Abstract Thinking Facilitates Aggregation of Information

Many situations in life (such as considering which stock to invest in, or which people to befriend) require averaging across series of values. Here, we examined predictions derived from construal level theory, and tested whether abstract compared with concrete thinking facilitates the process of aggregating values into a unified summary representation. In four experiments, participants were induced to think more abstractly (vs. concretely) and performed different variations of an averaging task with numerical values (Experiments 1–2 and 4), and emotional faces (Experiment 3). We found that the induction of abstract, compared with concrete thinking, improved aggregation accuracy (Experiments 1–3), but did not improve memory for specific items (Experiment 4). In particular, in concrete thinking, averaging was characterized by increased regression toward the mean and lower signal-to-noise ratio, compared with abstract thinking

A Web-based archive of systematic review data

Systematic reviews have become increasingly critical to informing healthcare policy; however, they remain a time-consuming and labor-intensive activity. The extraction of data from constituent studies comprises a significant portion of this effort, an activity which is often needlessly duplicated, such as when attempting to update a previously conducted review or in reviews of overlapping topics

A Structured Approach Using the Systematic Review Data Repository (SRDR): Building the Evidence for Oral Health Interventions in the Population With Intellectual and Developmental Disability

BACKGROUND: This review describes the methods used for a systematic review of oral health intervention literature in a target population (people with intellectual and developmental disability (I/DD)), which spans a broad range of interventions and study types, conducted with specialized software. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this article is to demonstrate the review strategy, using the free, online systematic review data repository (SRDR) tool, for oral health interventions aimed at reducing disparities between people with I/DD and the general population. RESEARCH DESIGN: Researchers used online title/abstract review (Abstrackr) and data extraction (SRDR) tools to structure the literature review and data extraction. A practicing clinician and an expert methodologist completed the quality review for each study. The data extraction team reported on the experience of using and customizing the SRDR. RESULTS: Using the SRDR, the team developed four extraction templates for eight key questions and completed extraction on 125 articles. CONCLUSIONS: This report discusses the advantages and disadvantages of using an electronic tool, such as the SRDR, in completing a systematic review in an area of growing research. This review provides valuable insight for researchers who are considering the use of the SRDR

sj-docx-1-spp-10.1177_19485506231164701 – Supplemental material for Psychological Distance Increases Conceptual Generalization

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-spp-10.1177_19485506231164701 for Psychological Distance Increases Conceptual Generalization by Hadar Ram, Nira Liberman and Christian Unkelbach in Social Psychological and Personality Science</p