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Personal motivation is a key factor in the service of foster care, impending both on the welfare of the child and on the satisfaction of the carer. This paper explores the benefits, challenges and dilemmas involved in the job of professional (i.e. state-supported) foster carer in Romania–a country where the issue of child protection has drawn a great deal of international attention over the last thirty years. The principal hypothesis concerns whether the benefits, challenges and dilemmas identified by foster carers are influenced by the factors that led to their taking up this kind of work. Quantitative research was conducted using a questionnaire as the main tool. The paper takes a descriptive, cross-sectional and multifactorial approach. Sampling was carried out by self-selecting method, and the study involved 51 participants. The research project identified a statistically significant variation in the challenges and dilemmas reported by foster carers. Thus, the results of the study show that the majority of the carers indicate a primarily intrinsic motivation for their work. By way of conclusion, it is argued that social workers, operating in collaboration with multidisciplinary teams, can offer carers support in managing more difficult periods in the child–carer relationship, thus enhancing the sustainability of the foster care service. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: In order to make informed decisions about how best to support children and young people with disabilities, effective strategies that facilitate active and meaningful participation in school are required. Clinical factors, diagnosis or impairments somewhat helpful in determining what should be provided in interventions. However, clinical factors alone will not offer a clear view of how to support participation. It is helpful then to look at wider psychosocial and environmental factors. The aim of this review was to synthesise evidence of psychosocial and environmental factors associated with school participation of 4–12 year old children with disabilities to inform the development of participation-fostering interventions. Methods: A systematic search and synthesis using realist methods was conducted of published research. Papers had to include consideration of psychosocial and/or environment factors for school participation of children with disabilities. The review was completed in accordance with the Realist and Meta-narrative Evidence Syntheses: Evolving Standards (RAMESES) and Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) guidelines. Papers were identified via Boolean search of the electronic databases MEDLINE, CINAHL, PhycINFO and ERIC (January 2006-October 2018). Appraisal focussed on contributions in terms of whether the articles are appropriate for the review (relevance) and research quality (rigour). Data were analyzed using content and thematic analysis methods using a realist framework. A narrative synthesis of results was reported. Results and implications: We identified 1828 papers in the initial search. Seventy two papers were included in the final synthesis. Synthesis of findings led to three overarching mechanisms representing psychosocial factors for children (1) identity (2) competence and (3) experience of mind and body. Environmental aspects (context) compromised five interrelated areas: (1) structures and organization, (2) peers, (3) adults, (4) space and (5) objects. Our synthesis provides insights on how professionals may organize efforts to improve children’s participation. Consideration of these findings will help to proactively deal with suboptimal participation outcomes. Development of theoretically determined assessments and interventions for management of school participation are now required. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowledge and motivation of a teacher are two unchallenged, essential characteristics for successful education. Whilst the relevance of teachers’ professional knowledge for successful students’ learning has been studied in a sophisticated manner for years, the meaning of teachers’ motivational orientations for students’ performance still lacks a differentiated consideration. This construct is conceptualized by three domains: (1) self-efficacy, (2) subject-specific enthusiasm, and (3) enthusiasm for teaching the subject. Motivational orientations overall have shown to be relevant predictors of students’ learning. However, there are several dimensions of motivation and their relative importance remains unclear. Our study goes beyond the available findings by considering in detail each of the three domains’ relations to students’ performance. Thus, we aim to further contribute to the clarification of the predictors of students’ performance in school teaching. For this purpose, we conducted a study with 48 biology teachers and their 1036 students. To assess the three domains of teachers’ motivational orientations, we applied paper and pencil tests. Concept maps and paper and pencil tests were used to measure students’ performance. By specifying multilevel structural equation models, we examined the relationship between the domains of teachers’ motivational orientations and the performance of the students. Our results reveal no relationship between teachers’ self-efficacy and students’ performance, but a significant positive relationship between the latter and teachers’ subject-specific enthusiasm. Moreover, our results show a positive trend in the relationship between enthusiasm for teaching the subject and students’ performance. The results provide a differentiated picture about the importance of motivational orientations for the characterisation of an effective teacher. We discuss our findings in terms of possible effect mechanisms and their relevance for further research on teacher motivation and the improvement of teacher education programmes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses text data mining to identify long-term developments in tourism academic research from the perspectives of thematic focus, geography, and gender of tourism authorship. Abstracts of papers published in the period of 1970–2017 in high-ranking tourist journals were extracted from the Scopus database and served as data source for the analysis. Fourteen subject areas were identified using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) text mining approach. LDA integrated with GIS information allowed to obtain geography distribution and trends of scholarly output, while probabilistic methods of gender identification based on social network data mining were used to track gender dynamics with sufficient confidence. The findings indicate that, while all 14 topics have been prominent from the inception of tourism studies to the present day, the geography of scholarship has notably expanded and the share of female authorship has increased through time and currently almost equals that of male authorship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social skills training, performed by human trainers, is a well-established method for obtaining appropriate skills in social interaction. Previous work automated the process of social skills training by developing a dialogue system that teaches social communication skills through interaction with a computer avatar. Even though previous work that simulated social skills training only considered acoustic and linguistic information, human social skills trainers take into account visual and other non-verbal features. In this paper, we create and evaluate a social skills training system that closes this gap by considering the audiovisual features of the smiling ratio and the head pose (yaw and pitch). In addition, the previous system was only tested with graduate students; in this paper, we applied our system to children or young adults with autism spectrum disorders. For our experimental evaluation, we recruited 18 members from the general population and 10 people with autism spectrum disorders and gave them our proposed multimodal system to use. An experienced human social skills trainer rated the social skills of the users. We evaluated the system’s effectiveness by comparing pre- and post-training scores and identified significant improvement in their social skills using our proposed multimodal system. Computer-based social skills training is useful for people who experience social difficulties. Such a system can be used by teachers, therapists, and social skills trainers for rehabilitation and the supplemental use of human-based training anywhere and anytime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Against a backdrop of more than four decades of war, conflict and insecurity, Afghanistan is recognised as suffering from endemic violence and children are exposed to multiple forms of violence, including at the family and school levels. This paper presents the results of an evaluation of school-based peace education and a community-based intervention to change harmful social norms and practices related to gender and the use of violence in conflict resolution, implemented in Afghanistan with the aim of reducing violence against and between children. Methods: The evaluation consisted of a cross-sectional, interrupted time series design with three data collection points over 12 months. Data was collected from students in 11 secondary schools (seven girls’ and four boys’ schools) in Jawzjan province of Afghanistan, with a total of 361 boys and 373 girls sampled at endline. All children were interviewed with a questionnaire developed for the study. Key outcomes included children’s experience of peer violence (both perpetration and victimization) at school, corporal punishment both at home and at school, and observation of family violence. Other outcomes included children’s gender equitable attitudes, attitudes towards child punishment, depression and school performance. Results: Between baseline and endline evaluation points, there were significant reductions in various forms of violence at the school level, including both boys’ and girls’ past month experience of peer violence victimization, peer violence perpetration, and corporal punishment by teachers. There were also significant reductions in boys’ and girls’ experience of corporal punishment at home and observation of family violence, with a particularly strong effect observed among girls. Both boys and girls had significantly more equitable gender attitudes and significantly less violence-supportive attitudes in relation to children’s punishment, and significantly fewer symptoms of depression. Girls’ school attendance was also significantly higher at endline. Discussion: To our knowledge this is the first time that a peace education program has been evaluated in Afghanistan, with or without a community intervention to change harmful social norms and practices related to gender and the use of violence for conflict resolution. The evaluation suggests that the intervention may have led to a reduction in various forms of violence, including children’s peer violence, corporal punishment of children both at school and at home, and in children’s reports of domestic violence against women at the household level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examined, with a behavioral paradigm, to what extent people choose to view stimuli that portray death, violence or harm. Based on briefly presented visual cues, participants made choices between highly arousing, negative images and positive or negative alternatives. The negative images displayed social scenes that involved death, violence or harm (e.g., war scene), or decontextualized, close-ups of physical harm (e.g., mutilated face) or natural threat (e.g., attacking shark). The results demonstrated that social negative images were chosen significantly more often than other negative categories. Furthermore, participants preferred social negative images over neutral images. Physical harm images and natural threat images were not preferred over neutral images, but were chosen in about thirty-five percent of the trials. These results were replicated across three different studies, including a study that presented verbal descriptions of images as pre-choice cues. Together, these results show that people deliberately subject themselves to negative images. With this, the present paper demonstrates a dynamic relationship between negative information and behavior and advances new insights into the phenomenon of morbid curiosity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Creativity is a complex, multi-faceted concept encompassing a variety of related aspects, abilities, properties and behaviours. If we wish to study creativity scientifically, then a tractable and well-articulated model of creativity is required. Such a model would be of great value to researchers investigating the nature of creativity and in particular, those concerned with the evaluation of creative practice. This paper describes a unique approach to developing a suitable model of how creative behaviour emerges that is based on the words people use to describe the concept. Using techniques from the field of statistical natural language processing, we identify a collection of fourteen key components of creativity through an analysis of a corpus of academic papers on the topic. Words are identified which appear significantly often in connection with discussions of the concept. Using a measure of lexical similarity to help cluster these words, a number of distinct themes emerge, which collectively contribute to a comprehensive and multi-perspective model of creativity. The components provide an ontology of creativity: a set of building blocks which can be used to model creative practice in a variety of domains. The components have been employed in two case studies to evaluate the creativity of computational systems and have proven useful in articulating achievements of this work and directions for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports the development and baseline data of a vignettes-based measure of gender equality. Methods: Vignettes were developed through 3-day long focus groups. After piloting in 13 sites and repiloting a revised version in 6 countries, responses were categorized by the construct tapped and a scoring system developed. Finalized vignettes were then tested in DR Congo, Ecuador and China. Results: Young adolescents can successfully respond to vignettes; and can differentiate self from hypothetical protagonists of same and opposite sex. Response differences by sex of respondent and protagonist were statistically significant across a range of scenarios and settings. Conclusion: This is the first vignettes-based measure for young adolescents assessing young adolescent perceptions of relationships differentiated by sex of the protagonist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the representations and discourse of 41 trainee teachers on the inclusion of gaming elements in education and their potential contribution to covering social problems in the curriculum, and to education on and for gender equality between men and women. The study follows the principles of mixed methods research, based on the transcription, coding, categorisation, and analysis of data obtained from 34 semi-structured interviews and two focus groups, in addition to their descriptive quantitative analysis. The results showed optimum reception of gamification as a useful formative strategy in the various stages of education and that it can be validly used to include gender as a category of analysis in the teaching of social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes seasonal effects and their potential drivers in charitable giving. We conduct two studies to analyze whether donations to the German Red Cross differ between the Christmas season and summer. In study 1 we find that in the pre-Christmas shopping season prosocial subjects almost donate 50% less compared to prosocials in summer. In study 2 we replicate the low donations in the Christmas season. In an extensive questionnaire we control for several causes of this effect. The data suggest that the higher prosocials’ self-reported stress level, the lower the donations. The higher their relative savings, the lower the giving. Our questionnaire rules out that “donation fatigue” matters. That is, donations do not depend on the number of charitable campaigns subjects are confronted with and their engagement in these activities during Christmas season outside the lab. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human populations show rich cultural diversity. Underpinning this diversity of tools, rituals, and cultural norms are complex interactions between cultural evolutionary and demographic processes. Most models of cultural change assume that individuals use the same learning modes and methods throughout their lives. However, empirical data on ‘learning life histories’—the balance of dominant modes of learning (for example, learning from parents, peers, or unrelated elders) throughout an individual’s lifetime—suggest that age structure may play a crucial role in determining learning modes and cultural evolutionary trajectories. Thus, studied in isolation, demographic and cultural evolutionary models show only part of the picture. This paper describes a mathematical and computational framework that combines demographic and cultural evolutionary methods. Using this general framework, we examine interactions between the ways in which culture is spread throughout an individual’s lifetime and cultural change across generations. We show that including demographic structure alongside cultural dynamics can help to explain domain-specific patterns of cultural evolution that are a persistent feature of cultural data, and can shed new light on rare but significant demographic events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current literature presents conflicting findings concerning the effect of religiosity on attitudes towards redistribution. This paper attempts to reconcile these findings by arguing that the belief and social behavior dimensions of religiosity affect support for redistribution via different mechanisms, and that these effects are moderated by state welfare generosity. Using multilevel path analysis models on data from the World Values Survey, we show that the effect of the religious belief on attitudes towards redistribution is mediated by competing personal orientations—prosocial values and conservative identification—while the religious social behavior dimension significantly decreases support for redistribution via increased levels of happiness. Lower levels of welfare generosity increase the positive effect of prosocial orientations and weaken the negative effect conservative identification, leading to positive or null indirect effect of religiosity. These findings show the importance of taking into account the multiple dimensions of religiosity and institutional context when studying the relationship between religion and redistribution attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Centile curves and standard scores are common in epidemiological research. However, standardised norms and centile growth curves for language disorder that reflect the entire UK local school population do not exist. Methods: Scores on six language indices assessing receptive and expressive functioning of children were obtained from the SCALES population survey. Monolingual English speaking participants were aged between five and nine years. Children who attended special schools at study intake, or who were learning English as an additional language were excluded. We constructed language norms using the LMS method of standardisation which allows for skewed measurements. We made use of probability weights that were produced from a two-step logistic model. Distributions of estimated standard scores from an intensively assessed sub-population and from the full population were contrasted to demonstrate the role of weights. Results: Non-overlapping centile curves and standardised scores at each age were obtained for the six language indices. The use of weights was essential at retrieving the target distribution of the scores. An online calculator that estimates standardised scores for the measures was constructed and made freely available. Conclusions: The findings highlight the usefulness and flexibility of the LMS method at dealing with the standardisation of linguistic and educational measures that are sufficiently continuous. The paper adds to the existing literature by providing population norms for a number of language tests that were calculated from the same group of individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Cultural changes faced by immigrants and ethnic minorities after moving to a host country may have a detrimental or beneficial influence on their oral health and oral health-related behaviors. Therefore, this paper reviews the literature to see the impact of acculturation on immigrants and ethnic minorities’ oral health outcomes. Methods: We searched seven electronic databases up to January 2018. All cross-sectional and longitudinal quantitative studies that examined associations between acculturation and oral health status and/or oral health behaviors among ethnic minority and immigrant population[s] were included. Study selection, data extraction, and risk of bias assessment were completed in duplicate. The Newcastle-Ottawa checklist was used to appraise the methodological quality of the quantitative studies. A meta-analytic approach was not feasible. Results: A total of 42 quantitative studies were identified. The studies showed a positive association between acculturation and oral health status/behaviors. The most frequently used acculturation indicators were language spoken by immigrant and ethnic minorities and length of stay at the host country. High-acculturated immigrant and ethnic minority groups demonstrated better oral health outcomes, oral health behaviors, dental care utilization, and dental knowledge. Conclusions: According to existing evidence, a positive effect of acculturation on oral health status and behaviors was found. Practical implications: Dental practitioners should be culturally competent to provide the appropriate services and treatments to immigrant and ethnic minorities. Policymakers should also be sensitive to cultural diversities and properly address the unique needs of each group in order to maintain oral health equity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many national (US) and International guidelines for physical activity provide guidance that under-active and sedentary adults can begin by accumulating moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) in bouts as brief as 10 minutes. This guidance fits well with Goal Setting theory in that goals should be realistic and achievable, and is also consistent with Social Cognitive theory since achieving small goals should boost self-efficacy and thus, encourage continued physical activity. In contrast, Behavioral Economics might suggest that fewer, longer bouts would be more conducive to the adoption of physical activity due to the costs incurred with each separate bout of MVPA. This paper examines patterns of MVPA adoption among a sample of under-active adults from the perspective of goal setting theory and behavioral economics to explore specific strategies to help people who are in the early stages of PA activity adoption. Under-active men and women (N = 225; mean age = 46 ± 10; mean BMI = 28 ± 4.48) who enrolled in a PA intervention participated in a single goal setting session at enrollment. Participants were encouraged to set realistic goals and to increase their activity to meet national recommendations (150 minutes/week of moderate to vigorous physical activity [MVPA]) by the 6-month follow up. This process included identifying a specific frequency goal (days/week) and session duration goal (minutes/day). At baseline, participants reported average weekly MVPA of 14.59 min (± 24), which increased to an average of 140.52 (± 143.55) at 6 months. MVPA goals at baseline averaged 33.24 min/day (± 18.08) and 3.85 days/week (± 1.31). Analyses showed that longer session duration goals set at baseline were associated with more weekly minutes of MVPA at 6 months (b = 1.26, SE = 0.58, t = 2.17, p = 0.03). There was no significant association between goals for number of days per week (frequency) or total minutes of weekly MVPA (minutes x frequency) and MVPA at 6 months. Widely promoted guidelines for uptake of physical activity recommend accumulating physical activity in bouts as short as 10 minutes. This recommendation may ultimately hinder the adoption of physical activity among under-active and sedentary individuals. For the purposes of behavioral adoption of MVPA, more ambitious session duration goals appear to result in higher levels of physical activity participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Smartphones and other mobile devices have fundamentally changed patterns of Internet use in everyday life by making online access constantly available. The present paper offers a theoretical explication and empirical assessment of the concept of online vigilance, referring to users’ permanent cognitive orientation towards online content and communication as well as their disposition to exploit these options constantly. Based on four studies, a validated and reliable self-report measure of online vigilance was developed. In combination, the results suggest that the Online Vigilance Scale (OVS) shows a stable factor structure in various contexts and user populations and provides future work in communication, psychology, and other social sciences with a new measure of the individual cognitive orientation towards ubiquitous online communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the deepening of the research on supply chain management, scholars have increasingly begun to investigate the impact of fairness on a supply chain, and many conclusions suggest that a simple wholesale price can coordinate a supply chain under specific conditions. However, the corresponding analysis and other optimization mechanisms that affect the situation in which the channel cannot be coordinated are either omitted or given little attention. In this paper, we constructed a dyadic supply chain with a single manufacturer and a single retailer; the manufacturer acts as a selfish leader, and the retailer acts as a follower with fairness concerns and sales efforts. For this setting, we derived the equilibrium strategy solution for a wholesale price contract and cost sharing of effort (CS-E) contract offered by the manufacturer, and the results indicated that both contracts achieved channel coordination with different requirements. Further, the profit of the manufacturer and the sales effort of the retailer under CS-E contracts were never less than those for the wholesale price contract, and there was an interval during which the retailer's profit and utility and supply chain efficiency were better than those under the wholesale price contract. In addition, we described situations in which a CS-E contract is unnecessary. These results should be a useful reference for managerial decisions and organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People are motivated to hold favorable attitudes about the systems on which they depend, so they justify (i.e., rationalize, defend and bolster) forms of social and economic inequality, even if the inequality is disadvantageous to them. This paper examines how this system-justifying motivation is reflected in behaviors involving interpersonal trust. In a series of three experiments using the trust game I manipulate income inequality by providing participants with higher (advantaged position) or lower (disadvantaged position) initial endowments and measure their trust toward individuals on the same or on different positions. Results show that higher income individuals trust other higher income individuals more than lower income individuals (ingroup favoritism), while lower income individuals trust higher income individuals more than lower income individuals (outgroup favoritism). It is also shown that the strength of these biases is dependent on the level of endorsement of system justifying ideology and the legitimacy of the system. More trust toward those in advantaged positions within a social system, expressed both by equally advantaged as well as by disadvantaged others, not only secures the advantaged in their positions but also reinforces the underlying inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Workshops are used to explore a specific topic, to transfer knowledge, to solve identified problems, or to create something new. In funded research projects and other research endeavours, workshops are the mechanism used to gather the wider project, community, or interested people together around a particular topic. However, natural questions arise: how do we measure the impact of these workshops? Do we know whether they are meeting the goals and objectives we set for them? What indicators should we use? In response to these questions, this paper will outline rules that will improve the measurement of the impact of workshops. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Predicting and analyzing behaviors of investors is of great value to financial institutions. This paper uses survey data from about 9,000 individual investors across China to explore the predictability of decision behaviors by studying demographic characteristics that are relatively easy to obtain. After applying Pearson’s chi-squared test, Spearman rank correlation test, and several data mining methods, we verified that demographic characteristics are closely linked to decision behaviors, and it would be an economical and feasible solution for financial organizations to build initial behavioral prediction models especially when investors’ behavioral data are insufficient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current paper reports long-term treatment impact estimates for a randomized evaluation of an early childhood intervention designed to promote children's developmental outcomes and improve the quality of Head Start centers serving high-violence and high-crime areas in inner-city Chicago. Initial evaluations of end-of-preschool data reported that the program led to reductions in child behavioral problems and gains in measures of executive function and academic achievement. For this report, we analyzed adolescent follow-up data taken 10 to 11 years after program completion. We found evidence that the program had positive long-term effects on students’ executive function and grades, though effects were somewhat imprecise and dependent on the inclusion of baseline covariates. Results also indicated that treated children had heightened sensitivity to emotional stimuli, and we found no evidence of long-run effects on measures of behavioral problems. These findings raise the possibility that developing programs that improve on the Head Start model could carry long-run benefits for affected children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Speech and language therapy provision for aphasia (a language disorder) post stroke has been studied over time through surveys completed by speech and language therapists. This paper revisits provision based on what was received by 278 patients in 21 UK speech and language therapy departments in 2014–2016. Aims: To explore the speech and language therapy received by community dwelling people with post stroke aphasia in the UK. Methods and procedures: A quantitative content analysis was conducted by two speech and language therapist researchers. Therapy goals recorded were coded into categories and subcategories. Descriptive statistics were used to identify the frequency with which goal categories were targeted, average therapy time received, length and frequency of therapy sessions, personnel involved and mode of delivery. Outcomes and results: Forty-five percent of participants were in receipt of therapy in the three month window observed. Six goal categories were identified. Rehabilitation was the most frequent (60%) followed by enabling (17.2%), review (4.3%), assessment (3.6%), supportive (3.5%) and activity to support therapy (2.8%). The median amount of therapy received in three months was 6.3 hours at an average of one 60-minute session every two weeks. Seventy-seven percent of therapy sessions were delivered by qualified speech and language therapists and 23% by assistants. Ninety percent of sessions were one to one, face to face sessions whilst 9.5% were group sessions. Discussion: In line with previous reports, speech and language therapy for community dwelling stroke survivors with aphasia is restricted. Rehabilitation is a large focus of therapy but the intensity and dose with which it is provided is substantially lower than that required for an effective outcome. Despite this, one to one face to face therapy is favoured. More efficient methods to support more therapeutic doses of therapy are not commonly used in routine clinical services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the booming development of evacuation simulation software, developing an extensive database in indoor scenarios for evacuation models is imperative. In this paper, we conduct a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the collected videotapes and aim to provide a complete and unitary database of pedestrians’ earthquake emergency response behaviors in indoor scenarios, including human-environment interactions. Using the qualitative analysis method, we extract keyword groups and keywords that code the response modes of pedestrians and construct a general decision flowchart using chronological organization. Using the quantitative analysis method, we analyze data on the delay time, evacuation speed, evacuation route and emergency exit choices. Furthermore, we study the effect of classroom layout on emergency evacuation. The database for indoor scenarios provides reliable input parameters and allows the construction of real and effective constraints for use in software and mathematical models. The database can also be used to validate the accuracy of evacuation models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper estimates the effect of students’ position in the classroom register on their academic performance. We use a unique dataset from Poland which contains information on the academic outcomes of students in the humanities, science and mathematics lower secondary school exams as well as the position students occupy in their classroom register. We find that students whose names are recorded near the end of the class list have lower performance than those students whose names are recorded near the beginning of the list. The effect appears to be larger for performance in the humanities exam, and for low-achieving boys who attend large classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ‘irrational’ preference for fairness has attracted increasing attention. Although previous studies have focused on the effects of spitefulness on the evolution of fairness, they did not consider non-monotonic rejections shown in behavioral experiments. In this paper, we introduce a non-monotonic rejection in an evolutionary model of the Ultimatum Game. We propose strategy intervention to study the evolution of fairness in general structured populations. By sequentially adding five strategies into the competition between a fair strategy and a selfish strategy, we arrive at the following conclusions. First, the evolution of fairness is inhibited by altruism, but it is promoted by spitefulness. Second, the non-monotonic rejection helps fairness overcome selfishness. Particularly for group-structured populations, we analytically investigate how fairness, selfishness, altruism, and spitefulness are affected by population size, mutation, and migration in the competition among seven strategies. Our results may provide important insights into understanding the evolutionary origin of fairness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on a social discounting experiment conducted with university students in South Africa. In line with other social discounting task experiments, participants identify target individuals at different degrees of intimacy in their social network and then make 10 choices involving sums of money for themselves or their targets. For an altruism premium to exist, senders’ donations to recipients should be positive, statistically and economically significant, and independent of relationship closeness. We hypothesize that in addition to the altruism premium for kin documented in the literature, there may be other premia for family in general and for partners and friends. We find that, apart from the “kinship” premium, there is a sizeable “intimacy” premium, which together translates into a substantial “family” premium. The study also finds a “friendship premium”, as is documented in various experiments. The closeness of relationships among family and kin, especially close kin, has a significant and large effect on altruism. The results also attest to the importance of the extended family in regards to the “kinship” premium on altruism. These various premiums on altruism emphasise the importance of the supportive role of various social systems. Nevertheless, altruism within families and among close kin might also be enhanced by building more cohesive and stronger families using developmental social welfare programmes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research suggests that psychological needs can influence the political attitudes of ordinary citizens, often outside of their conscious awareness. In this paper, we investigate whether psychological needs also shape the spending priorities of political elites in the US. Most models of policymaking assume that political elites respond to information in relatively homogeneous ways. We suggest otherwise, and explore one source of difference in information processing, namely, threat sensitivity, which previous research links to increased support for conservative policy attitudes. Drawing on a sample of state-level policymakers, we measure their spending priorities using a survey and their level of threat sensitivity using a standard psychophysiological measure (skin conductance). We find that, like ordinary citizens, threat sensitivity leads even state-level policymakers to prioritize spending on government polices that are designed to minimize threats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psychological and other persuasive mechanisms across diverse contexts are well researched, with many studies of the effectiveness of specific persuasive techniques on distinct types of human behaviour. In the present paper, our specific interest lies in the development of a generalized modular psychometric tool to measure individuals’ susceptibility to persuasion. The scale is constructed using items from previously developed and validated particulate scales established in the domains of social psychology and behavioural economics. In the first study we establish the Susceptibility to Persuasion–II (StP-II) scale, containing 54 items, 10 subscales and further 6 sub-sub scales. In Study 2 we establish the scale’s construct validity and reconfirm its reliability. We present a valid and reliable modular psychometric tool that measures general susceptibility to persuasive techniques. Since its inception, we have successfully implemented the StP-II scale to measure susceptibility to persuasion of IT security officers, the role of psychology of persuasion in cybercrime victims and general persuadability levels of Facebook users; these manuscripts are in preparation. We argue that the StP-II scale shows promise in measuring individual differences in susceptibility to persuasion, and is applicable across diverse contexts such as Internet security and cybercrime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Demonstrability—the extent to which group members can recognize a correct solution to a problem—has a significant effect on group performance. However, the interplay between group size, demonstrability and performance is not well understood. This paper addresses these gaps by studying the joint effect of two factors—the difficulty of solving a problem and the difficulty of verifying the correctness of a solution—on the ability of groups of varying sizes to converge to correct solutions. Our empirical investigations use problem instances from different computational complexity classes, NP-Complete (NPC) and PSPACE-complete (PSC), that exhibit similar solution difficulty but differ in verification difficulty. Our study focuses on nominal groups to isolate the effect of problem complexity on performance. We show that NPC problems have higher demonstrability than PSC problems: participants were significantly more likely to recognize correct and incorrect solutions for NPC problems than for PSC problems. We further show that increasing the group size can actually decrease group performance for some problems of low demonstrability. We analytically derive the boundary that distinguishes these problems from others for which group performance monotonically improves with group size. These findings increase our understanding of the mechanisms that underlie group problem-solving processes, and can inform the design of systems and processes that would better facilitate collective decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Leprosy is a condition that has long been associated with stigma and discrimination, even when infected persons have been cured. This paper describes stigma and discrimination as viewed by caregivers who are associated with people affected by leprosy in Ghana. Methods: A qualitative interview with semi-structured interviews were conducted for twenty caregivers. Results: Findings indicated that caregivers were of the view that people affected by leprosy in Ghana are stigmatized and discriminated against by the larger society thus making their movements and interactions restricted to the Leprosarium. Besides, employments opportunities are unavailable to them thus making them exposed to financial challenges. The livelihood Empowerment Against poverty (LEAP) money given them is not sufficient for their daily upkeep. Conclusion: People affected by leprosy in Ghana are stigmatized and therefore find it difficult to interact freely with the public. The associated physical deformities with the disease also tend to impede their ability to relate to the general public. The LEAP cash given to people affected by leprosy is helpful however, it could be enhanced to keep pace with prevailing economic conditions in the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has suggested that bribery is more normative in some countries than in others. To understand the underlying process, this paper examines the effects of social norm and gender on bribe-giving behavior. We argue that social norms provide information for strategic planning and impression management, and thus would impact participants’ bribe amount. Besides, males are more agentic and focus more on impression management than females. We predicted that males would defy the norm in order to win when the amount of their bribe was kept private, but would conform to the norm when it was made public. To test this hypothesis, we conducted two studies using a competitive game. In each game, we asked three participants to compete in five rounds of creative tasks, and the winner was determined by a referee’s subjective judgment of the participants’ performance on the tasks. Participants were allowed to give bribes to the referee. Bribe-giving norms were manipulated in two domains: norm level (high vs. low) and norm context (private vs. public), in order to investigate the influence of informational and affiliational needs. Studies 1 and 2 consistently showed that individuals conformed to the norm level of bribe-giving while maintaining a relative advantage for economic benefit. Study 2 found that males gave larger bribes in the private context than in the public, whereas females gave smaller bribes in both contexts. We used a latent growth curve model (LGCM) to depict the development of bribe-giving behaviors during five rounds of competition. The results showed that gender, creative performance, and norm level all influence the trajectory of bribe-giving behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The population of Ghana is increasingly becoming urbanized with about 70% of the estimated 27 million people living in urban and peri-urban areas. Nonetheless, eight out of the ten regions in Ghana remain predominantly rural where only 32% of the national health sector workforce works. Moreover, the rural-urban disparities in the density of health tutors (staff responsible for pre-service training of health professionals) are enormous. This paper explores perceived needs of health tutors in rural and urban health training institutions in Ghana. Methods: This is a descriptive qualitative study conducted in the Greater Accra and Northern regions of Ghana. The Study used the deductive thematic and sub-thematic analysis approaches. Five health training institutions were randomly sampled, and 72 tutors engaged in separate focus group discussions with an average size of 14 participants per group in each training institution. Results: Perceived rural-urban disparities among health tutors were found in the payment of extra duty allowances; school infrastructure including libraries and internet connectivity; staff accommodation; and opportunities for scholarships and higher education. Health tutors in rural areas generally expressed more frustration with these work conditions than those in urban areas. Conclusions: There is the need to initiate and sustain work incentives that promote motivation of rural health tutors to control ongoing rural-urban migration of qualified staff. It is recommended the following incentives be prioritized to promote retention of qualified health tutors in rural health training schools: payment of research, book and rural allowances; early promotion of rural staff; prioritizing rural tutors for scholarships, and introduction of national best health tutor awards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how information flow properties of a network affect the formation of categories shared between individuals, who are communicating through that network. Our work is based on the established multi-agent model of the emergence of linguistic categories grounded in external environment. We study how network information propagation efficiency and the direction of information flow affect categorization by performing simulations with idealized network topologies optimizing certain network centrality measures. We measure dynamic social adaptation when either network topology or environment is subject to change during the experiment, and the system has to adapt to new conditions. We find that both decentralized network topology efficient in information propagation and the presence of central authority (information flow from the center to peripheries) are beneficial for the formation of global agreement between agents. Systems with central authority cope well with network topology change, but are less robust in the case of environment change. These findings help to understand which network properties affect processes of social adaptation. They are important to inform the debate on the advantages and disadvantages of centralized systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the perceptive user, who could identify the high-quality objects in their initial lifespan, is presented. By tracking the ratings given to the rewarded objects, we present a method to identify the user perceptibility, which is defined as the capability that a user can identify these objects at their early lifespan. Moreover, we investigate the behavior patterns of the perceptive users from three dimensions: User activity, correlation characteristics of user rating series and user reputation. The experimental results for the empirical networks indicate that high perceptibility users show significantly different behavior patterns with the others: Having larger degree, stronger correlation of rating series and higher reputation. Furthermore, in view of the hysteresis in finding the rewarded objects, we present a general framework for identifying the high perceptibility users based on user behavior patterns. The experimental results show that this work is helpful for deeply understanding the collective behavior patterns for online users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developing interventions that address psychosocial wellbeing of people living with HIV is critical to ensure strong linkages to and retention in HIV care. This paper describes the development of Sondela, an HIV adjustment and coping intervention for heterosexual men and women living with HIV, and its relevance and feasibility in the South African context. Sondela is a six three-hour, small group-based, participatory workshop series. We followed an iterative, multi-phased process of curriculum development that involved research, theoretical frameworks and piloting. A systematic review highlighted the absence of psychosocial interventions targeting heterosexual HIV positive populations living in high HIV prevalence and resource-poor settings. Formative studies demonstrated risk and social factors associated with adjustment and coping with HIV, emphasising the need for interventions that acknowledge gendered experiences. Our pilot of Sondela demonstrated high levels of relevance and feasibility. Men appreciated the workshop “space” to openly talk about their HIV positive status and what is means for their role as partners and fathers and friends. Women valued the skills and approaches because they were relevant to “real life” situations and not just about HIV. Sondela promises to be valuable in supporting health system initiatives and psychosocial support to strengthen linkages to and retention in HIV care, and this suggests a need for rigorous evaluation of Sondela to establish evidence for its effectiveness in a general population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Immigration often results in changes in family dynamics, and within this process of dynamic relational adjustment youth can be conceptualised as contested sites of culture and associated intergenerational conflicts. This paper considers the experiences of migrant youth in Greater Western Sydney, New South Wales, Australia using conflict as a useful lens through which to view issues of migrant youth identity and their sense of social connectedness, belonging, and agency. The aim of this study was twofold: 1) to explore how migrant youth cope with acculturative stress and intergenerational conflicts, and 2) to better understand the systemic and family-related factors that facilitate positive settlement experiences for migrant youth. Methods: A total of 14 focus group discussions, comprising 164 people, were carried out in Greater Western Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. These focus groups targeted newly arrived migrant parents and young adults (aged 18–24) of African, Burmese, Nepalese, Indian, Afghani, Bangladeshi and Iraqi backgrounds. Each focus group was 1.5 hours in duration and was conducted by a team of three people (an experienced facilitator, an accredited interpreter/bilingual worker, and a note taker). Data were collected using a standard interview schedule, and an accredited interpreter/bilingual worker asked the questions in the appropriate language and translated participant responses into English. Results: The findings highlight how youth in new migrant families become contested sites of culture as they try to balance integration into the new culture while maintaining their originating country’s cultural values. Two themes and four subthemes emerged from the analysis: Intergenerational acculturation gap (loss of family capital and intergenerational conflicts); and factors that successfully protected positive family values while still allowing young people to integrate (the legal system that disarm authoritarian parenting practices and family rules; and parental use of children’s increased knowledge of the new environment to navigate their new environment). Migrant families conceptualised family capital as the social solidarity, influence, and control governing obligations and expectations, intergenerational knowledge transmission and information flow, social norms, and cultural identity. The loss of family capital was characterised by children’s refusal to associate with or meet family members, preferring to be alone in their rooms and private space. Migrant youth find themselves caught between and negotiating two cultures, with unwanted negative consequences at the family level in the form of intergenerational conflicts. The new found freedom among children and their rapid transition into the Australian society gives children an increased sense of agency, which in turn threatens parental authority, allowing children to exercise three forms of power: increased assertiveness due to legal protection of children against any corporal punishment; and English language fluency and greater understanding of the functioning of Australian social institutions. Conclusion: Our findings suggest the need for an inter-generational approach to healthy family dynamics within migrant communities when dealing with youth negotiating the complexity and sensitivity of forging their cultural identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Melioration learning is an empirically well-grounded model of reinforcement learning. By means of computer simulations, this paper derives predictions for several repeatedly played two-person games from this model. The results indicate a likely convergence to a pure Nash equilibrium of the game. If no pure equilibrium exists, the relative frequencies of choice may approach the predictions of the mixed Nash equilibrium. Yet in some games, no stable state is reached. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the contribution of chemist Rosalind E. Franklin in the discovery of double helix and highlights the changes and developments in the research practices and genomic collaborations as of 2016. Topics discussed include the rise of coauthorship in scientific papers, the underrepresentation of women in terms of authorship and the differences between the propensity of men and women to collaborate in research.

How to understand individual human actions is a fundamental question to modern science, which drives and incurs many social, technological, racial, religious and economic phenomena. Human dynamics tries to reveal the temporal pattern and internal mechanism of human actions in letter or electronic communications, from the perspective of continuous interactions among friends or acquaintances. For interactions between stranger to stranger, taxi industry provide fruitful phenomina and evidence to investigate the action decisions. In fact, one striking disturbing events commonly reported in taxi industry is passenger refusing or denial, whose reasons vary, including skin color, blind passenger, being a foreigner or too close destination, religion reasons and anti specific nationality, so that complaints about taxi passenger refusing have to be concerned and processed carefully by local governments. But more universal factors for this phenomena are of great significance, which might be fulfilled by big data research to obtain novel insights in this question. In this paper, we demonstrate the big data analytics application in revealing novel insights from massive taxi trace data, which, for the first time, validates the passengers denial in taxi industry and estimates the denial ratio in Beijing city. We first quantify the income differentiation facts among taxi drivers. Then we find out that choosing the drop-off places also contributes to the high income for taxi drivers, compared to the previous explanation of mobility intelligence. Moreover, we propose the pick-up, drop-off and grid diversity concepts and related diversity analysis suggest that, high income taxi drivers will deny passengers in some situations, so as to choose the passengers’ destination they prefer. Finally we design an estimation method for denial ratio and infer that high income taxi drivers will deny passengers with 8.52% likelihood in Beijing. Our work exhibits the power of big data analysis in revealing some dark side investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper advances theories of social learning through an empirical examination of how social networks change over time. Social networks are important for learning because they constrain individuals’ access to information about the behaviors and cognitions of other people. Using data on a large social network of mobile device users over a one-month time period, we test three hypotheses: 1) attraction homophily causes individuals to form ties on the basis of attribute similarity, 2) aversion homophily causes individuals to delete existing ties on the basis of attribute dissimilarity, and 3) social influence causes individuals to adopt the attributes of others they share direct ties with. Statistical models offer varied degrees of support for all three hypotheses and show that these mechanisms are more complex than assumed in prior work. Although homophily is normally thought of as a process of attraction, people also avoid relationships with others who are different. These mechanisms have distinct effects on network structure. While social influence does help explain behavior, people tend to follow global trends more than they follow their friends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper reports the results of two studies on the spelling performance of 1st graders in a transparent writing system. The spelling performance of Italian children was assessed to determine the cross-task relationship between spelling to dictation and spontaneous spelling at the single word level (Study 1) and at the text level (Study 2), respectively. In study 1, 132 Italian children’s spelling performance was assessed in 1st grade through two standardized tasks, i.e., word dictation, and spontaneous word spelling. In study 2, spelling performance of 81 Italian children was assessed in 1st grade through two tasks, i.e., text dictation, and spontaneous text spelling. In Study 1, spelling words and pseudo-words to dictation was found to be more difficult than spontaneous spelling of words. This effect was verified for all children (including low achievers and spelling impaired). The moderate correlation found between spelling to dictation and spontaneous spelling indicated that the two tasks are supported by partially different spelling processes and confirmed suggestions for including both types of spelling assessments in the school. In Study 2, children's spelling performances were not dependent across the two tasks (i.e., spelling a text under dictation or spontaneously). The two tasks shared the level of difficulty but performance in one task was not predictive of performance in the second task. Strong individual differences between children were found at the text level as a function of task. Similar to Study 1, the moderate correlation between spelling text to dictation and spontaneous spelling confirmed the usefulness of adopting both spelling assessments at school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cooperation amongst resource users holds the key to overcoming the social dilemma that characterizes community-based common-pool resource management. But is cooperation alone enough to achieve sustainable resource use? The short answer is no. Developing management strategies in a complex social-ecological environment also requires ecological knowledge and approaches to deal with perceived environmental uncertainty. Recent behavioral experimental research indicates variation in the degree to which a group of users can identify a sustainable exploitation level. In this paper, we identify social-ecological micro-foundations that facilitate cooperative sustainable common-pool resource use. We do so by using an agent-based model (ABM) that is informed by behavioral common-pool resource experiments. In these experiments, groups that cooperate do not necessarily manage the resource sustainably, but also over- or underexploit. By reproducing the patterns of the behavioral experiments in a qualitative way, the ABM represents a social-ecological explanation for the experimental observations. We find that the ecological knowledge of each group member cannot sufficiently explain the relationship between cooperation and sustainable resource use. Instead, the development of a sustainable exploitation level depends on the distribution of ecological knowledge among the group members, their influence on each other’s knowledge, and the environmental uncertainty the individuals perceive. The study provides insights about critical social-ecological micro-foundations underpinning collective action and sustainable resource management. These insights may inform policy-making, but also point to future research needs regarding the mechanisms of social learning, the development of shared management strategies and the interplay of social and ecological uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As breaking news unfolds people increasingly rely on social media to stay abreast of the latest updates. The use of social media in such situations comes with the caveat that new information being released piecemeal may encourage rumours, many of which remain unverified long after their point of release. Little is known, however, about the dynamics of the life cycle of a social media rumour. In this paper we present a methodology that has enabled us to collect, identify and annotate a dataset of 330 rumour threads (4,842 tweets) associated with 9 newsworthy events. We analyse this dataset to understand how users spread, support, or deny rumours that are later proven true or false, by distinguishing two levels of status in a rumour life cycle i.e., before and after its veracity status is resolved. The identification of rumours associated with each event, as well as the tweet that resolved each rumour as true or false, was performed by journalist members of the research team who tracked the events in real time. Our study shows that rumours that are ultimately proven true tend to be resolved faster than those that turn out to be false. Whilst one can readily see users denying rumours once they have been debunked, users appear to be less capable of distinguishing true from false rumours when their veracity remains in question. In fact, we show that the prevalent tendency for users is to support every unverified rumour. We also analyse the role of different types of users, finding that highly reputable users such as news organisations endeavour to post well-grounded statements, which appear to be certain and accompanied by evidence. Nevertheless, these often prove to be unverified pieces of information that give rise to false rumours. Our study reinforces the need for developing robust machine learning techniques that can provide assistance in real time for assessing the veracity of rumours. The findings of our study provide useful insights for achieving this aim. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Despite growing interest in the value of human-animal interactions (HAI) to human mental and physical health the quality of the evidence on which postulated benefits from animals to human psychological health are based is often unclear. To date there exist no systematic reviews on the effects of HAI in educational settings specifically focussing on the perceived benefits to children of reading to dogs. With rising popularity and implementation of these programmes in schools, it is essential that the evidence base exploring the pedagogic value of these initiatives is well documented. Methods: Using PRISMA guidelines we systematically investigated the literature reporting the pedagogic effects of reading to dogs. Because research in this area is in the early stages of scientific enquiry we adopted broad inclusion criteria, accepting all reports which discussed measurable effects related to the topic that were written in English. Multiple online databases were searched during January-March 2015; grey literature searches were also conducted. The search results which met the inclusion criteria were evaluated, and discussed, in relation to the Oxford Centre for Evidence Based Medicine levels of evidence; 27 papers were classified as Level 5, 13 as Level 4, 7 as Level 2c and 1 as Level 2b. Conclusion: The evidence suggests that reading to a dog may have a beneficial effect on a number of behavioural processes which contribute to a positive effect on the environment in which reading is practiced, leading to improved reading performance. However, the evidence base on which these inferences are made is of low quality. There is a clear need for the use of higher quality research methodologies and the inclusion of appropriate controls in order to draw causal inferences on whether or how reading to dogs may benefit children’s reading practices. The mechanisms for any effect remain a matter of conjecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In general terms, decreasing impatience means decreasing discount rates. This property has been usually referred to as hyperbolic discounting, although there are other discount functions which also exhibit decreasing discount rates. This paper focuses on the measurement of the impatience associated with a discount function with the aim of establishing a methodology to compare this characteristic for two different discount functions. In this way, first we define the patience associated with a discount function in an interval as its corresponding discount factor and consequently we deduce that the impatience at a given moment is the corresponding instantaneous discount rate. Second we compare the degree of impatience of discount functions belonging to the same or different families, by considering the cases in which the functions do or do not intersect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We tested the effectiveness of an intensive, on average 17-session, adaptive and computerized working-memory training program for improving performance on untrained, paper and pencil working memory tasks, standardized school achievement tasks, and teacher ratings of classroom behavior. Third-grade children received either a computerized working memory training for about 30 minutes per session (n = 156) or participated in regular classroom activities (n = 126). Results indicated strong gains in the training task. Further, pretest and posttest transfer measures of working memory and school achievement, as well as teacher ratings, showed substantial correlations with training task performance, suggesting that the training task captured abilities that were relevant for the transfer tasks. However, effect sizes of training-specific transfer gains were very small and not consistent across tasks. These results raise questions about the benefits of intensive working-memory training programs within a regular school context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the understanding of and motivation behind individual trading behavior is an important puzzle in finance, little is known about the connection between an investor's portfolio structure and her trading behavior in practice. In this paper, we investigate the relation between what stocks investors hold, and what stocks they buy, and show that investors with similar portfolio structures to a great extent trade in a similar way. With data from the central register of shareholdings in Sweden, we model the market in a similarity network, by considering investors as nodes, connected with links representing portfolio similarity. From the network, we find investor groups that not only identify different investment strategies, but also represent individual investors trading in a similar way. These findings suggest that the stock portfolios of investors hold meaningful information, which could be used to earn a better understanding of stock market dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Screen media usage, sleep time and socio-demographic features are related to adolescents' academic performance, but interrelations are little explored. This paper describes these interrelations and behavioral profiles clustered in low and high academic performance. A nationally representative sample of 3,095 Spanish adolescents, aged 12 to 18, was surveyed on 15 variables linked to the purpose of the study. A Self-Organizing Maps analysis established non-linear interrelationships among these variables and identified behavior patterns in subsequent cluster analyses. Topological interrelationships established from the 15 emerging maps indicated that boys used more passive videogames and computers for playing than girls, who tended to use mobile phones to communicate with others. Adolescents with the highest academic performance were the youngest. They slept more and spent less time using sedentary screen media when compared to those with the lowest performance, and they also showed topological relationships with higher socioeconomic status adolescents. Cluster 1 grouped boys who spent more than 5.5 hours daily using sedentary screen media. Their academic performance was low and they slept an average of 8 hours daily. Cluster 2 gathered girls with an excellent academic performance, who slept nearly 9 hours per day, and devoted less time daily to sedentary screen media. Academic performance was directly related to sleep time and socioeconomic status, but inversely related to overall sedentary screen media usage. Profiles from the two clusters were strongly differentiated by gender, age, sedentary screen media usage, sleep time and academic achievement. Girls with the highest academic results had a medium socioeconomic status in Cluster 2. Findings may contribute to establishing recommendations about the timing and duration of screen media usage in adolescents and appropriate sleep time needed to successfully meet the demands of school academics and to improve interventions targeting to affect behavioral change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]