94 results match your criteria: "Positive Psychology Center.[Affiliation]"

Real-world unexpected outcomes predict city-level mood states and risk-taking behavior.

PLoS One

April 2019

Positive Psychology Center, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America.

Fluctuations in mood states are driven by unpredictable outcomes in daily life but also appear to drive consequential behaviors such as risk-taking. However, our understanding of the relationships between unexpected outcomes, mood, and risk-taking behavior has relied primarily upon constrained and artificial laboratory settings. Here we examine, using naturalistic datasets, how real-world unexpected outcomes predict mood state changes observable at the level of a city, in turn predicting changes in gambling behavior.

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Depression, the most prevalent mental illness, is underdiagnosed and undertreated, highlighting the need to extend the scope of current screening methods. Here, we use language from Facebook posts of consenting individuals to predict depression recorded in electronic medical records. We accessed the history of Facebook statuses posted by 683 patients visiting a large urban academic emergency department, 114 of whom had a diagnosis of depression in their medical records.

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Beck's insight-that beliefs about one's self, future, and environment shape behavior-transformed depression treatment. Yet environment beliefs remain relatively understudied. We introduce a set of environment beliefs- or -that concern the world's overall character (e.

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There is broad consensus that there are at least two different dimensions of narcissism: vulnerable and grandiose. In this study, the authors use a new trifurcated, three-factor model of narcissism to examine relations between aspects of narcissism and an array of clinically relevant criteria related to psychopathology, the self, authenticity, and well-being. Neurotic and antagonistic aspects of narcissism emerged as the most clinically relevant dimensions of narcissism, bearing relations with outcomes relating to interpersonal guilt, insecure attachment styles, cognitive distortions, maladaptive defense mechanisms, experiential avoidance, impostor syndrome, weak sense of self, inauthenticity, low self-esteem, and reduced psychological well-being.

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Narcissism is a truly Janusian phenomenon, consisting of both narcissistic grandiosity, exhibitionism, admiration-seeking, boldness, and dominance on the one hand, and narcissistic vulnerability, introversion, withdrawal, hypersensitivity, and anxiety on the other hand. While there is broad consensus that these two seemingly contradictory faces of narcissism can be empirically discerned and have different implications for psychological functioning and mental health, there is not yet agreement on whether grandiose and vulnerable narcissism should be regarded as independent traits or as two manifestations of one personality trait. Previous research indicates that both views hold true when the level of grandiosity is considered a moderating factor: while grandiose and vulnerable narcissism are largely unrelated in the range of normal personality variation, they are correlated in the range of high grandiosity (Jauk et al.

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Assessing the predictive value of different social media platforms is important to understand the variation in how users reveal themselves across multiple platforms. Most social media platforms allow users to interact in multiple ways: by posting content to the platform, liking others' posts, or building a user profile. While prior studies offer insights into how language use differs across platforms, differences in image usage is less well understood.

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Objectives: The current study analyzes a large set of Twitter data from 1,384 US counties to determine whether excessive alcohol consumption rates can be predicted by the words being posted from each county.

Methods: Data from over 138 million county-level tweets were analyzed using predictive modeling, differential language analysis, and mediating language analysis.

Results: Twitter language data captures cross-sectional patterns of excessive alcohol consumption beyond that of sociodemographic factors (e.

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This study examined how social support seeking and rumination interacted to predict depression and anxiety symptoms six months later in early adolescents (N = 118; 11 - 14 yrs at baseline). We expected social support seeking would be more helpful for adolescents engaging in low rather than high levels of rumination. Adolescents self-reported on all measures at baseline, and on depression and anxiety symptoms six months later.

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Variations in Facebook Posting Patterns Across Validated Patient Health Conditions: A Prospective Cohort Study.

J Med Internet Res

January 2017

Penn Medicine Social Media and Health Innovation Lab, Penn Medicine Center for Health Care Innovation, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States.

Background: Social media is emerging as an insightful platform for studying health. To develop targeted health interventions involving social media, we sought to identify the patient demographic and disease predictors of frequency of posting on Facebook.

Objective: The aims were to explore the language topics correlated with frequency of social media use across a cohort of social media users within a health care setting, evaluate the differences in the quantity of social media postings across individuals with different disease diagnoses, and determine if patients could accurately predict their own levels of social media engagement.

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Twitter as a Potential Data Source for Cardiovascular Disease Research.

JAMA Cardiol

December 2016

Penn Medicine Social Media and Health Innovation Lab, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia2Department of Emergency Medicine, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

Importance: As society is increasingly becoming more networked, researchers are beginning to explore how social media can be used to study person-to-person communication about health and health care use. Twitter is an online messaging platform used by more than 300 million people who have generated several billion Tweets, yet little work has focused on the potential applications of these data for studying public attitudes and behaviors associated with cardiovascular health.

Objective: To describe the volume and content of Tweets associated with cardiovascular disease as well as the characteristics of Twitter users.

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Background: Assessing the efficacy of Internet interventions that are already in the market introduces both challenges and opportunities. While vast, often unprecedented amounts of data may be available (hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions of participants with high dimensions of assessed variables), the data are observational in nature, are partly unstructured (eg, free text, images, sensor data), do not include a natural control group to be used for comparison, and typically exhibit high attrition rates. New approaches are therefore needed to use these existing data and derive new insights that can augment traditional smaller-group randomized controlled trials.

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Positive Cardiovascular Health: A Timely Convergence.

J Am Coll Cardiol

August 2016

Department of Psychology, Positive Psychology Center, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Two concepts, positive health and cardiovascular health, have emerged recently from the respective fields of positive psychology and preventive cardiology. These parallel constructs are converging to foster positive cardiovascular health and a growing collaboration between psychologists and cardiovascular scientists to achieve significant improvements in both individual and population cardiovascular health. We explore these 2 concepts and note close similarities in the measures that define them, the health states that they aim to produce, and their intended long-term clinical and public health outcomes.

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Evidence from education, psychology, and neuroscience suggests that investing in the development of the social-emotional imagination is essential to cultivating giftedness in adolescents. Nurturing these capacities may be especially effective for promoting giftedness in students who are likely to lose interest and ambition over time. Giftedness is frequently equated with high general intelligence as measured by IQ tests, but this narrow conceptualization does not adequately capture students' abilities to utilize their talents strategically to fully realize their future possible selves.

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This report describes a groundbreaking military-civilian collaboration that benefits from an Army and Department of Defense (DoD) big data business intelligence platform called the Person-Event Data Environment (PDE). The PDE is a consolidated data repository that contains unclassified but sensitive manpower, training, financial, health, and medical records covering U.S.

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In a dyad interaction, respecting and obeying those with high status (authority) is highly valued in Chinese societies. Regarding explicit behaviors, Chinese people usually show respect to and obey authority, which we call authoritarian orientation. Previous literature has indicated that Chinese people have a high degree of authoritarian personality, which was considered a national character.

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Using Twitter to Measure Public Discussion of Diseases: A Case Study.

JMIR Public Health Surveill

June 2015

Positive Psychology Center, Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States.

Background: Twitter is increasingly used to estimate disease prevalence, but such measurements can be biased, due to both biased sampling and inherent ambiguity of natural language.

Objective: We characterized the extent of these biases and how they vary with disease.

Methods: We correlated self-reported prevalence rates for 22 diseases from Experian's Simmons National Consumer Study (n=12,305) with the number of times these diseases were mentioned on Twitter during the same period (2012).

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Linking social media and medical record data: a study of adults presenting to an academic, urban emergency department.

BMJ Qual Saf

June 2016

Penn Medicine Social Media and Health Innovation Lab, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA Department of Emergency Medicine, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.

Background: Social media may offer insight into the relationship between an individual's health and their everyday life, as well as attitudes towards health and the perceived quality of healthcare services.

Objective: To determine the acceptability to patients and potential utility to researchers of a database linking patients' social media content with their electronic medical record (EMR) data.

Methods: Adult Facebook/Twitter users who presented to an emergency department were queried about their willingness to share their social media data and EMR data with health researchers for the purpose of building a databank for research purposes.

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The longitudinal effectiveness of a universal, adolescent school-based depression prevention program Op Volle Kracht (OVK) was evaluated by means of a cluster randomized controlled trial with intervention and control condition (school as usual). OVK was based on the Penn Resiliency Program (PRP) (Gillham et al. Psychological Science, 6, 343-351, 1995).

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Automatically inferring user demographics from social media posts is useful for both social science research and a range of downstream applications in marketing and politics. We present the first extensive study where user behaviour on Twitter is used to build a predictive model of income. We apply non-linear methods for regression, i.

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Article Synopsis
  • * Intense Islamic prayer resulted in decreased CBF in areas like the prefrontal cortex, while differing prayer types showed increased CBF in regions such as the caudate nucleus and thalamus.
  • * The findings suggest distinct brain activity patterns during prayer, potentially linked to feelings of "surrender" and a "connection with God," highlighting the complexity of cognitive processes involved in these practices.
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Girls earn better grades than boys, but the mechanism explaining this gender difference is not well understood. We examined the relative importance of self-control and motivation in explaining the female advantage in grades. In Study 1, we surveyed middle school teachers and found they judged girls to be higher in both school motivation and self-control.

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The Big Five personality dimension Openness/Intellect is the trait most closely associated with creativity and creative achievement. Little is known, however, regarding the discriminant validity of its two aspects-Openness to Experience (reflecting cognitive engagement with perception, fantasy, aesthetics, and emotions) and Intellect (reflecting cognitive engagement with abstract and semantic information, primarily through reasoning)-in relation to creativity. In four demographically diverse samples totaling 1,035 participants, we investigated the independent predictive validity of Openness and Intellect by assessing the relations among cognitive ability, divergent thinking, personality, and creative achievement across the arts and sciences.

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The 2013 US Government Shutdown (#Shutdown) and health: an emerging role for social media.

Am J Public Health

December 2014

Raina M. Merchant, Yoonhee P. Ha, and Charlene A. Wong are with the Penn Medicine Social Media and Health Innovation Lab, Penn Medicine Center for Health Care Innovation, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. H. Andrew Schwartz, Lyle H. Ungar, and Maarten Sap are with the Department of Computer and Information Science, Positive Psychology Center, University of Pennsylvania. David A. Asch is with the Center for Health Equity Research and Promotion, Philadelphia Veteran's Affairs Medical Center, Philadelphia, PA.

In October 2013, multiple United States (US) federal health departments and agencies posted on Twitter, "We're sorry, but we will not be tweeting or responding to @replies during the shutdown. We'll be back as soon as possible!" These "last tweets" and the millions of responses they generated revealed social media's role as a forum for sharing and discussing information rapidly. Social media are now among the few dominant communication channels used today.

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