Americans are fighting coronavirus misinformation on social media

Traditionally, center-based Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) therapy is delivered in a face-to-face format across several sessions; however, given the recent COVID-19 pandemic, many behavior analysts practicing in ABA centers have temporarily been authorized to provide services using a telehealth model. This rapid change in service delivery has posed unique challenges for behavior analysts and families with loved ones who were receiving ABA services in centers or schools. Among one of the most pressing concerns is that behavior analysts commonly rely on direct observation of behavior to make data-based decisions regarding client treatment plans. The shift to a telehealth model in light of the COVID-19 pandemic requires behavior analysts to quickly adapt the manner in which many have been providing services. Although many behavior analysts may be familiar with various technologies, they may struggle to identify the benefits and limitations of each technology in terms of providing telehealth. Selecting an appropriate technology that allows behavior analysts to stay true to the science of behavior analysis is prudent. The purpose of this paper is to provide a review of some available technologies to support telehealth that will allow behavior analysts to conduct direct observation from a remote location. The three technologies reviewed are 1) web camera, 2) Swivl, and 3) telepresence robot. Features of these technologies will be described and compared including benefits and drawbacks of each (see Table 1). Sample task analyses for using each technology are also provided.

Technology to Facilitate Telehealth in Applied Behavior Analysis

Volunteer! Universities, community groups and even the NHS recommend it, citing benefits for society and also yourself. The claimed personal outcomes include boosting your health and subjective wellbeing, but while the former is slowly gathering experimental backing, the wellbeing research is overwhelmingly correlational, making it hard to prove that volunteering is causing the gains (it’s certainly plausible, for instance, that happier people are simply more inclined to give up their time for free). Now the journal Comprehensive Results in Social Psychology has published a more robust test: a randomised study. The researchers looked for evidence to support the mental wellbeing benefits from volunteering … but they looked in vain.

New study fails to find any psychological benefits of volunteering, but that doesn’t mean you should stop

Human decision-making is often swayed by irrecoverable investments even though it should only be based on future – and not past – costs and benefits. Although this sunk cost effect is widely documented and can lead to devastating losses, the underlying psychological mechanisms are unclear. To tease apart possible explanations through a comparative approach, we assessed capuchin and rhesus monkeys’ susceptibility to sunk costs in a psychomotor task. Monkeys needed to track a moving target with a joystick-controlled cursor for variable durations. They could stop at any time, ending the trial without reward. To minimize the work required for a reward, monkeys should have always persisted for at least 1 second, but should have abandoned the trial if that did not yield a reward. Capuchin monkeys and especially rhesus macaques persisted to trial completion even when it was suboptimal, and were more likely to complete the trial the longer they had already tracked the target. These effects were less pronounced, although still present, when the change in expected tracking duration was signalled visually. These results show that sunk cost effects can arise in the absence of human-unique factors and may emerge, in part, because persisting can resolve uncertainty.

Capuchin and rhesus monkeys show sunk cost effects in a psychomotor task

A core proposition in economics is that voluntary exchanges benefit both parties. We show that people often deny the mutually beneficial nature of exchange, instead espousing the belief that one or both parties fail to benefit from the exchange. Across 4 studies (and 7 further studies in the Supplementary Materials), participants read about simple exchanges of goods and services, judging whether each party to the transaction was better off or worse off afterwards. These studies revealed that win–win denial is pervasive, with buyers consistently seen as less likely to benefit from transactions than sellers. Several potential psychological mechanisms underlying win–win denial are considered, with the most important influences being mercantilist theories of value (confusing wealth for money) and naïve realism (failing to observe that people do not arbitrarily enter exchanges). We argue that these results have widespread implications for politics and society.

Win–Win Denial: The Psychological Underpinnings of Zero-Sum Thinking

In basic terms, online status indicators convey availability: whether someone is on or offline, or when they last logged into a particular app. But if you’ve ever anxiously awaited a response from a prospective partner or suspected your friend might be ignoring you, you’ll be painfully aware of just how much weight that indicator can actually hold. Now a new study has found that many users are not only aware of all that online status indicators can convey, but also change their behaviour accordingly. The research is due to be published in the Proceedings of the 2020 ACM conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Here’s How The Online Status Indicators In Apps Influence Our Behaviour

Psychologists will need to make some adjustments to testing children during the public health emergency.

Telehealth testing with children: Important factors to consider

Allyship is a growing phenomenon in many organizational contexts, and the involvement of allies in identity-based social movements (e.g., men in the feminist movement) is ubiquitous. However, the impression that these allies have on their intended beneficiaries is unclear. Over the course of three studies, we explore how different types of allyship behaviors are perceived by their beneficiaries. We find converging evidence that beneficiaries make critical judgments of their allies when their allies engage in actions that demonstrate lower levels of trustworthiness (e.g., selflessness, loyalty) and higher levels of influence (e.g., centrality, power) in the movement. This evidence was observed in a survey of 117 social movement activists (Study 1), and in two experiments sampling 752 liberal women and nonbinary individuals (Study 2), and 305 feminist social activists (Study 3). Taken together, our research documents the causal effects that different allyship behaviors have on beneficiaries’ attitudes toward allies (Studies 2 & 3) while recruiting samples of currently engaged movement activists to solicit their unique perspectives (Studies 1 & 3). We thereby identify the specific ways of being an ally that elicit the most positive impressions from their intended beneficiaries, which can reinforce intergroup coalitions, prosociality, and ultimately, downstream societal change.

Beneficiaries' Attitudes toward Allies in Social Movements

Doing What Matters in Times of Stress: An Illustrated Guide is a stress management guide for coping with adversity. The guide aims to equip people with practical skills to help cope with stress. A few minutes each day are enough to practice the self-help techniques. The guide can be used alone or with the accompanying audio exercises.Informed by evidence and extensive field testing, the guide is for anyone who experiences stress, wherever they live and whatever their circumstances.   

Doing What Matters in Times of Stress

Feelings of anxiety are rising across the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic, and social distancing mandates preclude access to in-person mental healthcare. Anxiety is not necessarily pathological; however, increased worrying about COVID-19 shows links to more severe anxiety pathology. Greater perceived control over anxiety has predicted decreased anxiety pathology, including adaptive responses to uncontrollable stressors. Evidence suggests that no-therapist, single-session interventions can strengthen perceived control over emotions like anxiety; similar programs, if designed for the COVID-19 context, could hold substantial public health value. We will test whether a no-therapist, single-session online intervention adapted for the COVID-19 context can: 1) increase perceived control over anxiety, versus a placebo intervention 2) without decreasing social-distancing intentions. We will test these questions using a within-subjects design in a weighted-probability U.S. sample (N=300). Findings will inform whether a highly-scalable intervention can increase perceived control over anxiety without yielding unwanted secondary effects.

A scalable, single session intervention for perceived control over anxiety during COVID-19

This study examines the mental health outcomes among the healthcare personnel and the general population and the role of socioeconomic status. Eight hundred and eighty-four (884) residents in Nigeria comprising 382 Healthcare Personnel and 502 general residents aged between 18 and 78 years (M = 28.75, SD = 8.17) responded to an online survey with measures of Impact of Event Scale-Revised (IES-R), Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD-7), Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ–9) and Insomnia Severity Index. Collected data were subjected to statistical analysis using the SPSS v.25. Results revealed significant difference in the prevalence of depressive symptoms (χ2 = 14.26; df = 4; p <0.01); insomnia symptoms (χ2 = 40.21; df = 3; p< 0.01); posttraumatic stress symptoms (χ2 = 08.34; df = 3; p< 0.05) and clinical anxiety symptoms (χ2 = 06.71; df = 1; p <0.05) among healthcare personnel and the general population, with a higher prevalence reported by the healthcare personnel. Further, socioeconomic status significantly influence prevalence of depressive symptoms (χ2 = 04.5; df = 4; p <0.05). The study concluded that the prevalence of poor mental health outcomes during the COVID-19 crisis among Nigerians is worrisome. Also, the socioeconomic status of the citizens has serious implications on depressive symptoms. It was recommended that better attention should be paid to the mental health of residents in Nigeria, most especially healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

INTERACTIONS BETWEEN SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS AND MENTAL HEALTH OUTCOMES IN THE NIGERIAN CONTEXT AMID COVID-19 PANDEMIC: A COMPARATIVE STUDY

There are several opinion dynamics models where extremism is defined as part of their characteristics. However, the way extremism is implemented in each model does not correspond to equivalent definitions. While some models focus on one aspect of the problem, others focus on different characteristics. This paper shows how each model only captures part of the problem and how Bayesian inspired opinion models can help put those differences in perspective. That discussion suggests new ways to introduce variables that can represent the problem of extremism better than we do today. Keywords: Extremism, Opinion dynamics, CODA, Sociophysics

Extremism definitions in opinion dynamics models

Intergroup competitions such as democratic elections can intensify intergroup polarization and conflict. Partisan attitudes toward the elected leader can also shift following an election, but the biology underlying these attitudinal shifts remains unknown. An important factor could be the hormone testosterone, which is theorized to fluctuate during competition and to influence status-seeking. In a longitudinal study of 113 voters conducted during the 2012 US presidential election, supporters of the losing candidate experienced acute increases in testosterone levels on the evening of the election and flatter diurnal testosterone slopes up to two days after the election, compared to supporters of the winner. Furthermore, these competition-related changes in testosterone concentrations among supporters of the losing candidate were associated with less positive evaluations of the winning candidate. These findings suggest that hormonal responses to an intergroup competition may shape how we perceive elected leaders, shedding light on the biology of intergroup relations.

Testosterone fluctuations in response to a democratic election predict partisan attitudes toward the elected leader

Im Folgenden finden Sie Einblicke in fortlaufend aktualisierte Ergebnisse Internationale Beiträge zu den Auswirkungen des Coronavirus auf Gesellschaft, Wirtschaft und Politik Deutsche Ergebnisse – Die Wahrnehmung aktueller Entwicklungen im Zeitverlauf

Coronavirus: Alle YouGov-Ergebnisse auf einen Blick

Durch die weitere Ausbreitung des Coronavirus weltweit wird die Bedrohung durch das Virus für die öffentliche Gesundheit häufiger als groß wahrgenommen, vor allem durch die älteren Befragten. Das zeigen YouGov-Umfragen von Februar und März im Vergleich

Die wahrgenommene Bedrohung durch das Coronavirus wächst besonders aus Sicht der älteren Bevölkerung

Welcome to the COVID-19 social science project tracker. This unofficial, community-driven, open initiative is led by Nate Matias

COVID-19 International Academic Social Science Research Project Tracker

Angesichts der Corona-Pandemie hat sich der Alltag für viele Menschen in kurzer Zeit gravierend verändert. Wir wollen mit den folgenden Fragen herausfinden, welche Auswirkungen diese Veränderungen auf die Arbeit und das Familienleben haben und welche Sorgen sich die Menschen machen. Hierfür müssen möglichst viele und unterschiedliche Personen an dieser kurzen Befragung teilnehmen. Darum möchten wir Sie bitten, uns ein paar Fragen zu Ihrer aktuellen Situation zu beantworten und den Link zu dieser Befragung an möglichst viele Bekannte weiterzuleiten oder in Ihren sozialen Netzwerken zu teilen. Die Befragung wird etwa 11 Minuten dauern. Vielen Dank, dass Sie sich die Zeit nehmen! Klicken Sie auf Weiter um zur Einverständniserklärung zu gelangen.

Fragen zu Ihrer aktuellen Situation

In economics many articles are subjected to multiple rounds of refereeing at the same journal, which generates time costs of referees alone of at least $50 million. This process leads to remarkably longer publication lags than in other social sciences. We examine whether repeated refereeing produces any benefits, using an experiment at one journal that allows authors to submit under an accept/reject (fast-track or not) or the usual regime. We evaluate the scholarly impacts of articles by their subsequent citation histories, holding constant their sub-fields, authors’ demographics and prior citations, and other characteristics. There is no payoff to refereeing beyond the first round and no difference between accept/reject articles and others. This result holds accounting for authors’ selectivity into the two regimes, which we model formally to generate an empirical selection equation. This latter is used to provide instrumental estimates of the effect of each regime on scholarly impact.

Is Scholarly Refereeing Productive (at the Margin)?

The Center for Open Science and the Web of Science Group, a Clarivate Analytics company, are collaborating to incorporate TOP Factor among the information and metrics available through participating journals in its Master Journal List.  The Master Journal List allows researchers, publishers and librarians to keep track of the publication landscape. The online list is a go-to place for researchers to explore which journals are included in the Web of Science, and to help them identify suitable publishing destinations for their research. Now, further assisting researchers in identifying the transparent and open practices of journals by incorporating TOP Factor data. Based on the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines, TOP Factor rates journals on the degree to which their policies implement open data, research design transparency, replication studies, and address publication bias.  “We are delighted that the Web of Science Group will be including TOP Factor in its journal information pages on the Master Journal List,” says David Mellor, Director of Policy Initiatives at the Center for Open Science. “Diversifying the information that is available about scientific journals benefits authors, readers, publishers, and editors by providing specific practices that are important to the scientific community.” As part of its mission to increase the transparency and reproducibility of scientific research, the Center for Open Science is working to showcase steps being taken by the scientific community to tackle these issues. This includes not only pointing out best practices, but also pointing out specific recommendations for improvement.  “There is a lot of room for improvement in the publishing community,” says Mellor, “but the good news is that TOP Factor lets the community see that small steps can be easily taken toward more transparency. And the bigger steps covered by the more ambitious policies covered in the TOP Guidelines are also being taken by journals across several disciplines. This can serve as an inspiration that these practices are not pie in the sky dreams but are, in fact, achievable.” TOP Factor and its data is a publicly available resource, and COS encourages its use by all parties who wish to recognize and promote transparent and open practices. Take a moment to view the TOP Factor integration on the Master Journal List here.

TOP Factor to appear in Master Journal List

Introduction The performance of modern Question Answering Models (BERT, ALBERT ...) has seen drastic improvements within the last year enabling many new opportunities for accessing information more efficiently. However, those models are designed to find answers within rather small text passages. Haystack lets you scale QA models to large collections of documents! While QA is the focussed use case for haystack, we will soon support additional options to boost search (re-ranking, most-similar search ...). Haystack is designed in a modular way and lets you use any models trained with FARM or Transformers. Core Features Powerful ML models: Utilize all latest transformer based models (BERT, ALBERT, RoBERTa ...) Modular & future-proof: Easily switch to newer models once they get published. Developer friendly: Easy to debug, extend and modify. Scalable: Production-ready deployments via Elasticsearch backend & REST API Customizable: Fine-tune models to your own domain & improve them continuously via user feedback Components DocumentStore: Database storing the documents for our search. We recommend Elasticsearch, but have also more light-weight options for fast prototyping (SQL or In-Memory). Retriever: Fast, simple algorithm that identifies candidate passages from a large collection of documents. Algorithms include TF-IDF or BM25, custom Elasticsearch queries, and embedding-based approaches. The Retriever helps to narrow down the scope for Reader to smaller units of text where a given question could be answered. Reader: Powerful neural model that reads through texts in detail to find an answer. Use diverse models like BERT, RoBERTa or XLNet trained via FARM or Transformers on SQuAD like tasks. The Reader takes multiple passages of text as input and returns top-n answers with corresponding confidence scores. You can just load a pretrained model from Hugging Face's model hub or fine-tune it to your own domain data. Finder: Glues together a Reader and a Retriever as a pipeline to provide an easy-to-use question answering interface. REST API: Exposes a simple API for running QA search, collecting feedback and monitoring requests Labeling Tool: Hosted version (Beta), Docker images (coming soon)

Haystack — Neural Question Answering At Scale

he best responses to COVID-19 involve behavior change, including social distancing, mask use, and, eventually, vaccine uptake. So why has the behavioral public policy community, encompassing governmental behavioral insights units and a variety of not-for-profit and private organizations, played a marginal role?

Behavioral Public Policy Faces a Crisis

In light of the COVID-19 pandemic it may be useful to explore how resilience can be promoted for teachers at this time – supporting positive adaptation in the face of significant challenge.Research exploring teacher resilience has looked at ways that resilience can be promoted and eroded over time4. This suggests that resilience is a process as opposed to an internal trait. Resilience can change over time depending on the context or situation – it is not a case of having or not having resilience. Therefore, factors known to promote resilience in teachers can be fostered and drawn upon in the current climate. This short paper is a quick reference guide and a ‘conversation starter’ designed to promote teacher resilience. The aim is not to be prescriptive as we know that teachers demonstrate resilience on a daily basis in their busy lives in the profession. We also know that resilience is often community-focused and therefore support is often best placed within pre-existing relationships. We hope this paper provides a framework, informed by psychology, to support what is likely to be happening in some capacity already within educational organisations in the UK. The suggestions that we make in this paper are based on evidence from research and practice.

Teacher resilience during coronavirus school closures

2004.14808

Multilayer networks have been widely used to represent and analyze systems of interconnected entities where both the entities and their connections can be of different types. However, real multilayer networks can be difficult to analyze because of irrelevant information, such as layers not related to the objective of the analysis, because of their size, or because traditional methods defined to analyze simple networks do not have a straightforward extension able to handle multiple layers. Therefore, a number of methods have been devised in the literature to simplify multilayer networks with the objective of improving our ability to analyze them. In this article we provide a unified and practical taxonomy of existing simplification approaches, and we identify categories of multilayer network simplification methods that are still underdeveloped, as well as emerging trends.

Multilayer network simplification: approaches, models and methods

The always increasing mobile connectivity affects every aspect of our daily lives, including how and when we keep ourselves informed and consult news media. By studying a DPI (deep packet inspection) dataset, provided by one of the major Chilean telecommunication companies, we investigate how different cohorts of the population of Santiago De Chile consume news media content through their smartphones. We find that some socio-demographic attributes are highly associated to specific news media consumption patterns. In particular, education and age play a significant role in shaping the consumers behaviour even in the digital context, in agreement with a large body of literature on off-line media distribution channels.

News and the city: understanding online press consumption patterns through mobile data

2004.14845

Network theory provides tools which are particularly appropriate for assessing the complex interdependencies that characterise our modern connected world. This article presents an introduction to network theory, in a way that doesn't require a strong mathematical background. We explore how network theory unveils commonalities in the interdependency profiles of various systems, ranging from biological, to social, and artistic domains. Our aim is to enable an intuitive understanding while conveying the fundamental principles and aims of complexity science. Additionally, various network-theoretic tools are discussed, and numerous references for more advanced materials are provided.

Understanding complexity via network theory: a gentle introduction

This study examined the psychological distress experience of Nigerians amid COVID-19 pandemic. From March 20, 2020 to April 12, 2020, this descriptive survey used a snowballing sampling technique to select 502-Nigerian with an online semi-structured questionnaire containing Impact of Event Scale-Revised, GAD-7, Patient Health Questionnaire and Insomnia Severity Index. Gender had insignificant difference in the level of insomnia (χ2=04.93; df=3; p>0.05), however, 20.8% of males had sub-threshold of insomnia, 8.2% experienced moderate insomnia and 5.9% had severe insomnia; 32% females reported sub-threshold of insomnia, 12.4% had moderate insomnia while, 3.6% had severe insomnia. Also, gender had insignificant difference in the measures of depression (χ2=01.94; df=4; p>0.05); 55.4% males reported minimal depression, 22.3% had mild depression, 11.9% had moderate depression; 6.7% to 3.7% males had moderately to severe depression while, 49.3% of the females had minimal depression, 26.7% reported mild depression, 14.29% had moderate depression, 4.4% to 5.3% had moderately to severe depressive symptoms. Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms (PTSS) has no gender difference among respondents (χ2=02.51; df =3; p>0.05); 23% of males reported partial PTSS, 17.5% presented clinical PTSS, and 21.6% males had severe PTSS; while 29.3% of females had severe PTSS, 24% reported partial PTSS and 18.7% had clinical PTSS. Respondents reported insignificant gender difference on anxiety (χ2=0.08; df=1; p>0.05), while 51% reported moderate anxiety and 49% exhibited severe anxiety during COVID-19 pandemic in Nigeria. Findings revealed that Nigerians experienced psychological distress during COVID-19 pandemic. Government and stakeholders in health sectors should provide psychological health services for the residents in Nigeria.

PSYCHOLOGICAL DISTRESS EXPERIENCES OF NIGERIANS AMID COVID-19 PANDEMIC

Naive observers can and do make a wide range of social judgments from static images of faces. These include evaluations of properties like trustworthiness and competence, but can also include estimations of mental health (e.g. depression, schizotypy). This latter class of judgments is particularly important insofar as these evaluations may inform the interactions between care providers and patients, and could potentially provide diagnostic value if they prove to be veridical. In a previous report, Kleiman and Rule (2013) demonstrated that naive observers were capable of classifying static images at above chance levels according to suicidality: The faces of individuals who had died by suicide could be distinguished from the faces of those who had not. Further, the authors also reported that the faces of individuals who died by suicide were perceived as more impulsive than control faces. Our goals in the current study were to carry out a replication of these important experiments with a larger participant sample (more than doubling the sample used in the original report) and to extend the original report by implementing a 2AFC paradigm that minimizes response bias. We found that while naive observers could categorize faces according to suicidality at an above-chance level using the original testing paradigm, performance dropped to chance in a 2AFC discrimination task. We also did not find evidence supporting differences in perceived impulsivity across categories in either paradigm. We discuss these outcomes from theoretical and methodological perspectives, and outline new directions for further research investigating social vision in clinical contexts.

Can naive observers detect suicidality in face images? A replication and extension of Kleiman and Rule (2013)