**Introduction:** The well-being of academics at universities, including students, staff, and faculty is a topic of increasing concern. The lack of well-being may be attributed to the current academic context which does not consistently provide cues that affirm social inclusion to all members of the academic population (Estrada et al., 2018). The lack of cues that affirm the dignity of others has consequences and undermines a basic need that people are more likely to survive and experience well-being when feeling socially connected (Baumeister & Leary, 1995; Dunbar & Barrett, 2007). Further, literature shows that social connection can reduce experiences of stress in pressured environments such as academia (Holt-Lunstad et al., 2015; USPHS, 2023; Valtorta et al., 2016). This study examines the role of kindness (defined as actions that affirm dignity and social inclusion) in promoting connectivity and well-being among academics. 
**Methods:** The Social Influence of Kindness Study was conducted through a one-time anonymous 10-minute online survey via Qualtrics. Participants were recruited using the snowball method via email and social media based on interest in taking a 10-minute survey about Kindness and Dignity during Spring 2020. For this study, 182 participants were selected for analysis based on their occupation designation of studying or working within an academic institution. Each survey included a written reflective micro-narrative in response to the prompt "recall an experience of kindness" and consisted of measures of Kindness Given, Kindness Received, Institutional Identity, Stress, and Well-Being. 
**Results:** We found engaging in acts of kindness, as measured by two novel psychometric rating scales Kindness Received (alpha=.927) and Kindness Given (alpha=.859), was significantly associated with increased institutional identity, well-being, and reduced stress. Our structural equation model (SEM) further validated the correlation results with receiving kindness. Interestingly through the SEM we found conducting acts of kindness had a significant negative relationship with institutional identity and reduced stress. Qualitative analysis of micronarratives on kindness showed that feeling safe and being acknowledged are the most common ways people describe experiencing kindness, an affirmation of their dignity. 
**Conclusions and Discussion:** This study shows that receiving kindness among academics has the potential to improve institutional identity, well-being, and reduce stress. Further, the results show that receiving kindness and giving kindness can be reliably measured amongst students and faculty in academia. We provide evidence that reflecting on experiences of kindness promotes positivity, with the potential to encourage people to conduct further acts of kindness. Together these findings provide knowledge that can inform workshops and interventions to improve social connection and inclusion amongst diverse academics. This study contributes to broader research highlighting positive contextual factors that promote the persistence of diverse students and faculty in academia. 
**Acknowledgments:** The project was funded by NIH grant #R01GM138700

The Influence of Kindness on Academic Well-Being - Poster

ASD children are characterised by their refusal to change and difficulty in changing their responses to different social situations, which make it difficult for them to communicate with others, including their parents. We applied the comprehensive care technique Humanitude™ to mothers of children with ASD to support them from a multimodal communication perspective.
Changes in mother-child communication were analysed in terms of mother-child gaze and the time the mother and child spent playing together. The results indicate that after the Humanitude™ intervention, there were significant differences in eye contact, mothers looking at their children, and children looking at their mothers. There was also a significant decrease in time children spent playing alone. There was a high correlation between pre and post-Humanitude™ intervention in the amount of time both mothers and children spent looking at each other, which suggests that incorporating multimodal communication can affect communication between parents and children.

Behavioural changes in the interaction between child with autism spectrum disorder and mother through the Comprehensive Care Humanitude™ intervention

Monitoring vaccine behaviour through social media can guide health policy. We present a new dataset of 9471 tweets posted in Australia from 2020 to 2022, annotated with sentiment toward vaccines and also 5C, the five types
of behaviour toward vaccines, a scheme commonly used in health psychology literature. We benchmark our dataset using BERT and Gradient Boosting Machine and show that jointly training both sentiment and 5C tasks (F1=48) outperforms individual training (F1=39) in this highly imbalanced data. Our sentiment analysis
indicates close correlation between the sentiments and prominent events during the pandemic. We hope that our dataset and benchmark models will inform further work in online monitoring of vaccine behaviour. The dataset and benchmark methods are accessible online.

Automatic Identification of 5C Vaccine Behaviour on Social Media

Origin and Pawn narrative content analysis with an adult who stutters

In this paper, we introduce a new QA dataset, CMQA, which is conditional and contains multiple answers of different quantities. Samples in CMQA have two characteristics: first, multi-span answers can be caused by users lacking related domain knowledge and asking ambiguous questions. In such cases, questions might need multiple conditions to specify the circumstance. Second, multiple answers in a sample might belong to different granularities, and there are often hierarchical relations among them.

**Author(s):** Claessens, S; Atkinson, Q. D. INTRODUCTION: Cross-national analyses test hypotheses about drivers of global variation in national outcomes. However, since nations are connected via spatial proximity and cultural ancestry, cross-national analyses often violate assumptions of non-independence, inflating false positive rates. Here, we test whether cross-national research in economics and psychology sufficiently accounts for non-independence. METHODS: We conducted a systematic literature review, a simulation study, and reanalyses of 12 previous studies to determine whether previous cross-national analyses sufficiently account for non-independence. RESULTS: Our literature review revealed that controls for non-independence are rare in economics and psychology. When studies do include controls for non-independence, our simulations suggest that commonly used methods continue to produce false positives. In addition, we show that half of our reanalyses are no longer significant after controlling for non-independence using global proximity matrices. DISCUSSION: Existing cross-national analyses must be treated with caution. We urge social scientists to sufficiently control for non-independence in cross-national research.

The non-independence of nations and why it matters

The present study investigated whether making judgments of learning (JOLs) can enhance the learning of the studied materials (backward effect) and newly studied materials (forward effect) in inductive learning. In two experiments, participants studied various butterfly species through Sections A and B. After learning Section A, participants made either target-present JOLs, target-absent JOLs, or merely restudied Section A (Experiment 1). We also manipulated whether participants make an explicit retrieval attempt before making JOLs (Experiment 2). Then all participants learned Section B and took a final test for both sections. The results revealed that simply making target-present or target-absent JOLs did not produce learning benefits. However, when people made the target-absent JOLs combined with explicit retrieval attempts they outperformed the other groups in both sections, showing backward and forward effects of JOLs. In conclusion, JOLs seem to be effective only when learners actively retrieve the learned information while making metacognitive judgments.

Do Judgments of Learning Improve Inductive Learning?

Testing on previously learned materials can enhance the learning of new materials studied after the test (the forward effect of testing). We examined how the timing of interim testing influenced subsequent learning. Participants studied trivia facts in two learning sections (A & B) and provided a mental effort rating for each section. Between the two sections, participants either restudied, took an immediate test, or a 15-min delayed test on Section A. They then proceeded to Section B and took a final test on both sections. The results demonstrated that both the immediate and delayed testing groups outperformed the restudy group on Section B, indicating that the forward effect of testing was independent of the test timing. Furthermore, the testing groups showed a bigger increase in their mental effort from Section A to B than the restudy group, suggesting that the forward testing effect occurred probably due to more mental effort.

Does delayed interim testing enhance subsequent learning?

While problem-solving is central in our daily life, its underlying mechanisms remain elusive. The dominant theory states that one must restructure a problem (i.e., reorganize problem-related representations) to solve it. As empirical evidence supporting this mechanism is scarce, we used network science methodology to demonstrate the key role of restructuring in problem-solving. Individual semantic memory networks were estimated before and after participants attempted to solve a riddle. These networks represent the organization of solution-relevant and irrelevant words as nodes, with edges representing the strength of the relationship between them based on the participants’ relatedness judgments. Restructuring was quantified as the difference in semantic network metrics between pre- and post-solving phases. Successful problem-solving was predicted by local semantic network restructuring, only in edges and nodes assessed as helpful to solve the riddle. These results shed new light on the mental restructuring in problem-solving and provide a new method to quantify it.

Restructuring problem-related semantic associations promotes solving success

Computational cognitive theories of Autism Spectrum Disorder have received renewed attention in recent years. Consistent with the predictive processing framework, ASD has
been re-conceptualized as a disorder of aberrant prediction and learning-rate estimation involving multiple levels of a putative cognitive computational hierarchy. Specifically, behavioral symptoms of individuals with ASD might manifest due to an aberrant overestimation of the volatility of environmental contingencies (i.e. tendency of change in cue-outcome probabilities) which in turn might induce a dysfunctional setting of learning rates. In this work, we attempted to conceptually replicate computational modeling analyses of an impactful study of the recent ASD modeling literature in an independent
sample of subjects. We were not able to replicate some prior reported effects likely due to differences in model architecture and cognitive task setup. We found statistical trends in similar directions.

Modeling aberrant volatility estimates in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Third party punishment (TPP), or altruistic punishment, is specifically human prosocial behavior. TPP denotes the administration of a sanction to a transgressor by an individual that is not affected by the transgression. In some evolutionary accounts, TPP is considered crucial for the stability of cooperation and solidarity in larger groups formed by genetically unrelated individuals. Belief in free will (BFW), on the other hand, is the idea that humans have control over their behavior. BFW is a human universal notion that, in some studies, has been found to be supportive of prosocial behavior. In our study, we examined the effect of BFW on TPP under high and low affect scenarios through optical brain imaging (fNIRS). We hypothesized that in low affect cases, there would be a positive correlation between the strength of the BFW and the severity of the punishment inflicted. Obtained results and related statistical analyses indicate that participants with higher degree of BFW have more neural activation in their right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) (hbo and hbt measures) in high affect scenarios, whereas the participants with lower degree of BFW have higher levels of neural activation in the medial PFC (hbo and hbt measures) in low affect scenarios. These empirical findings are in line with the research findings in the relevant academic literature and support the hypothesis that the degree of BFW influences punishment decisions.

The Neural Correlates of the Effect of Belief in Free Will on Third-Party Punishment: An Optical Brain Imaging (fNIRS) Study

Morality is a critical aspect of life––it influences how we think, design systems, and even the stories we tell. Looking to the popularity of true crime stories and characters like Dexter Morgan, it seems that our preferences are toward exploring moral ambiguity and moral badness. Across two experiments, we examine what moral ambiguity is and what kinds of moral information spark curiosity and explanation-seeking. In Experiment 1, we manipulate moral ambiguity to mean someone with conflicting moral character, and we predict those individuals will trigger curiosity more than morally consistent people. Results suggest that both morally ambiguous and immoral minds pique curiosity for explanations. In Experiment 2, we find that when ambiguity is instead operationalized as what is typical or average, we are curious about morally deviant things. This research points to critical differences in the kinds of moral minds we are curious to learn more about.


Underline digital video library

The Influence of Kindness on Academic Well-Being - Poster

Behavioural changes in the interaction between child with autism spectrum disorder and mother through the Comprehensive Care Humanitude™ intervention

Automatic Identification of 5C Vaccine Behaviour on Social Media

Origin and Pawn narrative content analysis with an adult who stutters

Automatic Identification of 5C Vaccine Behaviour on Social Media

The non-independence of nations and why it matters

Do Judgments of Learning Improve Inductive Learning?

Does delayed interim testing enhance subsequent learning?

Restructuring problem-related semantic associations promotes solving success

Modeling aberrant volatility estimates in Autism Spectrum Disorder

The Neural Correlates of the Effect of Belief in Free Will on Third-Party Punishment: An Optical Brain Imaging (fNIRS) Study

What is moral ambiguity and when does it trigger curiosity?

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