Dakota Cintron

Cornell University | CU · Department of Psychology

Introduction Leadership support has been identified as a key facilitator to successful implementation of school-based initiatives. School leadership contributions to student academic success and school reform have been documented, but less work has focused on the effects of leadership on school mental health initiatives such as social, emotional, a...

Affective experiences are key components of subjective well-being with important implications for health. However, little is known about heterogeneous longitudinal affect trajectories and their links to survival. This study identified joint trajectory subgroups based on 18-year changes in positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA) and examined t...

Objectives Loneliness and social isolation are major public health concerns among older adults in Japan. Generativity, the concern for and commitment to future generations, may buffer older adults from loneliness. This study examined the cross-sectional and longitudinal associations between generativity and social asymmetry (the discrepancy between...

Objective: To demonstrate the use of the alignment method to evaluate whether surveys function similarly (i.e., have evidence of measurement invariance) across culturally diverse intersectional groups. Intersectionality theory recognizes the interconnected nature of social categories such as race, gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. Data...

Introduction: Education is correlated with positive health outcomes, but associations are sometimes weaker among African Americans. The extent to which exposure to discrimination and depressive symptoms attenuates the education-cognition link has not been investigated. Methods: Study of Healthy Aging in African Americans (STAR) participants (n =...

Substantial heterogeneity in effects of social policies on health across subgroups may be common, but has not been systematically characterized. Using a sample of 55 contemporary studies on health effects of social policies, we recorded how often heterogeneous treatment effects (HTEs) were assessed, for what subgroups (e.g., male, female), and the...

Twenty years after Snyder’s seminar article on hope theory, research on hope has moved in many directions and has spanned multiple spheres of personal life and social life, including psychological adjustment, physical health, lifespan development, and interpersonal relationships. Given its importance for well-being, it is somewhat surprising that a...

In this chapter, we provide a basic overview of the notion and properties of Bayesian networks. We then discuss belief propagation, message-passing, and the recently developed R package, BayesNetBP, that facilitates belief propagation on Bayesian networks. We provide a motivating example using BayesNetBP for probabilistic reasoning in the form of a...

We explored factors associated with school approaches to identify and support student social, emotional, and behavioral needs. Hypothesized mediators of the relationship between district demographic characteristics and district academic and behavioral outcomes included district administrator perceptions of problems; use of a universal behavioral su...

Mixture models can be used for explanation or individual prediction and classification. In practice, researchers are often tempted to make the class membership manifest by classifying cases according to their class of maximum posterior probability and using the "observed" class membership directly or as a variable in follow-up analyses to predict d...

Purpose . Social policies are important determinants of population health but may have varying effects on subgroups of people. Evaluating heterogeneous treatment effects (HTEs) of social policies is critical to determine how social policies will affect health inequities. Methods for evaluating HTEs are not standardized. Little is known about how of...

Background Identifying mediators between education and later‐life cognition is an important step in developing prevention measures. We evaluate everyday and major lifetime discrimination as potential mediators of the impact of education on later‐life cognition. To address bias that might occur due to either time‐varying confounding or unreliable me...

Despite the rising popularity of big data, there is speculation that evaluators have been slow adopters of these new statistical approaches. Several possible reasons have been offered for why this is the case: ethical concerns, institutional capacity, and evaluator capacity and values. In this method note, we address one of these barriers and aim t...

A freely available workbook for implementing LDA topic modeling is provided as Supplemental Material Online.

The extent to which a test's time limit alters a test taker's performance is known as speededness. The manifestation of speededness, or speeded behavior on a test, can be in the form of random guessing, leaving a substantial proportion of test items unanswered, or rushed test‐taking behavior in general. Speeded responses do not depend solely on a t...

Black males are often underrepresented in postsecondary education settings and frequently encounter many barriers in getting to college. Our aim in this qualitative investigation was to understand the precollege and college experiences of Black males who successfully enrolled in a postsecondary institution. Through a focus group interview, seven Bl...

Using a nationally representative sample of U.S. public school districts, we explored the current landscape of social, emotional, and behavioral (SEB) approaches and their impact on behavioral outcomes. Data suggest SEB screening is the exception rather than the rule, with most districts reporting that students are referred to an internal support t...

Schools can play a significant role in promoting timely access to mental health services by utilizing proactive approaches to identifying and supporting students’ social, emotional, and behavioral needs. However, recent data suggest that few schools in the USA are taking such proactive approaches. Given that implementation of school-based programs...

In this article, the authors discuss how to prepare African American males for college through group counseling. The authors created, Achieving Excellence: A College Readiness Curriculum for African Males, a five-session, 50 minute group curriculum for sophomores to facilitate the process of college planning. The Eight Components of College and Car...

Previous research has suggested that multiple factors beyond acceptability alone (e.g., feasibility, external supports) may interact to determine whether consumers will use an intervention or assessment in practice. The Usage Rating Profile for Supporting Students’ Behavioral Needs (URP-NEEDS) was developed in order to provide a simultaneous assess...