We take the view that commonly used brain imaging techniques add new and informative data to psychological research. As with any new measure, we need to decide how to use it in an appropriate way. How does the measure help answer theoretical questions in ways that existing measures cannot? Is the measure best used as a dependent variable or as a predictor variable? How does it relate to other p...

BACKGROUND Progressions in science and technology have generated several methods for delaying preterm delivery and abortion; therefore, discovering an easy, non-invasive, practical, and non-expensive predictive factor can help us to perform preventive methods in healthy pregnant women, without any risk factors. OBJECTIVE To indicate an appropriate index for predicting abortion in early pregna...

BACKGROUND Reaction time (RT) is one of the most widely used measures of performance in experimental psychology, yet relatively few fMRI studies have included trial-by-trial differences in RT as a predictor variable in their analyses. Using a multi-study approach, we investigated whether there are brain regions that show a general relationship between trial-by-trial RT variability and activatio...

There are strong evidences linking physical outdoor activity and health benefits; however, little is known about the impact on environmental behaviors. Thus, this study aims to close this gap by investigating the influence of physical outdoor activity on environmental behaviors. A total of 416 surveys were distributed to students in eight public primary schools located near the Hsinchu Science ...

OBJECTIVE Many forms of contraception are available on prescription only for example, the oral contraceptive pill (OCP) and long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs). In this analysis we aim to identify key determinants of prescription contraceptive use. DESIGN Cross-sectional population survey. Data on sociodemographic indices, concerns about the OCP and perceived barriers to access were...

The increase of strategic alliance and national or pan-national government collaborative programmes has highlighted the shifting management and policy focus from inducing inhouse R&D to promoting a joint partnership between firms and organisations in the increasingly complex and costly innovation process. Recent outputs from the dynamic capability school and innovation network theorists demonst...

Worker Role Interview (WRI) is an assessment tool designed to identify psychosocial and environmental factors which influence a person's ability to return to work. The purpose of this study was to investigate if the Worker Role Interview (WRI) can predict return to work over a period of two years. Fifty three long-term sick-listed people were interviewed and rated with the WRI. Differences in r...

A threshold effect takes place in situations where the relationship between an outcome variable and a predictor variable changes as the predictor value crosses a certain threshold/change point. Threshold effects are often plausible in a complex biological system, especially in defining immune responses that are protective against infections such as HIV-1, which motivates the current work. We st...

Experiments suggest that biodiversity enhances the ability of ecosystems to maintain multiple functions, such as carbon storage, productivity, and the buildup of nutrient pools (multifunctionality). However, the relationship between biodiversity and multifunctionality has never been assessed globally in natural ecosystems. We report here on a global empirical study relating plant species richne...

To date, the vast majority of studies in urban areas have been carried out on birds, yet it is not known whether the responses of birds to urbanization are congruent with those of other taxa. In this paper, we compared the responses of breeding birds and carabid beetles to urbanization, specifically asking whether the emerging generalizations of the effects of extreme levels of urbanization on ...