23 research outputs found
Perceptions of Distance Education Students on How a University Education will Help Achieve their Career Goals
Using the responses to an open-ended question on the annual web-based scholarship application on how students are planning to use their education in achieving their career goals, this study explored the intersection of educational and career goals of mostly non-traditional students
The association of stress and physical activity: Mind the ecological fallacy [Der Zusammenhang zwischen Stress und körperlicher Aktivität: Mind the ecological fallacy]
Psychological stress and physical activity are interrelated, constituting a relevant association to human health, especially in children. However, the association’s nature remains elusive, i.e., why psychological stress predicts both decreased and increased physical activity. To test whether effects vary as a function of the level of analyses, we derived intensive longitudinal data via accelerometers and stress questionnaires from 74 children across 7 days as they went about their daily routines (n = 513 assessments). Multilevel modelling analyses revealed that between children, higher psychological stress predicted decreased physical activity (standardized beta coefficient = −0.14; p = 0.046). Concurrently, within those children, higher psychological stress predicted increased physical activity across days (standardized beta coefficient = 0.09; p = 0.015). Translated to practice, children who experienced more stress than others moved less, but children were more active on days when they experienced heightened stress. This suggests that the analyses level is crucial to the understanding of the association between psychological stress and physical activity and should be considered to receive unequivocal results. If replicated, e.g., including high-frequency sampling and experimental manipulation in everyday life for in-depth insights on underlying mechanisms and causality, our findings may be translated to individually tailored (digital) prevention and intervention strategies which target children’s distress-feelings despite impairing their heightened physical activity in stressful situations and identify tipping points of chronic stress phases. Therefore, we especially call for more intensive longitudinal data approaches to tackle thus far neglected within-subject issues in the field of physical activity, sport and exercise research
Statistical Signatures of Structural Organization: The case of long memory in renewal processes
Identifying and quantifying memory are often critical steps in developing a
mechanistic understanding of stochastic processes. These are particularly
challenging and necessary when exploring processes that exhibit long-range
correlations. The most common signatures employed rely on second-order temporal
statistics and lead, for example, to identifying long memory in processes with
power-law autocorrelation function and Hurst exponent greater than .
However, most stochastic processes hide their memory in higher-order temporal
correlations. Information measures---specifically, divergences in the mutual
information between a process' past and future (excess entropy) and minimal
predictive memory stored in a process' causal states (statistical
complexity)---provide a different way to identify long memory in processes with
higher-order temporal correlations. However, there are no ergodic stationary
processes with infinite excess entropy for which information measures have been
compared to autocorrelation functions and Hurst exponents. Here, we show that
fractal renewal processes---those with interevent distribution tails ---exhibit long memory via a phase transition at .
Excess entropy diverges only there and statistical complexity diverges there
and for all . When these processes do have power-law
autocorrelation function and Hurst exponent greater than , they do not
have divergent excess entropy. This analysis breaks the intuitive association
between these different quantifications of memory. We hope that the methods
used here, based on causal states, provide some guide as to how to construct
and analyze other long memory processes.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figures, 3 appendixes;
http://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/compmech/pubs/lrmrp.ht
Initial response to the COVID-19 pandemic on real-life well-being, social contact and roaming behavior in patients with schizophrenia, major depression and healthy controls: A longitudinal ecological momentary assessment study
The COVID-19 pandemic strongly impacted people\u27s daily lives. However, it remains unknown how the pandemic situation affects daily-life experiences of individuals with preexisting severe mental illnesses (SMI). In this real-life longitudinal study, the acute onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany did not cause the already low everyday well-being of patients with schizophrenia (SZ) or major depression (MDD) to decrease further. On the contrary, healthy participants’ well-being, anxiety, social isolation, and mobility worsened, especially in healthy individuals at risk for mental disorder, but remained above the levels seen in patients. Despite being stressful for healthy individuals at risk for mental disorder, the COVID-19 pandemic had little additional influence on daily-life well-being in psychiatric patients with SMI. This highlights the need for preventive action and targeted support of this vulnerable population
Open land cover from OpenStreetMap and remote sensing
OpenStreetMap (OSM) tags were used to produce a global Open Land Cover (OLC) product with fractional data gaps available at osmlanduse.org. Data gaps in the global OLC map were filled for a case study in Heidelberg, Germany using free remote sensing data, which resulted in a land cover (LC) prototype with complete coverage in this area. Sixty tags in the OSM were used to allocate a Corine Land Cover (CLC) level 2 land use classification to 91.8% of the study area, and the remaining gaps were filled with remote sensing data. For this case study, complete are coverage OLC overall accuracy was estimated 87%, which performed better than the CLC product (81% overall accuracy) of 2012. Spatial thematic overlap for the two products was 84%. OLC was in large parts found to be more detailed than CLC, particularly when LC patterns were heterogeneous, and outperformed CLC in the classification of 12 of the 14 classes. Our OLC product represented data created in different periods; 53% of the area was 2011–2016, and 46% of the area was representative of 2016–2017
The association of stress and physical activity
Psychological stress and physical activity are interrelated, constituting a relevant association to human health, especially in children. However, the association’s nature remains elusive, i.e., why psychological stress predicts both decreased and increased physical activity. To test whether effects vary as a function of the level of analyses, we derived intensive longitudinal data via accelerometers and stress questionnaires from 74 children across 7 days as they went about their daily routines ( = 513 assessments). Multilevel modelling analyses revealed that between children, higher psychological stress predicted decreased physical activity (standardized beta coefficient = −0.14; = 0.046). Concurrently, within those children, higher psychological stress predicted increased physical activity across days (standardized beta coefficient = 0.09; = 0.015). Translated to practice, children who experienced more stress than others moved less, but children were more active on days when they experienced heightened stress. This suggests that the analyses level is crucial to the understanding of the association between psychological stress and physical activity and should be considered to receive unequivocal results. If replicated, e.g., including high-frequency sampling and experimental manipulation in everyday life for in-depth insights on underlying mechanisms and causality, our findings may be translated to individually tailored (digital) prevention and intervention strategies which target children's distress-feelings despite impairing their heightened physical activity in stressful situations and identify tipping points of chronic stress phases. Therefore, we especially call for more intensive longitudinal data approaches to tackle thus far neglected within-subject issues in the field of physical activity, sport and exercise research