Yarkoni, T., Poldrack, R. A., Nichols, T. E., Van Essen, D. C., & Wager, T. D. (2011). Large-scale automated synthesis of human functional neuroimaging data.
Nature Methods, 8, 665-670.
Abstract: The explosive growth of the human neuroimaging literature has led to major advances in understanding of human brain function, but has also made aggregation and synthesis of neuroimaging findings increasingly difficult. Here we describe and validate a highly automated brain mapping framework that uses text mining, meta-analysis and machine learning techniques to generate a large database of mappings between neural and cognitive states. We demonstrate the capacity of our approach to (a) automatically conduct large-scale, high-quality neuroimaging meta-analyses, (b) address long-standing inferential problems in the neuroimaging literature, and (c) support accurate ?decoding? of broad cognitive states from brain activity in both entire studies and individual human subjects. Collectively, our results validate a powerful and generative new framework for synthesizing human neuroimaging data on an unprecedented scale.
Rodebaugh, T. L., Klein, S. R., Yarkoni, T., & Langer, J. K. (2011). Measuring social anxiety related interpersonal constraint with the flexible iterated Prisoner's Dilemma.
Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 25, 427-436.
Abstract: Data from self-report and observational studies make it clear that problematic social anxiety confers interpersonal constraint that may contribute to the interpersonal dysfunction reported by individuals with social anxiety disorder. Direct observation of interpersonal behavior in established relationships is rare and difficult to obtain for practical reasons. We tested a flexible iterated prisoner's dilemma computer task to examine whether it might capture interpersonal constraint related to social anxiety. Our first study suggested that, at least for men, the task directly captures social anxiety's constraint on responses to friendly giving. Our second study more strongly supported the assertion that the task directly assesses interpersonal constraint. The data support a model in which social anxiety directly confers trait-like tendencies toward interpersonal constraint and indirectly constrains behavior in specific interactions. These studies provide further evidence that constrained responses to positive social behaviors are characteristic of people with problematic social anxiety and may be particularly important to dysfunctions in the close relationships of these individuals.
emotion
decision-making
indiv. diff.
Holtzman, N. S., Schott, J. P., Jones, M. N., Balota, D. A., & Yarkoni, T. (2011). Exploring Media Bias with Semantic Analysis Tools: Validation of the Contrast Analysis of Semantic Similarity (CASS).
Behavior Research Methods, 43, 193-200.
Abstract: Text-analytic methods have become increasingly popular in cognitive science for understanding differences in semantic structure between documents. However, such methods have not been widely used in other disciplines. With the aim of disseminating these approaches, we introduce a text-analytic technique (Contrast Analysis of Semantic Similarity, CASS, www.casstools.org), based on the BEAGLE semantic space model (Jones & Mewhort, 2007) and add new features to test between-corpora differences in semantic associations (e.g., the association between democrat and good, compared to democrat and bad). By analyzing television transcripts from cable news from a 12 month period, we reveal significant differences in political bias between television channels (liberal to conservative: MSNBC, CNN, FoxNews) and find expected differences between newscasters (Colmes, Hannity). Compared to existing measures of media bias, our measure has higher reliability. CASS can be used to investigate semantic structure when exploring any topic (e.g., self-esteem or stereotyping) that affords a large text-based database.
