Darren Edwards

Swansea University | SWAN · Department of public Health and Social Sciences

This book designates Visualization Psychology as an interdisciplinary subject. The book contains literature reviews and experimental works that exemplify a range of open questions at this critical intersection. It also includes discourses that envision how the subject may be developed in the coming years and decades. The field of visualization is...

Introduction Mental health services are stretched in the UK and are in need of support. One approach that could improve mental health symptoms is osteopathy. Research suggests that osteopathy influences psychophysiological factors, which could lead to improvements in mental health. The first objective of this protocol is to investigate the feasibil...

The Bayesian approach of cognitive science largely takes the position that evolution drives perception to produce precepts that are veridical. However, some efforts utilizing evolutionary game theory simulations have shown that perception is more likely based on a fitness function, which promotes survival rather than promoting perceptual truth abou...

Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) has traditionally been employed at the individual level as a therapeutic model to change the way the individual relates to their thoughts and feelings, helping to connect to meaningful values, and promoting psychological flexibility. More recently, it also has been applied at the societal level to promote pro...

This chapter reviews some of the key ideas emerging from the heterogeneous discipline of wellbeing science and presented in this book by individual contributors, encompassing perspectives from psychological scientists, public health professionals, and economic and political theorists. Contributions document a wide range of issues including the expa...

This chapter provides a brief introduction to the complex construct of wellbeing, some of the major societal challenges impacting on it and potential solutions. Wellbeing is a controversial topic and its definition is typically dependent on disciplinary perspectives. Here we take a broader view, encompassing individual, collective and planetary wel...

Background There is much overlap among the symptomology of autistic spectrum disorders (ASDs), obsessive compulsive disorders (OCDs), and alexithymia, which all typically involve impaired social interactions, repetitive impulsive behaviors, problems with communication, and mental health. Aim This study aimed to identify direct and indirect associa...

This is a preprint of the following chapter: Kemp, A.H. & Edwards, D.J., ‘Discussion: Broadening the Scope of Wellbeing Science’, to be published in Broadening the Scope of Wellbeing Science: Multidisciplinary and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Human Flourishing and Wellbeing, edited by A.H. Kemp & D.J. Edwards, (forthcoming), Palgrave Macmill...

This is a preprint of the following chapter: Kemp, A.H. & Edwards, D.J., ‘Chapter 1: An introduction to the complex construct of wellbeing, societal challenges and potential solutions’, to be published in Broadening the Scope of Wellbeing Science: Multidisciplinary and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Human Flourishing and Wellbeing, edited by A...

Psychology has benefited from an enormous wealth of knowledge about processes of cognition in relation to how the brain organizes information. Within the categorization literature, this behavior is often explained through theories of memory construction called exemplar theory and prototype theory which are typically based on similarity or rule func...

Public health (PH) messaging can have an enormous impact on shaping how individuals within society behave, and can ensure it is in a safe and responsible way, consistent with up-to-date evidence-based PH guidelines. If done effectively, messaging can save lives and improve the health of those within society. However, unfortunately, those within Gov...

Background: Alexithymia is a personality trait which is characterized by an inability to identify and describe conscious emotions of oneself and others. Aim: The present study aimed to determine whether various measures of mental health, interoception, psychological flexibility, and self-as-context, predicted through linear associations alexithymia...

Introduction In recent years, serious video games have been used to promote emotional regulation in individuals with mental health issues. Although these therapeutic strategies are innovative, they are limited with respect to scope of treatment, often focusing on specific cognitive skills, to help remediate a specific mental health disorder. Objec...

Visualization is a useful technology in health science, and especially for community network analysis. Because visualization applications in healthcare are typically risk-averse, health psychologists can play a significant role in ensuring appropriate and effective uses of visualization techniques in healthcare. In this paper, we examine the role o...

Defining trust is an important endeavor given its applicability to assessing public mood to much of the innovation in the newly formed autonomous industry, such as artificial intelligence (AI),medical bots, drones, autonomous vehicles, and smart factories [19].Through developing a reliable index or means to measure trust,this may have wide impact f...

In visualization, there are many different wisdoms and opinions about why visualization works, what makes a good visualization, and how to design and evaluate visualization. Collectively these wisdoms and options have shaped a landscape of the schools of thought in the field of visualization. In this chapter, we examine various schools of thought i...

Background: Interoception and heart rate variability have been found to predict outcomes of mental health and well-being. However, these have usually been investigated independently of one another. Objectives: This systematic review aimed to explore a key gap in the current literature, that being, identifying whether HRV and interoception predict e...

Introduction: In recent years, serious video games have been utilised to promote emotional regulation in individuals with mental health issues. Though these therapeutic strategies are innovative, they are limited in the scope of treatment, often focusing on specific cognitive skills, to help remediate a specific mental health disorder. Objective: H...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fnint.2018.00041.].

Background Chronic pain is a growing global and economically costly problem leading the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK to actively search for novel strategies to improve health outcomes. Some trials have shown a benefit when practitioners use a positive communication style, however, much of the available literature investigating the use of...

Background: There is paucity in the literature regarding the role of interoceptive accuracy (IAc) at predicting the effectiveness of osteopathic techniques which increase spinal mobility when directed specifically at the thoracolumbar junction (TLJ). Aims: The study aimed to explore whether a high velocity, low amplitude (HVLA) thrust of the TLJ...

Empirical studies form an integral part of visualization research. Not only can they facilitate the evaluation of various designs, techniques, systems, and practices in visualization, but they can also enable the discovery of the causalities explaining why and how visualization works. This state-of-the-art report focuses on controlled and semi-cont...

The excellent paper by Panagioti et al. [1] reminds us of the significance impact of preventable iatrogenic harm, affecting around 6% of patients. More than half the harm is due to mismanagement of prescribed medicines and other therapeutic management incidents. Further research is unlikely to substantially alter this estimate [2], and these findin...

Introduction: Recent studies have revealed a high prevalence of depression, anxiety and stress symptoms among university students, highlighting an urgent need for preventative measures at low cost to better support often overwhelmed support services. Objective: Here we propose a protocol for assessing the feasibility of a randomised controlled t...

Introduction Persistent pain affects a large percentage of the UK population and its burden has wide ramifications that affect physical, psychological, socioeconomic and occupational status. Pain has a significant impact on people’s well-being and quality of life. Some of the most common comorbidities found in this population are depression and anx...

Background: There is paucity in the literature regarding the role of the interoceptive pathway through the insular cortex (IC), as well as heart rate variability (HRV) in relation to Osteopathic Manipulative Therapy (OMT) and deep-touch. Aims: The present study investigated whether both OMT treatment and deep-touch (a newly hypothesized treatment o...

Background: Myofascial release (MFR) is used to restore tissue extensibility of the fascia tissue and is considered to be useful in a number of clinical settings such as low back pain, ankle injuries, fibromyalgia, and headaches. There is, however, despite the popularity of MFR in manual therapy, little consensus on whether it leads to biomechanic...

Article in The Conversation https://theconversation.com/osteopathy-can-be-used-to-treat-mental-health-issues-related-to-back-pain-new-study-94845

Co-morbid mental health conditions such as anxiety, depression and fear avoidance are often associated with chronic pain. This novel study aimed to explore the impact of osteopathic treatment on several psychological outcome measures relating to anxiety, depression, mental health and fear avoidance for a chronic pain population receiving osteopathi...

Abstract Perspective-taking interventions have been shown to improve attitudes toward social outgroups. In contrast, similar interventions have produced opposite effects (i.e., enhanced negativity) in the context of attitudes toward elderly groups. The current study investigated whether a brief perspective-taking intervention enhanced with mindfuln...

There are many theories that explain how route knowledge is acquired. We examined here if the sequence of elements that are part of a route can become integrated into a single unit, to the extent that the processing of individual transitions may only be relevant in the context of this entire unit. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants learned a rout...

ersistent pain is considered a complex biopsychosocial phenomenon whose understanding and management is yet to be improved. More research is needed to determine the common paths that lead to developing persistent pain, to identify the populations most at risk and to develop and evaluate interventions. The last decades have seen a shift in pain mana...

This chapter introduces information processing perspectives from cognitive psychology, providing historical background content where it might prove useful. The hope is that this will provide readers enough of an understanding of psychology perspectives, theories, and methods that they can better apply crowdsourcing methods to understand the cogniti...

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Background: Neurodynamics is a clinical medium for testing the mechanical sensitivity of peripheral nerves which innervate the tissues of both the upper and lower limb. Currently, there is paucity in the literature of neurodynamic testing in osteopathic research, and where there is research, these are often methodologically flawed, without the app...

Perspective-taking interventions have been shown to improve attitudes toward social outgroups. In contrast, similar interventions have produced opposite effects (i.e., enhanced negativity) in the context of attitudes to elderly groups. The current study investigated whether a brief perspective-taking intervention enhanced with mindfulness would be...

First-line treatment recommended for pelvic floor disorders is pelvic floor muscle training (PFMT), which is effective, acceptable to patients, and cost efficient. However, PFMT outcomes are mediated by patient variables, such as depression, anxiety, motivation, and health values. The current study examined whether provision of an adjunct values-ba...

Cognitive factors play a crucial role in human computation and crowd-powered systems. However, the impact of cog-nitive factors in microtask crowdsourcing marketplaces has been studied to a limited extent. In this paper, we reflect on the importance of considering cognitive effects of task design and decomposition on crowd workers. Cognitive Consid...

Primary objective: This study explored over-selectivity (executive dysfunction) using a standard unsupervised categorization task. Over-selectivity has been demonstrated using supervised categorization procedures (where training is given); however, little has been done in the way of unsupervised categorization (without training). Methods and proced...

In clinical practice, Osteopaths and Manual Therapists commonly direct treatment towards the diaphragm by the use of a ‘Diaphragm Release’. Currently, there is paucity within the literature to support the use of this technique, specifically in pain outcomes. This research aims to support a neurophysiological mechanism based upon the osteopathic pri...

The design of effective glyphs for visualisation involves a number of different visual encodings. Since spatial position is usually already specified in advance, we must rely on other visual channels to convey additional relationships for multivariate analysis. One such relationship is the apparent order present in the data. This paper presents two...

Objective Choice of reconstruction following bladder removal is often between neobladder or ileal conduit diversion. Identifying patient concerns about this little understood choice should provide better understanding of factors important in making surgical decisions. The current study used a qualitative technique to identify patient concerns and v...

The design of effective glyphs for visualisation involves a number of different visual encodings. Since spatial position is usually already specified in advance, we must rely on other visual channels to convey additional relationships for multivariate analysis. One such relationship is the apparent order present in the data. This paper presents two...

We examined the effect of context on the learning of spatial coding in four experiments. Two partially overlapping sets of stimuli, which had the very same stimulus-response spatial coding, were presented in unique contexts. Results show contextual locking, i.e., response times to the very same item in a more common context (80%) were significantly...

This study explores relational-like and absolute-like representations in categorization. Although there is much evidence that categorization processes can involve information about both the particular physical properties of studied instances and abstract (relational) properties, there has been little work on the factors that lead to one kind of rep...

This study explores relational-like and absolute-like representations in categorization. Although there is much evidence that categorization processes can involve information about both the particular physical properties of studied instances and abstract (relational) properties, there has been little work on the factors that lead to one kind of rep...

Studies of supervised Categorization have demonstrated limited Categorization performance in participants with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), however little research has been conducted regarding unsupervised Categorization in this population. This study explored unsupervised Categorization using two stimulus sets that differed in their difficulty...

The issue of how category variability affects classification of novel instances is an important one for assessing theories of categorisation, yet previous research cannot provide a compelling conclusion. In five experiments we reexamine some of the factors thought to affect participant performance. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants almost always...

What makes a category seem natural or intuitive? In this paper, an unsupervised categorization task was employed to examine observer agreement concerning the categorization of nine different stimulus sets. The stimulus sets were designed to capture different intuitions about classification structure. The main empirical index of category intuitivene...

The dream-lag effect refers to there being, after the frequent incorporation of memory elements from the previous day into dreams (the day-residue), a lower incorporation of memory elements from 2 to 4 days before the dream, but then an increased incorporation of memory elements from 5 to 7 days before the dream. Participants (n=8, all female) kept...

Supervised and unsupervised categorization have been studied in separate research traditions. A handful of studies have attempted to explore a possible convergence between the two. The present research builds on these studies, by comparing the unsupervised categorization results of Pothos et al. ( 2011 ; Pothos et al., 2008 ) with the results from...

In the present study, we investigated possible influences on the unitization of responses. In Experiments 1, 2, 3, and 6, we found that when the same small fragment (i.e., a few consecutive responses in a sequence) was presented as part of two larger sequences, participants responded to it faster when it was part of the sequence that was presented...

We asked 169 participants to spontaneously categorize nine sets of items. A category structure was assumed to be more intuitive if a large number of participants consistently produced the same classification. Our results provide a rich empirical framework for examining models of unsupervised categorization—and illustrate the corresponding profound...