Friday, April 24, 2020

Students are at elevated risk for mental health problems; despite increasing rates of infections & COVID-19 deaths, they had slight decreases of mental health problems & and loneliness

Fried, Eiko I. 2020. “Mental Health and Social Contact During the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Ecological Momentary Assessment Study.” PsyArXiv. April 24. doi:10.31234/osf.io/36xkp

Abstract: Students are at elevated risk for mental health problems. The COVID-19 pandemic and public health responses such as school and university closures caused once-in-a-lifetime disruptions of daily life for most students. In March 2020, during the beginning of the outbreak in the Netherlands, we used Ecological Momentary Assessment to follow 80 bachelor students 4 times a day for 2 weeks. Despite rapidly increasing rates of infections and deaths, short-term dynamics revealed slight decreases of mental health problems, COVID-19 related concerns, and loneliness, especially in the first few days of the study. Students showed no changes in the frequency of in-person social activities. Dynamic network models indicated that social activities were negatively related to being at home, and identified reinforcing vicious cycles among mental health problems and being alone, which in turn predicted concerns about COVID-19. Findings and implications are discussed in detail.


The Psychology of Queuing

Furnham, A. , Treglown, L. and Horne, G. (2020) The Psychology of Queuing. Psychology, 11, 480-498. doi: 10.4236/psych.2020.113033.

ABSTRACT: Queuing is still a fundamental function of how many businesses operate, yet there is not a clear understanding to impact the queuing environment to increase the amount of time an individual is willing to wait, improving an individual’s queuing experience, as well as reduce frustration and reneging. This paper presents a synthesis of the academic literature on queuing phenomenon. In particular, the paper focuses on the social norms of queuing, how they are upheld, and reactions to when they are violated; and environmental moderators, examining the impact of factors such as queue length, presence of information, music, light, and scent. Issues like the effect of number of people in a queue, personal space and the ideal queuing environment are discussed. Finally, this paper addresses limitations within the current body of research as well as proposing an agenda for future research.

KEYWORDS: Queuing, Waiting, Time, Environmental Moderators, Social Norms, Personal Space, Ideal Queues

9.6. Employee Visibility
The patience of queuers has also been known to fluctuate depending on the visibility of employees. In particular, whether the queuers perceive the employees to be working hard to serve all those who are queuing. Studies have shown that customer satisfaction in banks is strongly predicted by whether queuers believed all tellers to be doing their best to serve all customers (Clemmer & Schneider, 1989) . Furthermore, queuers become more frustrated when service providers are not working hard (e.g. talking with their co-workers) as this information is used to predict a longer wait (Larson, 1987) .

‘They can’t fool me, but they can fool the others!’ Third person effect and fake news detection.

‘They can’t fool me, but they can fool the others!’ Third person effect and fake news detection. Nicoleta Corbu et al. European Journal of Communication, February 17, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323120903686

Abstract: The aftermath of the 2016 US Presidential Elections and the Brexit campaign in Europe have opened the floor to heated debates about fake news and the dangers that these phenomena pose to elections and to democracy, in general. Despite a growing body of scholarly literature on fake news and its close relatives misinformation, disinformation or, more encompassing, communication and information disorders, few studies have so far attempted to empirically account for the effects that fake news might have, especially with respect to what communication scholars call the third person effect. This study aims to provide empirical evidence for the third person effect in the case of people’s self-perceived ability to detect fake news and of their perception of others’ ability to detect it. Based on a survey run in August 2018 and comprising a national, diverse sample of Romanian adults (N = 813), this research reveals that there is a significant third person effect regarding people’s self-reported ability to spot fake news and that this effect is stronger when people compare their fake news detection literacy to that of distant others than to that close others. Furthermore, this study shows that the most important predictors of third person effect related to fake news detection are education, income, interest in politics, Facebook dependency and confirmation bias, with age being a non-significant predictor.

Keywords: Distant and close others, fake news, predictors, third person effect

“Wonderful but Weak”: Children’s Ambivalent Attitudes Toward Women

“Wonderful but Weak”: Children’s Ambivalent Attitudes Toward Women. Matthew D. Hammond & Andrei Cimpian. Sex Roles, Apr 23 2020. https://rd.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11199-020-01150-0

Abstract: According to ambivalent sexism theory, prejudice toward women has two forms: hostile (i.e., antipathy toward women) and benevolent (i.e., patronizing and paternalistic attitudes toward women). We investigated whether 5- to 11-year-old children’s gender attitudes exhibit this bipartite, ambivalent structure. Consistent with this possibility, latent variable modeling on a new developmentally appropriate instrument revealed that children’s (n = 237) hostile and benevolent attitudes were two distinct but positively associated factors. Using this instrument, we then explored age and U.S. regional differences in ambivalent gender attitudes, as well as whether these attitudes predicted self-evaluations and preferences associated with traditional gender roles. Stronger agreement with hostile and benevolent gender attitudes was found among younger children, except for boys’ benevolent attitudes, which did not vary with age. Children also reported lower agreement with benevolent gender attitudes in a more gender-egalitarian region of the United States (New York vs. Illinois). Finally, children’s benevolent and hostile attitudes differentially predicted their self-evaluations (e.g., boys’ benevolent vs. hostile attitudes predicted higher vs. lower self-evaluations of warmth, respectively). No evidence emerged for links between gender attitudes and traditional career or relationship expectations. These findings provide the first known evidence that children’s gender attitudes are ambivalent—comprising distinct, but positively related, dimensions of subjective positivity and negativity.