Applications of Artificial Intelligence Methodologies to Behavioral and Social Sciences

A healthy lifestyle is fundamental for the prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease and other noncommunicable diseases (NCDs). Investment in primary prevention, including modification of health risk behaviors, could result in a 4-fold improvement in health outcomes compared with secondary prevention based on pharmacological treatment. The American Heart Association (AHA) emphasized the importance of lifestyle in its 2020 goals for cardiovascular health promotion and disease reduction. In addition to defining “cardiovascular health” based on criteria for blood pressure and biochemical markers (lipids and glycemia), the AHA Strategic Planning Committee further identified lifestyle characteristics of central importance: nutrition, physical activity, smoking, and maintenance of a healthy body weight.1 The World Health Organization estimated that ≈80% of NCDs could be prevented if 4 key lifestyle practices were followed: a healthy diet, being physically active, avoidance of tobacco, and alcohol intake in moderation.2 To support healthy lifestyle initiatives, major changes are necessary at the societal level to improve population health. Numerous strategies might help to create a culture that promotes and facilitates healthy behaviors, including creating laws and regulations, mounting large-scale public awareness and education campaigns, implementing local community programs, and providing individual counseling.3 Physicians are uniquely positioned to encourage individuals to adopt healthy lifestyle behaviors: Approximately 80% of Americans visit their primary care physician at least once a year. Physicians directly communicate with their patients during clinical encounters across numerous settings, and research indicates that patients highly value recommendations provided by their physicians.4,5 However, data further indicate that lifestyle counseling does not routinely occur in physicians’ offices, thereby representing a lost opportunity. Physicians report that they perform lifestyle counseling during ≈34% of clinic visits.4 Patients, in turn, report an even lower frequency of physician lifestyle counseling. For example, obese patients reported receiving physical activity and …

Removing the stigma of medication for opioid use disorder

Increasing blood donor recruitment and retention is of key importance to transfusion services. Research within the social and behavioral science traditions has adopted separate but complementary approaches to addressing these issues. This article aims to review both of these types of literature, examine theoretical developments, identify commonalities, and offer a means to integrate these within a single intervention approach. The social and behavioral science literature on blood donor recruitment and retention focusing on theory, interventions, and integration is reviewed. The role of emotional regulation (anticipated anxiety and vasovagal reactions) is central to both the behavioral and the social science approaches to enhancing donor motivation, yet although intentions are the best predictor of donor behavior, interventions targeting enactment of intentions have not been used to increase donation. Implementation intentions (that is, if-then plans formed in advance of acting) provide a useful technique to integrate findings from social and behavioral sciences to increase donor recruitment and retention. After reviewing the literature, implementation intention formation is proposed as a technique to integrate the key findings and theories from the behavioral and social science literature on blood donor recruitment and retention.

The Society of Behavioral Medicine (SBM) Leadership Institute provides leadership training for mid-career behavioral medicine scientists. As an institute fellow, I explored the experiences of social scientists working in healthcare settings. Exploratory research to describe the experiences, barriers, and facilitators social scientists face working in a healthcare delivery and research system. Our research questions were exploratory, focused on understanding (a) the experiences of social scientists working in a healthcare delivery and research system, (b) barriers that social scientists face working in a healthcare delivery and research system, (c) perceived value of sociological and anthropologic methods to clinicians and other health researchers, and (4) to understand the landscape of organizational models that feature social scientists as part of a larger scientific enterprise. We developed a plan for needs assessment activities. We conducted a design workshop of social scientists (n = 11). Using human-centered design methods, we elicited experiences and asked participants to develop a prototype model where social scientists could find career fulfillment with minimal structural barriers. We found that social scientists feel a strong sense of pride in their social science training and passion for the work they do. They reported occupying multiple disciplines at once, including multiple promotion and reputational expectations. Participants commonly reported that they themselves, as well as collaborators, viewed social science work, particularly qualitative research, as supplemental to quantitative work. Participants described perceptions that social science research is less rigorous or requires less training compared with other disciplines. Participants identified several contextual factors that influenced the perceived value of social science research in healthcare, including the focus of external funding priorities on larger clinical questions, organizational structure, and tangible leadership support of social science. The SBM Leadership Institute created a space for preliminary research into an area that could improve the experiences and research impact of social and behavioral scientists.

This paper discusses a number of issues in the methodology of social and behavioral sciences which concern how concepts are defined and related to observations, how theories are constructed, and how we proceed in actual research. Examples are mainly taken from experimental psychology, and from social psychology, but the problems and answers apply to the whole of behavioral and social sciences.

As the largest generation in U.S. history — the population born in the two decades immediately following World War II — enters the age of risk for cognitive impairment, growing numbers of people will experience dementia (including Alzheimer's disease and related dementias). By one estimate, nearly 14 million people in the United States will be living with dementia by 2060. Like other hardships, the experience of living with dementia can bring unexpected moments of intimacy, growth, and compassion, but these diseases also affect people's capacity to work and carry out other activities and alter their relationships with loved ones, friends, and coworkers. Those who live with and care for individuals experiencing these diseases face challenges that include physical and emotional stress, difficult changes and losses in their relationships with life partners, loss of income, and interrupted connections to other activities and friends. From a societal perspective, these diseases place substantial demands on communities and on the institutions and government entities that support people living with dementia and their families, including the health care system, the providers of direct care, and others.Nevertheless, research in the social and behavioral sciences points to possibilities for preventing or slowing the development of dementia and for substantially reducing its social and economic impacts. At the request of the National Institute on Aging of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Reducing the Impact of Dementia in America assesses the contributions of research in the social and behavioral sciences and identifies a research agenda for the coming decade. This report offers a blueprint for the next decade of behavioral and social science research to reduce the negative impact of dementia for America's diverse population. Reducing the Impact of Dementia in America calls for research that addresses the causes and solutions for disparities in both developing dementia and receiving adequate treatment and support. It calls for research that sets goals meaningful not just for scientists but for people living with dementia and those who support them as well.By 2030, an estimated 8.5 million Americans will have Alzheimer's disease and many more will have other forms of dementia. Through identifying priorities social and behavioral science research and recommending ways in which they can be pursued in a coordinated fashion, Reducing the Impact of Dementia in America will help produce research that improves the lives of all those affected by dementia.

Human health is influenced by multiple interacting biological, psychological, sociocultural, economic, and behavioral factors. Research in behavioral and social sciences informs physicians' approaches to prevention, diagnosis, and patient care. Competent physicians, therefore, require knowledge of society and human behavior to develop essential communication skills, professional conduct, self-awareness, ethical reasoning, and cultural understanding. Consequently, these Social and Behavioral sciences are integral to medical training. This cross-sectional study examines the current state of Social and Behavioral Sciences integration in Libyan medical education programs through a survey of 105 faculty members, curriculum developers, and administrators. Findings reveal strong recognition of SBS importance (84.6% rated it "very important"), yet inconsistencies in curriculum implementation, with 27.9% reporting no formal SBS inclusion. Teaching methods remain lecture-dominated (77.9%), and key challenges include insufficient faculty expertise (59.6%) and curriculum time constraints (40.4%). The study recommended the early curricular integration, faculty development, and enhanced experiential learning.

Health and human behavior: areas of interest common to the social and medical sciences.

It is a privilege and an honor to speak with the scientific community about the need to integrate the behavioral and social sciences with the biomedical sciences and how this relates to the mission of the American Heart Association. My observations and thoughts are influenced by my experiences as a nurse researcher and behavioral scientist at Johns Hopkins, where I have been involved in a research program on high blood pressure control in urban black communities. Tremendous advances in biology are providing new knowledge about genetics, physiology, pathophysiology, and disease, creating exciting opportunities for clinical research. From the laboratory this research evolves into new applications for diagnosis, therapy, and prevention in humans. At the same time, important advances in behavioral science, clinical outcomes, and healthcare delivery have provided needed knowledge about prevention and treatment. This research transitions from the healthcare setting into the community. Individuals’ lifestyles significantly impact their health, with unhealthy habits accounting for about 54%1 of known contributions to heart disease. Behavioral and biological interventions can reduce morbidity, disability, and death due to heart disease and stroke. They can improve quality of life and influence the behavior of policy makers in their decisions, health professionals in their practice, and people in their daily lives. However, there is a gap between the efficacy of interventions in studies and their effectiveness in practice, a gap between potential and reality, intention and action, and information and behavior. This gap illustrates the urgent need to more fully integrate the social and behavioral sciences with the biomedical sciences. Three questions arise: Despite extensive studies of strategies to prevent and treat risk factors for heart disease and stroke, current evidence documents …

Abstract. In this study, the evaluation of the 9th European Conference on Social and Behavioral Sciences held on 3-6 February 2016 in Paris will be mentioned. Keywords. Social sciences, Political sciences, Business administration, Financial economics, Finance, European Conference, Paris. JEL. G10, M10, M20.

Judy Auerbach is Vice President, Public Policy at the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR), where she is responsible for developing, leading, and managing the activities of amfAR’s Public Policy Office in Washington, D.C. These activities include advocating for sound, science-based HIV/AIDS policy and protecting the rights of people infected with HIV and those at risk of infection. Prior to coming to amfAR, Dr. Auerbach served as the Director of the Behavioral and Social Science Program and as the HIV Prevention Science Coordinator in the Office of AIDS Research (OAR) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). During 1998, while on a detail from the OAR, Dr. Auerbach served as Assistant Director for Social and Behavioral Sciences in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Prior to going to the NIH, Dr. Auerbach was a Senior Program Office at the Institute of Medicine/National Academy of Sciences, where she was Study Director for the Committee on Substance Abuse and Mental Health Issues in AIDS Research. Dr. Auerbach began her policy work in Washington in 1988 as an AAAS Congressional Science Fellow, sponsored by the Society for Research in Child Development, when she worked on child, family, and health policy issues in the office of Representative Pat Schroeder. From 1989 to 1990, she served as Director of the Institute for the Study of Women and Men at the University of Southern California. She then returned to Washington and served as Associate Director for Government Affairs at the Consortium of Social Science Associations. Dr. Auerbach received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1986, and taught sociology at Widener University and the University of California, Los Angeles. In addition to a number of articles and book chapters, she is the author of the book, In the Business of Child Care: Employer Initiatives and Working Women (Praeger, 1988).

New Developments in Medical Student Education: Opportunities for Child and Adolescent Psychiatrists

Existing methods in social [oral] epidemiology primarily utilize statistical models that assume static characteristics of individuals and environments. While useful, an over reliance on these methods in the social and behavioural sciences can unnecessarily limit perspective and progress as even the most advanced statistical methods cannot capture complex behaviour over time given that systems evolve, environments respond, and behaviours and beliefs crystalize or deteriorate based on a variety of social, environmental and access variables. The recent consensus statement on Future Directions for the Behavioral and Social Sciences in Oral Health acknowledges that dental, oral and craniofacial health emerge from the complex interplay of multiple factors at multiple levels over time and highlights the need for the incorporation of new and underutilized methodologies. Complex Systems Science offers a suite of tools and methodologies that are responsive to the generative mechanisms and processes that underlie population distributions of oral health and disease. Specifically, they assume intricate, dynamic interactions between individuals and groups, they facilitate the study and synthesis of interconnections between people (e.g. patients, healthcare providers and policy makers), how these change over time, any differences across settings, and provide an opportunity to guide future longitudinal data collection and intervention science more effectively. This paper aims to provide an introduction to foundational principles of complex systems, complex systems thinking, and methods found in complex systems science, including social network analysis, system dynamics models and agent-based models, and offers perspectives on the challenges faced and opportunities afforded in the incorporation of these methods into the population oral health sciences.

In this article, we share our experiences offering an original course entitled Intelligent Systems targeted at undergraduate social and behavioral science students. Intelligent Systems provides a rigorous introduction to robotics and surveys selected topics in artificial intelligence. This course is tailored to students with little mathematical background and no programming experience. We offer best practices and information from successful course components and ideas for tailoring course content to social and behavioral science students.The motivation for this course comes from the wide interdisciplinary appeal of robotics and artificial intelligence. They have been leveraged to improve recruitment to the major and to expose students in other disciplines to computational thinking. However, no offerings of CS0 that exclusively cater to the large social and behavioral science population are available that focus on intelligent systems. Robots and AI systems are affordable and accessible to this group of students. We propose our solution to this problem and argue for offering multiple, interdisciplinary CS0 offerings.

Previous articleNext article No AccessMagic and Witchcraft: An Interpretation from Dissonance TheoryTheodore Rosenthal, and Bernard J. SiegelTheodore Rosenthal Search for more articles by this author , and Bernard J. Siegel Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 15, Number 2Summer, 1959 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/soutjanth.15.2.3628803 Views: 10Total views on this site Citations: 32Citations are reported from Crossref Journal History This article was published in the Southwestern Journal of Anthropology (1945-1972), which is continued by the Journal of Anthropological Research (1973-present). PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Thi An Tran From Dichotomy to Multipolarity: A Case Study of the Four Ladyship Saints Worshipping Practices in Vietnam, (Oct 2021): 167–187.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-5055-0_10Patrick Kwaku Ofori, David Tod, David Lavallee An exploratory investigation of superstitious behaviours, coping, control strategies, and personal control in Ghanaian and British student-athletes, International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology 16, no.11 (Feb 2016): 3–19.https://doi.org/10.1080/1612197X.2016.1142460Richard Sosis, W. Penn Handwerker Psalms and Coping with Uncertainty: Religious Israeli Women's Responses to the 2006 Lebanon War, American Anthropologist 113, no.11 (Feb 2011): 40–55.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1433.2010.01305.xJules J. Wanderer, George Rivera, Jr. Black magic beliefs and white magic practices: The common structure of intimacy, tradition, and power, The Social Science Journal 23, no.44 (Dec 2019): 419–430.https://doi.org/10.1016/S0362-3319(86)80016-7Nicholas P. Spanos Hypnotic behavior: A social-psychological interpretation of amnesia, analgesia, and “trance logic”, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 9, no.33 (Feb 2010): 449–467.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00046537John O. Beahrs The “special-process” controversy: What is at issue?, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 9, no.33 (Feb 2010): 467–468.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00046549Patricia G. Bowers Understanding reports of nonvolition, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 9, no.33 (Feb 2010): 469–470.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00046562Nathan Brody Cognitively induced analgesia and semantic dissociation, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 9, no.33 (Feb 2010): 470–470.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00046574William E. 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Naish Hypnosis: Towards a rational explanation of irrational behaviour, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 9, no.33 (Feb 2010): 476–477.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X0004663XMartin T. Orne, David F. Dinges, Emily Carota Orne Hypnotic experience: A cognitive social-psychological reality, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 9, no.33 (Feb 2010): 477–478.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00046641Campbell Perry, Jean-Roch Laurence Social and psychological influences on hypnotic behavior, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 9, no.33 (Feb 2010): 478–479.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00046653Robert Rosenthal Nonsignificant relationships as scientific evidence, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 9, no.33 (Feb 2010): 479–481.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00046665Ted L. Rosenthal Hypnotic phenomena: Who really sees the emperor's new clothes?, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 9, no.33 (Feb 2010): 481–481.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00046677John Sabini, Debra A. 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Forget it, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 9, no.33 (Feb 2010): 485–486.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00046732Graham F. Wagstaff State versus nonstate paradigms of hypnosis: A real or a false dichotomy?, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 9, no.33 (Feb 2010): 486–487.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00046744Edwin A. Weinstein Attentional capacities have neurological basis, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 9, no.33 (Feb 2010): 487–488.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00046756Nicholas P. Spanos More on the social psychology of hypnotic responding, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 9, no.33 (Feb 2010): 489–502.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X0004677XThomas Frank Lazar Indigenous Curing Patterns in a Samoan Migrant Community, Oceania 55, no.44 (Feb 2015): 288–302.https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1834-4461.1985.tb02094.xTED L. 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