ABSTRACT
OBJECTIVE: Narrative identity is a promising approach for understanding the content of individuals' ethnic identities but can be limited by the time-intensive nature of human coding and the reliance on preestablished coding systems. BACKGROUND: The aim of our preregistered study is to elucidate the content of individuals' ethnicity-related experiences using a novel statistical approach. METHOD: We applied structural topic modeling (STM), a natural language processing tool, to narratives written by an ethnically diverse sample of 1149 young adults about a moment they felt aware of their ethnicity. RESULTS: We identified 14 topics within ethnicity narratives and analyzed how each topic related to both the participant's ethnicity and the human-coded themes of agency and communion. For example, the topic Gained perspective of structural inequality was associated with greater agency, whereas Peer dynamics was associated with greater communion. Ethnic/cultural celebration was associated with both. CONCLUSIONS: This study introduces STM as a useful tool for extracting topic content in narrative data and demonstrates how the multi-method assessment of ethnicity narratives provides greater insight into the content of ethnic experiences. These findings contribute to our understanding of contextualized aspects of personality, including the innovative ways we might examine them.
ABSTRACT
High-intensity exercise has recently emerged as a potent alternative to aerobic regimens, with ramifications for health and brain function. As part of this trend, single sessions of intense exercise have been proposed as powerful, noninvasive means for transiently enhancing cognition. However, findings in this field remain mixed, and a thorough synthesis of the evidence is lacking. Here, we synthesized the literature in a meta-analysis of the acute effect of high-intensity exercise on executive function. We included a total of 1,177 participants and 147 effect sizes across 28 studies and found a small facilitating effect (d = 0.24) of high-intensity exercise on executive function. However, this effect was significant only compared with rest (d = 0.34); it was not significant when high-intensity exercise was compared with low-to-moderate intensity exercise (d = 0.07). This suggests that intense and moderate exercise affect executive function in a comparable manner. We tested a number of moderators that together explained a significant proportion of the between-studies variance. Overall, our findings indicate that high-intensity cardiovascular exercise might be a viable alternative for eliciting acute cognitive gains. We discuss the potential of this line of research, identify a number of challenges and limitations it faces, and propose applications to individuals, society, and policies.
