Robert Hubal

Getting Meaningful Informed Consent from Older Adults: A Structured Literature Review of Empirical Research

OBJECTIVES: To perform a structured literature review of the published empirical research on informed consent with older adults in order to make recommendations to improve the informed consent process and to highlight areas needing further examination.

Mediators of the Stress-Substance-Use Relationship in Urban Male Adolescents

Exposure to chronic or severe acute stressors throughout the lifespan has been linked with numerous negative behavioral, emotional, cognitive, and physical consequences. Adolescence is considered to be a particularly vulnerable period given that the brain is experiencing dramatic developmental change during this time. The present study examined a sample of adolescents (N=125) considered to be at high risk for stress exposures and drug use by virtue of their environment and low income levels to identify possible neurocognitive (i.e., impulsivity, delay of gratification, emotional perception, and risky decision-making) and social competency mechanisms that may mediate this relationship. Using Mplus, a mediational model was tested using full information maximum likelihood estimates. Risky decision-making and poor social competency skills were related to previous stressful experiences; however, only social competencies mediated the effect of stressors on reports of past year marijuana, alcohol, and polydrug use. As such, stress appears to exert its negative impact through alterations in abilities to generate and execute prosocial decisions and behaviors. Interventions that directly address the effects of stress on social competencies may be especially important for children who have experienced adversity including those exposed to parental divorce, parental psychopathology, neglect or abuse, parental death, and poverty.

Lessons learned in modeling schizophrenic and depressed responsive virtual humans for training

This paper describes lessons learned in developing the linguistic, cognitive, emotional, and gestural models underlying virtual human behavior in a training application designed to train civilian police officers how to recognize gestures and verbal cues indicating different forms of mental illness and how to verbally interact with the mentally ill. Schizophrenia, paranoia, and depression were all modeled for the application. For linguistics, the application has quite complex language grammars that captured a range of syntactic structures and semantic categories. For cognition, there is a great deal of augmentation to a plan-based transition network needed to model the virtual humans knowledge. For emotions and gestures, virtual human behavior is based on expert-validated mapping tables specific to each mental illness. The paper presents five areas demanding continued research to improve virtual human behavior for use in training applications

Approaches to the primary prevention of posttraumatic stress disorder in the military: a review of the stress control literature

Numerous studies are underway, using data collected from clinical studies and data collected from surveys of combat troops, to determine the most efficacious treatment options for those diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In contrast, little is known about the effectiveness of predeployment training in preventing or mitigating the impact of combat-related stressors on the development of PTSD. We conducted a comprehensive review of literature pertaining to primary prevention efforts to stem the advent of PTSD and other combat and operational stress injuries in military populations using databases from the peer-reviewed literature as well as online searches and colleague referrals. Results show that, as with treatment for PTSD, the most promising preventive approaches appear to utilize exposure strategies, especially those in conjunction with education and stress reduction skills training.

An evaluation of virtual human technology in informational kiosks

In this paper, we look at the results of using spoken language interactive virtual characters in information kiosks. Users interact with synthetic spokespeople using spoken natural language dialogue. The virtual characters respond with spoken language, body and facial gesture, and graphical images on the screen. We present findings from studies of three different information kiosk applications. As we developed successive kiosks, we applied lessons learned from previous kiosks to improve system performance. For each setting, we briefly describe the application, the participants, and the results, with specific focus on how we increased user participation and improved informational throughput. We tie the results together in a lessons learned section.

Synthetic Characters in Health-related Applications

This chapter introduces synthetic character technologies, surveys the broad range of health-related applications using synthetic characters, and addresses in detail the development and usage of health-related synthetic character applications.

PHIT for duty, a mobile approach for psychological health intervention.

The goal of this effort is to support prevention of psychological health problems through innovation in mobile personal health assessment and self-help intervention (SHI). For the U.S. military, we are developing and evaluating a field-deployable personalized application, PHIT for DutyTM, to help build resilience in healthy troops and support prevention in high-risk personnel. PHIT for Duty is delivered using any smartphone or tablet with optional nonintrusive physiological and behavioral sensors for health status monitoring. The application integrates a suite of health assessments with an intelligent advisor that recommends, tailors, and presents self-help advisories. PHIT for Duty is intended for secondary prevention of psychological health problems in persons who have been exposed to psychological trauma and may be showing some symptoms of distress, but have not been diagnosed with any psychological disease or disorder.

Multi-modal interaction for UAS control

Unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) have seen a dramatic increase in military operations over the last two decades. The increased demand for their capabilities on the battlefield has resulted in quick fielding with user interfaces that are designed more for engineers in mind than for UAS operators. UAS interfaces tend to support tele-operation with a joystick or complex, menu-driven interfaces that have a steep learning curve. These approaches to control require constant attention to manage a single UAS and require increased heads-down time in an interface to search for and click on the right menus to invoke commands. The time and attention required by these interfaces makes it difficult to increase a single operator’s span of control to encompass multiple UAS or the control of sensor systems. In this paper, we explore an alternative interface to the standard menu-based control interfaces. Our approach in this work was to first study how operators might want to task a UAS if they were not constrained by a typical menu interface. Based on this study, we developed a prototype multi-modal dialogue interface for more intuitive control of multiple unmanned aircraft and their sensor systems using speech and map-based gesture/sketch. The system we developed is a two-way interface that allows a user to draw on a map while speaking commands to the system, and which provides feedback to the user to ensure the user knows what the system is doing. When the system does not understand the user for some reason – for example, because speech recognition failed or because the user did not provide enough information – the system engages with the user in a dialogue to gather the information needed to perform the command. With the help of UAS operators, we conducted a user study to compare the performance of our prototype system against a representative menu-based control interface in terms of usability, time on task, and mission effectiveness. This paper describes a study to gather data about how people might use a natural interface, the system itself, and the results of the user study. Keywords: UAS control, natural interfaces, multi-modal interaction.

Simulating a vigilance task: Extensible technology for baggage security assessment and training

A number of homeland security occupations require vigilance to potentially subtle events in the environment, with high stakes for missing infrequent but consequential items. Sustained vigilance can be required for long periods of time or when sleep-deprived or physically inactive, compounding the difficulty of this task. Research on sustained vigilance has largely focused on tasks such as driving, air traffic control, medical screening, and military specialties, but the findings closely apply also to other homeland security-related occupations. A research area that has received relatively little attention, but is of critical importance to homeland security, involves the role of individual differences in vigilance. Prior research suggests that certain individuals are better than others at searching for rarely present targets over long time periods, yet what is driving this effect remains unclear. Further, it is not known whether or not sustained vigilance can be improved through training. This research team is studying two research questions: Are there individual differences in the inherent ability to sustain vigilance? and What are the most effective approaches for training and improving sustained vigilance for rare items or events?. The intent is to employ tasks (primarily visual identification and gross motor tests) that readily translate to the relevant homeland security occupations requiring sustained vigilance.

Emotions in Speech: Juristic Implications

This chapter focuses on the detection of emotion in speech and the impact that using technology to automate emotion detection would have within the legal system. The current states of the art for studies of perception and acoustics are described, and a number of implications for legal contexts are provided. We discuss, inter alia, assessment of emotion in others, witness credibility, forensic investigation, and training of law enforcement officers.