Patient-reported outcome (PRO) refers to measures that emphasize the subjective view of patients about their health-related conditions and behaviors. Typically, PROs include self-report questionnaires and clinical interviews. Defining PROs for borderline personality disorder (BPD) is particularly challenging given the disorder's high symptomatic heterogeneity, high comorbidity with other psychi...

Analogy and metaphor are figurative forms of communication that help people integrate new information with prior knowledge to facilitate comprehension and appropriate inferences. The novelty and versatility of the Web place cognitive burdens on learners that can be overcome through the use of analogies and metaphors. This paper explores three uses of figurative communication as design elements ...

BACKGROUND It is well established that drastic declines in physical activity (PA) occur during young adults' transition into university; however, our understanding of contextual and environmental factors as it relates to young adults' PA is limited. OBJECTIVE The purpose of our study was to examine the feasibility of using wrist-worn accelerometers and the use of ecological momentary assessme...

This research examined the effects of naturally occurring appearance comparisons on women's affect, body satisfaction, and compensatory cognitions and behaviors. Using ecological momentary assessment, women with high body dissatisfaction and eating pathology (EPHB), high body dissatisfaction (HB), or low body dissatisfaction (LB) recorded their reactions to appearance-focused social comparisons...

Most categorical models of meaning use a functor from the syntactic category to the semantic category. When semantic information is available, the problem of grammar induction can therefore be defined as finding preimages of the semantic types under this forgetful functor, lifting the information flow from the semantic level to a valid reduction at the syntactic level. We study the complexity o...

Many of the problems associated with alcohol occur after a single drinking event (e.g. drink driving, assault). These acute alcohol problems have a huge global impact and account for a large percentage of unintentional and intentional injuries in the world. Nonetheless, alcohol research and preventive interventions rarely focus on drinking at the event-level since drinking events are complex, d...

We have designed a flexible ecological momentary assessment/intervention smartphone (EMA/EMI) "app". We examine the utility of this app for collecting real-time data, and assessing intra-subject variability, by using it to assess how freshman undergraduates spend their time. We also explore whether its use can promote greater self-awareness. Participants were randomly divided into an experiment...

BACKGROUND Discretionary eating behaviour ("snacking") is dependent on internal and external cues. Individual differences in the effects of these cues suggest that some people are more or less likely to snack in certain situations than others. Previous research is limited to laboratory-based experiments or survey-based food recall. This study for the first time examines everyday snacking using ...

The concept of affordances, with its emphasis to the interactions between the robot and the environment, is highly relevant for epigenetic robotics. However, the use of the concept in robotics has been rather rudimentary, mostly confined to an inspiration source. In this paper, we present a new formalization of the concept, based partially on the recent formalizations proposed in Ecological Psy...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to assess the value of ecological momentary assessment in evaluating physical activity among children, adolescents, and adults. It also determines whether ecological momentary assessment fulfills the criteria of validity, reliability, objectivity, norms, and standardization applied to the tools used for the evaluation of physical activity. METHODS The E...