Simulating disabilities promotes distress and fails to improve attitudes toward disabled people, undermining efforts to improve integration even while participants report more empathetic concern and "understanding of what the disability experience is like." (PsycINFO Database Record

BackgroundAssessing the efficacy of Internet interventions that are already in the market introduces both challenges and opportunities. While vast, often unprecedented amounts of data may be available (hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions of participants with high dimensions of assessed variables), the data are observational in nature, are partly unstructured (eg, free text, images, sensor data), do not include a natural control group to be used for comparison, and typically exhibit high attrition rates. New approaches are therefore needed to use these existing data and derive new insights that can augment traditional smaller-group randomized controlled trials.ObjectiveOur objective was to demonstrate how emerging big data approaches can help explore questions about the effectiveness and process of an Internet well-being intervention.MethodsWe drew data from the user base of a well-being website and app called Happify. To explore effectiveness, multilevel models focusing on within-person variation explored whether greater usage predicted higher well-being in a sample of 152,747 users. In addition, to explore the underlying processes that accompany improvement, we analyzed language for 10,818 users who had a sufficient volume of free-text response and timespan of platform usage. A topic model constructed from this free text provided language-based correlates of individual user improvement in outcome measures, providing insights into the beneficial underlying processes experienced by users.ResultsOn a measure of positive emotion, the average user improved 1.38 points per week (SE 0.01, t122,455=113.60, P<.001, 95% CI 1.36–1.41), about a 27% increase over 8 weeks. Within a given individual user, more usage predicted more positive emotion and less usage predicted less positive emotion (estimate 0.09, SE 0.01, t6047=9.15, P=.001, 95% CI .07–.12). This estimate predicted that a given user would report positive emotion 1.26 points higher after a 2-week period when they used Happify daily than during a week when they didn’t use it at all. Among highly engaged users, 200 automatically clustered topics showed a significant (corrected P<.001) effect on change in well-being over time, illustrating which topics may be more beneficial than others when engaging with the interventions. In particular, topics that are related to addressing negative thoughts and feelings were correlated with improvement over time.ConclusionsUsing observational analyses on naturalistic big data, we can explore the relationship between usage and well-being among people using an Internet well-being intervention and provide new insights into the underlying mechanisms that accompany it. By leveraging big data to power these new types of analyses, we can explore the workings of an intervention from new angles, and harness the insights that surface to feed back into the intervention and improve it further in the future.

The expression of a 25 kDa protein, encoded by the fused mitochondrial pcf gene, is associated with cytoplasmic male sterility (CMS) in petunia. To investigate the role of the 25 kDa protein in CMS we have transformed petunia and tobacco plants with constructs expressing a portion of the urfS sequence of the pcf cDNA which encodes the 25 kDa protein. The urfS sequence was fused with two different mitochondrial targeting sequences. The chimeric gene coding region was placed under the control of the CaMV 35S promoter or a tapetum-specific promoter. Expression of the PCF protein was obtained in mitochondria of transgenic petunia and tobacco plants, yet fertility of the plants was not affected. Analysis of the location of the urfS-encoded protein revealed that it fractionates primarily into the soluble fraction in the transgenic plants whereas the genuine 25 kDa protein is found primarily in the soluble fraction but also in the membrane portion of immature buds from CMS petunia plants. Fertile transgenic plants were obtained which expressed the 25 kDa protein in the tapetal layer of post-meiotic anthers, while CMS plants express the endogenous 25 kDa protein in both the tapetal layer and sporogenous tissue of pre-meiotic anthers.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.2196/jmir.5725.].

Required reporting varies substantially by state or territory. Health care professionals are integral to public health efforts at the local, state, and national levels.