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImportant developments in the study of decision making have been based on the establishment and testing of choice paradoxes (e.g., Allais') that reject different theories (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe investigated whether older adults are more likely than younger adults to violate a foundational property of rational decision making, the axiom of transitive preference. Our experiment consisted of two groups, older (ages 60-75; 21 participants) and younger (ages 18-30; 20 participants) adults. We used Bayesian model selection to investigate whether individuals were better described via (transitive) weak order-based decision strategies or (possibly intransitive) lexicographic semiorder decision strategies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMost meta-analyses focus on the behavior of meta-analytic means. In many cases, however, this mean is difficult to defend as a construct because the underlying distribution of studies reflects many factors, including how we as researchers choose to design studies. We present an alternative goal for meta-analysis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe explore the implication of viewing a psychological theory as the logical conjunction of all its predictions. Even if several predictions derived from a theory are descriptive of behavior in separate studies, the theory as a whole may fail to be descriptive of any single individual. We discuss what proportion of a population satisfies a theory's joint predictions as a function of the true effect sizes and the proportion of variance attributable to individual differences.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMany psychological theories can be operationalized as linear inequality constraints on the parameters of multinomial distributions (e.g., discrete choice analysis).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlcohol intoxication is well known to impair a number of cognitive abilities required for sound decision making. We tested whether an intoxicating dose of alcohol altered whether individuals satisfied a basic property of rational decision making, transitivity of preference. Our study was within-subjects in design and our analysis teased apart stable, yet error-prone, preferences from variable, error-free preferences.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMathematical psychology has a long tradition of modeling probabilistic choice via distribution-free random utility models and associated random preference models. For such models, the predicted choice probabilities often form a bounded and convex polyhedral set, or polytope. Polyhedral combinatorics have thus played a key role in studying the mathematical structure of these models.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMany negative outcomes associated with alcohol consumption stem from individual decision making, such as the decision whether or not to drive after drinking. Understanding biases in decision making as they relate to alcohol, and measuring variability in decision strategies across individuals, can be a tool for improving policy. For alcohol-related policy, both addiction and the acute effects of intoxication are potential sources of bias or heterogeneity in decision strategy, and we provide a brief primer on how they can affect decision making.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSample means comparisons are a fundamental and ubiquitous approach to interpreting experimental psychological data. Yet, we argue that the sample and effect sizes in published psychological research are frequently so small that sample means are insufficiently accurate to determine whether treatment effects have occurred. Generally, an estimator should be more accurate than any benchmark that systematically ignores information about the relations among experimental conditions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Behav Decis Mak
January 2018
After more then 50 years of probabilistic choice modeling in Economics, Marketing, Political Science, Psychology, and related disciplines, theoretical and computational advances give scholars access to a sophisticated array of modeling and inference resources. We review some important, but perhaps often overlooked, properties of major classes of probabilistic choice models. For within-respondent applications, we discuss which models require repeated choices by an individual to be independent and response probabilities to be stationary.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPsychol Methods
December 2018
Within modern psychology, computational and statistical models play an important role in describing a wide variety of human behavior. Model selection analyses are typically used to classify individuals according to the model(s) that best describe their behavior. These classifications are inherently probabilistic, which presents challenges for performing group-level analyses, such as quantifying the effect of an experimental manipulation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe model of Tsetsos et al. (2016a) is a biologically motivated computational framework that aims to model intransitive preference and choice. Tsetsos et al.
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