Connections
It’s surprisingly nice to hear you: Misunderstanding the impact of communication media can lead to suboptimal choices of how to connect with others
Amit Kumar & Nicholas Epley
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
Positive social connections improve wellbeing. Technology increasingly affords a wide variety of media that people can use to connect with others, but not all media strengthen social connection equally. Optimizing wellbeing, therefore, requires choosing how to connect with others wisely. We predicted that people’s preferences for communication media would be at least partly guided by the expected costs and benefits of the interaction — specifically, how awkward or uncomfortable the interaction would be and how connected they would feel to their partner — but that people’s expectations would consistently undervalue the overall benefit of more intimate voice-based interactions. We tested this hypothesis by asking participants in a field experiment to reconnect with an old friend either over the phone or e-mail, and by asking laboratory participants to “chat” with a stranger over video, voice, or text-based media. Results indicated that interactions including voice (phone, video chat, and voice chat) created stronger social bonds and no increase in awkwardness, compared with interactions including text (e-mail, text chat), but miscalibrated expectations about awkwardness or connection could lead to suboptimal preferences for text-based media. Misunderstanding the consequences of using different communication media could create preferences for media that do not maximize either one’s own or others’ wellbeing.
Pandemic practice: Horror fans and morbidly curious individuals are more psychologically resilient during the COVID-19 pandemic
Coltan Scrivner et al.
Personality and Individual Differences, forthcoming
Abstract:
One explanation for why people engage in frightening fictional experiences is that these experiences can act as simulations of actual experiences from which individuals can gather information and model possible worlds. Conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, this study (n = 310) tested whether past and current engagement with thematically relevant media fictions, including horror and pandemic films, was associated with greater preparedness for and psychological resilience toward the pandemic. Since morbid curiosity has previously been associated with horror media use during the COVID-19 pandemic, we also tested whether trait morbid curiosity was associated with pandemic preparedness and psychological resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic. We found that fans of horror films exhibited greater resilience during the pandemic and that fans of “prepper” genres (alien-invasion, apocalyptic, and zombie films) exhibited both greater resilience and preparedness. We also found that trait morbid curiosity was associated with positive resilience and interest in pandemic films during the pandemic. Taken together, these results are consistent with the hypothesis that exposure to frightening fictions allow audiences to practice effective coping strategies that can be beneficial in real-world situations.
Did the COVID-19 Pandemic Trigger Nostalgia? Evidence of Music Consumption on Spotify
Timothy Yu-Cheong Yeung
Centre for Economic Policy Research Working Paper, August 2020
Abstract:
By scraping data of almost 17 trillion plays of songs on Spotify in six European countries, this work provides evidence that the lockdown imposed in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic significantly changed the music consumption in terms of nostalgia. This work constructs a binary measure of nostalgia consumption of music and employs country-specific logistic regressions in which lockdown is taken as a treatment that interacts with a quadratic trend. The lockdown altered the trend of nostalgia consumption upward, which peaked roughly 60 days after the lockdown. A placebo test shows that the upward turn of slope is not an annual pattern. On the other hand, COVID incidence rate does not provide significant additional explanatory power to the model. This work shows that Spotify's users react to the lockdown even when COVID incidence rate is low and the impact stays high even the incidence rate has peaked, suggesting that demand for nostalgia tends to respond to the drastic and lasting change caused by the lockdown rather than to the fluctuations in the viral infection.
Emotional Empathy in the Social Regulation of Distress: A Dyadic Approach
Casey Brown et al.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although research suggests distressed individuals benefit from others’ empathy, it is unclear how an individual’s level of empathy influences dyadic responses during emotional situations. In the current study, female participants (N = 140; 70 dyads) were paired with a stranger. One member of each dyad (the experiencer) was randomly assigned to undergo a stressful task and disclose negative personal experiences to their partner (the listener). Experiencers paired with listeners higher in dispositional emotional empathy had less negative affect during emotional disclosure and lower sympathetic nervous system reactivity during the stressful task and disclosure. Listeners higher in emotional empathy reported more negative affect in response to their partner’s distress. Furthermore, for listeners higher in emotional empathy, those who more accurately rated their partner’s emotions were more physiologically influenced by their partners. Findings shed light on interpersonal functions of empathy and suggest a stranger’s level of emotional empathy regulates distressed partner’s emotions and physiology.
How does peer adversity “Get inside the Brain?” Adolescent girls’ differential susceptibility to neural dysregulation of emotion following victimization
Karen Rudolph et al.
Developmental Psychobiology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Exposure to peer victimization is a traumatic stressor, with adverse consequences for mental and physical health. This prospective, multi‐method, multi‐informant study investigated how victimization “gets into the brain,” as reflected in neural dysregulation of emotion during adolescence. Moreover, we examined whether certain youth are particularly vulnerable to compromised neural function (i.e., a pattern of positive amygdala‐right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex [rVLPFC] connectivity linked to poor emotion regulation [ER] and emotional distress) following victimization. In all, 43 adolescent girls completed an implicit ER task during a functional brain scan, and reported on rejection sensitivity. In 6th–9th grades, teachers and adolescents reported annually on victimization. Results revealed that a history of elevated victimization predicted less effective neural regulation of emotion (more positive amygdala‐rVLPFC connectivity) in girls with high but not low rejection sensitivity. Consistent with a differential susceptibility model, high rejection sensitivity was associated with particularly effective neural regulation of emotion (more negative amygdala‐rVLPFC connectivity) in girls with low‐victimization histories. A parallel pattern emerged for a behavioral index of ER. This research provides insight into one pathway through which peer adversity undermines emotional development in ways that forecast compromised future health, and identifies youth who are at particularly high risk following peer adversity.
Crowd Sourcing: Do Peer Crowd Prototypes Match Reality?
Lilla Pivnick, Rachel Gordon & Robert Crosnoe
Social Psychology Quarterly, September 2020, Pages 272-293
Abstract:
During the transition into high school, adolescents sort large sets of unfamiliar peers into prototypical peer crowds thought to share similar values, behaviors, and interests (e.g., Jocks). Often, such sorting is based solely on appearance. This study investigates the accuracy of this sorting process in relation to actual characteristics using video and survey data from a longitudinal sample of U.S. youths who attended high school in the mid- to late-2000s. To simulate this sorting process, we asked same-birth-cohort strangers to view short videos of youths at age 15 and to classify those strangers into likely crowd membership. We then compared the classifications they made to how adolescents characterized themselves at that same time point. Results show that peer crowd classification predicts aspects of unknown peers’ mental health, academic achievement, extracurricular involvement, social status, and risk-taking behaviors.