Rick H Hoyle

Duke University | DU

Concerns regarding the potential negative impacts of digital technology use on youth mental health and well-being are high. However, most studies have several methodological limitations: relying on cross-sectional designs and retrospective reports, assessing technology use as an omnibus construct, and focusing on between- instead of within-person c...

Adolescents may be exposed to online content depicting substance use, raising the question of how exposure to others’ online substance use content relates to one’s own use. Additionally, it is of interest to explore how parental restrictive (i.e., media content restriction) and active mediation (i.e., media content discussion) may relate to links b...

This study examined how living in a gentrifying neighborhood may impact adolescents’ reading and math achievement via educational aspirations and psychological distress and asked whether these pathways differ according to socioeconomic status and race. A framework combining theories of adolescent development and neighborhood effects was empirically...

Objective: Adolescence is characterized by psychosocial and cognitive changes that can alter the perceived risk of negative effects of alcohol, opportunities to drink, and self-control. Few studies have investigated whether these factors change in their contribution to adolescent drinking over time. This study examined associations between perceive...

Activity space research explores the behavioral impact of the spaces people move through in daily life. This research has focused on urban settings, devoting little attention to non-urban settings. We examined the validity of the activity space method, comparing feasibility and data quality in urban and non-urban contexts. Overall, we found that th...

Background: The large-scale identification of people at risk of transitioning from relatively lower-risk to higher-risk alcohol use (e.g., problem drinking) remains a public health challenge despite advances in the identification of risk and protective factors. Objective: This paper used machine learning to identify Reddit (social media platform) p...

The volume Divided: Open-Mindedness and Dogmatism in a Polarized World provides a current scientific understanding of open-mindedness and dogmatism, illuminates the nature and causes of polarization, and provides clues regarding how one might attempt to reduce pernicious forms of polarization. To do so, this volume brings together a diverse group o...

Encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and long COVID share some clinical and social characteristics. We predicted that this would lead to an increased interaction between pre-pandemic members of an ME/CFS online support community and a long COVID community. We performed a mixed-methods retrospective observational study of the Reddit a...

The volume Divided: Open-Mindedness and Dogmatism in a Polarized World provides a current scientific understanding of open-mindedness and dogmatism, illuminates the nature and causes of polarization, and provides clues regarding how one might attempt to reduce pernicious forms of polarization. To do so, this volume brings together a diverse group o...

Encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and long COVID share some clinical and social characteristics. We predicted that this would lead to an increased interaction between pre-pandemic members of a ME/CFS online support community and a long COVID community. We performed a mixed-methods retrospective observational study of the Reddit ac...

This study examines diphenhydramine (DPH) use by analyzing data from the r/DPH subreddit. The objective is to enhance understanding of DPH use patterns, provide insights for prevention and intervention, and raise awareness among clinicians. Analysis of the subreddit revealed 19,004 authors contributing 233,028 posts between 2014 and 2022, with user...

Narrative identity refers to a person's internalized and evolving life story. It is a rapidly growing research field, motivated by studies showing a unique association with well-being. Here we show that this association disappears when controlling for the emotional valence of the stories told and individuals' general experience of autobiographical...

Importance: Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a leading cause of global distress and disability. Earlier studies have indicated that antidepressant therapy confers a modest reduction in depressive symptoms on average, but the distribution of this reduction requires more research. Objective: To estimate the distribution of antidepressant respons...

We examined the association between intellectual humility (IH)-a willingness to consider credible new information and alternative views and revise one's own views if warranted-and adherence to experts' health behavior recommendations in the U.S. during the COVID-19 pandemic. Study 1 (N = 541) results showed that people higher in IH are more likely...

We examined the association between sociodemographic factors, views of vaccines as being an individual choice to protect oneself versus a collective choice to protect others, general vaccine hesitancy, and willingness to receive a COVID‐19 vaccine. In a sample of adults ( N = 619; 33% non‐white), we showed that demographic factors explain significa...

Public health officials and clinicians routinely advise social media users to avoid nighttime social media use due to the perception that this delays the onset of sleep and predisposes to the health risks of insufficient sleep. With some exceptions, the evidence behind this advice mostly derives from surveys identifying an association between self-...

We examined the relations between disruptions experienced by young adults in the US during the COVID‐19 pandemic and their psychological adjustment. An online sample ( N = 180, M age = 24.8) reported on the impact of the pandemic on their living arrangements, work status, and finances; their psychological adjustment overall and with specific refere...

This study examined differences in both average and variability in daily adolescent food insecurity, by adolescents' levels of economic disadvantage and race/ethnicity. We used data from a 14-day ecological momentary assessment of 395 adolescents enrolled in public schools in North Carolina. Each evening, adolescents were asked questions about that...

The emergence of digital technologies has changed the dynamic of parent-adolescent relationships. Parents can now use digital technologies to monitor their adolescent's physical location. Yet, to date, no known research has examined the extent to which digital location tracking occurs in parent-adolescent dyads, and how tracking links to adolescent...

Partialing is a statistical approach researchers use with the goal of removing extraneous variance from a variable before examining its association with other variables. Controlling for confounds through analysis of covariance or multiple regression analysis and residualizing variables for use in subsequent analyses are common approaches to partial...

Background: Individuals with later bedtimes have an increased risk of difficulties with mood and substances. To investigate the causes and consequences of late bedtimes and other sleep patterns, researchers are exploring social media as a data source. Pioneering studies inferred sleep patterns directly from social media data. While innovative, the...

Smartphones are a ubiquitous part of many people's lives, but little is known about their impact on everyday thought processes. Here we introduce the spontaneous smartphone checking scale (SSCS)—which measures the tendency to direct attention toward one's smartphone, unpreceded by external prompts (e.g., notifications, or alerts) and with no specif...

The COVID-19 pandemic provides a naturalistic test of whether pandemic-related disruptions weaken habits and undermine behavior stability. We hypothesized that better capacity to effortfully guide behavior (self-regulation) would buffer this effect and be associated with behavior stability and development of new habits to accomplish daily behaviors...

There is fear that adolescents have limited control over their digital technology use. The current research examines longitudinal (Study 1) and daily (Study 2) associations between U.S. adolescents’ self-control and digital technological impairment and use. Using a large sample (N = 2,104; Wave 1: Mage = 12.36, 52% female, 57% economically disadvan...

In a community sample of emerging adults ( N = 232), this study (a) assessed participants’ exposure to and postings about alcohol, cigarettes, e-cigarettes, and marijuana across social media platforms, (b) investigated how exposure to and posting about text versus visual substance-related content differentially relate to one’s own use, and (c) test...

Partialing is a statistical approach researchers use with the goal of removing extraneous variance from a variable before examining its association with other variables. Controlling for confounds through analysis of covariance or multiple regression analysis and residualizing variables for use in subsequent analyses are common approaches to partial...

This study examined the association between pubertal timing, daily affect, conduct problems, and the exposure to hassles across family, peer, and school contexts. Adolescents ( M age = 12.27; 49.7% female; 62.6% White) completed ecological momentary assessments across 14 consecutive days ( N = 388). Earlier maturing girls reported lower daily avera...

Cognitive control is guided by learning, as people adjust control to meet changing task demands. The two best-studied instances of “control-learning” are the enhancement of attentional task focus in response to increased frequencies of incongruent distracter stimuli, reflected in the list-wide proportion congruent (LWPC) effect, and the enhancement...

Public health officials and clinicians routinely advise social media users to avoid nighttime social media use due to the perception that this delays the onset of sleep and predisposes to the health risks of insufficient sleep. The evidence behind this advice mostly derives from surveys identifying an association between self-reported social media...

Goal disengagement has been well studied in contexts where giving up is generally adaptive, and understudied in more ordinary situations. 1,201 American adults described up to five New Year’s resolutions and reported on their goal pursuit after six months and one year. Explicit goal disengagement was very rare and occurred in less than 7% of goals...

Social media usage is both a potential influencer of human sleep and a research tool for understanding human sleep more generally. For both reasons, there is a growing interest in understanding the sleep patterns of social media users. These studies require both social media usage data and sleep data. There is ample social media data that are publi...

Changes in depressive symptoms in response to the experience of a first high-impact stressor (i.e., a stressor rated as both very upsetting and very disruptive) in college were examined as an indicator of student resilience. Participants were 953 college undergraduates from four institutions participating in a larger longitudinal study of student r...

Grounded in a developmental perspective, this chapter focuses, in particular, on food insecurity among adolescents. Using survey data from parents and adolescents in the same family (N = 581 families with both parent and adolescent reports), results show that though parents and adolescents largely agree about their families’ food insecurity, parent...

Purpose Although studies have found associations between greater digital technology use and poorer sleep health among adolescents, these studies typically rely on self-reported sleep and cross-sectional designs. This study applied an ecological momentary assessment design to examine how adolescents’ daily digital technology use relates to self-repo...

General Audience Summary Autobiographical memory is the kind of memory that allows us to remember events in our personal past. People often claim their memory for their past is better or worse than the one of others. Some seem to remember their past vividly and as coherent stories, while for others, memories of their personal past may seem vague an...

Many studies have documented the role of self-regulation in predicting academic outcomes. However, fewer have comprehensively measured self-regulation or considered it simultaneously with contextual variables to test formally the often-advanced "risk-buffering" hypothesis, wherein self-regulatory skill protects against contextual risk factors. In a...

The Autobiographical Recollection Test (ART; Berntsen et al., 2019) measures individual differences in autobiographical memory. We here examined whether the ART correlates with characteristics of people’s specific autobiographical memories. Participants (Ns ≥ 475) completed the ART and rated recollective qualities of autobiographical memories cued...

We examine the fundamental role of visualizations and offer strategies and recommendations on how to use graphics to facilitate the use of SEM to fit models to data. We begin by reviewing aspects of model specification using the popular LISREL matrix notation highlighting the isomorphism between the algebraic representation of models and the path d...

Background The infertility experience is often surrounded by frustration and discouragement associated with the thwarted goal to have a child. Though research has identified commonly used strategies to cope with infertility, this study is the first to examine how different goal attributes and processes associated with the experience of infertility...

According to prior work, persistent goal pursuit is a continuous process where persisting is a matter of resisting the urge to give up. In everyday goals, however, persistence is often episodic, and its causes are more complex. People pause and resume pursuit many times. Whether people persist reflects more than will power and motivation, it also r...

The aim of this study was to examine the association between traits associated with adaptive self-management and psychological distress in women experiencing infertility. A sample of 326 women reported on their infertility experience; their tendencies with respect to self-compassion, emotion regulation, and positivity; and their current psychologic...

The performance and well-being of university students is influenced by many factors, including self-control and affect regulation, but little is known about how these factors relate. We therefore analyzed data from a multi-site research project that assessed trait self-control, affect regulation, and anxiety in a longitudinal cohort design ('N' = 1...

Objective: To examine the cross-sectional associations between young adolescents' access, use, and perceived impairments related to digital technologies and their academic, psychological, and physical well-being. Study design: There were 2104 adolescents (ages 10-15 years), representative of the North Carolina Public School population, who compl...

When predicting success, how important are personal attributes other than cognitive ability? To address this question, we capitalized on a full decade of prospective, longitudinal data from n = 11,258 cadets entering training at the US Military Academy at West Point. Prior to training, cognitive ability was negatively correlated with both physical...

Commercially available wearable devices are marketed as a means of objectively capturing daily sleep easily and inexpensively outside of the laboratory. Two ecological momentary assessment studies—with 120 older adolescents (aged 18–19) and 395 younger adolescents (aged 10–16)—captured nightly self‐reported and wearable (Jawbone) recorded sleep dur...

General Audience Summary Autobiographical memory is the kind of memory that allows us to remember and consciously relive memories of our past. It is a complex form of memory that consists of several cognitive and emotional components that must be combined in the construction of individual memories and which can be influenced by other factors such a...

We introduce the Autobiographical Recollection Test (ART) to examine individual differences in how well people think they remember personal events. The ART comprises seven theoretically motivated and empirically supported interrelated aspects of recollecting autobiographical memories: reliving, vividness, visual imagery, scene, narrative coherence,...

Adolescents in the United States live amid high levels of concentrated poverty and increasing income inequality. Poverty is robustly linked to adolescents' mental health problems; however, less is known about how perceptions of their social status and exposure to local area income inequality relate to mental health. Participants consisted of a popu...

Extending the growing literature on the role of grit in different life domains, this research explores the relationship between grit and involvement in entrepreneurship. The research highlights the role of personal income and satisfaction with one’s current financial situation as moderators of the relationship between grit and entrepreneurial behav...

The authors review the empirical literature showing associations between personality traits and trait self-control. They introduce a new measure of trait self-control, the Capacity for Self-Control Scale, which provides a fuller account of the construct than other measures and, in so doing, reveals additional associations with personality.

The Centrality of Event Scale (CES) was introduced to examine the extent to which a traumatic or stressful event is perceived as central to an individual's identity and life story, and how this relates to Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) symptoms. In addition, the CES has been examined in relation to a range of other conditions and dispositions...

This paper describes the development and initial validation of a Spanish version of the Short Grit (Grit-S) Scale. The Grit-S Scale was adapted and translated into Spanish using the Translation, Review, Adjudication, Pre-testing, and Documentation model and responses to a preliminary set of items from a large sample of university students (N = 1,12...

Objective: To test whether exposure to violence is associated with same-day increases in obesogenic behaviors among young adolescents, including unhealthy food and beverage consumption, poor quality sleep, and lack of physical activity. Methods: Young at-risk adolescents between 12 and 15 years of age were recruited via telephone screening from...

Four studies examined intellectual humility—the degree to which people recognize that their beliefs might be wrong. Using a new Intellectual Humility (IH) Scale, Study 1 showed that intellectual humility was associated with variables related to openness, curiosity, tolerance of ambiguity, and low dogmatism. Study 2 revealed that participants high i...

A large array of constructs, processes, and behaviours are relevant to self regulation. The processes and behaviours that are relevant for the broad goal of acquiring skills and knowledge can be arrayed in a three-phase process. Widely used measure of self-control that emphasises inhibition of impulses predicts better academic performance, less bin...

This study examined the relationship between recognition memory and intellectual humility, the degree to which people recognize that their personal beliefs are fallible. Participants completed the General Intellectual Humility Scale, an incidental old/new recognition task, and a task that assessed the tendency to over-claim one's knowledge. Signal...

Although significant progress has been made in the conceptualization and measurement of intellectual humility, little is known about intellectual humility with respect to specific opinions, beliefs, and positions. We offer a conceptualization of specific intellectual humility and present three studies that examine its key tenets. Study 1 developed...

Mediation analysis is a popular framework for identifying underlying mechanisms in social psychology. In the context of simple mediation, we review and discuss the implications of three facets of mediation analysis: (a) conceptualization of the relations between the variables, (b) statistical approaches, and (c) relevant elements of design. We also...

Complex research questions often cannot be addressed adequately with a single data set. One sensible alternative to the high cost and effort associated with the creation of large new data sets is to combine existing data sets containing variables related to the constructs of interest. The goal of the present research was to develop a flexible, broa...

We discuss the articles of this special issue with reference to an important yet previously only implicit dimension of study quality: alignment across the theoretical and methodological decisions that collectively define an approach to self-regulated learning. Integrating and extending work by leaders in the field, we propose a framework for evalua...

Due to changes in cannabis policies, concerns about cannabis use (CU) in adolescents have increased. The population of nonwhite groups is growing quickly in the United States. We examined perceived CU norms and their association with CU and CU disorder (CUD) for White, Black, Hispanic, Native-American, Asian-American, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Island...

The goal of this manuscript is to describe strategies for maximizing the yield of data from small samples in prevention research. We begin by discussing what "small" means as a description of sample size in prevention research. We then present a series of practical strategies for getting the most out of data when sample size is small and constraine...

Objective: The clinical presentation of anorexia nervosa (AN) is characterized by preoccupation with body experience, intrusive concerns regarding shape, and pathological fears of weight gain. These symptoms are suggestive of unrelenting self-focused attention. No research to date has characterized self-focused attention (SFA) in AN nor examined n...

Identifying and understanding the goal pursuit strategies that distinguish effective self-regulators from less-effective self-regulators are important for elucidating how individuals achieve their goals. We suggest that the timing of plans for difficult goal pursuits is one differentiation. A pilot study shows that effective self-regulators tend to...

There are concerns over nonmedical use of prescription stimulants among youths, but little is known about the extent of use among young Asian-Americans, Native Hawaiians/Pacific Islanders (NHs/PIs), and mixed-race individuals-the fastest growing segments of the U.S. population. We examined prevalences and correlates of nonmedical stimulant use (NMS...

Background Little is known about weekly variability in medication nonadherence both between and within persons. Purpose To characterize medication nonadherence across repeated, closely spaced occasions. Methods This prospective cohort study comprised four unannounced telephone assessment occasions, each separated by approximately 2 weeks. On each...

In the 12 years since scholars first investigated the link between self-control and forgiveness (Finkel & Campbell, 2001), the literature investigating this relation has grown rapidly. The present article reports a meta-analytic review of this link across 40 independent samples and 5,105 independent observations. In addition, it investigates an arr...

When the goal of prevention research is to capture in statistical models some measure of the dynamic complexity in structures and processes implicated in problem behavior and its prevention, approaches such as multilevel modeling (MLM) and structural equation modeling (SEM) are indicated. Yet the assumptions that must be satisfied if these approach...

Impulsiveness is a personality trait that reflects an urge to act spontaneously, without thinking or planning ahead for the consequences of your actions. High impulsiveness is characteristic of a variety of problematic behaviors including attention deficit disorder, hyperactivity, excessive gambling, risk-taking, drug use, and alcoholism. Researche...

Intellectual humility, a recognition of the fallibility of one's own views and an openness to changing those views when warranted, is a construct with roots in philosophy that is only now beginning to receive attention from psychological scientists. We focus on intellectual humility in the domain of religious belief and conduct an initial test of t...

Reactions to stressful negative events have long been studied using approaches based on either the narrative interpretation of the event or the traits of the individual. Here, we integrate these 2 approaches by using individual-differences measures of both the narrative interpretation of the stressful event as central to one's life and the personal...

Psychological research typically involves the analysis of data (e.g., questionnaire responses, records of behavior) using statistical methods. The description of how those methods are used and the results they produce is a key component of scholarly publications. Despite their importance, these descriptions are not always complete and clear. In ord...

We thank Dr. Molloy for his commentary, which raises two important issues to consider when addressing medication nonadherence. First, he suggests that our measure should classify reasons for nonadherence as intentional or unintentional because this distinction might indicate whether behavior is influenced more by reflective or automatic processes....

In the study reported here, we examined posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms in 746 Danish soldiers measured on five occasions before, during, and after deployment to Afghanistan. Using latent class growth analysis, we identified six trajectories of change in PTSD symptoms. Two resilient trajectories had low levels across all five times, a...

Factor analysis is a family of statistical strategies used to model unmeasured sources of variability in a set of scores. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), otherwise referred to as restricted factor analysis, structural factor analysis, or the measurement model, typically is used in a deductive mode to test hypotheses regarding unmeasured sources...

Background: Self-report measures of medication nonadherence confound the extent of and reasons for medication nonadherence. Each construct is assessed with a different type of psychometric model, which dictates how to establish reliability and validity. Objectives: To evaluate the psychometric properties of a self-report measure of medication no...

We present and test a theory in which self-control is distinguished from broader acts of self-regulation when it is both effortful and conscious. In two studies, we examined whether acts of behavioral management that do not require effort are exempt from resource depletion. In Study 1, we found that a self-regulation task only reduced subsequent se...