Body weight is commonly used as an indicator of animal health and stability in laboratory research. Inadequate or inconsistent feeding in laboratory birds can lead to weight loss, reduced motivation, endangering welfare, and unreliable experiment results, making weight monitoring crucial in controlled research studies. This study examined how participation in different experimental conditions affected changes in pigeon body weight over time. Using daily weight records collected from 18 laboratory pigeons across two experimental groups from February 2024 through December 2024, pre- and post-experimental weights were recorded each session day to calculate daily weight change for each bird. A quantitative research design was used, with descriptive statistics and monthly trend analysis to compare weight change patterns between the two groups. Results showed that all pigeons gained weight during their daily sessions across both conditions, with Experiment 1 averaging 7.75 grams of daily weight gain and Experiment 2 averaging 9.07 grams. While both groups showed comparable gains in the first half of the year, Experiment 2 demonstrated a sharp decline in average daily weight gain beginning in August 2024, dropping close to zero by December 2024, while Experiment 1 maintained more stable gains throughout. These findings suggest that the type of experimental conditions significantly influences patterns of body weight change in pigeons over time. This research helps to better understand how controlled experimental settings affect body weight, with implications for improving experimental design and ensuring animal welfare in behavioral research.

Despite some Republican policies harming people of color (PoC) and minorities making up around 42.2% of the U.S. population (U.S. Census Bureau, 2020), a substantial amount of PoC, including 35% of Hispanic voters, 12% of Black voters, and 35% of Asian voters, voted for the Republican party (Pew Research Center, 2024). System Justification Theory, or when disadvantaged groups defend, bolster, or justify the status quo to cope with its inequities, may play a key role in this phenomenon (Jost, 2018). To system-justifying PoC, supporting policy that benefits White Americans may be a way to support the status quo, where White Americans are on top, at the expense of their own ingroup. In this study, we will use all the responses of self-identified PoC from the 2024 American National Election Survey (ANES), a high-quality, publicly available dataset. We hypothesize that system justification leads PoC to more strongly favor Whites than their ingroup as well as to support policies that harm their ingroup, such as supporting the police’s ability to use full force and rejecting DEI policies. Furthermore, we hypothesize that this relationship will be moderated by political identity, so that this relationship will be stronger among self-identified Republicans than Democrats. These findings will help us uncover more about the psychological processes regarding why Republican PoC support policies at the expense of harming their own ingroup and other PoC.

Curiosity is a fundamental driver of learning, and Intellectual-type Epistemic Curiosity reflects acquiring knowledge for the inherent joy of it. This study investigated whether a 12-minute curiosity-evoking conversation with a Large Language Model-based Chatbot can stimulate curiosity toward learning material. 97 undergraduate participants were randomly assigned to a curiosity-evoking conversation or a neutral, casual conversation with a calibrated Chatbot, between viewing two 5-minute videos on science topics. Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) measured participants’ neural signature associated with information acquisition as they watched the videos. Participants also completed pre- and post-session surveys that assess their openness to new information, and a calibrated GPT-4 model evaluated their conversational enjoyment using a customized epistemic emotion scale. Analysis revealed that participants who engaged in the curiosity-evoking conversation showed increased self-reported openness and significantly greater neural synchrony in the anterior-medial prefrontal cortex during the post-intervention video, comparing to in the casual conversation condition. Increase neural synchrony reflects more similar way of processing information. The conclusion was that LLM-based conversational intervention can increase curiosity, in line with increases in self-reported openness. The consistency of these effects across multiple intervention sessions remain to be tested.

Mental illness is an important public health issue that deeply affects quality of life. One evidence-based approach to address quality of life in this community is physical activity (PA). However, multifaceted psychological and social barriers can limit PA participation. One potential solution to promoting PA, particularly sport, may be active esports (i.e., PA where an individual physically moves as part of virtual competition). Esports are the world’s fastest growing sport and have been promoted by traditional gatekeepers to the sporting world, including the International Olympic Committee. The purpose of this scoping review is to (1) identify existing research on active esports for individuals experiencing mental illness; and (2) determine key knowledge gaps. The scoping review will seek to identify and examine English-language research indexed in academic databases (PubMed, MEDLINE, EMBASE, and PsychINFO). Search terms have been identified based on two domains: esport and mental illness. The study will exclude literature reviews, systematic reviews, meta-analyses, though a hand-search of their references lists will be conducted to identify relevant studies that may have been missed in the original database search. As technology continues to evolve, this research seeks to prioritize understanding of modern non-traditional methods of PA participation to determine how they can be implemented to support the health and well-being of people experiencing mental illness.