Lynn Carol Miller

University of Southern California | USC · School for Communication and Journalism

Introduction: Men who have sex with men (MSM) often face socially sanctioned disapproval of sexual deviance from the heterosexual "normal." Such sexual stigma can be internalized producing a painful affective state (i.e., shame). Although shame (e.g., addiction) can predict risk-taking (e.g., alcohol abuse), sexual shame's link to sexual risk-taki...

Sex and mating are central to evolutionary processes. Understanding the factors, including the evolved mechanisms, affecting men’s and women’s sexual decision making, is of interest to scientists, and the public at large. But “getting it right” is critical to researchers trying to develop more effective interventions to address today’s important he...

Objective: We discuss how our recent neural network model of personality and motivation can explain many aspects of the regulation of behavior. Method: Contrary to approaches that focus on a goal-corrected, set-point, and discrepancy-reducing mechanism, we argue that many aspects of regulation can be understood in terms of two other mechanisms....

Artificial intelligence (AI) research provides a rich source of modeling languages capable of generating socially plausible simulations of human behavior, while also providing a transparent ground truth that can support validation of social-science methods applied to that simulation. In this work, we leverage two established AI representations: dec...

BACKGROUND A just-in-time adaptive intervention (JITAI) is "designed to address the dynamically changing needs of individuals via the provision of the type/amount of support needed, at the right time… when needed." If and how Rumination Focused Cognitive Behavior Therapy (RFCBT), “the gold standard”, blocks emotional cascades underlying rumination...

Background A just-in-time adaptive intervention (JITAI) is “designed to address the dynamically changing needs of individuals via the provision of the type or amount of support needed, at the right time when needed.” If and how rumination-focused cognitive behavioral therapy (RFCBT), the gold standard, blocks emotional cascades underlying ruminatio...

Avatars or agents are digitized self-representations of a player in mediated environments. While using agents to navigate through mediated environments, players form bonds with their self-agents or characters, a process referred to as identification. Identification can involve automatic, but temporary, self-concept “shifts in implicit self-percepti...

Identity development is a fragile process for any youth, but this fragility may be entangled with greater complexity for young men who have sex with men (YMSM), particularly if confronted by rejection from those “closest to home”: their parents. While parental rejection to coming out may contribute to a range of maladaptive effects, the present wor...

Avatar research largely focuses on the effects of the appearance and external characteristics of avatars, but may also warrant further consideration of the effects of avatar movement characteristics. With Protean kinematics, we offer an expansion the avatar-user appearances-based effects of the Proteus Effect to a systematic exploration into the ro...

Social support differs for depressed and non-depressed individuals. However, the structural features of social supports, as represented via social networks and how they are related to depression, and its mitigation, are unclear. Here, we examine associations between personal support network structures and self-reports of depression and depression m...

Individuals with social anxiety disorder (iSAD) experience adverse outcomes in daily life due to the disorder (e.g., lower educational and work achievement compared to their healthy counterparts). They are prone to social isolation, even though they desire intimate interpersonal relationships. Yet, little research on iSAD is devoted to understandin...

We describe our Virtual Personalities model of the structure and dynamics of personality and its implementation as a neural network model. The Virtual Personalities model proposes that both the structure and dynamics of personality can be understood in terms of the interaction between structured motivational systems within the individual and the mo...

Challenges in personality science abound. We need a systematic, theory-based way to examine the dynamics of within-person variability in behavior in response to context and over time. Such a theory-based approach should afford an analysis at different “grain” sizes from moment-to-moment for assessing individual patterns of behavior variability give...

Although personality theory and research have recently made considerable progress, this work has also highlighted a number of unresolved issues in personality theory and measurement. We present a model of personality, embodied in a neural network, that addresses many of these issues. After first presenting our goal/motive-based model of personality...

Drawing from a recent call to advance generalizability and causal inference in psychological science using contextually representative research designs, we introduce a conceptual framework that integrates techniques in machine perception of poses with VR-driven inverse kinematic character animation, leveraging the Unity game engine to mediate betwe...

Although the link between social support and depression is well established, little is known about how the relational structure of social support differs for depressed and non-depressed individuals and whether these structural features are related to the ability to mitigate depression. In this study, we examine associations between personal support...

Advances in media technology have enabled an increasing number of serious games that are engaging and entertaining, most of which incorporate interactivity and narrative. Questions regarding the mechanisms underlying the role of stories in video games (e.g., in effectiveness of behavior change) remain. In the current study, using a narrative-based...

In this study, we introduced the design of an interactive, narrative video game. We examined – using interactive games -- how individuals’ traits predict “first date” in-the-moment communication patterns. We looked at whether attachment anxiety and avoidance and Behavioral Inhibition System (BIS) scores predict the choice to dismiss a partners’ int...

Evaluating the feasibility of using multivariate meta-analysis to examine the association of traits and communication patterns Traits have long been fruitfully examined as potential predictors of communication patterns. Indeed, a plethora of meta-analytical studies have examined the role of personality traits in producing one or more communication...

Neural Network Models of Personality Structure and Dynamics to appear in Wood, D., Harms, P., Read, S. J., & Slaughter, A. (Eds.). (in press). Measuring and Modeling Persons and Situations. Cambridge, MA: Elsevier.

Read, S. J., Droutman, V., & Miller L. C. (2017). Virtual Personalities: A Neural Network Model of the Structure and Dynamics of Personality. In R. R. Vallacher, S. J. Read, & A. Nowak (Eds.). Computational Social Psychology. New York: Psychology Press (Frontiers of Psychology series).

Objective: Attachment theory provides a powerful framework for understanding individual differences affecting interpersonal relationships and a range of health behavior outcomes. However, no meta-analyses have yet to examine the relationship between adult attachment styles and risky sexual behaviors. The purpose of this meta-analysis was to synthe...

Causal inference and generalizability both matter. Historically, systematic designs emphasize causal inference, while representative designs focus on generalizability. Here, we suggest a transformative synthesis – Systematic Representative Design (SRD) – concurrently enhancing both causal inference and “built-in” generalizability by leveraging toda...

Systematic Representative Design (SRD), enabled by today’s technologies leverages many of the strengths of past designs into a new synthesis affording the capacity for both causal inference and generalizability to everyday life (GEL). In doing so, it could help better integrate past and ongoing empirical research findings in psychology. Generally,...

A just-in-time, adaptive intervention (JITAI) is an emerging type of intervention that provides tailored support at the exact time of need. It does so using enabling new technologies (e.g., mobile phones, sensors) that capture the changing states of individuals. Extracting effect sizes of primary outcomes produced by 33 empirical studies that used...

Normative-based research has found that norms are significant predictors of safe sex behavioral intentions and behavior. Research shows that group identity moderates the relationship between norms and intentions/behavior. The present study used the theory of normative social behavior to evaluate whether identification with characters in an HIV-prev...

Preventable diseases, environmental crises, and terrorist attacks cause hundreds of thousands of deaths annually in the United States alone and many more worldwide. Appropriate individual behaviors and decisions can mitigate loss of life from each of these, but understanding and changing the behavior of individuals in risk situations is highly chal...

We describe our model of motivated decision‐making in everyday social behavior and its implementation as a neural network model. Most models of decision‐making are relatively static and apply to single decisions. In contrast, our model is designed to capture the dynamics, the ebb, and flow of motivated decisions across time and situations in our da...

Neuroadaptations caused by chronic methamphetamine (MA) use are likely major contributors to high relapse rate following treatment. Thus, focusing intervention efforts at pre-empting addiction in vulnerable populations, thereby preventing MA-use-induced neurological changes that make recovery so challenging, may prove more effective than targeting...

The Virtual Personalities Model is a motive-based neural network model that provides both a psychological model and a computational implementation that explicates the dynamics and often large within-person variability in behavior that arises over time. At the same time the same model can produce—across many virtual personalities—between-subject var...

Narrative games, in which users interact with virtual agents, are increasingly being used in health interventions to change targeted behaviors. In virtual social interactions, based on similar real-life contextual cues, past behavior can predict virtual choices. Here, based on theories in learning and interactivity, we examined the whether followin...

Background Research suggests that deficits in both executive functioning and trait impulsivity may play a role in risky sexual behavior. At the neural level, differences in regulation of the prefrontal cortex have been linked to impulsivity, measured neurocognitively and through self-report. The relationship between neurocognitive measures of execu...

The insula plays an important role in response inhibition. Most relevant here, it has been proposed that the dorsal anterior insular cortex (dAIC) plays a central role in a salience network that is responsible for switching between the default mode network and the executive control network. However, the insula's role in sexually motivated response...

While summer camps are a recognized evidence-based strategy for building social and emotional skills among youth (U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2009), no known studies have evaluated the effects of camp programming for LGBTQ youth in the U.S. This pilot study evaluates a novel program (Brave Trails) for LGBTQ youth ages 12...

HIV is most prevalent among men who have sex with men (MSM), and although most MSM use condoms consistently during casual sex, some take risks. To better understand the psychology of those risky decisions, we examined neural correlates of playing a virtual sexual “hook up” game in an fMRI scanner in MSM who had, in the past 90 days, been sexually r...

This paper presents a tutorial for creating neural network models of personality processes. Such models enable researchers to create explicit models of both personality structure and personality dynamics, and to address issues of recent concern in personality, such as, "If personality is stable, then how is it possible that within subject variabili...

Based on the thoughtful and thought-provoking comments, we strengthened some of the main proposals of our framework to integrate research on personality structure, process, and development. Integration is an important, yet challenging goal for personality science, and we see considerable potential for it, theoretically and in empirical research. We...

Background: Research suggests that deficits in both executive functioning and trait impulsivity may play a role in risky sexual behavior. At the neural level, differences in regulation of the prefrontal cortex have been linked to impulsivity, measured neurocognitively and through self-report. The relationship between neurocognitive measures of exec...

In this target article, we argue that personality processes, personality structure, and personality development have to be understood and investigated in integrated ways in order to provide comprehensive responses to the key questions of personality psychology. The psychological processes and mechanisms that explain concrete behaviour in concrete s...

While applications of virtual agents in training and pedagogy have largely concentrated on positive valenced environments and interactions, human-human interactions certainly also involve a fair share of negativity that is worth exploring in virtual environments. Further, in natural human interaction as well as in virtual spaces, physical actions a...

Young (aged 18–30) Black and Latino men who have sex with men are at a higher risk of contracting HIV than their White counterparts. In order to better understand the unique nature of sexual risk-taking, we examined the extent to which ethnic group, ethnic identity, and sexual pride predicted condomless anal sex with casual partners among 161 young...

How can the same underlying psychological/neurobiological system result in both stable between-individual differences and high levels of within-individual variability in personality states over time and situations? We argue that both types of variability result from a psychological system based on structured, chronic motivations, where behavior at...

Young (aged 18–30) Black and Latino men who have sex with men are at a higher risk of contracting HIV than their White counterparts. In order to better understand the unique nature of sexual risk-taking, we examined the extent to which ethnic group, ethnic identity, and sexual pride predicted condomless anal sex with casual partners among 161 young...

Computational models of context that are compatible with human cognitive representations could be used to augment human decision-making and to enable improved interactive and cooperative capabilities of non-human agents. If unconstrained by human cognitive limitations and biases, such cognitively-inspired models of context could also scale to probl...

Background: Nationally, HIV incidence is rising rapidly among young (18–24 years old) men who have sex with men (YMSM). Knowledge of safer sex generally enhances self-efficacy for safer sex, an important predictor of safer-sex behaviors. Recent findings suggest that a strong negative social emotion (i.e., shame) increases YMSM’s sexual risk-taking....

Young men (18-24) who have sex with men (YMSM) are at high risk for contracting HIV. Most existing HIV prevention interventions focus on changing intervening cognitive and deliberative processes or outcomes (e.g.,beliefs, norms, self-efficacy, intentions) to change behavior. Many MSM, however, guided by contextual cues in emotionally arousing scena...

Sexual Strategies Theory (SST; Buss and Schmitt 1993) suggests that, typically, men more so than women are more likely to spend proportionately more of their mating effort in short-term mating, lower their standards in short-term compared to long-term mating, feel reproductively constrained, and seek, but certainly not avoid, sex if pregnancy is li...

Risky decisions (e.g., having unprotected sex; using methamphetamine) are often context dependent, automatic, and affectively based, but the contextual triggers that contribute to those risks may not be well understood by the individual him or herself. Virtual game simulations, designed to capture real-life situations, for example for PTSD sufferer...

The internet makes it possible to reach and provide HIV prevention interventions to at-risk audiences across the nation. There are, however, a myriad of challenges for randomized control trials (RCT) using on-line interventions. For example, in our ongoing trial targeting at-risk 18-24 year old MSM, variability and changes in technologies and in fl...

Multiple lines of research in cognitive science have brought insight on the role that internal (cognitive) representations of situational context play in framing decision making and in differentiating expert versus novice decision performance. However, no single framework has emerged to integrate these lines of research, particularly the views from...

We agree with the authors' key point that the standard trait approach to personality does not provide a method for understanding the causal structure of personality. Furthermore, their new technique for visualizing structure shows promise. However, although genetic analyses are important, we think that they are, by themselves, inadequate as a sourc...

Although young men who have sex with men (MSM) are at high risk for contracting HIV, few interventions address the affective/automatic factors (e.g., sexual arousal, shame/stigma) that may precipitate young MSM's risk-taking. A National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded DVD interactive video intervention that simulated a "virtual date" with guides/...

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in exploring virtual environments and computer aided interactive stories as tools in developing health promotion and disease prevention interventions. Applications have been developed to address a range of health related conditions, including stress [1], risky behaviors [2] and post-traumatic s...

Models seeking to predict human social behavior must contend with multiple sources of individual and group variability that underlie social behavior. One set of interrelated factors that strongly contribute to that variability – motivations, personality, and emotions – has been only minimally incorporated in previous computational models of social...

In an attempt to optimize the reach and generalizability of future HIVprevention efforts, we explored predictors of attrition in a randomized controlled trial (N=527) of a behavioral intervention that successfully reduced sexual risk-taking among 18 to 30 year old men who have sex with men (MSM). At baseline, participants reported their demographic...

We present a neural network model that aims to bridge the historical gap between dynamic and structural approaches to personality. The model integrates work on the structure of the trait lexicon, the neurobiology of personality, temperament, goal-based models of personality, and an evolutionary analysis of motives. It is organized in terms of two o...

The theory of interpersonalism was used to examine how relationship goals, beliefs about safer sex practices, and communication resources may predict risky sexual behaviors for a high-risk population. 306 low- to middle-income African American males and females (mean age 24.4 yrs) who defined themselves as sexually active were interviewed. Results...

The concept of situations has a long past, but the conceptualization of situations only has a short history. This article provides a survey of the concept of situations. Based upon Milgram’s [Human Relations 18 (1965), 57] vision toward ‘a compelling theory of situations,’ the authors examine the concept of situations in three specific literatures:...

Two core challenges must be overcome to enable the wider use of robotic and uninhabited vehicles by personnel with limited training. These are robust and understandable autonomy and simplified, intuitive, and learnable human control mechanisms. Our research is based on the premise that investigation into computational models of human cognition, per...

The Personality-enabled Architecture for Cognition (PAC) is a new modeling architecture designed to create Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs) with personality traits and cultural characteristics. PAC integrates theory and empirical data from personality psychology, social psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience to build a model of personalit...

Article placed next to this citation is: "Virtual Interactive Interventions for Reducing Risky Sex: Adaptations, Integrations, and Innovations" NOT "Increasing healthy behavior through the use of interactive video technology"

Miller, Appleby and Read (2005) produced three interactive HIV/methamphetamine prevention DVDs (African-American, Latino, and Caucasian versions). These were culturally tailored for each group using extensive pilot work, community advisory boards, and co-writers matched on ethnicity/race. The "how to" of production of interactive DVDs is focused up...

Although considerable work has been done on personality structure, little attention has been paid to the structure of situations. A lexical approach to situational taxonomies is presented, based on abstract psychological descriptions of situations in Chinese idioms. Chinese idioms were chosen because they oVer a rich set of single terms for labelin...

The PAC (personality, affect, and cognition) Architecture is a new modeling architecture designed to create Intelligent Virtual Agents with spe cific personality traits, emotions, and cultural characteristics. PAC integrates theory and data from personality and social psychology, cognitive sci ence, and neuroscience to build a model of personality,...

Wolitski et al., (2001) argue that one of the reasons for this new wave of HIV infection is that “outdated or overly simplistic safer sex messages for MSM (a common criticism in recent years) have led to a backlash against existing prevention efforts” (p. 883-884). It is crucial, therefore, that HIV prevention interventions keep pace with changes i...