Mariya P Shiyko

• Northeastern University

Background: The network approach has emerged as a useful framework for conceptualizing and investigating psychopathology, including eating disorders. Network connectivity, that is, the density of the connections among network nodes, has been somewhat neglected despite its theoretical relevance. As predicted by network theory, symptom connectivity...

Outcome-driven studies designed to evaluate potential effects of games and apps designed to promote healthy eating and exercising remain limited either targeting design or usability factors while omitting out health-based outcomes altogether, or tend to be too narrowly focuses on behavioral outcomes within a short periods of time thereby less likel...

Pervasive health games have a potential to impact health-related behaviors. And, similar to other types of interventions, engagement and adherence in health games is the keystone for examining their short- and long-term effects. Many health-based applications have turned to gamification principles specifically to. enhance their engagement. However,...

Vicarious trauma (VT) is the witnessing of, or learning about, another individual’s traumatic experience, evoking an empathic response. VT, and associated conditions such as vicarious traumatization and secondary traumatic stress, is widespread among first responders (i.e., firefighters, police, and Emergency medical technicians [EMTs]) and victim...

The Vicarious Trauma Organizational Readiness Guide (VT-ORG) is an assessment of an organization's readiness to address vicarious trauma (VT), which is exposure to the traumatic experiences of people served. This study reports on the psychometric properties of the VT-ORG. Employees of first responder agencies (e.g., law enforcement, fire, emergency...

The period of recovery following a lung-cancer surgery presents unique challenges and psychological demands. The study utilized ecological momentary assessments (EMA) to repeatedly sample mindfulness states in a sample of mindfulness-untrained individuals following hospital discharge. Intra- and inter- individual variability was assessed to examine...

Researchers are sometimes interested in predicting a distal or external outcome (such as smoking cessation at follow-up) from the trajectory of an intensively recorded longitudinal variable (such as urge to smoke). This can be done in a semiparametric way via scalar-on-function regression. However, the resulting fitted coefficient regression functi...

Posttraumatic growth (PTG) is a process of personal transformation following a traumatic life event in domains of life appreciation, interpersonal relationships, recognition of personal strengths, openness to taking a different life path, and spirituality. Mindfulness training has been tested as a facilitator of PTG; however, the extent of its impa...

Background Yoga is a popular complementary therapy for musculoskeletal pain. There are few studies however, that have examined the risks of recreational participation for causing musculoskeletal pain. Objectives To examine the relationship between musculoskeletal pain and recreational yoga participation. Methods This was a prospective cohort stud...

All adolescents in general, including ethnic and racial minorities, report high levels of cell phone use, making mobile technology a useful tool for assessment and intervention. Known health and education disparities based on minority status motivated us to conduct an in-depth investigation regarding feasibility of and adherence to the ecological m...

Background: Obesity and weight gain is a critical public health concern. Serious digital games are gaining popularity in the context of health interventions. They use persuasive and fun design features to engage users in health-related behaviors in a non-game context. As a young field, research about effectiveness and acceptability of such games f...

Farm to Family is a subsidized community supported agriculture model for low-income families. This study evaluated text message reminders on Head Start parents’ farm share pickup rates. Pickup rates were high for both groups within 2 days of delivery, with 96% (SD = 0.04) of parents in the text messaging group picking up their produce vs. 92% (SD =...

Objective: To evaluate the capacity of a mobile technology-based intervention to support healthy eating among ethnic minority female students. Participants: Forty-three African-American and Hispanic female students participated in a three-week intervention between January and May 2013. Methods: Participants photographed their meals using their...

Behavioral scientists increasingly collect intensive longitudinal data (ILD), in which phenomena are measured at high frequency and in real time. In many such studies, it is of interest to describe the pattern of change over time in important variables as well as the changing nature of the relationship between variables. Individuals' trajectories o...

To quantify the prevalence of biomechanical deficit patterns associated with ACL injury risk and their inter-connections in a large cohort of female athletes during an unanticipated cutting task. High school female athletes (N=721) performed an unanticipated cutting task in the biomechanics laboratory. Trunk and lower extremity 3D kinetics and kine...

Examine the association between perceived stress and hunger continuously over a week in free-living individuals. Forty five young adults (70% women, 30% overweight/obese) ages 18 to 24 years (Mean=20.7, SD=1.5), with BMI between 17.4 and 36.3 kg/m(2) (Mean=23.6, SD=4.0) provided between 513-577 concurrent ratings of perceived stress and hunger for...

Interventions aiming to help ethnically diverse emerging adults engage in healthy eating have had limited success. The aim of this study was to assess the feasibility of and adherence to an intervention capitalizing on mobile technology to improve healthy eating. Participants created an online photo food journal and received motivational text messa...

Family and dynamic systems theories have emerged from basic principles of general systems theory (von Bertalanffy General systems theory. George Braziller. New York, 1968). In this chapter, we illustrate how one of the modeling frameworks being used in ecology (nonlinear dynamic models) can be used to study family systems. First, we review some of...

An important goal of prevention research is to predict a range of outcomes (e.g., smoking, drinking, injury etc.). Statistically, prediction can be expressed as a regression model, with an outcome of interest regressed on predictors. The model set-up is such that both an outcome and predictors are measured on a similar frequency scale. If frequenci...

Games have become a prominent medium for empowering individuals to manage their health. However, the use of games for health behavior change remains largely understudied; little is known about the mechanisms through which games can effectively engage players or how such mechanisms can affect behavior change. This chapter presents SpaPlay-a game des...

Early maternal depression is a risk factor that may have adverse effects on adolescent social skills. Although evidence indicates links between early maternal depression and social outcomes during early childhood, whether an association extends to adolescence needs further examination. We tested the possible long-term association between early mate...

Objective: The goal of this article is to introduce to social and behavioral scientists the generalized time-varying effect model (TVEM), a semiparametric approach for investigating time-varying effects of a treatment. The method is best suited for data collected intensively over time (e.g., experience sampling or ecological momentary assessments)...

Games have increasingly become a prominent medium in the area of personal health and are known to be a uniquely positioned as a medium that can empower and engage individuals in managing their own health, short or long-term. However, an important area of challenge in this, still nascent, field of study, is examining the use of the medium and its ef...

Ecological momentary assessments (EMA) are increasingly used in studies of smoking behavior. Through EMA, examination of lagged relationships is particularly useful for establishing a temporal order of events and for identifying types and timing of risk factors. The time-varying effect model (TVEM) handles EMA data challenges and addresses unique q...

Objective: Cancer patients who smoke are advised to quit smoking to reduce treatment complications and future cancer risk. This study's main objective was to evaluate the efficacy of a novel, presurgical cessation intervention in newly diagnosed cancer patients scheduled for surgical hospitalization. Method: We conducted a parallel-arm, randomiz...

Intensive longitudinal data (ILD) have become increasingly common in the social and behavioral sciences; count variables, such as the number of daily smoked cigarettes, are frequently-used outcomes in many ILD studies. We demonstrate a generalized extension of growth mixture modeling (GMM) to Poisson-distributed ILD for identifying qualitatively di...

With technological advances, collection of intensive longitudinal data (ILD), such as ecological momentary assessments, becomes more widespread in prevention science. In ILD studies, researchers are often interested in the effects of time-varying covariates (TVCs) on a time-varying outcome to discover correlates and triggers of target behaviors (e....

Researchers have been making use of ecological momentary assessment (EMA) and other study designs that sample feelings and behaviors in real time and in naturalistic settings to study temporal dynamics and contextual factors of a wide variety of psychological, physiological, and behavioral processes. As EMA designs become more widespread, questions...

Understanding temporal change in human behavior and psychological processes is a central issue in the behavioral sciences. With technological advances, intensive longitudinal data (ILD) are increasingly generated by studies of human behavior that repeatedly administer assessments over time. ILD offer unique opportunities to describe temporal behavi...

Substantial evidence from cross-sectional and short time-span longitudinal studies exists about negative associations between early pubertal maturation on a number of psychological outcomes. The objective of the present study was to assess the association between early maturation and developmental trajectories of social skills and internalizing and...

Using separate generalized mixed-effects models, we assessed seizure recall and prediction, as well as contributing diagnostic variables, in 83 adult patients with epilepsy undergoing video/EEG monitoring. The model revealed that when participants predicted a seizure, probability equaled 0.320 (95% CI: 0.149-0.558), a significant (P<0.05) increase...

The purpose of this study was to compare the isolated effects of cover-copy-compare (CCC) with the combined effects of CCC and two types of performance feedback (i.e., digits correct and incorrect per minute) on sixth grade students’ mathematics fluency and accuracy. An alternating treatments design was employed to compare treatments across 16 week...