Friday, November 5, 2021

Resilients maintained higher levels of mental health and recovered faster when faced with specific adversities (unemployment, disability, divorce, and widowhood)

Unraveling Resilience: Personality Predicts Exposure and Reaction to Stressful Life Events. Eva Asselmann, Theo A. Klimstra, Jaap J. A. Denissen. Personality Science, 2021, Vol. 2, Article e6055, Nov 4 2021, https://doi.org/10.5964/ps.6055

Abstract: Resilience is a key construct in psychology, which describes the maintenance of comparatively good mental health despite of environmental adversities or successful recovery from such adversities. Furthermore, it labels a specific personality type, characterized by high levels across the Big Five. However, whether the resilient type predicts less unfavorable mental health changes around environmental adversities remains unresolved. In a nationally representative sample from the Netherlands (LISS panel, N = 12,551), we longitudinally examined whether changes of internalizing symptoms around four stressful life events (unemployment, disability, divorce, and widowhood) differed between resilients and non-resilients. Internalizing symptoms increased before but decreased after each event, indicating recovery. Compared to non-resilients, resilients experienced a weaker symptom increase before the onset of unemployment and a stronger symptom rebound after the onset of disability. Thus, resilients maintained higher levels of mental health and recovered faster when faced with specific adversities, which underscores the importance of personality types in resilience.

Keywords: Big Five, personality type, longitudinal, adjustment, mental health, psychopathology, internalizing, substance use.


News producers’ incentive to invest in news quality increases with the private knowledge of the topic; hence, when information is most needed, the generated news tends to be of lesser quality; & competition does not necessarily improve news quality

Four Things Nobody Tells you About Online News: a Model for the New News Market. Melika Liporace. Bocconi University, October 2021. https://melikaliporace.github.io/research/Liporace_OnlineNewsMarket.pdf

Abstract: Social media create a new type of incentives for news producers. Consumers share content, influence the visibility of articles and determine the advertisement revenues ensuing. I study the new incentives created by sharing and evaluate the potential quality of ad-funded online news. Producers rely on a subset of rational and unbiased consumers to spread news articles. The resulting news has low precision and ambiguous welfare effects. Producers’ incentive to invest in news quality increases with the private knowledge of the topic; hence, when information is most needed, the generated news tends to be of lesser quality. Competition does not necessarily improve news quality – it does so only if the sharing network is sufficiently dense. While ad-funded online news occasionally helps consumers take better decisions, it creates welfare mostly through entertainment. Some interventions, such as flagging wrong articles, substantially improve the outcome; other approaches, such as quality certification, do not.

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The tragedy of journalists and editors...