Depression is associated with attentional biases for emotional information that are proposed to reflect stable vulnerability factors for the development and recurrence of depression. A key question for researchers is whether those who have recovered from depression also exhibit attentional biases, and if so, how similar these biases are to those who are currently depressed. To address this ques...

BACKGROUND/AIMS Research has provided evidence for an association between attentional biases for substance-related stimuli and the development and maintenance of a variety of addictive behaviours. Attempts at reducing attentional bias amongst harmful and dependent drinkers have provided evidence to suggest that reduced attentional bias in heavy drinkers would lead to necessary reductions in alc...

The assumption of strongly ignorable treatment assignment is required for eliminating selection bias in observational studies. This article investigates how well this assumption is met by various conceptually unique sets of covariates. The methodology we use is a within-study comparison that contrasts results from a randomized experiment and a quasiexperiment that differ only in whether their r...

Random walks have been proposed as a simple method of efficiently searching, or disseminating information throughout, communication and sensor networks. In nature, animals (such as ants) tend to follow correlated random walks, i.e., random walks that are biased towards their current heading. In this paper, we investigate whether or not complementing random walks with directional bias can decrea...

It is well known that the symmetry bias much accelerates the vocabulary learning. In particular, the bias helps infants to connect objects with their names easily. However, grammar learning is another important aspect of language acquisition. In this study, we propose that the symmetry bias also would help to acquire grammar rules faster. We employ Iterated Learning Model, and revise it to incl...

The present paper investigates the effectiveness of R&D subsidies given to start-ups. Taking an aggregate view rather than evaluating a single program, we estimate the impact of R&D subsidies on start-ups’ employment growth and their patent output. A unique data set on start-ups in the East German county of Thuringia allows us to focus on those start-ups that conduct R&D within the first three ...

health consequences of industrialization and urbanization. This interpretation, however, relies on sources subject to selection bias. Our meta-analysis shows that the declining height during industrialization emerges primarily in selected samples. We also develop a parsimonious diagnostic test that reveals, but does not correct for, selection bias in height samples. When applied to four represe...

This study investigated attentional biases in children with asthma. The study aimed at testing whether children with asthma are vigilant to asthma and/or anxiety cues. Thirty-six children (18 with asthma and 18 healthy controls) aged 9-12 completed a computerised dot probe task designed to measure attentional bias to three different categories of words: asthma, anxiety symptom and general negat...

Data from Twitter have been employed in prior research to study the impact of events. Historically, researchers have relied on keyword-based samples of tweets to create a panel of Twitter users that mention event-related keywords during and/or after an event. There are limitations to the keywordbased panel approach. First, the technique suffers from selection bias since users who discuss an eve...

Recent empirical literature documents value-destroying \crosssubsidization" among the divisions of diversi ̄ed ̄rms. However, this literature relies upon two maintained hypotheses: that divisions of diversi ̄ed ̄rms are randomly allocated to their corporate parents and that the investment opportunities facing conglomerate divisions are identical to those of stand-alone ̄rms in their industries. T...