We present the first comprehensive taxonomic revision and review the biology of the olingos, the endemic Neotropical procyonid genus Bassaricyon, based on most specimens available in museums, and with data derived from anatomy, morphometrics, mitochondrial and nuclear DNA, field observations, and geographic range modeling. Species of Bassaricyon are primarily forest-living, arboreal, nocturnal, frugivorous, and solitary, and have one young at a time. We demonstrate that four olingo species can be recognized, including a Central American species (Bassaricyon gabbii), lowland species with (...) eastern, cis-Andean (Bassaricyon alleni) and western, trans-Andean (Bassaricyon medius) distributions, and a species endemic to cloud forests in the Andes. The oldest evolutionary divergence in the genus is between this last species, endemic to the Andes of Colombia and Ecuador, and all other species, which occur in lower elevation habitats. Surprisingly, this Andean endemic species, which we call the Olinguito, has never been previously described; it represents a new species in the order Carnivora and is the smallest living member of the family Procyonidae. We report on the biology of this new species based on information from museum specimens, niche modeling, and fieldwork in western Ecuador, and describe four Olinguito subspecies based on morphological distinctions across different regions of the Northern Andes. (shrink)

Teams have been a ubiquitous structure for conducting work and business for most of human history. However, today’s organizations are markedly different than those of previous generations. The explosion of innovative ideas and novel technologies mandate changes in job descriptions, roles, responsibilities, and how employees interact and collaborate. These advances have heralded a new era for teams and teamwork in which previous teams research and practice may not be fully appropriate for meeting current requirements and demands. In this article, we (...) describe how teams have been historically defined, unpacking five important characteristics of teams, including membership, interdependence, shared goals, dynamics, and an organizationally bounded context, and relating how these characteristics have been addressed in the past and how they are changing in the present. We then articulate the implications these changes have on how we study teams moving forward by offering specific research questions. (shrink)

This grounded study investigated the negotiation of authorship by faculty members, graduate student mentors, and their undergraduate protégés in undergraduate research experiences at a private research university in the northeastern United States. Semi-structured interviews using complementary scripts were conducted separately with 42 participants over a 3 year period to probe their knowledge and understanding of responsible authorship and publication practices and learn how faculty and students entered into authorship decision-making intended to lead to the publication of peer-reviewed technical papers. Herein (...) the theoretical model for the negotiation of authorship developed through the analysis of these interviews is reported. The model identifies critical causal and intervening conditions responsible for the coping strategies faculty and students employ, which, in our study, appear to often produce unfortunate consequences for all involved. The undergraduate student researchers and their graduate student mentors interviewed in this study exhibited a limited understanding of authorship and the requirements for authorship in their research groups. The power differential between faculty and students, the students’ limited epistemic development, the busy-ness of the faculty, and the faculty’s failure to prioritize authorship have been identified as key factors inhibiting both undergraduate and graduate students from developing a deeper understanding of responsible authorship and publication practices. Implications for graduate education and undergraduate research are discussed, and strategies for helping all students to develop a deeper understanding of authorship are identified. (shrink)

COVID-19 severity and mortality risk are greater for older adults whereas economic impact is deeper for younger adults. Using the Health Belief Model as a framework, this study used a web-based survey to examine how perceived COVID-19 susceptibility and severity and perceived efficacy of recommended health behaviors varied by age group and were related to the adoption of health behaviors. Proportional odds logistic regression was used to examine the relationship between age group and perceived COVID-19 susceptibility, severity, impact, and health (...) behavior efficacy and adoption. Structural equation modeling based on HBM constructs examined the relationships between health beliefs and behaviors. Data from 820 participants were analyzed. Middle-aged and older adults reported greater concerns about the personal risk of hospitalization and mortality, economic impact, and social impact of COVID-19 than young adults. Middle-aged adults also reported greatest concern for other age groups. Adoption and perceived efficacy of health behaviors was similar across age groups with few exceptions. Both middle-aged and older-adults were more likely to perceive their own and each other's age groups as responding adequately to COVID-19 compared to young adults. Structural equation modeling indicated perceived benefits of health behaviors were the primary driver of behavior uptake, with socioeconomic factors and perceived severity and susceptibility indirectly associated with uptake through their influence on perceived benefits. Overall, these results suggest adoption of health behaviors is very high with few differences between age groups, despite differences in perceived impact of COVID-19. Public health communications should focus on the benefits of health behaviors to drive adoption. (shrink)

This paper explores the political potential of digital failure as a refusal to work in service of today’s dataveillance society. Moving beyond criticisms of flawed digital systems, this paper traces the moments of digital failure that seek to break, rather than fix, existing systems. Instead, digital failure is characterized by pesky data that sneaks through the cracks of digital capitalism and dissipates into the unproductive; it supports run-away data prone to misidentifications by digital marketers, coders, and content moderators; and it (...) celebrates data predisposed to “back-talk” with playful irreverence toward those that seek to bring order through normative categorization and moderation. I call these data entropic, fugitive, and queer and explore their mischievous practices through three case studies: the unaccountable data in identity resolution, public shaming of the ImageNet training data, and reading practices of sex worker and influencer, @Charlieshe. Together these case studies articulate the political potential of digital failure as a process of unbecoming the good data subject by pushing past the margins of legibility, knowability, and thinkability, to reveal what is made illegible, unknowable, and unthinkable to data’s seeing eye. As predictive analytics, automated decision-systems, and artificial intelligence take on increasingly central roles in public governance, digital failure reveals how data itself is a flawed concept prone to political abuse and social engineering to protect the interests of the powerful, while keeping those marginalized over-surveilled and underrepresented. (shrink)

The authors meta-analytically examined the relationship between intrinsic religiosity and internal locus of control. Thirty-seven independent samples, comprising 9,924 participants, yielded an average effect size of r =.06, which was small, but significant, indicating a positive correlation between intrinsic religiosity and internal locus of control. Moderation analyses showed a significant trend of effects becoming weaker over time. The judged religiousness of samples significantly predicted the strength of the correlation, such that more religious samples showed stronger effect sizes.

Self-regulation, or the ability to effectively manage emotions and behavior, is a critical skill to develop in early childhood. Children living in a context of economic hardship are at an increased risk for developing self-regulation difficulties. However, few studies have comprehensively examined how multiple aspects of the caregiving environment, including fathers’ parenting and coparenting quality, may contribute to child self-regulation. Thus, this study applied a family systems perspective to examine whether coparenting and resident and non-resident fathers’ reports of parenting quantity (...) and quality were associated with observations of children’s self-regulation. Participants were drawn from the Embedded Developmental Study of the Three-City Study, a longitudinal study of children and families facing economic hardship. At Wave 1, when children were 2–4 years old, reports of parenting and coparenting were obtained. At Wave 2, when children were 3–6 years old, children participated in a snack delay and gift wrap task, which assessed their self-regulation. Multi-group path analyses indicated that resident fathers’ harsh parenting at Wave 1 predicted decreased levels of self-regulation at Wave 2. Non-resident fathers’ reported hours of involvement at Wave 1 predicted greater levels of self-regulation at Wave 2. Additionally, supportive coparenting among families with a non-resident father predicted greater self-regulation. Supportive coparenting was not associated with child self-regulation in families with a resident father. The implications for research focused on facilitating positive father–child relationships in diverse family contexts are discussed. (shrink)

Subthalamic nucleus deep brain stimulation is an established therapy for Parkinson’s disease motor symptoms. The ideal site for implantation within STN, however, remains controversial. While many argue that placement of a DBS lead within the sensorimotor territory of the STN yields better motor outcomes, others report similar effects with leads placed in the associative or motor territory of the STN, while still others assert that placing a DBS lead “anywhere within a 6-mm-diameter cylinder centered at the presumed middle of the (...) STN produces similar clinical efficacy.” These discrepancies likely result from methodological differences including targeting preferences, imaging acquisition and the use of brain atlases that do not account for patient-specific anatomic variability. We present a first-in-kind within-patient demonstration of severe mood side effects and minimal motor improvement in a Parkinson’s disease patient following placement of a DBS lead in the limbic/associative territory of the STN who experienced marked improvement in motor benefit and resolution of mood side effects following repositioning the lead within the STN sensorimotor territory. 7 Tesla magnetic resonance imaging data were used to generate a patient-specific anatomical model of the STN with parcellation into distinct functional territories and computational modeling to assess the relative degree of activation of motor, associative and limbic territories. (shrink)

Human capital, the knowledge, skills, and abilities of employees, can be a powerful driver of firm performance, yet the mobility of human capital raises questions over how to protect it. Employee non-compete agreements, which limit an employee’s ability to start or join a rival firm, have received recent attention. While past research considers whether non-competes are effective tools at limiting employee mobility, few have considered if non-competes should be used. Filling this gap, I propose a normative schema for when employee (...) non-competes can be considered ethical. A review of the limited existing literature on the ethics of employee non-competes finds that prior research has mostly focused on questions of property rights, which I propose as being nested within other ethical constructs. Analysis of two real-world illustrative examples of employee non-competes leads to a three-prong approach to evaluating non-competes based on ethical dimensions of power, autonomy, and fairness. I end by proposing—although further research is warranted—a measure of employee-level absorptive capacity, which is closely coupled with an employee’s pre-employment human capital, as an employee-level attribute independent of, although likely coincidental with, the tripartite requirements of power/autonomy/fairness for ethical employee non-compete agreements. (shrink)

Memory is modified through the act of retrieval. Although retrieving a target piece of information may strengthen the retrieved information itself, it may also serve to weaken retention of related information. This phenomenon, termed retrieval-induced forgetting, has garnered substantial interest for its implications as to why forgetting occurs. The present study attempted to replicate the seminal work by Anderson, Bjork, and Bjork (1994) on retrieval-induced forgetting, given the apparent sensitivity of the effect to certain deviations from the original paradigm developed (...) to study the phenomenon. The study extends the conditions under which retrieval-induced forgetting has been examined by utilizing both a traditional college undergraduate sample (Experiment 1), along with a more diverse internet sample (Experiment 2). In addition, Experiment 3 details a replication attempt of retrieval-induced forgetting using Anderson and Spellman’s (1995) independent cue procedure. Retrieval-induced forgetting was observed when using the traditional retrieval practice paradigm with undergraduate (Experiment 1) and internet (Experiment 2) samples, though the effect was not found when using the independent cue procedure (Experiment 3). Thus, the study can provide an indication as to the robustness of retrieval-induced forgetting to deviations from the traditional college undergraduate samples that have been used in the majority of existing research on the effect. (shrink)

Research Ethics, Volume 18, Issue 1, Page 64-83, January 2022. Automated, wearable cameras can benefit health-related research by capturing accurate and objective information about individuals’ daily experiences. However, wearable cameras present unique privacy- and confidentiality-related risks due to the possibility of the images capturing identifying or sensitive information from participants and third parties. Although best practice guidelines for ethical research with wearable cameras have been published, limited information exists on the risks of studies using wearable cameras. The aim of this (...) literature review was to survey risks related to using wearable cameras, and precautions taken to reduce those risks, as reported in empirical research. Forty-five publications, comprising 36 independent studies, were reviewed, and findings revealed that participants’ primary concerns with using wearable cameras included physical inconvenience and discomfort in certain situations. None of the studies reviewed reported any serious adverse events. Although it is possible that reported findings do not include all risks experienced by participants in research with wearable cameras, our findings suggest a low level of risk to participants. However, it is important that investigators adopt recommended precautions, which can promote autonomy and reduce risks, including participant discomfort. (shrink)

We agree that human culture is unique. However, we also believe that an understanding of the evolution of culture requires a comparative approach. We offer examples of collaborative behaviors from dolphin play, and argue that consideration should be given to whether various forms of culture are best viewed as falling along a continuum or as discrete categories.

Do philosophic views affect job performance? The authors found that possessing a belief in free will predicted better career attitudes and actual job performance. The effect of free will beliefs on job performance indicators were over and above well-established predictors such as conscientiousness, locus of control, and Protestant work ethic. In Study 1, stronger belief in free will corresponded to more positive attitudes about expected career success. In Study 2, job performance was evaluated objectively and independently by a supervisor. Results (...) indicated that employees who espoused free will beliefs were given better work performance evaluations than those who disbelieve in free will, presumably because belief in free will facilitates exerting control over one’s actions. (shrink)

The coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) has caused shortages of life-sustaining medical resources, and future waves of the virus may cause further scarcity. The Yale New Haven Health System developed a triage protocol to allocate scarce medical resources during the COVID-19 pandemic, with the primary goal of saving the most lives possible, and a secondary goal of making triage assessments and decisions consistent, transparent, and fair. We outline the process of developing the protocol, summarize the protocol, and discuss the major ethical challenges (...) encountered, along with our answers to the challenges. These challenges include (1) the role of age and chronic comorbidities; (2) evaluating children and pregnant patients; (3) racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic disparities in health; (4) prioritization of healthcare workers; and (5) balancing clinical judgment versus protocolized assessments.We conclude with a review of the limitations of our protocol and the lessons learned. We hope that a robust public discussion of such protocols and the ethical challenges they raise will result in the fairest possible processes, less need for triage, and more lives saved during future waves of the pandemic and similar public health emergencies. (shrink)

Although many people choose to sign consent forms and participate in research, how many thoroughly read a consent form before signing it? Across 3 experiments using 348 undergraduate student participants, we examined whether personality characteristics as well as consent form content, format, and delivery method were related to thorough reading. Students repeatedly failed to read the consent forms, although small effects were found favoring electronic delivery methods and traditional format forms. Potential explanations are discussed and include participant apathy, participants trying (...) to save time by not reading the consent form, and participant assumptions about consent forms. (shrink)

Cognitive neuroscience has inspired a number of methodological advances to extract the highest signal-to-noise ratio from neuroimaging data. Popular techniques used to summarize behavioral data include sum-scores and item response theory. While these techniques can be useful when applied appropriately, item dimensionality and the quality of information are often left unexplored allowing poor performing items to be included in an itemset. The purpose of this study is to highlight how the application of two-stage approaches introduces parameter bias, differential item functioning (...) can manifest in cognitive neuroscience data and how techniques such as the multiple indicator multiple cause model can identify and remove items with DIF and model these data with greater sensitivity for brain–behavior relationships. This was performed using a simulation and an empirical study. The simulation explores parameter bias across two separate techniques used to summarize behavioral data: sum-scores and IRT and formative relationships with those estimated from a MIMIC model. In an empirical study participants performed an emotional identification task while concurrent electroencephalogram data were acquired across 384 trials. Participants were asked to identify the emotion presented by a static face of a child across four categories: happy, neutral, discomfort, and distress. The primary outcomes of interest were P200 event-related potential amplitude and latency within each emotion category. Instances of DIF related to correct emotion identification were explored with respect to an individual’s neurophysiology; specifically an item’s difficulty and discrimination were explored with respect to an individual’s average P200 amplitude and latency using a MIMIC model. The MIMIC model’s sensitivity was then compared to popular two-stage approaches for cognitive performance summary scores, including sum-scores and an IRT model framework and then regressing these onto the ERP characteristics. Here sensitivity refers to the magnitude and significance of coefficients relating the brain to these behavioral outcomes. The first set of analyses displayed instances of DIF within all four emotions which were then removed from all further models. The next set of analyses compared the two-stage approaches with the MIMIC model. Only the MIMIC model identified any significant brain–behavior relationships. Taken together, these results indicate that item performance can be gleaned from subject-specific biomarkers, and that techniques such as the MIMIC model may be useful tools to derive complex item-level brain–behavior relationships. (shrink)

Retrieval efficiencies of paper-based references in journals and other serials containing 10 scientific names of fossil amphibians were determined for seven major search engines. Retrievals were compared to the number of references obtained covering the period 1895—2006 by a Comprehensive Search. The latter was primarily a traditional library-based search which involved intensive work from 2002—2007. Only a few references originally obtained by search engines were included. Retrieval efficiencies were calculated by comparison to the number obtained through the Comprehensive Search (assumed (...) to be 100%). All percent retrievals were quite low (mean = 11.3%, range = 4.0—22.9%). For all seven search engines combined (duplicate references excluded), the percent retrieval was only 40.7%. There was also retrieval inefficiency and bias of the search engines in: sampling over time, the top five journals containing the most references, the top five most prolific authors, and non-English references. Consequently, all seven search engines were unsatisfactory for retrieval of references for our scientific research. (shrink)

Lack of guidance and regulation for authorizing medical cannabis for conditions involving the health and neurodevelopment of children is ethically problematic as it promulgates access inequities, risk-benefit inconsistencies, and inadequate consent mechanisms. In two virtual sessions using participatory action research and consensus-building methods, we obtained perspectives of stakeholders on ethics and medical cannabis for children and youth. The sessions focused on the scientific and regulatory landscape of medical cannabis, surrogate decision-making and assent, and the social and political culture of medical (...) cannabis. We found that evidence-gathering and data dissemination, pressures on clinical relationships, and the lack of integration of culturally diverse perspectives and Indigenous knowledges were key areas of concern. Participants emphasized the importance of utilizing adaptive study designs, highlighted the importance of trust-building between clinicians, patients and caregivers, and discussed barriers including historical and ongoing stigmatization of medical cannabis. We conclude that continued public consultation and strength-based research that integrate diverse perspectives are critical steps forward. (shrink)

Although case-based training is popular for ethics education, little is known about how specific case content influences training effectiveness. Therefore, the effects of (a) codes of ethical conduct and (b) forecasting content were investigated. Results revealed richer cases, including both codes and forecasting content, led to increased knowledge acquisition, greater sensemaking strategy use, and better decision ethicality. With richer cases, a specific pattern emerged. Specifically, content describing codes alone was more effective when combined with short-term forecasts, whereas content embedding codes (...) within context was more effective when combined with long-term forecasts, leading to greater knowledge acquisition and sensemaking strategy use. (shrink)

This study examined how structuring case-based ethics training, either through (a) case presentation or (b) prompt questions, influences training outcomes. Results revealed an interaction between case presentation and prompt questions such that some form of structure improved effectiveness. Specifically, comparing cases led to greater sensemaking strategy use and decision-ethicality when trainees considered unstructured rather than structured prompts. When cases were presented sequentially, structuring prompts improved training effectiveness. Too much structure, however, decreased future ethical decision making, suggesting that there can be (...) too much of a good thing when structuring case-based ethics education. Implications for designing ethics training programs are discussed. (shrink)

Multiteam systems are complex organizational forms comprising interdependent teams that work towards their own proximal goals within and across teams to also accomplish a shared superordinate goal. MTSs operate within high-stakes, dangerous contexts with high consequences for suboptimal performance. We answer calls for nuanced exploration and cross-context comparison of MTSs “in the wild” by leveraging the MTS action sub-phase behavioral taxonomy to determine where and how MTS failures occur. To our knowledge, this is the first study to also examine how (...) key MTS attributes influence MTS processes and performance. We conducted historiometric analysis on 40 cases of failed MTS performance across various contexts to uncover patterns of within- and between-team behaviors of failing MTSs, resulting in four themes. First, component teams of failing MTSs over-engaged in within-team alignment behaviors by enacting acting, monitoring, and recalibrating behaviors more often within than between teams. Second, failing MTSs over-focused on acting behaviors and tended to not fully enact the action sub-phase cycle. Third and fourth, boundary status and goal type exacerbated these behavioral patterns, as external and physical MTSs were less likely to enact sufficient between-team behaviors or fully enact the action sub-phase cycle compared to internal and intellectual MTSs. We propose entrainment as a mechanism for facilitating MTS performance wherein specific, cyclical behavioral patterns enacted by teams align to facilitate goal achievement via three multilevel behavioral cycles. We argue that the degree to which these cycles are aligned both between teams and with the overarching MTS goal determines whether and how an MTS fails. Our findings add nuance beyond single-context MTS studies by showing that the identified behavioral patterns hold both across contexts and almost all types of MTS action-phase behaviors. We show that these patterns vary by MTS boundary status and goal type. Our findings inform MTS training best practices, which should be structured to integrate all component teams and tailored to both MTS attributes and situation type. (shrink)

This essay summarizes key insights across the essays in the Hastings Center Report's special report “Time to Rebuild: Essays on Trust in Health Care and Science.” These insights concern trust and trustworthiness as distinct concepts, competence as a necessary but not sufficient input to trust, trust as a reciprocal good, trust as an interpersonal as well as structural phenomena, the ethical impermissibility of seeking to win trust without being trustworthy, building and borrowing trust as distinct strategies, and challenges to trustworthiness (...) posed by the contingent nature of science. Together, these insights stand to advance an area of research that we believe has been historically stymied by conceptual confusion and a long‐standing insistence on treating trust as a purely instrumental good. (shrink)

The ethical recruitment of participants with neurological disorders in clinical research requires obtaining initial and ongoing informed consent. The purpose of this study is to characterize barriers faced by research personnel in obtaining informed consent from research participants with neurological disorders and to identify strategies applied by researchers to overcome those barriers. This study was designed as a web-based survey of US researchers with an optional follow-up interview. A subset of participants who completed the survey were selected using a stratified (...) purposeful sampling strategy and invited to participate in an in-depth qualitative interview by phone or video conference. Data were analyzed using a mixed methods approach, including content analysis of survey responses and thematic analysis of interview responses. Over 1 year, 113 survey responses were received from US research personnel directly involved in obtaining informed consent from participants in neurological research. Frequently identified barriers to informed consent included: cognitive and communication impairments (e.g. aphasia), unrealistic expectations of research participants, mistrust of medical research, time constraints, literacy barriers, lack of available social support, and practical or resource-related constraints. Strategies to enhance informed consent included: involving close others to support participant understanding of study-related information, collaborating with more experienced research personnel to facilitate training in obtaining informed consent, encouraging participants to review consent forms in advance of consent discussions, and using printed materials and visual references. Beyond conveying study-related information, researchers included in this study endorsed ethical responsibilities to support deliberation necessary to informed consent in the context of misconceptions about research, unrealistic expectations, limited understanding, mistrust, and/or pressure from close others. Findings highlight the importance of training researchers involved in obtaining informed consent in neurological research to address disease-specific challenges and to support the decision-making processes of potential research participants and their close others. (shrink)