ReportWire

Tag: Behavioral Science

  • Two-Thirds of Chicago Parents Worried About Possible Shooting at Their Children’s School

    Two-Thirds of Chicago Parents Worried About Possible Shooting at Their Children’s School

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    Newswise — With 157 school shootings in the United States since 2018, as well as increasingly common mass shootings in other public places, parents fear that a similar tragedy could strike in Chicago. In a recent survey from Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, 67 percent of Chicago parents were worried about a possible shooting at their children’s school and 73 percent worried that a mass shooting might occur in another public place.  

    A substantial proportion of parents also perceived that their children are worried about mass shootings, both at their school (40 percent) and at another public place (43 percent). Their children’s fears about school shootings were associated with lower scores on measures of well-being and higher scores on measures of stress.

    “After so many mass shooting tragedies across the country, considerable parental anxiety about their children’s safety is not surprising and is consistent with data from national polls,” said Matthew M. Davis, MD, MAPP, Chair of the Department of Medicine at Lurie Children’s, Executive Vice President and Chief Community Health Transformation Officer at the Patrick M. Magoon Institute for Healthy Communities at Lurie Children’s, and Chair of Pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “Our survey results further underscore that fears about mass shootings impact youth health and well-being, especially in the context of the ongoing youth mental health crisis.”

    Over 1,000 parents from all 77 community areas in Chicago were surveyed from October through November 2022 via the Voices of Child Health in Chicago Parent Panel Survey. All analyses were conducted with statistical weighting so that the results are representative of the parent population in the City of Chicago during the period of data collection.

    “Getting involved with advocacy organizations can be a powerful way to transform worry into action,” said Karen Sheehan, MD, MPH, Medical Director at the Patrick M. Magoon Institute for Healthy Communities at Lurie Children’s, and Professor of Pediatrics and Preventive Medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. Dr. Sheehan also holds the Arnold-Gorter Family Professorship in Healthy Communities. “Contacting your legislator to demand action is another important step all of us can take to reduce gun violence.”

    Advocacy Resources:

    https://www.everytown.org

    https://elections.il.gov/ElectionOperations/DistrictLocator/DistrictOfficialSearchByAddress.aspx  

    https://www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member

    https://openstates.org/find_your_legislator/

     

    Research at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago is conducted through Stanley Manne Children’s Research Institute. The Manne Research Institute is focused on improving child health, transforming pediatric medicine and ensuring healthier futures through the relentless pursuit of knowledge. Lurie Children’s is ranked as one of the nation’s top children’s hospitals by U.S. News & World Report. It is the pediatric training ground for Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

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    Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago

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  • Imaging brain connections can predict improvements in obsessive-compulsive disorder patients after deep brain stimulation

    Imaging brain connections can predict improvements in obsessive-compulsive disorder patients after deep brain stimulation

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    Newswise — Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is a promising therapy for treatment-resistant obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). A first-of-its-kind collaborative study led by researchers at Texas Children’s Hospital, Baylor College of Medicine, and Brigham & Women’s Hospital has found that mapping neural connections in the brains of OCD patients offers key insights that explain the observed improvements in their clinical outcomes after DBS. The study was published in Biological Psychiatry.

    Neuropsychiatric disorders such as obsessive-compulsive disorder are a result of dysfunction across broad neural networks and typically involve brain domains responsible for cognitive and higher-order decision-making such as the prefrontal cortex.

    “The goal of neuromodulatory therapies like DBS is to restore the functional balance within these networks. Since the extent of functional dysfunction in these networks varies between individuals, it is important to customize DBS surgery for each patient. To do that reliably, we first need to precisely map the neural connections involved in the specific condition and then understand how these connections are affected by DBS,” said co-corresponding author Dr. Sameer Sheth, professor in the department of neurosurgery at Baylor College of Medicine, director of the Cain Foundation Labs, and principal investigator at the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute (Duncan NRI) at Texas Children’s Hospital.

    In 2020, a seminal study by Dr. Andreas Horn and his team at Brigham & Women’s Hospital identified an ‘OCD response tract’ – a white matter circuit that precisely mapped the specific fiber bundles and brain regions whose modulation by DBS could improve clinical outcomes in OCD patients. The present study is the first one to conduct blind testing of the OCD response tract model with the goal of developing a predictive ‘connectomic’ model.

    Connectomic imaging strategies such as white matter tractography – a three-dimensional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technique that maps the location and direction of white matter bundles and their constituent fibers within the brain – are becoming increasingly reliable methods to identify these networks that inform surgeons where to implant DBS electrodes in the brain of the patient during surgery. Here, Sheth and colleagues used this approach to rank and conduct ‘blind’ comparison of clinical outcomes in ten OCD patients who had undergone a specific DBS procedure six months prior to the study.

    DBS programming was performed by Dr. Wayne Goodman, Chair of the department of psychiatry at Baylor College, and patient outcomes were periodically assessed by Dr. Eric Storch, Vice Chair of psychology, for changes in the severity of their OCD and mood symptoms.

    Then the Brigham & Women’s Hospital (BWH) team led by Dr. Andreas Horn analyzed the imaging data and provided rank predictions based solely on the neuroimaging data and stimulation parameters. This team was not involved in DBS planning or programming and did not have prior knowledge of clinical outcomes. The outcomes predicted by the BWH team closely matched the actual clinical outcomes that the Baylor team observed in these patients.

    “To our knowledge, this is the first example of such a collaborative ‘blinded’ team effort by two research centers to validate DBS therapy for a brain tract proposed on the basis of retrospective data,” co-corresponding author, Dr. Horn added. “This is also a big step in the continued optimization and improving the efficacy of DBS procedures that target this brain tract to treat OCD, even as efforts are underway to make this therapy more widely available to patients. Finally, this two-center ‘blinded’ approach could serve as a model for validating and optimizing DBS therapies for other neurological conditions in the future.”

    Others involved in the study were Ron Gadot, Ningfei Li, Ben Shofty, Michelle Avendano-Ortega, Sarah McKay, Kelly Bijanki, Megan Robinson, Garrett Banks, and Nicole Provenza. They are affiliated with one or more of the following institutions: Baylor College of Medicine, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Germany; University of Utah, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. This research was funded by the National Institutes for Health and the McNair Foundation.

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    Texas Children’s Hospital

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  • Learning to love music

    Learning to love music

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    Newswise — In an inviting space full of vibrant bold colors, fiber optic curtains, and a vibrating haptic chair, sounds of “Row Row Row Your Boat” and other popular children’s songs fill the air, and children with autism are becoming their own composers, learning to love music. 

    This is the scene in the Sensory Room at the Route 9 Library and Innovation Center, where the music is theirs to alter as they see fit. When children like what they hear, they pause to listen more closely, smile, or dance. Other children focus intently as they explore the many combinations of sound available at their fingertips. Some young listeners take delight in adding a drumbeat or fast countermelody while others seem to prefer a calmer rendition of a familiar tune. As they listen, these children learn what they like to listen to and what they don’t, providing a valuable glimpse into how they respond to musical sounds. 

    The children are piloting a listening device developed by University of Delaware researchers Daniel Stevens, a professor of music theory in the School of Music within the College of Arts and Sciences, Matthew Mauriello, assistant professor of computer and information sciences in the College of Engineering, and their respective students.

    The professors’ divergent backgrounds were a complementary match for this innovative project that aims to better the lives of children with developmental disabilities. Together, they applied for and were awarded $50,000 from the Maggie E. Neumann Health Sciences Research Fund to advance their research. The fund specifically targets interdisciplinary research and innovation that aims to improve the lives of people with disabilities.

    The device is the dream of sophomore Elise Ruggiero, a double major in music performance and psychology. Her younger brother was diagnosed with autism at age 2. 

    “I started playing violin at age 9. As I advanced in the music field and had recitals, I noticed that sitting still and listening to music was a challenge for my brother,” Ruggiero said. “When we’d go out to eat, if the restaurant was playing music too loudly, it would make him extremely anxious, and there wasn’t much we could do about it.” 

    In a freshman honors music theory class, Stevens tasked his students with solving a problem in the community. 

    “I asked students: ‘How would you like to change the world in which you live and work with your music skills?’ My challenge was met with stunned silence,” Stevens recalled.

    But students quickly got to work, reaching out to local organizations, identifying issues, and dreaming up ways to solve problems. Ruggiero used her personal experience to team up with Autism Delaware, and her idea to create an interactive music device for children with autism was ultimately selected to move forward as the class project.

    “It was really satisfying knowing that something I knew was a problem I wanted to tackle for so long is achievable,” Ruggiero said. “Seeing other people who are passionate about it too made me realize that together we can make a difference.” 

    Music theory students in Stevens’ class spent hours designing various renditions of what the team has been describing as modular music that’s modifiable to suit a child’s listening needs and preferences. 

    “Listeners with autism have real needs. Those with auditory sensitivities, for example, may be unable to participate in the formative experiences that children have singing songs with their parents or classmates, in part, because the music might be too fast, or it might have too much stimulation, or it might not have enough stimulation,” Stevens said. “Every child with autism is different, so we need to compose music that would address various needs.”

    Had a device like this existed years ago, Ruggiero said it could have helped her brother.

    “He was turned off by the idea of making music at a young age because he was so sensitive to sound,” Ruggiero said. “For other kids with autism, I want them to have the option to want to make music.”

    Mauriello joined the project shortly after its inception to help design, build and deploy the technology in the field. He’s passionate about applying computing to challenges related to social good using his background in human-computer interaction, a blend of computer science and engineering, design, and psychology. 

    “I enjoy opportunities to understand and empathize with users. This allows me to build technologies that meet their specific needs,” Mauriello said. 

    With generous support from the Maggie E. Neumann Health Sciences Research Fund, the researchers transformed an idea into a prototype. Now, a controller housed inside a white 3D-printed box with a series of presets, or light-up buttons with pictures of instruments provides a potentially infinite amount of sound combinations and aims to enhance the listening experience for children with autism. Every time a child presses a button, the sound or melody changes, sometimes slightly, other times dramatically; each interaction is recorded so Stevens and Mauriello can gather data about listening preferences and find new ways to display this data back to composers to help them create more suitable music. 

    “We want to understand the way children with autism hear the world and interact with music by looking at the larger patterns that start to emerge in the data,” Stevens said. “Music is such a rich artform, and yet we hear it so frequently, we take for granted melody, harmony, texture, rhythm and all these elements that work together to make every listening experience enjoyable. When it comes to listeners with autism, every sound is up for grabs. It’s been really rewarding to think about how music can serve the listener. The needs of this particular group of listeners invite us to think creatively about how sounds can be manipulated and designed to meet their needs.” 

    That’s an area of particular interest to Simon Brugel. The sophomore computer science major, who’s on the spectrum, brings personal experience to the project. He said he is sensitive to loud noises. 

    “I don’t like squeaking or alarms,” Brugel said. “I can notice some subtle sounds others might not notice, and I prefer some instruments over others.” 

    Brugel helped design and write the software for the prototype and never expected to work on a project with potential for broad impact this early in his college career.  

    “It’s satisfying to know that my creations are having an impact on the community or the advancement of research,” Brugel said. 

    By participating in this interdisciplinary research, Mauriello wants his students to understand that computing technology can serve diverse populations. 

    “To help broaden participation in computing, we need to demonstrate that computing can have an impact on diverse problems that are facing society,” Mauriello said. “This project offers a nice opportunity for that as computer science and engineering students work with music students to build something that can have a real impact on the world.” 

    Abby Von Ohlen, a sophomore music education major, loved playing a role in this project and watching the idea blossom.  

    “Seeing this idea come to fruition has been such a good experience,” Von Ohlen said. “I’ve always been able to enjoy music and not be overstimulated by it. It’s interesting to see that even just changing one track or sound level can affect someone. It’s fulfilling to know that others will be able to enjoy music as much as I do.” 

    Ruggiero has observed initial trials for the device and said feedback has shown the device can be engaging and might be more attractive to children if it looked more like a toy. 

    “A parent of one of the children suggested that he might enjoy the device more if it was shaped like a fire truck that they could wheel around while listening to music,” Ruggiero said. “If it was more physically appealing, it might make kids more inclined to play with it.” 

    For older children, Ruggiero envisions an app being useful. 

    “If a teen or adult is out in public and something bothers them, they can modify it or use their own music on their phone to calm themselves, I would love that,” she said. 

    Through working on this project, Ruggiero got a lot more than she ever dreamed of in her first year of college. She had simply hoped to meet new friends and become well-adjusted to college life.  

    “I was not expecting to have my idea go as far as it’s gone. It makes me so happy and excited,” she said.

    Now, she’s dreaming of a career in music therapy.

    “This project made me interested in the research aspects of music and psychology,” she said. “I want to work with people on the spectrum and make music more accessible to them.” 

    Ultimately, Mauriello and Stevens said they hope the music listening device becomes a permanent fixture in the Route 9 Library’s sensory room. They also hope to incorporate the device in music and special education classes.  

    “The research is very clear — music participation is incredibly important to a child’s social and emotional formation, their motor development, and their interactions with family members, other children and their community,” Stevens said. “We’re inspired to make formative, engaging, participatory musical experiences accessible to every child with autism in our state and beyond over time.”

    For more information on the project, . 

    About the fund

    Maggie E. Neumann Health Sciences Research Fund was established in 2020 to support research designed to improve health and quality of life outcomes for children and adults with physical and developmental disabilities. While the fund resides at the College of Health Sciences, the intent is to support interdisciplinary research across all colleges.

    The research fund was created with a gift from Donald J. Puglisi and Marichu C. Valencia in honor of their granddaughter, Maggie E. Neumann. Puglisi is a member of UD’s Board of Trustees and they both serve on the President’s Leadership Council.

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    University of Delaware

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  • Study finds higher risk of sleep problems in gay, lesbian, and bisexual youth

    Study finds higher risk of sleep problems in gay, lesbian, and bisexual youth

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    Newswise — Toronto, ON – A new national study, published in LGBT Health, finds that lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) youth are twice as likely to report trouble falling or staying asleep than their straight peers. Greater depression, stress, and family conflict contribute to the sleep problems of LGB youth.

    “Young people who identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual may face discrimination and negative attitudes because of their sexual orientation. These experiences can make it harder for them to get a good night’s sleep,” says lead author, Jason Nagata, MD, assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco. “Difficulties getting along with family, feeling sad and hopeless, and being under a lot of pressure could all make it hard for lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth to sleep well.”

    The researchers analyzed data from 8563 youth ages 10-14 years old who are part of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, the largest long-term study of brain development and child health in the United States. Data were collected from 2018-2020. The youth and their parents answered questions about their sleep habits and youth were asked about their sexual orientation. Youth who were questioning their sexuality (e.g., who replied “maybe” to being gay, lesbian, or bisexual) also had greater risk for sleep problems compared to their straight peers.

    “Families should provide support by being present and encouraging young people’s exploration of their identity and development of a sense of self,” said co-author, Kyle T. Ganson, PhD, assistant professor at the University of Toronto’s Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work. “Adolescent development is a challenging time for many given the social pressures and physical, psychological, and emotional changes that occur. Understanding this process and being present to support it is crucial for positive health outcomes.”

    “Getting enough sleep is crucial for teenagers because it helps their body and mind grow and develop properly,” Nagata says. “To sleep well, teenagers should follow a consistent sleep routine, make sure their sleeping environment is comfortable, and avoid using electronic devices before going to bed.”

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    University of Toronto

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  • How preservice teachers argue about controversial issues

    How preservice teachers argue about controversial issues

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    Newswise — Mandatory vaccination, climate change, energy transition: topics at the interface between science and society are often controversial. Science teachers should teach their students to engage with such topics in a differentiated way so that they can make informed decisions and take responsibility. But how well can the future teachers do this themselves? Dr. Nina Minkley from the Behavioural Biology and Biology Education group at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, together with Professor Moritz Krell and Dr. Carola Garrecht from the Leibniz Institute for Science and Mathematics Education in Kiel, investigated this question with 76 prospective biology teachers. The team’s conclusion: the structural complexity of their argumentation was good. In terms of content complexity, however, they could include a broader range of content areas and perspectives in their argumentation. The researchers report in the International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education of 15. March 2023.

    Should there be a mandatory vaccination against COVID-19?

    The topic of the argumentation that the 76 participants wrote down as part of the study was a possible mandatory vaccination against COVID-19. The study took place in spring 2021, at a time when there was still a shortage of vaccine, but mandatory vaccination was already being discussed.

    On the question of whether there should be a mandatory vaccination against COVID-19, the participants positioned themselves in different ways. “In terms of the structural complexity of their argumentation, they reached a relatively high level and justify their position with several arguments. Around a third even included possible counter-positions in their own argumentation,” reports Nina Minkley.

    Content complexity is only reflected to a limited extent

    However, it was also noticeable that the participants were less confident regarding the content complexity, that is, the consideration of different content areas such as politics, ethics, and social sciences. Here, the participants only considered two of the possible six content areas on average.

    “We also found that those who supported mandatory vaccination most often referred to scientific and ethical arguments, such as protecting others. They rarely used political arguments. Those who argued against mandatory vaccination were slightly less likely to argue with scientific and ethical reasons, but referred much more to political arguments,” says Nina Minkley.

    The researchers recommend that the ability to argue about issues at the interface between science and society should be better embedded in the training of future teachers. “There are many perspectives on such issues, and ideally teachers should be exposed to the full breadth in order to be able to teach this skill to their students, too,” the team says.

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    Ruhr-Universitat Bochum

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  • Diet and exercise programs alone won’t tackle childhood obesity

    Diet and exercise programs alone won’t tackle childhood obesity

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    Newswise — Focusing on immediate fixes such as diet and exercise programs alone won’t curb the tide of childhood obesity, according to a new study that for the first time maps the complex pathways that lead to obesity in childhood.

    Coordinated by the University of Sydney’s Charles Perkins Centre the study finds children whose parents did not complete high school and who live with social disadvantage, were more likely to be affected by overweight or obesity in mid-adolescence. High school completion is a strong indicator of socio-economic status.

    These factors were ‘on ramps’ which flow down to influence the body mass index (BMI) of parents, in turn providing immediate lifestyle impacts (diet, sedentary time) on a child’s risk of developing obesity.  

    Paediatrician Professor Louise Baur of the University of Sydney said the research explains why most current public health policies to prevent childhood obesity have had limited success.

    “We tend to ignore the root causes of childhood obesity which include social disadvantage, and of course, this is not something parents or children choose for themselves,” said Professor Baur, co-author from the University’s Charles Perkins Centre.

    “While healthy eating and activity interventions are important, the solutions lie not just in the domain of health departments. We need to see many government departments working together to consider how to make structural changes to reduce social inequality if we want to change Australia’s current trajectory.”

    Other interesting findings from the research include how different drivers of obesity play out at different life stages, particularly the influence of free time activity after the age of eight.

    There are also different influences on how free time is spent and influenced for boys versus girls. For boys, more electronic gaming leads to less active free time. For girls, better sleep quality leads to longer sleep time and more active free time.

    Obesity in children

    Childhood obesity occurs when a child is significantly overweight for their age and height. It can lead to a higher risk of cardiovascular disease, insulin resistance, psychological effects and even premature death.

    In Australia, 1 in 4 school-aged children and adolescents are affected by overweight or obesity, with 1 in 12 affected by obesity. It is more common in those living in regional and remote areas, those from lower socioeconomic areas, those from one-parent families and those with a disability.

    How was the study conducted?

    The study, published in BMC Medicine today, drew on data from ‘Growing up in Australia: The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children,’ a nationally representative sample of over 10,000 Australian Children.

    The team of leading scientists and clinicians­­—bringing together the fields of data science, biology, paediatrics and public health—spent close to two years using state-of-the-art statistical modelling (Bayesian network modelling) and informed analysis to untangle a complex web of on-ramps and causal factors, many of which interplay.

    Senior author Professor Sally Cripps of the University of Technology Sydney said the knowledge gained from this study is vital for policy makers moving forward and could not have been achieved without this diverse skill-set.

    “This is a truly multidisciplinary piece of research. Data alone is never enough to uncover the complex set of interacting factors which lead to childhood obesity. But by combining the skills of mathematicians and computer scientists with obesity and nutritional experts we have been able to predict and model what has never been clearly articulated before – showing the complex interplay between multiple upstream, downstream and causal factors, and how these play out over time for children and families,” said Cripps, Director of Technology at the Human Technology Institute.

    Lead author and statistician Wanchuang Zhu, also of the University of Technology Sydney and an affiliate of the Charles Perkins Centre said: “To our knowledge this is first time anyone has used the advanced statistical network modelling to analyse the complex factors that lead to childhood obesity. It provides us with a much more complete picture.”

    Key findings

    • Childhood obesity is largely a by-product of socio-economic status
    • Parental high school levels (both paternal and maternal) serve as on-ramps to childhood obesity
    • When children are aged 2 to 4 years the causal pathway is: socio-economic status/parental high school level -> parental BMI -> child BMI
    • When children are aged 8 to 10 years an additional pathway emerged focused on how children spend their leisure time: parental high school level /socio economic status -> electronic games ->free time activity-> child BMC
    • The upstream influences on free time activity were different in boys compared with girls.
    • The strong and independent link between parent’s BMIs and childhood BMI suggests a biological link—high weight runs in families, and this is in part because of shared genes.

    The work is a collaboration between scientists and clinicians from the University of Sydney, University of Technology Sydney and CSIRO – brought together by the Charles Perkins Centre, a research initiative committed to collaborative and multidisciplinary research to tackle obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and related conditions.

    “This study is exactly why the Charles Perkins Centre was founded, to bring together people with special skill sets from different academic and clinical backgrounds to find new ways of thinking about and solving the most complex challenges of our time,” said Professor Stephen Simpson, Academic Director of the Charles Perkins Centre and Executive Director of Obesity Australia.

    The authors express sincere gratitude to the families who contributed their data and acknowledge the generous support of Paul Ramsay Foundation.

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    University of Sydney

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  • Workers’ and bosses’ trust in teleworking is key

    Workers’ and bosses’ trust in teleworking is key

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    Newswise — In recent years, teleworking – spurred by the implementation of information and communication technologies and the recent pandemic, particularly – has become a feature of many jobs. Many companies have now made this form of working available to their employees, but it is still far from common practice in today’s labour market.

    Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) researchers have analysed the different perspectives and perceptions on teleworking, looking  at the wide range of factors that affect it, including the psychosocial aspects, productivity or costs. “We explore and examine different models to identify the factors affecting – positively or negatively – performance of employees teleworking, showing how trust, excessive workloads, social isolation and work-related fatigue impact their performance,” said Pilar Ficapal-Cusí, associate professor at the UOC’s Faculty of Economics and Business and one of the study’s lead authors.

    Research into the topic has shown that teleworking has a positive impact on the individual, group and organizational performance of companies and organizations. More specifically, comparative studies have shown that teleworkers feel more productive and display lower levels of fatigue. 

    Nevertheless, other studies also indicate that the very conditions of teleworking may lead to an intensification of work and, consequently, prolonged mental or physical effort impacting staff efficiency and performance levels. “These results raise a dilemma, since, on the one hand, we see favourable conditions and beneficial effects, but, on the other, there may be a dysfunctional impact and limitations on optimal staff performance,” said Ficapal-Cusí, also member of the UOC’s i2TIC research group.

     

    The pros and cons of teleworking

    After analysing data on more than 200 employees at different Spanish companies that have implemented teleworking, the authors saw that, if these employees trust in teleworking, they have the perception that it will help them to be more productive. If, however, they do not trust this kind of labour relationship, this perception of performance is diminished, which could also lead to social isolation or work-related fatigue problems.

    “Fatigue is the factor that has the greatest (negative) effect on teleworking performance, followed by trust, which is positive, and social isolation, which is once again negative,” she said.

    In this context, the term “trust” means that teleworkers have a perception of support from their superiors, that this form of working does not negatively impact recognition of their contributions or their career progression. “Trust in teleworking establishes favourable conditions for fostering it and obtaining optimal performance from teleworking employees. Whereas, a lack of trust can lead to and accentuate the negative impact of social and professional isolation, as – given that there is less perception of social support – it may undermine the positive effects of telework.”

    It is here that the absence of social connectivity is a significant variable in individual performance. Whilst it is true that a reduction in irrelevant interactions and the availability of more time leads to greater effectiveness, if employees suffer from a feeling of isolation, this can negatively impact their on-the-job performance.

    “Social isolation refers to an individual’s feelings of a lack of inclusion or connection at work. Isolated employees have less trust in their skills and knowledge and have few opportunities to interact with colleagues, as well as a diminished capacity to manage things. That’s why the role of managers is essential in facilitating the effective social integration of staff who telework.”

    There are also other factors, such as overworking and work-related fatigue, which can negatively affect people’s mindsets and productivity. Work-related fatigue is extreme tiredness experienced during and at the end of the working day that diminishes employee’s physical and mental capabilities. “If someone feels they cannot deal with the demands of the job due to its complexity, time pressures or the great effort required to complete tasks, this gives rise to an overload of work, which is an antecedent to work-related fatigue.”

    Indeed, there is plenty of data pointing to how teleworkers who work very intensely, both at home and at work, can experience higher levels of exhaustion.

     

    The implementation of teleworking in Spain

    It is estimated that, in Spain, one in six people in employment teleworks: between 14% and 17% – according to the latest figures from the Survey on Information and Communication Technology Equipment and Usage in the Home, published by Spain’s National Statistics Institute (INE) – although demand for it is far greater. “Teleworking is seen as a tool for attracting and retaining talent. However, it still needs to overcome a number of hurdles for it to become widespread, as it calls for some effort on the part of public administrations, companies and workers.”

    According to the authors of the UOC study, trust in telework and in the organization promoting it needs to be the cornerstone of its on-the-ground implementation. This means that companies and other organizations need to focus on creating trust, ensuring visibility and supporting the career progression of teleworkers, so as to enhance their performance. “Trust is key in adapting to teleworking, and also reduces any feeling of isolation or fatigue.” 

    In this regard, to ensure effective implementation, it is also important to address perceptions of isolation and loneliness on the part of employees through the implementation of certain practices. “Face-to-face interaction, the ongoing exchange of information and leadership training have all been highlighted as good practices for preventing isolation.”

    Nevertheless, it should be borne in mind that teleworking is currently closely associated with technology-dependent professions, and its implementation in certain kinds of jobs is still far from being a reality. “Its use in other sectors requiring a degree of onsite working is more problematic and will call for new formulas.”

    “Distance management and an organizational design for a smooth transition to teleworking require bolstering employees’ trust in teleworking and in the organization behind it, and establishing mechanisms to minimize feelings of social isolation and fatigue,” concluded Ficapal-Cusí.

    This UOC research supports Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 3, Good Health and Well-being, and 8, Decent Work and Economic Growth.

     

    Reference

    Ficapal-Cusí, Pilar; Torrent-Sellens, Joan; Palos-Sanchez, Pedro, and González-González, Inés. (2023). The telework performance dilemma: exploring the role of trust, social isolation and fatigue. International Journal of Manpower. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1108/IJM-08-2022-0363

     

    UOC R&I

    The UOC’s research and innovation (R&I) is helping overcome pressing challenges faced by global societies in the 21st century by studying interactions between technology and human & social sciences with a specific focus on the network society, e-learning and e-health.

    Over 500 researchers and more than 50 research groups work in the UOC’s seven faculties, its eLearning Research programme and its two research centres: the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) and the eHealth Center (eHC).

    The university also develops online learning innovations at its eLearning Innovation Center (eLinC), as well as UOC community entrepreneurship and knowledge transfer via the Hubbik platform.

    Open knowledge and the goals of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development serve as strategic pillars for the UOC’s teaching, research and innovation. More information: research.uoc.edu.

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    Universitat Oberta De Catalunya (UOC)

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  • Inmates With Opioid Addiction Report Peer Navigators Are Crucial for Successful Community Reentry

    Inmates With Opioid Addiction Report Peer Navigators Are Crucial for Successful Community Reentry

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    Newswise — Recently incarcerated people with opioid use disorder have trust in working with peer support specialists who recovered from addiction and faced similar life experiences, according to a Rutgers study.

    The study, published in the journal Psychiatric Services, found that peer support specialists were most valued for providing emotional and community-based addiction recovery support as well as housing and employment information — crucial when going back into the community.

    More than half of people incarcerated in state prisons have been diagnosed with a substance use disorder, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. They are most vulnerable in the months following their release, when they are at high risk of unemployment, homelessness, recidivism and overdose.

    “The risk of a fatal drug overdose in the two weeks after release is 129 times that of the general population, in part because of the high risk of relapse and the loss of drug tolerance while incarcerated,” said Margaret Swarbrick, associate director of the Center of Alcohol & Substance Use Studies at Rutgers, research professor at the Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology and an author of the study.

    The researchers interviewed 39 adult inmates diagnosed with an opioid use disorder who worked with peer support specialists upon their release from a New Jersey state prison between July 2020 and April 2021. Thirty completed a follow-up interview about four months later.

    They found that participants appreciated working with someone with a shared life experience with whom they could establish a trusting relationship. However, they reported that policy barriers to recovery and community reintegration presented challenges to meeting certain needs, such as housing, food, employment and access to timely medical and recovery services, even with the peer navigator’s assistance.

    Participants reported the peer support specialists were most valued for providing emotional support and housing and employment information and for navigating barriers to medical and community-based treatment. This was especially true for people with a conviction for drug distribution charges, which precludes access to resources for housing and employment, according to Michael Enich, an M.D.-Ph.D candidate at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, who reported on the findings.

    “Studies have shown that trained peer support specialists who have experienced addiction, incarceration or both, who assist newly released offenders significantly improve the success rates of their reentry into society, especially when it comes to mental health treatment and sobriety,” said Enich. “However, few studies have examined the role of peer services for substance use disorders during the early months after prison release.”

    Many participants viewed their peer navigators as role models who have overcome similar challenges, which was valued especially when they felt at risk of relapse, said Stephen Crystal, director of the Center for Health Services Research at Rutgers Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research and an author of the study. “Having someone who was there for them ‘no matter what’ and whom they could call at any time was the most important aspect of the program as it gave them a sense of security,” said Crystal, who is also Board of Governors Professor at Rutgers School of Social Work.

    The participants reported the most effective peer health navigators were empathetic, open-minded and good listeners.

    The authors said more research is needed to rigorously examine the long-term impact of peer services on factors such as overdose reduction, treatment engagement and sustained recovery.

    Other Rutgers researchers involved in the study are Peter Treitler, Leigh Belsky and Micah Hillis.

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    Rutgers University-New Brunswick

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  • East and West Germans show preference for different government systems 30 years on

    East and West Germans show preference for different government systems 30 years on

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    Newswise — Even after 27 years of reunification, East Germans are still more likely to be pro-state support than their Western counterparts, a new study published in the De Gruyter journal German Economic Review finds. Of the sample studied, 48% of respondents from the East said it was the government’s duty to support the family compared to 35% from the West. 

    The study led by Prof. Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln of Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany builds on her earlier work which evaluated results from the German Socio-Economic Panel, a regular survey of around 15,000 households. The survey has been running in the federal states that made up West Germany since 1984 and in those of the former East Germany since 1990.

    In 1997 and 2002, respondents were asked who they thought should provide financial protection for groups such as families, the elderly, the sick and disabled, and so on, using a scale from one (only the state) to five (only private forces). This question was asked again in 2017, allowing Fuchs-Schündeln and the paper’s co-author Mariia Bondar to see how preferences were further changing over time.  

    West and East Germans have been moving towards a common level of preference for state support over the years. However, the extra results from 2017 indicate this rate of convergence is slowing. “In our original study, we concluded that if the convergence continued at its original pace we wouldn’t see any differences in one or two generations,” said Fuchs-Schündeln. “However, that wasn’t the case.”

    Interestingly, East German preferences for more state support appear to be passed on to the next generation. The researchers found that people born between 1990 and 1999 (that is, after reunification) who had at least one parent from the former GDR were significantly more likely to think that it was the state’s responsibility to provide financial security for families and the elderly. “That means that living under different systems can have really long-lasting effects on preferences, which are passed down from one generation to the next,” said Fuchs-Schündeln.

    These results highlight that even though unification happened in 1990, key differences still survive. “It’s a bit of a call for action on how we can generate a more unified Germany,” said Fuchs-Schündeln. “It tells us we shouldn’t take it for granted that separation is not a topic anymore.”

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    De Gruyter

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  • Health Care Providers Rarely Ask Patients About Access to Firearms

    Health Care Providers Rarely Ask Patients About Access to Firearms

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    Newswise — Health care providers rarely ask patients if they have access to firearms in their home – a question that could diminish the risk of serious injury or death and encourage conversations about secure firearm storage, according to a Rutgers study.

    However, according to a study in Preventive Medicine, led by the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center at Rutgers, health care providers rarely screen their patients for firearm access.

    Researchers surveyed 3,510 English-speaking adults in five states: Colorado, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Jersey and Texas, asking if a health care provider had ever asked them whether they have access to firearms.

    They found that 17.1 percent of participants had been asked by a health care provider about firearm access. This number was largely consistent across groups, with 20.1 percent of those with children 17 years old or younger, 25.5 percent of those with a history of mental health treatment and 21.4 percent of firearm owners ever having been screened for firearm access.

    “Although we know that firearm access increases the risk for fatal injury for everyone in the home, health care providers are rarely asking about firearm access,” said Allison Bond, a doctoral student at the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center and the lead author of the study. “In order to prevent these injuries and deaths, healthcare providers need consider adding screening for firearm access into standard practice so that they are better positioned to then provide resources on secure firearm storage to the families that would most benefit from that information.”

    Researchers also examined which factors were associated with greater odds of having been screened by a health care provider for firearm access.

    They found that individuals with a lifetime history of suicidal thoughts, men, those who identified as white, parents with children 17 years old or younger living in the home, those with a history of mental health treatment and firearm owners were more likely to have been screened.

    Among firearm owners, those with children in the home ages 17 or younger and those with a history of mental health treatment were more likely to have been screened. Even among groups with greater odds of having been screened, the majority of individuals had never been asked about firearm access.

    “Given these results, it appears that screening is more likely among certain health care providers, like pediatricians and mental health care providers,” said Michael Anestis, executive director of the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center, an associate professor in the Rutgers School of Public Health and senior author of the study. “It may also be that health care providers are often relying upon their sense of who is most likely to own a firearm when making a decision whether or not to ask.”

    “The problem with that, however, is that the demographics of firearm ownership have changed in the past few years and many of those at greatest risk for firearm injury or death never present in specialized mental health care settings,” said Anestis. “We need health care providers to broaden their vision of the role of firearm access to ensure they can help the greatest number of people.”

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    Rutgers University-New Brunswick

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  • Is it Dangerous for My Teenager to Turn to TikTok for Medical Advice?

    Is it Dangerous for My Teenager to Turn to TikTok for Medical Advice?

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    BYLINE: Dr. Angelia Spurgin

    Ochsner Health blog

    Newswise — “I’m so worried,” “I can’t focus,” “I’m just so down,” “I just don’t know what’s wrong with me.” These are common phrases psychologists regularly hear from children and adolescents in our communities. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there is a substantial increase in mental health crises for youth in the United States, especially those in underserved communities. ADHD, depression, anxiety, eating disorders and substance abuse are the most diagnosed mental disorders among teenagers, with depression and suicide reaching their highest levels in a decade.

    Treatment rates vary among disorders, with the National Institutes of Health reporting roughly one in four youth receive mental health services. Various limitations contribute to a lack of seeking treatment: limited access in the community, finances, stigma associated with mental health and fear of judgment. As a result, teenagers seek alternative methods to help with their mental health challenges.

    What alternative methods are teens using?

    Today, social media is a powerful influence on teen culture. According to the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, roughly 90% of teens have used social media, with 51% reporting they visit it daily. On average, teens are online for approximately nine hours per day. YouTube was reported to be the most popular site among teenagers, followed by TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat.

    A newer trend currently amongst teens includes seeking social media therapy. It has been reported the term “mental health” has been searched on TikTok over 67 billion times. Teenagers regularly turn to social media platforms to find support for their mental health struggles. Most teens view social media as a safe place to talk or vent about what is going on in their lives. They find helpful coping resources, there is minimal judgment associated with researching mental health via social media and they often feel validated in their struggles when hearing from peers experiencing similar challenges. Additionally, access to social media far surpasses access to a trained mental health professional in their community. Social media usage can be helpful when done responsibly; however, significant limitations pose potential dangers to teens.

    Why can seeking medical advice on social media be a bad thing?

    Many social media influencers are not trained professionals in mental health; these influencers do not have the background to provide accurate diagnoses. Additionally, there is no guarantee of confidentiality, the information on social media is traditionally not vetted by a trained professional and the skills/resources provided are not guaranteed to be evidence-based treatments. Self-diagnosis can be a slippery slope, especially for teenagers. Most social media platforms operate from an algorithm that organizes content based on an individual’s searches.

    Therefore, when searching for information on mental health, one runs the chance of having their feed flooded with various mental health topics, which may lead to further over-diagnosing of themselves and their symptoms. When seeking mental health treatment, connecting with someone trained in the diagnosis and appropriate treatment is important.

    What signs should I look for in my child’s mental health?

    For caregivers, it is crucial to be aware of their teen’s screen time and social media usage. High levels of time spent online may impact overall mental health and contribute to sleeping challenges, decreased academic performance, reduced social time with others, limited physical activity, weight or mood problems, or lower self-esteem or body image issues. Additionally, guardians need to be aware of their teen’s mental health. Signs to be aware of may include the following:

    • Changes in sleep, weight, eating habits or other everyday patterns
    • Loss of interest in the things they previously enjoyed
    • Withdrawing more than usual from friends or family
    • Academic struggles that seem different or more intense
    • Excessive thoughts or worries they can’t stop.
    • Refusing to talk about what’s bothering them, even after you’ve made it as safe as possible to discuss hard issues openly
    • Obsession with a specific goal, possibly with the belief that if they don’t achieve it, their life will never be the same
    • Signs of drug or alcohol use
    • Signs of self-harm, such as cuts, burns and bruises that your teen tries to hide or can’t explain fully and credibly

    How can I support my teen’s mental health?

    Here are tips for caregivers on talking to their teens about mental health from the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry:

    • Make it safe for your child to discuss challenging issues with you. Kids often avoid discussing touchy subjects, especially if they expect to be judged, lectured or punished. Confirm that your teen can tell you anything if you still need to clarify this. Emphasize that these conversations will take place in a judgment-free zone. Explain that you want to understand what they’re going through and provide loving support.
    • Resolve to listen more than you speak. Nothing will send your teen running the other way faster than failing to see and hear them fully. It would help to manage your fears during the conversation to avoid autobiographical listening. This happens when you filter everything through your life lens instead of listening for deep understanding.
    • Consider ways to avoid putting your teen on the defensive. Naturally, you can’t be sure how they will react when you ask about their mental health. But fair, factual statements are usually best. Instead of saying, “You’ve been acting strange these past few weeks,” you could start with an example: “I noticed you hate coming down to dinner lately – and you don’t seem hungry at other times. I wondered if something in your life is making it hard for you to enjoy the stuff you usually love, like my killer oatmeal cookies.”
    • Accept some silence. Your child might not know what to say, especially if they’ve been trying to hide their feelings or manage things independently. People having mental health struggles often feel shame and fear on top of everything else. This can make it hard to open up to anyone (even someone they trust). Although you’re worried, you can wait for them to think about what they want you to know. If they don’t return to you independently, restart the conversation in a few days.
    • Realize that mental health stigma still exists. Despite much progress, some people still believe that having a mental health condition means someone is broken, untrustworthy or potentially violent. Many don’t seek mental health treatment because they fear what others will think of them.

    Additional points to keep in mind:

    • Mental health is a key part of human health. Caregivers and teens do not need to feel ashamed or fearful in seeking treatment. It’s no different from getting care for a broken bone, a serious infection, or other health concerns.
    • Try not to blame yourself for your child’s struggles. Life is hard, and kids are doing their best to manage the pressures they face (just as you are, too). Show compassion for yourself and your child as you move forward.
    • Even if you have a history of mental health issues, you are not the root cause of your child’s difficulties. Showing love, trust and respect for yourself and your teen is the healthiest way to ensure you both find the necessary resources.

    Are there any resources available?

    If you or someone you know has a mental illness, is struggling emotionally, or has concerns about their mental health, there are ways to get help. Use these resources to find support for your teen, a friend or a family member.

    To schedule your own interview with Dr. Angelia Spurgin, pediatric psychologist, .

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  • Screen Time Tied to Suicide Risk for Tweens – But Don’t Panic

    Screen Time Tied to Suicide Risk for Tweens – But Don’t Panic

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    Newswise — No one can blame parents for being spooked by new research finding that tweens’ risk of suicidal behavior increases with their amount of screen time. However, lead researcher Jason Nagata, MD, of UCSF Benioff Children Hospitals, says that caregivers should view these findings mostly as a reminder to ingrain healthy screen use habits in their kids as early as possible.

    So your study found that screen use increases suicide risk?

    The more time kids spend using screens from ages 9 to 11 years old, the higher their odds of suicidal behaviors two years later, at ages 11 to 13. Specifically, each additional hour of screen time increased the risk by 9%. The risk was highest with texting, followed by video chatting, watching videos, and playing video games. Social media didn’t show an effect, but that may be because, technically, kids aren’t allowed to be on social media platforms until they are 13 (though some still are), so we didn’t have as much data there.

    What does “suicidal behavior” mean?

    It means thinking about suicide, with or without a specific plan, as well as attempting suicide. We weren’t able to separate attempts versus types of thoughts in this study. I should also note that, overall, suicidal behavior was uncommon in these young kids, occurring in just 1.38% of the 11,633 kids we studied. The risk of suicidal behavior tends to increase with age, so this could be seen as an early warning sign.

    Why does screen time increase suicidal behavior?

    Time spent on screens often displaces time spent on in-person socializing, physical activity and sleep – all of which are good for mental health. Screen usage can lead to cyberbullying, poor eating habits, isolation and disrupted sleep – all of which can worsen mental health. It also increases exposure to potentially anxiety-provoking or otherwise distressing content.

    Is all screen time bad for tweens?

    Screens can be helpful in some cases, like for kids who, say, are LGBTQ and don’t have real-life access to support, and to stay in touch with friends and family who live far away. I’d say it’s about being thoughtful about how kids engage with screens and keeping an eye on what they consume.

    What can parents do to help kids use screens safely?

    It’s important for parents to do what’s developmentally appropriate. For older teens, it’s about giving advice. With younger children, preteens and young teens, it makes sense to have a more hands-on approach, like using parental controls and keeping them off social media until they are 13. This time, during early adolescence, is when you set the behaviors that will help kids develop healthy screen habits later on.

    What healthy screen habits do you recommend for tweens?

    • Avoid screens before bedtime. We know screen use interferes with sleep, and good sleep is so important for mental health.
       
    • Avoid snacking while using screens, to make eating more intentional; and no use of screens during family meals. That helps keep family time about connection, and also helps parents monitor their kids’ eating, which is important because screen overuse is connected to disordered eating, a mental health issue.
       
    • Parents can also establish screen-free zones, like bathrooms and bedrooms. Kids are less likely to get into violent or harmful content in public spaces in the home.
       
    • Parents should try to model all these behaviors for their kids, which can be the hardest part.

    What questions are you still trying to answer about screen time and suicide risk?

    One is whether screen use causes suicidality, or whether the increased odds of suicide is because kids who are already depressed are more prone to using screens. With this paper, we see a little more evidence that it’s screens leading to suicidal behavior, because we adjusted for mental health at baseline and we looked at the kids two years later.

    Another question is, how can we identify the 1% of kids who might tip into suicidality? We need to learn more about the type of content they consume and how it might play a role.

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    University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)

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  • Emergency department visits for attempted suicides rose globally among youth during pandemic

    Emergency department visits for attempted suicides rose globally among youth during pandemic

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    Newswise — Calgary, AB – Even though pediatric emergency department visits decreased greatly overall during the COVID-19 pandemic, a newly published study led out of the University of Calgary shows there was also a sharp increase in emergency department visits for attempted suicide and suicide ideation among children and adolescents in that same period of social isolation. 

    Dr. Sheri Madigan, a clinical psychologist in the Department of Psychology, is the lead author on the study, published today (March 9) in Lancet Psychiatry, which provides a meta-analysis of 42 studies representing over 11 million pediatric emergency department visits across 18 countries, comparing the data on visits prior to the pandemic with those that took place during the pandemic, up to July 2021. 

    The numbers show that while there was a 32 per cent reduction in pediatric emergency department visits for any health-related reasons during the pandemic, there was still a 22 per cent increase in children and adolescents going to emergency departments for suicide attempts, and an eight per cent increase in visits for suicide ideation.  

    Madigan says, “What this 22% increase means is that in an average emergency department setting, there were 102 child and adolescent visits per month for suicide attempts before the COVID-19 pandemic, which increased to 125 per month during the pandemic.”

    While Madigan is, of course, troubled by these findings, they don’t necessarily come as a shock. In the summer of 2021, her research team led a study which found that depression and anxiety symptoms doubled in children and adolescents during the first year of the pandemic, and she cautioned it was a global mental health crisis. 

    These new concerning findings seem to bear witness to that warning. 

    “In our earlier work on mental health in the pandemic, we determined that kids were in crisis, and that we needed to bolster services and resources, or it was going to get worse,” says Madigan, who is a Canada Research Chair in Determinants of Child Development. “There’s been a debate during the pandemic as to whether the kids are alright or not alright. Now that more data have been published and analyzed, we can more precisely answer that question. The kids are, in fact, not alright.”

    At face value, there seems to be a confusing discrepancy between the overall reduction in pediatric emergency department visits during the pandemic, on the one hand, and the spike in visits associated with suicide attempts and suicide ideation, on the other. But, beneath the surface, it makes perfect sense, says Madigan, who co-authored the Lancet Psychiatry study with researchers from The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) in Toronto, the University of Ottawa, and University College Dublin. 

    Fear of COVID-19 infection and other factors kept people away from emergency departments for most health conditions during the pandemic. But in that same period the proven risk factors for mental illness for children and adolescents increased dramatically. Children’s screen time rose greatly during the pandemic as physical activity levels dwindled. Many families were in turmoil as jobs were lost, family violence increased, and the mental health of parents deteriorated. 

    “These are all accelerants to mental distress,” says Madigan. “Children have an ability to show resilience in difficult times, but they were pushed past what is tolerable, beyond their capacity-to-cope threshold. And now, far more kids and teens are in crisis then was the case before the pandemic.” 

    The researchers included studies published between January 2020 and July 2021 that contained data on pediatric emergency department visits before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, up to the summer of 2021. 

    Because ongoing studies on the more recent administrative health data have yet to be published, Madigan says the Lancet Psychiatry article findings provide the clearest snapshot of the pandemic up to about July 2021. Madigan says: “We will continue to monitor the incoming data to see if this trend of increasing emergency department visits for suicide attempts and suicide ideation among children and adolescents continues to climb as the pandemic changes and evolves.”  

    Before the pandemic, says Madigan, about one in five children worldwide were experiencing some form of mental illness, but only 25 per cent in serious need of treatment received it. As mental health stressors escalated overwhelmingly during the pandemic, the need for mental health resources increased in kind, and services and supports are still insufficient to meet the overwhelming demand for mental health treatment. 

    “We can’t ignore that the mental health of children and adolescents is in crisis,” Madigan says. “We need to prioritize the creation of mental health resources, supports, and services now, to help children shift from languishing to flourishing.” To do so, she suggests that governments need to invest in community resources and infrastructure to support the identification and treatment of mental illness, as well as school programs that focus on prevention and mental health literacy.

     

    Sheri Madigan is a professor in the Department of Psychology, Faculty of Arts, and a member of Alberta Children’s Hospital Research Institute, the Owerko Centre at ACHRI, the Hotchkiss Brain Institute and the Mathison Centre of Mental Health Research and Education at the Cumming School of Medicine. She is a Tier II Canada Research Chair in Determinants of Child Development.

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    University of Calgary

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  • Celebrity sightings have a built-in contradiction

    Celebrity sightings have a built-in contradiction

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    Newswise — RIVERSIDE, Calif. — Their popularity makes celebrities easy to spot. Strangers, however, can also get mistaken for celebrities, resulting in cases of false “celebrity sightings.” In attempting to explain the contradiction, a University of California, Riverside, study reports that celebrity faces are remembered more precisely but less accurately.

    Precision, in this context, refers to how memories for a particular face resemble each other over repeated memory retrievals, which can be likened to the clustering of arrows on a target in archery. Accuracy measures how remembered faces resemble newly encountered faces — or the deviation from the target in archery.

    “What our findings say is that people might accept errors by misidentifying someone as a celebrity in the interest of securing a ‘celebrity sighting,’” said Weiwei Zhang, an associate professor of psychology, who led the study that appears in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. “Our study explains why people are good and bad at spotting celebrities and highlights the importance of assessing both memory imprecision and bias in memory performance.”

    The study tested 52 college students’ memory for morphed faces that looked like the celebrities Anne Hathaway, Brad Pitt, Zendaya Coleman, or George Clooney. The goal was to assess whether and how prior familiarity with celebrities affects participants’ memory performance. 

    The researchers collected a total of eight face stimuli: those of Hathaway, Pitt, Coleman, and Clooney, and four non-celebrity faces. Participants were first briefly presented with a photo of a celebrity or non-celebrity. After a short interval, they were presented with a test face and asked if it was the same face as the studied face (test faces were the same half the time and altered the rest of the time). For instance, if the first photo was 100% celebrity, the test face could be altered to 78% celebrity 50% of the time, Zhang said. The same procedure was followed when participants were first shown photos of non-celebrities.

    “We found that familiarity with celebrities led to sharpened and more precise memories for celebrities as compared to non-celebrities,” he said. “But it also led to impaired memory accuracy, where celebrity lookalikes or morphed faces were misremembered as celebrities.”

    According to Zhang, the findings can help explain a tradeoff in human behavior. 

    “Familiarity with celebrities in our study is key for the variance-bias tradeoff in face recognition for celebrities,” he said. “We don’t seem to do this for anyone else.”

    Bias and variance are prediction errors. The total error is the sum of these two error terms, resulting in a trade-off between the two. In machine learning, bias is the difference between the average prediction and the correct value. Variance is a measure of the spread of data points. The variance-bias tradeoff, as its name suggests, is the tradeoff between variance and bias. Finding a good balance between these prediction errors helps minimize the total error. 

    Zhang explained that human cognition appears to work like machine learning; where cognition is concerned, variance, which is the opposite of precision, and bias, which is the opposite of accuracy, would need to trade off each other to maximize the opportunity to process and represent information. 

    “The conventional wisdom is that we want our memory to be super accurate and precise,” he said. “But such a rigid memory would not be able to accommodate the variance seen in natural stimuli. For instance, with different lighting conditions, makeup, dresses, and hairstyle, a person’s look can vary greatly. Our memories have to be noisy and vague enough — high variance — to support face recognition with all the variance we find in looks. However, when our memory is vague, face recognition can fail from time to time, which is not optimal in celebrity sightings, given that we don’t want to miss encounters with celebrities. So as a solution, we introduce recognition biases in the mix. We start identifying strangers or celebrity lookalikes as celebrities as an overcorrection for vague memories.”

    Zhang is unsure if the findings have applications beyond faces — to objects and places, for example.

    “It is at least theoretically possible that the variance-bias trade off may be extended to objects and places of importance to individuals,” he said. “We think our findings may be related to déjà vu experiences in that we may have inaccurate but subjectively strong memories.”

    Next, the research team plans to conduct research to assess how memory accuracy and precision interact with each other and how these two aspects of memories are encoded in the brain.

    Zhang was joined in the study by Bo‐Yeong Won and Hyung‐Bum Park. Won is now an assistant professor of psychology at California State University Chico. Park is now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago. 

    The study was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, the lead federal agency for research on mental disorders.

    The research paper is titled “Familiarity enhances mnemonic precision but impairs mnemonic accuracy in visual working memory.”

    The University of California, Riverside is a doctoral research university, a living laboratory for groundbreaking exploration of issues critical to Inland Southern California, the state and communities around the world. Reflecting California’s diverse culture, UCR’s enrollment is more than 26,000 students. The campus opened a medical school in 2013 and has reached the heart of the Coachella Valley by way of the UCR Palm Desert Center. The campus has an annual impact of more than $2.7 billion on the U.S. economy. To learn more, visit www.ucr.edu.

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    University of California, Riverside

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  • Unconventional spellings are a ‘Badd Choyce’ for brand names

    Unconventional spellings are a ‘Badd Choyce’ for brand names

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    Newswise — COLUMBUS, Ohio – While marketers seem to love creating new brand names by deliberately misspelling real words, a new study shows that consumers almost never like this tactic.

    In a series of studies, researchers found that consumers respond less positively in a variety of ways to new products when their brand names use unconventional spellings of real words, like “Klear” instead of “Clear.”

    “People just don’t like these types of names very much,” said Jesse Walker, co-author of the study and assistant professor of marketing at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business. “Using these unconventional spellings often backfires.”

    Findings showed that consumers thought brands with these names were less sincere, according to study co-author John Costello, assistant professor of marketing at the University of Notre Dame and a PhD graduate of Ohio State.

    “Consumers see these names as just a persuasion tactic, a marketing gimmick, and that leads them to respond less positively,” Costello said.

    The study was published online recently in the Journal of Marketing.

    In one study, the researchers set up tables outside a college football stadium on two afternoons leading up to a home football game.  They had assistants pose as brand ambassadors distributing free samples of a new non-alcoholic seltzer.

    People coming to the tables were offered a choice of two seltzers.  One was always called “Deep.” The other was either called “Clear” or “Klear.”

    When presented the choice between Deep or Klear, people chose Klear only 48% of the time. But when they were offered “Clear” they chose that 62% of the time over “Deep.”

    “This was a real product choice where consumers were unaware they were participating in a study – and they clearly preferred the name with the conventional spelling,” Costello said.

    Other studies supported this result in a variety of different contexts.

    For example, in one online study, consumers selected their preference between two real food or clothing brands. The researchers chose new brands that were unlikely to be widely recognized.

    Sometimes one of the choices was a product with the true, unconventional spelling of the brand. One example was a clothing brand called “DSTLD.”  But in other cases, the researchers used the conventional spelling of the word used for the brand – in this case, “DISTILLED.”

    Results showed that participants were more likely to choose a brand when presented with the conventional spelling than when presented the real, unconventional spelling of the brand.

    Another study asked participants why they rated a brand with an unconventionally spelled name lower than one with the proper spelling.

    Results showed that participants thought the unconventional spelling was a gimmick or marketing tactic designed to make the brand seem cool or trendy. They also thought it made the brand seem less sincere – less honest, down-to-earth and wholesome.

    These findings all involved new brands, explained co-author Rebecca Reczek, professor of marketing at Ohio State. Established brands with unconventionally spelled names – like Krazy Glue or Krispy Kreme – probably won’t suffer from a backfire effect.

    “It may be that using these unconventional spellings was better accepted years ago when it was still more of a novelty,” Reczek said.

    “But now consumers just see it as a gimmick. New brands would be better off not going that route.”

    The researchers did other studies that found deliberately misspelling words can work in some limited cases, such as when the reason for selecting the name is seen as sincere, or when consumers are seeking a memorable experience – for example, a restaurant or bar. In one study, the researchers found that a bar called “Xtra Chilld Lounge” did appeal to consumers looking for a fun, memorable evening.

    But these are the exceptions, Walker said.

    “There are very few situations in which people actually like brand names with these unconventional spellings of real words,” he said.

    “But what is really interesting is that the marketing establishment doesn’t really seem to realize this.”

    In a pilot study of 100 marketing managers, the researchers found that most managers still believed that unconventional spelling in brand names was an effective tactic. And there are several recent books that still promote this approach, as well.

    “Our work shows there are many more negatives than positives for brands who try to use unconventional spellings for their names,” Costello said.

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    Ohio State University

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  • Upward trend in ‘deaths of despair’ linked to drop in religious participation, economist finds

    Upward trend in ‘deaths of despair’ linked to drop in religious participation, economist finds

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    Newswise — Over the past 20 years, the death rate from drug poisonings in the U.S. has tripled and suicide and alcoholic liver disease death rates have increased by 30 percent — particularly among middle-aged white Americans, according to studies by the National Center for Health Statistics. 

    Further evidence shows that these dramatic changes in mortality rates within American communities actually began in the late 20th century, but researchers have been unable to pinpoint a cause for these “deaths of despair.” 

    To fill that gap in understanding, Daniel Hungerman, professor of economics at the University of Notre Dame, and his co-authors studied the connection between a sharp downturn of religious participation in the late 1980s and the swift rise in deaths of white Americans ages 45 to 54 in the early 1990s. Their findings were recently issued in a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

    While the post-1999 mortality increase has justifiably attracted a large amount of attention with the introduction of OxyContin, “this change in the early 1990s is perhaps as striking but has received little attention in prior work,” the researchers explained.  

    “It’s pretty unusual for an advanced country like America to see people start dying sooner, at a younger age,” Hungerman said. “And what we found is that there is a direct correlation between the effects of religious practice and these mortality rates from alcoholism, suicide and overdose.”

    Their study highlighted how changes in religious participation can have large consequences for the health and well-being of middle-aged, white individuals, wrote Hungerman and his co-authors. 

    “Our work provides evidence that religious participation matters,” they said.
     

    Bringing the data together, comparing

    Comparing mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Multiple Cause of Death files and religiosity survey data from the General Social Survey, the researchers identified a definite correlation between the decline in religious affiliation and church attendance and the increase in deaths of despair among middle-aged white Americans that began in the late 1980s and continued through the 1990s.

    Researchers also found that states that had experienced larger declines in religious participation in the last 15 years of the century saw larger increases in deaths of despair. Notably, the decline in religious participation was not specifically driven by males or females, nor was it initially observed for non-white Americans. 

    Hungerman and his co-authors presented evidence that this decline in religious participation was driven more by a collective resistance to formal or organized religion than by changes in personal religious beliefs or spiritual habits. 

    “What happened is that they quit going to church — they stopped affiliating with religious places,” Hungerman said. “But if you ask them, ‘Do you believe in God,’ then that is still a constant. It has more to do with the social aspect of the formal participation.”

    One explanation for the decline in religious activity is the shifting relationship between religion and politics, Hungerman theorized. “There are some indications that more progressively oriented individuals stopped affiliating with religion,” he said. “Another is an increase in education — those educational gains may have led to lower participation.” 

    The causes of the decline in religiosity and religious participation are less important than the consequences, however, Hungerman said. “We’ve accepted this decline has occurred, and now we want to show what it has caused in people’s lives.” 
     

    Historical ‘shocks’ contribute to decline

    The researchers considered two additional “shocks” occurring at different times in our history that seem to have also contributed to the decrease in faith activities and increase in mortality. One was the repeal of the blue laws in the 1960s and 1970s. These laws restricted commerce during a certain time of week, typically Sunday mornings. Unlike some blue laws of today, which limit alcohol sales on Sundays, the earlier iterations prohibited all labor on that day — which allowed more people to attend church versus working or going shopping. According to the researchers, repealing the blue laws led to a 5-10 percent negative impact on weekly attendance of religious services for middle-aged Americans and increased the rate of deaths of despair by two deaths per 100,000 people.

    The second shock occurred much later with the increase of opioid use in the 1990s, particularly following the introduction of the prescription drug OxyContin in 1996 and its subsequent abuse. 

    “With these sorts of shocks occurring, we see — for the groups affected — a coinciding change in suicides, heavy drinking and drug use,” Hungerman said. “We’re seeing these relatively smaller, earlier shocks as setting the stage for the later, larger effects (sharp mortality rate increases). We use that as another piece of evidence to help us better understand this relationship between what you’re doing on Sunday morning and your health outcomes.”
     

    Cultural influence or true despair?

    Scientists have had difficulty studying the cultural or social influences in this arena, Hungerman said. “Despite the title ‘deaths of despair,’ they have struggled to see whether or not despair actually plays any role here, or if it’s just a cultural anomaly, more generally. We think our research provides novel evidence that it does.”

    Hungerman and his co-authors noted that prior studies have indicated nonreligious organizations are unable to provide the same sense of community, closeness and social service that religious traditions have typically supplied. And while they acknowledged that their study confirmed the importance of religion alone in promoting well-being, future research can be done to see if other cultural institutions — including voluntary and community activities — could have similar large-scale effects on health and mortality.

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    University of Notre Dame

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  • Diversity Training for Police Officers: One-and-Done Efforts Aren’t Enough

    Diversity Training for Police Officers: One-and-Done Efforts Aren’t Enough

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    Newswise — What explains persistent racial disparities in policing, despite police departments’ repeated investments in bias-training programs? A wide range of data indicate that police in the United States tend to stop, arrest, injure, or kill more Black people than White people. Calvin K. Lai (Washington University in St. Louis) and Jaclyn A. Lisnek (University of Virginia) analyzed the effectiveness of a day-long implicit-bias-oriented diversity training session designed to increase U.S. police officers’ knowledge of bias, concerns about bias, and use of evidence-based strategies to mitigate bias. Their findings, recently published in Psychological Science, suggest that “diversity trainings as they are currently practiced are unlikely to change police behavior.” 

    Immediately after these trainings, police officers have strong intentions to use the strategies they’ve learned, explained Lai in a forthcoming interview on Under the Cortex, the APS podcast. But “one month later there wasn’t that kind of follow through.” 

    In 2020 and 2021, Lai and Lisnek evaluated 251 training sessions (in-person or remote) in which 24 different educators taught the Managing Bias program—developed by the Anti-Defamation League to reduce the influence of biases in the behaviors of police officers, improve the relationship between the community and the police, and increase safety—to different police departments with a history of Black–White racial disparities in policing. This day-long training consists of an interactive workshop, led by two educators, that uses activities to educate officers about the origins and differences between explicit and implicit bias, how biases may affect their behavior, and gaps in understanding between police and the community. After learning about biases, officers were trained on strategies and skills to reduce biased behavior.  

    Lai, a recipient of the APS 2023 Janet Taylor Spence Award for Early Career Contributions, and Lisnek surveyed police officers immediately before the training to establish a baseline, assessing knowledge and concern about bias, usage of strategies to manage bias, and characteristics relevant to police training (e.g., centrality of police identity, expectations of respect from community members). A second survey, administered immediately after the training, evaluated knowledge and concern about bias plus the intention to use the strategies to manage bias.  

    Results indicated that before the training, officers showed low understanding of and concern about bias, but the training immediately increased their knowledge and concern about bias. Right after the training, officers reported feeling empowered and motivated to use the strategies they learned to manage bias. However, another survey one month later found that officers’ concerns about bias had returned to pre-intervention levels and their use of these strategies had declined compared with their reported intentions immediately after training. Nevertheless, their general understanding of biases remained as high as immediately after the training. 

    Future research, Lai said, will attempt “to close that gap between officers really being motivated but not finding ways to follow through using some of these bias mitigation strategies.”  

    The researchers also identified characteristics of diversity training that might affect its efficacy. For instance, previous literature has suggested embedding such efforts with other organizational initiatives, having managers reinforce them, and evaluating expected behavior as a part of job performance. The training examined in this study was implemented and administered by an external organization. Adding booster sessions instead of a one-and-done training model could also increase effectiveness, Lai and Lisnek said.  

    Finally, the strategies taught could have had low applicability outside of a lab in real-world policing, another factor that can also undermine training effectiveness. “One of the things we’re finding is that there might not be these great one-size-fits-all solutions for combating bias at work,” said Lai. It may be necessary “to think very concretely and specifically” about the daily work activities where police officers may be inclined to discriminate—and then provide “super-tailored strategies” to mitigate those behaviors. 

    Journalists: email [email protected] for a copy of this research article.

    Reference  

    Lai, C. K., & Lisnek, J. A. (2023). The impact of implicit-bias-oriented diversity training on police officers’ beliefs, motivations, and actions. Psychological Science. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09567976221150617 

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    Association for Psychological Science

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  • On social media platforms, more sharing means less caring about accuracy

    On social media platforms, more sharing means less caring about accuracy

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    Newswise — As a social media user, you can be eager to share content. You can also try to judge whether it is true or not. But for many people it is difficult to prioritize both these things at once.

    That’s the conclusion of a new experiment led by MIT scholars, which finds that even considering whether or not to share news items on social media reduces people’s ability to tell truths from falsehoods.

    The study involved asking people to assess whether various news headlines were accurate. But if participants were first asked whether they would share that content, they were 35 percent worse at telling truths from falsehoods. Participants were also 18 percent less successful at discerning truth when asked about sharing right after evaluating them.

    “Just asking people whether they want to share things makes them more likely to believe headlines they wouldn’t otherwise have believed, and less likely to believe headlines they would have believed,” says David Rand, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and co-author of a new paper detailing the study’s results. “Thinking about sharing just mixes them up.”

    The results suggest an essential tension between sharing and accuracy in the realm of social media. While people’s willingness to share news content and their ability to judge it accurately can both be bolstered separately, the study suggests the two things do not positively reinforce each other when considered at the same time.

    “The second you ask people about accuracy, you’re prompting them, and the second you ask about sharing, you’re prompting them,” says Ziv Epstein, a PhD student in the Human Dynamics group at the MIT Media Lab and another of the paper’s co-authors. “If you ask about sharing and accuracy at the same time, it can undermine people’s capacity for truth discernment.”

    The paper, “The social media context interferes with truth discernment,” will be published in Science Advances. The authors are Epstein; Nathaniel Sirlin, a research assistant at MIT Sloan; Antonio Arechar, a professor at the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics, in Aguascalientes, Mexico; Gordon Pennycook, an associate professor at the University of Regina; and Rand, who is the Erwin H. Schell Professor, a professor of management science and of brain and cognitive sciences, and the director of MIT’s Applied Cooperation Team.  

    To carry out the study, the researchers conducted two waves of online surveys of 3,157 Americans whose demographic characteristics approximated the U.S. averages for age, gender, ethnicity, and geographic distribution. All participants use either Twitter or Facebook. People were shown a series of true and false headlines about politics and the Covid-19 pandemic, and were randomly assigned to two groups. At times they were asked only about accuracy or only about sharing content; at other times they were asked about both, in differing orders. From this survey design, the scholars could determine the effect that being asked about sharing content has on people’s news accuracy judgments.

    In conducting the survey, the researchers were exploring two hypotheses about sharing and news judgements. One possibility is that being asked about sharing could make people more discerning about content because they would not want to share misleading news items. The other possibility is that asking people about sharing headlines feeds into the generally distracted condition in which consumers view news while on social media, and therefore detracts from their ability to tell truth from falsity.

    “Our results are different from saying, ‘If I told you I was going to share it, then I say I believe it because I don’t want to look like I shared something I don’t believe,” Rand says. “We have evidence that that’s not what is going on. Instead, it’s about more generalized distraction.”

    The research also examined partisan leanings among participants and found that when it came to Covid-19 headlines, being prompted about sharing affected the judgment of Republicans more than Democrats, although there was not a parallel effect for political news headlines.

    “We don’t really have an explanation for that partisan difference,” Rand says, calling the issue “an important direction for future research.”

    As for the overall findings, Rand suggests that, as daunting as the results might sound, they also contain some silver linings. One conclusion of the study is that people’s belief in falsehoods may be more influenced by their patterns of online activity than by an active intent to deceive others.

    “I think there’s in some sense a hopeful take on it, in that a lot of the message is that people aren’t immoral and purposely sharing bad things,” Rand says. “And people aren’t totally hopeless. But more it’s that the social media platforms have created an environment in which people are being distracted.”

    Eventually, the researchers say, those social media platforms could be redesigned to create settings in which people are less likely to share misleading and inaccurate news content.

    “There are ways of broadcasting posts that aren’t just focused on sharing,” Epstein says.

    He adds: “There’s so much room to grow and develop and design these platforms that are consistent with our best theories about how we process information and can make good decisions and form good beliefs. I think this is an exciting opportunity for platform designers to rethink these things as we take a step forward.”

    The project was funded in part by the MIT Sloan Latin America Office; the Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Initiative of the Miami Foundation; the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; the Reset initiative of Luminate; the John Templeton Foundation; the TDF Foundation, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research; the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; the Australian Research Council; Google; and Facebook.

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    Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

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  • Scientists find that people use emojis to hide, as well as show, their feelings

    Scientists find that people use emojis to hide, as well as show, their feelings

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    Newswise — Have you ever received an unwanted gift and still said ‘thank you’? This choice to hide a negative emotion is a display rule — one of many which define socially appropriate responses to emotions. Although display rules can promote interpersonal harmony, they can also have negative consequences for the person choosing to change how they express emotions. As more social interaction goes online, scientists are investigating how emojis are used to reflect our emotions in different contexts. Are there display rules that apply to emojis, and how do those affect people’s wellbeing?

    “As online socializing becomes more prevalent, people have become accustomed to embellishing their expressions and scrutinizing the appropriateness of their communication,” said Moyu Liu of the University of Tokyo, who investigated this question in a study published in Frontiers in Psychology. “However, I realized that this may lead us to lose touch with our authentic emotions.”

    Emojis and emotions

    Liu recruited 1,289 participants, all users of the most-downloaded emoji keyboard in Japan, Simeji, to investigate how emojis were used to express or mask emotions. Previous research had established that people use emojis as functional equivalents of facial expressions, but not the relationships between emotions expressed and experienced. This is when display rules can prove problematic: if the dissonance between the emotions that you experience and the emotions that you can express is too great, emotional exhaustion can develop, although members of different cultures experience this differently.

    Display rules impact more on negative emotions, which it is usually considered less appropriate to express. It is also often more acceptable to express emotions to someone who is closer to you, and it can be more acceptable for a particular gender to express particular emotions. It can also be considered more acceptable to express negative emotions in more individualist societies.

    Wearing your heart on your screen

    The participants in Liu’s study provided demographic data, answered questions about their subjective wellbeing, and rated how often they use emojis. They were given messages with varying social contexts, responded to them as they would normally, and rated the intensity of the expression of their emotions.

    Liu found that people chose to express more emotions with emojis in private contexts or with close friends. Respondents expressed least emotion towards higher-status individuals. Intense expressions of emotion came with matching emojis, unless people felt the need to mask their true emotions: for instance, using smiling emojis to mask negative emotions. Negative emojis were used only where negative feelings were very strongly felt. Expressing emotions with emojis was associated with higher subjective wellbeing compared to masking emotions.

    “With online socializing becoming ever more prevalent, it is important to consider whether it is causing us to become more detached from our true emotions,” said Liu. “Do people require a ‘shelter’ to express their genuine emotions, and is it possible to break free from pretense and share our true selves in online settings?”

    Liu emphasized that the study should be expanded in the future. The Simeji keyboard is extremely popular among young women, which skewed the sample towards women and generation Z. However, this also reflected the gender imbalance in use of emojis in general and the Simeji keyboard in particular. A broader pool of participants would provide a fuller picture of the display rules around emojis.

    “First, the highly gender-imbalanced sample may have led to stronger results. Future research should explore potential gender differences in emoji display rules and examine the structural issues surrounding the formation of these emotion cultures,” cautioned Liu. “Second, Japanese culture’s emphasis on interpersonal harmony and concealment of negative emotions may have influenced the results.”

    “I would welcome the opportunity to expand this study and investigate the display rules for emojis across different genders and cultures,” added Liu. “Collaboration with scholars from diverse cultural backgrounds would be invaluable in this endeavor, and I am open to any contact.”

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    Frontiers

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  • Netflix password sharing outrage can be explained by behavioral economics, says expert

    Netflix password sharing outrage can be explained by behavioral economics, says expert

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    BYLINE: Riley Petersen

    Newswise — By the end of March, Netflix plans to crack down on password sharing for U.S. subscribers. This announcement has been met by surprise, outrage, and confusion as consumers ponder how their Netflix accounts will be affected. Jadrian Wooten, a professor of economics at Virginia Tech, provides his perspective on the issue. 

    “Password sharing has been a recurring issue for Netflix since they transitioned from a DVD-based subscription platform to a digital one,” says Wooten. “Initially, Netflix encouraged multiple people to login together, which was part of their brand. However, when reporting subscriber growth in their annual reports, they have noted that subscription numbers are missing many people who share accounts.”

    Nexflix didn’t implement this change until they realized the importance of measuring their viewership, especially as other streaming platforms were on the rise. To hold a strong competitive advantage, Netflix made the decision to end password sharing. 

    Since Netflix’s announcement, many subscribers have taken to Twitter to express their frustration. For many, password sharing accommodates family members who live out of state or alleviates financial burden amongst family members.

    “The frustration that many people are experiencing with the recent change can be explained by a concept in behavioral economics called loss aversion. This concept refers to the tendency for people to react more strongly to the prospect of losing something compared to the happiness they feel from gaining something,” explained Wooten. 

    One question stands: is this a good move for Netflix?

    “Although many people on social media are threatening to quit Netflix, it is unlikely to cause a significant drop in their overall subscription numbers,” says Wooten. “Netflix believes that cracking down on password sharing will realistically increase the number of subscribers, especially now that they offer a lower-priced, ad-supported option.”

    Other streaming services such as Disney+ have also adapted ad-supported streaming packages with lower costs. As for password sharing, Wooten predicts they may follow suit.

    “It is highly likely that other streaming services will follow Netflix’s lead in cracking down on password sharing, although they may initially delay to attract new customers who may cancel their Netflix subscription,” says Wooten.

    About Wooten

    Jadrian Wooten is collegiate associate professor at Virginia Tech within the Department of Economics and is the author of Parks and Recreation and Economics. Read more about Wooten’s economic perspective on Netflix’s plan for subscribers in his Monday Morning Economist newsletter.

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    Virginia Tech

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