How COVID-19 is laying bare structural racism and what we can do about it

Two intersecting pandemics

Chinese Canadians share their experiences of racism during COVID-19

The pandemic has exposed Chinese Canadians to new levels of hatred and abuse. Here are just a few of their stories. Words and pictures by Jessica Lee

Social media has seeped into virtually all aspects of modern life. The vast social media universe collectively now holds 3.8 billion users, representing roughly 50% of the global population.

Visualizing the Social Media Universe in 2020

10.1038/s41467-020-17540-7

The synchronization of human networks is essential for our civilization and understanding its dynamics is important to many aspects of our lives. Human ensembles were investigated, but in noisy environments and with limited control over the network parameters which govern the network dynamics. Specifically, research has focused predominantly on all-to-all coupling, whereas current social networks and human interactions are often based on complex coupling configurations. Here, we study the synchronization between violin players in complex networks with full and accurate control over the network connectivity, coupling strength, and delay. We show that the players can tune their playing period and delete connections by ignoring frustrating signals, to find a stable solution. These additional degrees of freedom enable new strategies and yield better solutions than are possible within current models such as the Kuramoto model. Our results may influence numerous fields, including traffic management, epidemic control, and stock market dynamics.

Synchronization of complex human networks

The price the UK government was prepared to pay to save lives during the COVID-19 pandemic was far lower than in many other developed nations, a study has revealed.

‘Price of life’ lowest in UK during COVID-19 pandemic, study finds

5 myths about face masks under the microscope <img src="https://assets.weforum.org/article/image/ChEN9dkM3kNMXUWw6dHjnT1raXvm7Swhftcp6qxrNlo.JPG" srcset="https://assets.weforum.org/article/image/responsive_big_ChEN9dkM3kNMXUWw6dHjnT1raXvm7Swhftcp6qxrNlo.JPG 1600w, https://assets.weforum.org/article/image/responsive_large_ChEN9dkM3kNMXUWw6dHjnT1raXvm7Swhftcp6qxrNlo.JPG 800w, https://assets.weforum.org/article/image/responsive_medium_ChEN9dkM3kNMXUWw6dHjnT1raXvm7Swhftcp6qxrNlo.JPG 485w, https://assets.weforum.org/article/image/responsive_small_ChEN9dkM3kNMXUWw6dHjnT1raXvm7Swhftcp6qxrNlo.JPG 350w, https://assets.weforum.org/article/image/responsive_tiny_ChEN9dkM3kNMXUWw6dHjnT1raXvm7Swhftcp6qxrNlo.JPG 97w" webp_srcset="https://assets.weforum.org/article/image/responsive_big_webp_ChEN9dkM3kNMXUWw6dHjnT1raXvm7Swhftcp6qxrNlo.webp 1600w, https://assets.weforum.org/article/image/responsive_large_webp_ChEN9dkM3kNMXUWw6dHjnT1raXvm7Swhftcp6qxrNlo.webp 800w, https://assets.weforum.org/article/image/responsive_medium_webp_ChEN9dkM3kNMXUWw6dHjnT1raXvm7Swhftcp6qxrNlo.webp 485w, https://assets.weforum.org/article/image/responsive_small_webp_ChEN9dkM3kNMXUWw6dHjnT1raXvm7Swhftcp6qxrNlo.webp 350w, https://assets.weforum.org/article/image/responsive_tiny_webp_ChEN9dkM3kNMXUWw6dHjnT1raXvm7Swhftcp6qxrNlo.webp 97w" sizes="100vw" html="{:loading=&gt;&quot;eager&quot;, :class=&gt;&quot;&quot;, :alt=&gt;&quot;People wearing protective face masks sit at the Las Cruces park amid the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Madrid, Spain July 28, 2020. REUTERS/Javier Barbancho - RC2K2I9HIV0N&quot;, :style=&gt;&quot;width: 100.0%; margin-left: -0.0%; margin-top: -18.68%;&quot;}" use_picture="true">

To cover, or not to cover? That is the question. Not just a question, in fact, but a divisive issue that has led to protests in some parts of the world – most notably in the United States – and explosions of fake news on the internet.

There seems to have been a lot of criticism for the use of the term "behavioural fatigue", and its potential impact on policy, by the UK government in the early part of the pandemic

What's so wrong with 'behavioural fatigue'?

Idaho lawmakers are moving to strip the authority of public health districts to close schools in emergencies or require masks for safety reasons.

‘Listening to experts is elitist’: Idaho Republicans move to strip power from public health officials

We analyze the consequences of the decision of French government to maintain the first round of the municipal elections on March 15, 2020 on local excess mortality in the following weeks. We exploit heterogeneity across municipalities in voter turnout, which we instrument using a measure of the intensity of local competition. The results reveal that a higher turnout was associated with a significantly higher death counts for the elderly population in the five weeks after the elections. If the historically low turnout in 2020 had been at its 2014 level, the number of deaths would have been 21.8 percent higher than the one that was recorded. More than three quarters of these additional deaths would have occurred among the individuals aged 80 and above

Turnout in the Municipal Elections of March 2020 and Excess Mortality during the COVID-19 Epidemic in France

Turnout in the Municipal Elections of March 2020 and Excess Mortality during the COVID-19 Epidemic in France

10.31234/osf.io/by5xj

10.31234/osf.io/by5xj

Higher educational institutions around the world were affected by COVID-19 pandemic. The applicability of social distancing measures requires an adaptation from in-person teaching in the classroom to remote teaching. This context demands extra planning for both the professors and the students. In this article, we have created guidelines to support the work of university managers, to assess and deal with difficulties and restrictions imposed by the emergency situation, caused by the pandemic, to promote viable and safe working and pedagogical conditions to teachers and students. We draw these guidelines based on a higher education conception oriented to the development of professional performance (as opposed to the transmission of educational content) and on variables that interfere in the educational process.

HigherEducationintheTimesofPandemic:universitymanagementguidelines

Boris Johnson’s warning comes after Spain is critical of UK for extending non-essential travel advice to Canary and Balearic islands

10.31234/osf.io/65df4

Around the world, governments have been asking their citizens to substantially change their behaviour for a prolonged period of time, by practising physical distancing and staying at home, to contain the spread of Covid-19. Are happier people more willing to comply with these measures? Using three independent surveys covering about 119,000 adult respondents across 35 countries, including longitudinal data from the UK, we found that past and present happiness predicts compliance during lockdown. The relationship is stronger for those with higher levels of happiness. A negative mood, or loss in happiness, predicts lower compliance. We explored risk-avoidance and pro-social motivations for this relationship, and found that motivations for compliance are not uniformly distributed but dependent on personal characteristics and context: people who are older or have certain medical preconditions seem to be predominantly motivated by risk-avoidance, whereas motivations of people who are less at risk of Covid-19 seem more mixed. Our findings have implications for policy design, targeting, and communication.

Are Happier People More Compliant?Global Evidence From Three Large-Scale Surveys During Covid-19 Lockdowns

Nudging and behavioural insights need to be taken into account in strategic action planning for suppression and reduction of pandemic effects. This paper focuses on a few selected areas of significant importance to getting SAR-CoV2 under control in both the non-pharmaceutical and the pharmaceutical phase, i.e. after the development of an effective

10.31234/osf.io/uzb5t

The Strategic Use of Nudging and Behavioural Approaches in Public Health Policy during the Coronavirus Crisis

https://doi.org/10.1002/cpmc.108

The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‐CoV‐2) emerged in the city of Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, in late 2019. Since then, the virus has spread globally and caused a pandemic. Assays that can measure the antiviral activity of antibodies or antiviral compounds are needed for SARS‐CoV‐2 vaccine and drug development. Here, we describe in detail a microneutralization assay, which can be used to assess in a quantitative manner if antibodies or drugs can block entry and/or replication of SARS‐CoV‐2 in vitro.

An In Vitro Microneutralization Assay for SARS‐CoV‐2 Serology and Drug Screening

doi.org/10.1101/2020.07.14.20151126

SARS-CoV-2 has caused a global pandemic with millions infected and numerous fatalities. Questions regarding the robustness, functionality and longevity of the antibody response to the virus remain unanswered. Here we report that the vast majority of infected individuals with mild-to-moderate COVID-19 experience robust IgG antibody responses against the viral spike protein, based on a dataset of 19,860 individuals screened at Mount Sinai Health System in New York City. We also show that titers are stable for at least a period approximating three months, and that anti-spike binding titers significantly correlate with neutralization of authentic SARS-CoV-2. Our data suggests that more than 90% of seroconverters make detectible neutralizing antibody responses and that these titers are stable for at least the near-term future.

SARS-CoV-2 infection induces robust, neutralizing antibody responses that are stable for at least three months

SARS-CoV-2 has caused a global pandemic with millions infected and numerous fatalities. Questions regarding the robustness, functionality and longevity of the antibody response to the virus remain unanswered. Here we report that the vast majority of infected individuals with mild-to-moderate COVID-19 experience robust IgG antibody responses against the viral spike protein, based on a dataset of 19,860 individuals screened at Mount Sinai Health System in New York City. We also show that titers are stable for at least a period approximating three months, and that anti-spike binding titers significantly correlate with neutralization of authentic SARS-CoV-2. Our data suggests that more than 90% of seroconverters make detectible neutralizing antibody responses and that these titers are stable for at least the near-term future.

21% of reported cases affect Black people, who make up only 9% of the city's overall population

Black people and other people of colour make up 83% of reported COVID-19 cases in Toronto

The Texas Tribune is using data from the Texas Department of State Health Services to track how many people have tested positive for the novel coronavirus in Texas each day. The state data comes from local health officials, and it may not represent all cases of the disease given limited testing. Here's what we know about the daily numbers.

Texas reports over 3,000 total deaths, 10,002 patients hospitalized due to coronavirus

On 31 December 2019, an outbreak of "pneumonia of an unknown cause” was declared in Wuhan, a city of more than 11 million people in the central Chinese province of Hubei.   Six months later, life across the globe has become unrecognisable. Travel has halted, entire nations have entered lockdown, and hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost. The virus behind the outbreak, which causes the disease COVID-19, has spread to at least 188 countries and territories.  Imperial College London has played a key role in tackling the virus. Let us take you on a walk through some of the defining moments.  

COVID-19: six months on the frontline

10.31234/osf.io/mk69x

Body illusions (BIs) refer to altered perceptual states where the perception of the self-body significantly deviates from the configuration of the physical body, for example, in aspects like perceived size, shape, posture, location, and sense of ownership. Different established experimental paradigms allow to temporarily induce such altered perceptual states in a predictable and systematic manner. There is evidence demonstrating the use of BIs in clinical neuroscience, however, to our knowledge, this is the first systematic review evaluating the effectiveness of BIs in healthy and clinical populations. This systematic review examined the use of BIs in the healthy and clinical populations, and review how BIs can be adopted to enhance mental health in different mental illness conditions. The systematic review was conducted following the PRISMA guidelines. Of the 8086 studies identified, 189 studies were included for full-text analyses. Seventy-seven studies used BIs in clinical populations. Most of the studies using BIs with clinical populations used body illusions toward a body part, modulating the external aspects of body representation. Even though clinical studies showed the positive effects of BIs to improve mental illness conditions, future technologies using BIs targeting both the external (exteroceptive) and the internal (interoceptive) aspects of body representations can further improve the efficacy of this approach.

Body illusions for mental health: a systematic review

10.31235/osf.io/fmz8e

The adverse policy environment in the United States (US) has made immigrant communities particularly vulnerable to uncontrolled community spread of COVID-19. President Trump is using his emergency powers during the pandemic to push his broader agenda which includes locking down the southern US border to severely limit immigration. Immigration policies such as the ‘public charge rule’ may further disincentivize even authorized immigrants to seek care if they develop symptoms. The recently passed Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act will not provide any social safety net support to the millions of undocumented immigrants. Compounding these issues, the US economy is expected to contract substantially. Many construction, agricultural, and service workers are immigrants, and these industries will be severely impacted. The long-term impact of COVID-19 and commensurate health and economic impact on families, communities, and state and federal governments will be a topic of research for many years. Federal and state policies should pivot to find ways to improve access to healthcare for immigrants.

US Policies Increase Vulnerability of Immigrant Communities to the COVID-19 Pandemic

10.31234/osf.io/8439q

This report is based on findings from a nationally representative survey – Climate Change in the American Mind – conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (climatecommunication.yale.edu) and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication (climatechangecommunication.org). Interview dates: April 7 – 17, 2020. Interviews: 1,029 Adults (18+). Average margin of error +/- 3 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.

climate changein the american mind

10.31234/osf.io/d7vbq

Drawing on a nationally representative survey (N = 1,029; including 911 registered voters), this report describes how Democratic, Independent, and Republican registered voters view global warming, climate and energy policies, and personal and collective action. This report is based on findings from a nationally representative survey – Climate Change in the American Mind – conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (climatecommunication.yale.edu) and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication (climatechangecommunication.org), Interview dates: April 7 – 17, 2020. Average margin of error +/- 3 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.

politics &global warming

10.31234/osf.io/tq7v5

Music copyright lawsuits often result in multimillion dollar settlements, yet there are few objective guidelines for applying copyright law in infringement claims involving musical works. Recent research has attempted to develop objective methods based on automated similarity algorithms, but there remains almost no data on the role of perceived similarity in music copyright decisions despite its crucial role in copyright law. We collected perceptual data from 20 participants for 17 past copyright cases from the USA and Japan after editing the disputed sections to contain either full audio, melody only, or lyrics only. Due to the historical emphasis in legal opinions on melody as the key criterion for deciding infringement, we predicted that listening to melody-only versions would result in perceptual judgments that more closely matched actual past legal decisions. Surprisingly, however, we found no significant differences between the three conditions, with participants matching past decisions in between 50-60% of cases in all three conditions. Automated algorithms designed to calculate melodic and audio similarity produced comparable results: both algorithms were able to match past decisions with identical accuracy of 71% (12/17 cases). Analysis of cases that were difficult to classify suggests that melody, lyrics, and other factors sometimes interact in complex ways difficult to capture using quantitative metrics. We propose directions for further investigation of the role of similarity in music copyright law using larger samples of cases and enhanced methods, including some developed for purposes of cover-song detection. Our results contribute to important practical debates, such as whether jury members should be allowed to listen to full audio recordings during copyright cases.

PERCEPTUAL VS. AUTOMATED JUDGMENTS OF MUSIC COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT

Academia is often critiqued as an “ivory tower” where research, thinking, and teaching is isolated from the complexity and everyday experience of so many people. As instructors of political and other psychology courses, we strive to break down these barriers and engage with the dynamic and nuanced nature of phenomena as situated in lived social and political contexts. In this report, we unpack and detail how we strive to achieve this goal by expanding on Plous’ articulation of action teaching (2012). We first define our pedagogical focus on active engagement, critical thinking, and staying on the move between multiple perspectives. We then provide specific examples of how we enact our philosophy in activities and assessment. We end by articulating how this approach to teaching in social and political psychology can be understood as furthering not only our students’ intellectual growth as psychologists, but also their development as democratic citizens. In doing so, we argue that action teaching not only involves course activities directly engaging with social issues, but also provides students with a scaffold to actually do so in a way that is attentive to the complexity, pluralism, and dynamism of social and political issues.

10.31234/osf.io/yedap

Teaching students how to think, not what to think: Pedagogy & political psychology

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Memory is a crucial component of everyday decision making, yet little is known about how memory and choice processes interact, and whether or not established memory regularities persist during memory-based decision making. In this paper, we introduce a novel experimental paradigm to study the differences between memory processes at play in standard list recall versus in preferential choice. Using computational memory models, fit to data from two pre-registered experiments, we find that some established memory regularities (primacy, recency, semantic clustering) emerge in preferential choice, whereas others (temporal clustering) are significantly weakened relative to standard list recall. Notably, decision-relevant features, such as item desirability, play a stronger role in guiding retrieval in choice. Our results suggest memory processes differ across preferential choice and standard memory tasks, and that choice modulates memory by differentially activating decision-relevant features such as what we like.

What I Like Is What I Remember: Memory Modulation and Preferential Choice

10.31234/osf.io/qhc35

The repulsive body image (RBI) describes a schematic representation of the own body marked by body-directed self-disgust and other body image concerns. This RBI may bias autobiographical memory processing towards RBI-congruent memories, which would be expected to be overgeneral, because disgust may promote the avoidance of specific memories. In the current study, women with high (HRBI; n = 61) and low (LRBI; n = 64) RBI levels retrieved memories in response to abstract body-related cue words in a minimal instructions Autobiographical Memory Test. Compared to the LRBI group, the HRBI group recalled a higher number of autobiographical memories that involved appraisals of the own body as disgusting, and reported elevated habitual tendencies to prevent experiencing disgust towards the own body. Neither RBI scores nor tendencies to prevent experiencing body-related disgust were found to be statistically significant predictors of memory specificity. In light of the low memory specificity in the whole sample, more sensitive measures of autobiographical memory specificity may be needed to examine disgust-driven avoidance at the memory level. Nevertheless, the current results may indicate that disgust-related memories and the prevention of experiencing disgust towards the own body could play a role in the persistence of body image concerns.

Averting Repulsion? Body-Directed Self-Disgust and Autobiographical Memory Retrieval

he developmental trajectory of open-mindedness: from 18 to 87-years of age.

Objectives: The present study examined the role of aging in participants between 18 and 87-years of age on open-mindedness in the Actively Open-minded Thinking (AOT) scale and the Actively Open-minded Thinking about Evidence (AOT-E) scale. Method: The amalgamated data from 12 Amazon Mechanical Turk™ studies was analysed. This included a total of 9010 participants (age: M = 37.30, SD = 14.13 / sex: 4191 males, 4734 females and 85 who did not wish to state their sex). All participants completed the 7-item Actively Open-minded Thinking (AOT) scale, of these participants four-hundred and ninety-one also completed the 8-item Actively Open-minded Thinking about Evidence (AOT-E) scale (age: M = 33.27, SD = 5.78 / sex: 2317 males, 2512 females and 62 who did not wish to state their sex). Results: AOT score positively correlated with AOT-E score (r = 0.27). Age negatively correlated with AOT score (r = -0.11) and AOT-E score (r = -0.13). There was a statistical difference in AOT score between the age ranges of participants (18-28, 29-38, 39-48, 49-58, 59-68 and 69-87 years of age). There was also a difference in AOT-E score between the age ranges of participants too. Discussion: The results showed that open-mindedness as measured by the AOT and AOT-E decreased as a function of aging. In an aging population were more adults work into later age the decrease in open-mindedness could influence many areas of judgments of decision-making.

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Registered reports are a relatively new type of journal article format in which the decision to publish an article is based on sound conceptualization, methods, and planned analyses, rather than the specific nature of the results. Registered reports are becoming increasingly instituted in journals across the sciences, but mostly in experimental contexts. Relatively few of these journals pertain directly to developmental research with adolescents, emerging adults, and adults, which tend to use more complex methods, or at least methods that involve a greater degree of flexibility. This article describes lessons learned through editing a special issue focused on registered reports based on analyses of a single existing dataset, the Emerging Adulthood Measured and Multiple Institutions 2 project. These observations should be helpful for researchers interested in preparing registered report submissions using developmental and secondary data.

Registered Reports with Developmental and Secondary Data: Some Brief Observations and Introduction to the Special Issue

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Facial expressions support effective social communication by dynamically transmitting complex, multi-layered messages, such as emotion categories and their intensity. How facial expressions achieve this signalling task remains unknown. Here, we address this question by identifying the specific facial movements that convey two key components of emotion communication – emotion classification (such as ‘happy,’ ‘sad’) and intensification (such as ‘very strong’) – in the six classic emotions (happy, surprise, fear, disgust, anger and sad). Using a data-driven, reverse correlation approach and an information-theoretic analysis framework, we identified in 60 Western receivers three communicative functions of face movements: those used to classify the emotion (classifiers), to perceive emotional intensity (intensifiers), and those serving the dual role of classifier and intensifier. We then validated the communicative functions of these face movements in a broader set of 18 complex facial expressions of emotion (including excited, shame, anxious, hate). We find that the timing of emotion classifier and intensifier face movements are temporally distinct, in which intensifiers peaked earlier or later than classifiers. Together, these results reveal the complexities of facial expressions as a signalling system, in which individual face movements serve specific communicative functions with a clear temporal structure.

Dynamic facial expressions of emotion decouple emotion category and intensity information over time

Women are underrepresented in positions of power – a pattern partly explained by pervasive stereotypes about who should be leaders. How do the beliefs underlying gender disparities in leadership develop? This study revealed that gender stereotypes influence children’s (3.5-6.9 years; N = 185) decisions about who should be leaders: Girls asked to pick someone to lead were less likely to choose a girl than were girls asked to choose someone to work on a team, whereas boys were equally likely to select a boy for either type of role. Yet, there were no gender differences in children’s interest in leadership or beliefs about their own leadership potential. These findings indicate that gender disparities in advancement may begin with the acquisition of gender stereotypes about who should lead.

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Gender stereotypes about leadership in early childhood

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Although past research has shown that social comparisons made through social media contribute to negative outcomes, little is known about the nature of these comparisons (domains, direction, and extremity), variables that determine comparison outcomes (post valence, perceiver’s self- esteem), and how these comparisons differ from those made in other contexts (e.g., text messages, face-to-face interactions). In four studies (N=798), we provide the first comprehensive analysis of how individuals make and respond to social comparisons on social media, using comparisons made in real-time while browsing news feeds (Study 1), experimenter- generated comparisons (Study 2), and comparisons made on social media vs. in other contexts (Studies 3-4). More frequent and more extreme upward comparisons resulted in immediate declines in self-evaluations as well as cumulative negative effects on individuals’ state self- esteem, mood, and life satisfaction after a social media browsing session. Moreover, downward and lateral comparisons occurred less frequently and did little to mitigate upward comparisons’ negative effects. Furthermore, low self-esteem individuals were particularly vulnerable to making more frequent and more extreme upward comparisons on social media, which in turn threatened their already-lower self-evaluations. Finally, social media comparisons resulted in greater declines in self-evaluation than those made in other contexts. Together, these studies provide the first insights into the cumulative impact of multiple comparisons, clarify the role of self-esteem in online comparison processes, and demonstrate how the characteristics and impact of comparisons on social media differ from those made in other contexts.

When Every Day is a High School Reunion: Social Media Comparisons and Self-Esteem

10.31234/osf.io/qphk2

Although trust plays a pivotal role in many aspects of life, very little is known about the manifestation of trust and distrust in everyday life. In this work, we integrated several prior approaches to trust and investigated the prevalence and key determinants of trust (vs. distrust) in people’s natural environments, using preregistered experience-sampling methodology. Across more than 4,500 social interactions from a heterogeneous sample of 427 participants, results showed high average levels of trust, but also considerable variability in trust across contexts. This variability was attributable to aspects of trustee perception, social distance, as well as three key dimensions of situational interdependence: conflict of interests, information (un)certainty, and power imbalance. At the dispositional level, average everyday trust was shaped by general trust, moral identity, and zero-sum beliefs. The social scope of most trust-related traits, however, was moderated by social distance: Whereas moral identity buffered against distrusting distant targets, high general distrust and low social value orientation amplified trust differences between close vs. distant others. Furthermore, a laboratory-based trust game predicted everyday trust only with regard to more distant but not close interaction partners. Finally, everyday trust was linked to self-disclosure and to cooperation, particularly in situations of high conflict between interaction partners’ interests. We conclude that trust can be conceptualized as a relational hub that interconnects the social perception of the trustee, the relational closeness between trustor and trustee, key structural features of situational interdependence, and behavioral response options such as self-disclosure.

Trust in Everyday Life

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This article describes the data reported in the paper “Being in the know: Social network analysis of gossip and friendship on college campuses” [1]. Data were collected from a Men’s and Women’s collegiate crew team members from a small liberal arts college. Participants (N = 44) reported information about how often they gossip about members of the team (positively, negatively), who they have had hooked-up with on the team, who they consider to be friends with on the team, whether they have to sabotaged or been sabotaged by any teammates, their well-being and feelings of loneliness. This data brief provides detailed information about data preparation and participants responses to all survey items.

Gossip,Sabotage,andFriendshipNetworkDataset

The Coronavirus Is Emboldening Autocrats the World Over

Democracy Versus the Pandemic

These include an overview of consumption in each market, including details of the most popular news brands – traditional and online. The pages also contain statistics about the use of new devices such as smartphones and tablets and the role of different social networks for news. Information is drawn from the 2020 Digital News Report survey using the methodology outlined on p. 6, with the exception of population and internet levels which are drawn from Internet World Statistics (2019).

Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2020

10.31234/osf.io/53ey9

BECON methodology

The imposition of lockdowns in response to the COVID-19 outbreak has underscored the importance of human behavior in mitigating virus transmission. As lockdowns are gradually relaxed, social distancing becomes less enforced and more dependent on the willingness of the public to follow guidelines. Scientific study of interventions designed to change behavior (e.g., to promote social distancing) requires measures of effectiveness that are fast, that can be assessed through experiments, and that can be investigated without actual transmission of the virus. In the present paper, we develop a methodological approach designed to deliver such indicators. We show that behavioral data, obtainable through tracing apps currently in development, can be used to reconstruct a central concept in epidemiology known as the contact network: a network representation that encodes which individuals have been in physical proximity long enough to transmit the virus. Because behavioral interventions alter the contact network, a comparison of contact networks before and after the intervention can show to what extent the intervention was effective. We coin indicators based on reconstructed contact networks Behavioral Contact Network (BECON) indicators. We examine the performance of three indicators: the Density BECON (based on differences in network density), the Spectral BECON (based on differences in the eigenvector of the adjacency matrix), and the ASPL BECON (based on differences in average shortest path lengths). Using simulations, we show that all three indicators can effectively track the effect of behavioral interventions. Even in conditions with significant amounts of noise, BECON indicators can reliably identify and order effect sizes of interventions. Because BECON indicators are available in real time, they can be used to assess induced changes in contact networks virtually instantaneously; and because they do not require actual transmission of the virus, they can be used to assess effectiveness in healthy subjects. The present paper invites further methodological study of the proposed method as well as practical implementations to test the validity of BECON indicators in real data.

doi.org/10.1057/s41599-018-0144-2

Scientists are increasingly required to demonstrate the real world tangible impacts arising from their research. Despite significant advances in scholarship dedicated to understanding and improving the relationships between science, policy and practice, much of the existing literature remains high level, theoretical, and not immediately accessible to early career researchers (ECRs) who work outside of the policy sciences. In this paper, we draw on the literature and our own experiences working in the environmental sciences to provide an accessible resource for ECRs seeking to achieve policy impact in their chosen field. First, we describe key concepts in public policy to provide sufficient background for the non-expert. Next, we articulate a number of practical steps and tools that can help ECRs to identify and enhance the policy relevance of their research, better understand the policy world in practice and identify a range of pathways to achieving impact. Finally, we draw on our personal experiences to highlight some of the key individual characteristics and values that are needed to operate more effectively at the interface of science, policy and practice. Our hope is that the information and tools provided here can help to empower ECRs to create their own pathways to impact that best suit their individual goals, circumstances, interests and strengths.

An introduction to achieving policy impact for early career researchers

Working paper: to be updated1Hate multiverse spreads malicious COVID-19content online beyond individualplatform control

We show that malicious COVID-19 content, including hate speech, disinformation, and misinformation, exploits the multiverse of online hate to spread quickly beyond the control of any individual social media platform. Machine learning topic analysis shows quantitatively how online hate communities are weaponizing COVID-19, with topics evolving rapidly and content becoming increasingly coherent. Our mathematical analysis provides a generalized form of the public health R0predicting the tipping point for multiverse-wide viral spreading, which suggests new policy options to mitigate the global spread of malicious COVID-19 content without relying on future coordination between all online platforms.

10.31234/osf.io/x9ch8

The COVID-19 outbreak has simultaneously increased the need for mental health services and decreased their availability. Brief online self-help interventions that can be completed in a single session could be especially helpful in improving access to care during the crisis. However, little is known about the uptake, acceptability, and perceived utility of these interventions outside of clinical trials in which participants are compensated. Here, we describe the development, deployment, acceptability ratings, and pre-post effects of a single-session intervention, the Common Elements Toolbox (COMET), adapted for the COVID-19 crisis to support graduate and professional students. Participants (n = 263), who were not compensated, were randomly assigned to two of three modules: behavioral activation, cognitive restructuring, and gratitude. Over one week, 263 individuals began and 189 individuals (72%) completed the intervention. Participants reported that the intervention modules were acceptable (93% endorsing), helpful (88%), engaging (86%), applicable to their lives (87%), and could help them manage COVID-related challenges (88%). Participants reported pre- to post-program improvements in secondary control (i.e., the belief that one can control their reactions to objective events; dav=0.36, dz=0.50, p<0.001) and in the perceived negative impact of the COVID-19 crisis on their quality of life (dav=0.22, dz=0.25, p<0.001). On average, differences in their perceived ability to handle lifestyle changes resulting from the pandemic were positive, but small and at the level of a nonsignificant trend (dav=0.13, dz=0.14, p=0.066). Our results highlight the acceptability and utility of an online intervention for supporting individuals through the COVID-19 crisis.

Promoting Graduate Student Mental Health during COVID-19: Acceptability and Perceived Utility of an Online Single-Session Intervention