On the role of (implicit) drinking self-identity in alcohol use and problematic drinking : a comparison of five measures

OBJECTIVE: Implicit and explicit drinking self-identity appear to be useful in predicting alcohol-related outcomes. However, there are several different implicit and explicit measures which can be used to assess drinking self-identity. Some of these implicit measures can also capture relational information (e.g., I am a drinker, I should be a drinker), which might provide unique advantages. Despite the importance of having good measures of drinking self-identity, to date there has been little direct comparison of these measures. METHOD: This study (N = 358) systematically compared two commonly-used measures of drinking self-identity (one implicit and one explicit: the IAT and the ASCS) with three relational measures of implicit self-identity (the aIAT, the RRT, and the pCIT) on a range of criteria relevant to experimental and clinical alcohol researchers. RESULTS: Overall, we found mixed performances on the implicit measures. Interestingly, the aIAT which probed should-based drinking identity performed better than the standard IAT. However, the explicit measure exhibited superior performance to all other measures across all criteria. CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest that researchers who wish to assess drinking-related self-identity and to predict alcohol-related outcomes cross-sectionally should set their focus primarily on the use (and further development) of the ASCS, rather than any of the implicit measures. Future research focusing on the ASCS should seek to investigate the generalisability of our findings to patient populations, and incorporate relational information within that procedure in order to further improve upon its already-strong utility

Implicit and explicit COVID‐19‐vaccine harmfulness/helpfulness associations predict vaccine beliefs, intentions, and behaviors

We investigated the role of implicit and explicit associations between harm and COVID-19 vaccines using a large sample (N = 4668) of online volunteers. The participants completed a brief implicit association test and explicit measures to evaluate the extent to which they associated COVID-19 vaccines with concepts of harmfulness or helpfulness. We examined the relationship between these harmfulness/helpfulness COVID-19 vaccine associations and vaccination status, intentions, beliefs, and behavior. We found that stronger implicit and explicit associations that COVID-19 vaccines are helpful relate to vaccination status and beliefs about the COVID-19 vaccine. That is, stronger pro-helpful COVID-19 vaccine associations, both implicitly and explicitly, related to greater intentions to be vaccinated, more positive beliefs about the vaccine, and greater vaccine uptake

The Role of Uncertainty, Worry, and Control in Well-Being: Evidence From the COVID-19 Outbreak and Pandemic in U.S. and China

Uncertainty about the future often leads to worries about what the future will bring, which can have negative consequences for health and well-being. However, if worry can act as a motivator to promote efforts to prevent undesirable future outcomes, those negative consequences of worry may be mitigated. In this article, we apply a novel model of uncertainty, worry, and perceived control to predict psychological and physical well-being among four samples collected in China (Study 1; during the early COVID-19 outbreak in China) and the United States (Studies 2–4, during 4 weeks in May 2020, 4 weeks in November 2020, and crosssectionally between April and November 2020). Grounded in the feeling-is-for-doing approach to emotions, we hypothesized (and found) that uncertainty about one’s COVID-19 risk would predict greater worry about the virus and one’s risk of contracting it, and that greater worry would in turn predict poorer well-being. We also hypothesized, and found somewhat mixed evidence, that perceptions of control over 1’s COVID-19 risk moderated the relationship between worry and well-being such that worry was related to diminished well-being when people felt they lacked control over their risk for contracting the virus. This study is one of the first to demonstrate an indirect path from uncertainty to well-being via worry and to demonstrate the role of control in moderating whether uncertainty and worry manifest in poor well-being

Cephalopod genomics: a plan of strategies and organization

The Cephalopod Sequencing Consortium (CephSeq Consortium) was established at a NESCent Catalysis Group Meeting, "Paths to Cephalopod Genomics-Strategies, Choices, Organization," held in Durham, North Carolina, USA on May 24-27, 2012. Twenty-eight participants representing nine countries (Austria, Australia, China, Denmark, France, Italy, Japan, Spain and the USA) met to address the pressing need for genome sequencing of cephalopod mollusks. This group, drawn from cephalopod biologists, neuroscientists, developmental and evolutionary biologists, materials scientists, bioinformaticians and researchers active in sequencing, assembling and annotating genomes, agreed on a set of cephalopod species of particular importance for initial sequencing and developed strategies and an organization (CephSeq Consortium) to promote this sequencing. The conclusions and recommendations of this meeting are described in this white paper

Cephalopod genomics : a plan of strategies and organization

© The Author(s), 2012. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Standards in Genomic Sciences 7 (2012): 175-188, doi:10.4056/sigs.3136559.The Cephalopod Sequencing Consortium (CephSeq Consortium) was established at a NESCent Catalysis Group Meeting, “Paths to Cephalopod Genomics- Strategies, Choices, Organization,” held in Durham, North Carolina, USA on May 24-27, 2012. Twenty-eight participants representing nine countries (Austria, Australia, China, Denmark, France, Italy, Japan, Spain and the USA) met to address the pressing need for genome sequencing of cephalopod molluscs. This group, drawn from cephalopod biologists, neuroscientists, developmental and evolutionary biologists, materials scientists, bioinformaticians and researchers active in sequencing, assembling and annotating genomes, agreed on a set of cephalopod species of particular importance for initial sequencing and developed strategies and an organization (CephSeq Consortium) to promote this sequencing. The conclusions and recommendations of this meeting are described in this White Paper.The Catalysis Group Meeting was supported by the National Science Foundation through the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) under grant number NSF #EF-0905606

ICAD Study 3 data

open access dat

Predictive validity of an implicit association test measuring attitudes toward cannabis

Evaluating the predictive validity of an implicit association test that measures beliefs about cannabis presents a timely solution to contemporary issues surrounding complex attitudes and beliefs that are often difficult to assess through self-report measures. Specifically, measuring implicit beliefs about cannabis might help predict differences in the risk of hazardous cannabis use above and beyond what is captured by explicit self-report measures. This is important because implicit measures might be more sensitive to identifying and predicting risks that would otherwise go undetected using explicit self-report methods. Research on relatively more automatic and less consciously controlled measures of attitudes suggests that implicit associations tied to health predict health behavior intentions beyond explicitly assessed attitudes (Ratliff & Howell, 2015) and predict health information avoidance beyond explicit reports (Howell et al., 2016). Existing work examining implicit attitudes and beliefs about cannabis is sparse. Yet, initial evidence suggests that implicit associations differ between users and non-users and, further, that stronger implicit associations of cannabis as harmful, as opposed to safe, predict lower current and future (3, 6 month) cannabis use (Ramirez et al., 2020). This work added to existing substance use research examining implicit cognition because it used both a longitudinal—rather than cross-sectional—design with a community—rather than online—sample. However, because they did not measure explicit attitudes toward cannabis and used a relatively unique, potentially less-generalizable sample (young people living in the Pacific Northwest), it remains unclear whether measuring implicit attitudes towards cannabis as safe or harmful explains unique variance in self-reported risk of hazardous cannabis use. The primary purpose of this study is to examine the internal reliability and predictive validity of an Implicit Association Test (Greenwald et al., 1998) designed by Ramirez and colleagues (2020) to measure attitudes toward cannabis as dangerous or safe. To extend prior work, the present study will use a large sample of adults (estimated sample size close to 10,000, see description of recruitment below) who reside in the United States to evaluate the unique contribution of implicit associations between cannabis and danger in predicting risk of hazardous cannabis use after controlling for explicit associations and to evaluate whether and how this relationship differs between different demographic groups and across different levels of self-reported physical and mental health. We plan to split data that has already been collected (between August 2019 and August 2022) into an initial exploratory set (35% of observations) and a confirmatory set (65%). We have identified several theoretically-derived expectations to test in the exploratory data set (see below). After inspecting this initial exploratory model (e.g., regression diagnostics, model coefficients) we will revise and update this pre-registration with specific expectations regarding the analytic model, including code that we will use to examine the remaining 65% of extracted observations in a confirmatory model