Multifactorial model of willingness to get vaccinated in medical students during 3rd wave of COVID-19 pandemic

Vaccination of the population is the most essential and decisive measure in overcoming the COVID-19 pandemic that has involved the whole world. The vaccination of healthcare workers and medical students who can spread the infection among patients is crucial.Objective: to study the attitude towards vaccination among medical students.Patients and methods. From 18 to 22 June 2021, an anonymous Internet survey of 364 students of medical and technical universities was conducted. The sample included 135 medical students with no immunity to COVID-19 – who had not been ill or vaccinated. Three variants of behavioral strategies related to vaccination were compared: refusal to vaccinate, observation of the situation, consent to vaccination.Results and discussion. The key factors influencing the choice of a behavioral strategy for avoiding vaccination are the belief that COVID-19 infection is not dangerous for young people and that the vaccine is not studied enough. The willingness to get vaccinated is associated with denial of insufficient knowledge about the vaccine, belief in its safety and effectiveness, fear of infecting loved ones. The observer student group is characterized by an intermediate position on vaccination beliefs.Conclusion. To increase the willingness for vaccination, it is necessary, first of all, to spread the information about the vaccine, its safety (inability to cause severe complications, death) and effectiveness in preventing infection, reducing the level of anxiety concerning vaccination. It is also important to spread awareness about the danger of infecting loved ones and increase personal responsibility for the health of their loved ones.

Male coloration affects female gestation period and timing of fertilization in the guppy (Poecilia reticulata)

The trade-up hypothesis is a female behavioral strategy related to mating with multiple males. In this hypothesis, females can produce high-quality offspring while avoiding the risk of losing reproductive opportunities by non-selective mating with males at first mating and then re-mating with more attractive males. As an internal mechanism to realize this behavioral strategy, we predicted that females would immediately fertilize their eggs when they mated with attractive males, whereas females would delay fertilization when they mated with unattractive males to trade-up sires of offspring. The guppy (Poecilia reticulata) is an ovoviviparous fish with internal fertilization, and females show a clear mate preference based on the area of orange coloration on the bodies of males. In addition, it is known that females show a re-mating strategy consistent with the trade-up hypothesis. We tested whether the attractiveness of mated males affected the gestation period and the timing of fertilization. Females were paired with either colorful males or drab males, and the gestation periods (the number of days from mating to parturition) were compared. In addition, we dissected the abdomens of the females at intervals of several days after mating and observed whether the eggs were fertilized. The gestation period in females that were paired with attractive colorful males was significantly shorter than that in females that were paired with drab males. We found that females that mated with colorful males also had their eggs fertilized earlier than those that mated with drab males. Our findings show that differences in the timing of fertilization according to attractiveness of the mate increase the opportunity for cryptic female choice and trading up.

The Associative Learning Prediction Error Feedback Loop as Reversible Driving Belt of the Bioenergetics of Longevity

Leukocyte telomere shortening is a useful biomarker of biological and cellular age that occurs at an accelerated rate in anxiety disorders and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Intriguingly, inhibitory learning — the systematic exposure to noxious stimuli that serves as a basis for many treatments for anxiety, phobia, and PTSD —reduces relative telomeres attrition rates and increases protective telomerase activity in a manner predictive of treatment response. How does inhibitory learning, a behavioral strategy, modulate organismal chromosomal activity? Inhibitory learning may induce repeated mismatch between treatment expectations, intrasession states, and eventual outcome. Nevertheless, inhibitory learning can incentivize repetition of the behavior. Thus, this paper aims to conceptualize inhibitory learning as involving a ‘prediction error feedback loop’, i.e., a series of self-perpetuating prediction errors — mismatches between expectations and outcomes — that enhances neural inhibitory regulation to effectuate extinction. Inhibitory learning is necessarily predicated upon an opposing process – excitatory learning – that may be conceptualized as a prediction error feedback loop that operates in reverse to inhibitory learning and enhances neural excitability as arousal. Together, excitatory and inhibitory learning may be elements of an associative learning prediction error feedback loop responsible for modulating neural bioenergetic rates, leading to changes in downstream cellular signaling that could explain reduced or increased rates of leukocyte telomere shortening and telomerase activity from each behavioral strategy, respectively.

Behavioral strategy: mapping the trends, sources and intellectual evolution

PurposeThis paper presents a comprehensive review of academic research dedicated to the field of Behavioral Strategy. Based on a series of Bibliometric and network analyses, the paper identifies the prominent trend and growth patterns pertaining to the evolution of this important strategic management subfield; it documents which particular journals, articles and authors have most influenced its development, and it maps the intellectual structure and network of authors, publications and countries. Finally, the paper considers the substantive research themes emerging from the analyses reported, in terms of their implications for future work.Design/methodology/approachThe authors undertook a series of Bibliometric and network analyses of 217 relevant articles, published between 1975 and 2020, in journals listed in the Scopus database, using R-studio and VOSviewer. Articles incorporated in the study were selected based on relevant key terms searched from the title, abstract and list of keywords associated with each publication.FindingsThe results demonstrate that behavioral strategy has enjoyed robust and sustained growth, with widespread impact across many areas of the heterogeneous business and management field as a whole. Three distinct periods are identified: an infancy stage (prior to 1999); a steady growth stage (1999–2010); and a take-off stage (2011 onwards). The top three journals in terms of content coverage, based on the number of relevant articles published in relation to behavioral strategy, are Strategic Management Journal, Advances in Strategic Management (AiSM) and the Journal of Management, while the top three most influential journals, in terms of citations pertaining to Behavioral Strategy, based on an analysis of citations in the Scopus database, are Strategic Management Journal, Academy of Management Perspectives and Journal of Management Studies. Gerard P. Hodgkinson and Thomas C. Powell are the most prolific authors. The emerging themes based on intellectual structures have been identified as Behavioral Strategy, Behavioral Theory of Firm; Strategic Leadership and Dynamic Capabilities; and Strategic Cognition and Decision Making.Practical implicationsThe study contributes to knowledge advancement concerning Behavioral Strategy by opening new possibilities to discover important research areas.Originality/valueThe study is the first of its kind on Behavioral Strategy providing a comprehensive systematic literature review.

A Novel Behavioral Strategy for RoboCode Platform Based on Deep Q-Learning

This paper addresses a new machine learning-based behavioral strategy using the deep Q-learning algorithm for the RoboCode simulation platform. According to this strategy, a new model is proposed for the RoboCode platform, providing an environment for simulated robots that can be programmed to battle against other robots. Compared to Atari Games, RoboCode has a fairly wide set of actions and situations. Due to the challenges of training a CNN model for such a continuous action space problem, the inputs obtained from the simulation environment were generated dynamically, and the proposed model was trained by using these inputs. The trained model battled against the predefined rival robots of the environment (standard robots) by cumulatively benefiting from the experience of these robots. The comparison between the proposed model and standard robots of RoboCode Platform was statistically verified. Finally, the performance of the proposed model was compared with machine learning based-customized robots (community robots). Experimental results reveal that the proposed model is mostly superior to community robots. Therefore, the deep Q-learning-based model has proven to be successful in such a complex simulation environment. It should also be noted that this new model facilitates simulation performance in adaptive and partially cluttered environments.

Conditions for the emergence of circumnutations in plant roots

The plant root system shows remarkably complex behaviors driven by environmental cues and internal dynamics, whose interplay remains largely unknown. A notable example is circumnutation growth movements, which are growth oscillations from side to side of the root apex. Here we describe a model capable of replicating root growth behaviors, which we used to analyze the role of circumnuntations, revealing their emergence I) under gravitropic stress, as a combination of signal propagation and sensitivity to the signal carriers; II) as a result of the interplay between gravitropic and thigmotropic responses; and III) as a behavioral strategy to detect and react to resource gradients. The latter function requires the presence of a hypothetical internal oscillator whose parameters are regulated by the perception of environmental resources.

MODEL OF INTERACTION BETWEEN ADVERTISING, PR AND JOURNALISM

The article is an overview of the journalism – PR – advertising relationship at the terminological, empirical-analytical and practical levels. It traces the state of the discussion of these correlations in the post-soviet media such as Ukraine. The study describes that domesticating the importance of the appropriate partnership between the three communication technologies. The thesis is that journalism, advertising and PR create a mutual connection that takes place in an atmosphere of PR and advertising permissiveness and deepens with the development of digitalization, Social network development. The present research is based on a comprehensive approach. The inductive and deductive methods are adopted to discuss theoretical materials, and the interdisciplinary research method is used to detect PR-specific features as a philosophy of a new journalism project. The interpretive approach, usually employed to analyze media text as a complex synthetic structure, was also taken into consideration. The analytical method application identified the modern means of substantiating the ideological, esthetical and informative value of brand journalism and spin doctor. The innovative character of modern media as a behavioral strategy in the advertising and PR industry consists in the fact that it is a form of creative production and behavior rather than adapting a specific communication situation. The article examines the main directions of contemporary interactions between PR, advertising and journalism as a media content creation. In this context, it is asserted that advertising, journalism and PR activities can contribute to the creation of media content. At some point, good media content is achieved not only as a result of this competition but also from the correlation between PR, advertising and journalism.