Health behavior during periods of stressful uncertainty: associations with emotions, cognitions, and expectation management.

Objective: The present study examined how cognitions and emotions characteristic of awaiting uncertain news influenced healthy (diet/exercise) and unhealthy (alcohol use) behaviors in three samples of people awaiting important news.Design: Study 1 examined voting-eligible citizens during the month prior to learning the results of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Study 2 examined the experience of law graduates across four months while they awaited the results of their bar exam (i.e., the licensing exam they need to pass to practice law). Study 3 examined current or recent PhD students searching for a job on the academic job market.Results: Though the findings were somewhat mixed across studies, they generally suggest a relationship between positive emotions and health-promoting behaviors and between worry and alcohol use, with less consistent relationships between outcome expectations and health behaviors.Conclusion: Taken together, these results offer a promising set of initial findings to understand health behavior in the context of awaiting uncertain news and provide a foundation for future investigations on the topic

WARNING: Physics Envy May Be Hazardous To Your Wealth!

The quantitative aspirations of economists and financial analysts have for many years been based on the belief that it should be possible to build models of economic systems - and financial markets in particular - that are as predictive as those in physics. While this perspective has led to a number of important breakthroughs in economics, "physics envy" has also created a false sense of mathematical precision in some cases. We speculate on the origins of physics envy, and then describe an alternate perspective of economic behavior based on a new taxonomy of uncertainty. We illustrate the relevance of this taxonomy with two concrete examples: the classical harmonic oscillator with some new twists that make physics look more like economics, and a quantitative equity market-neutral strategy. We conclude by offering a new interpretation of tail events, proposing an "uncertainty checklist" with which our taxonomy can be implemented, and considering the role that quants played in the current financial crisis.Comment: v3 adds 2 reference

(WP 2011-05) \u27Til Recession Do Us Part: Booms, Busts, and Divorce in the United States

A general hypothesis regarding the impact of permanent income levels and business cycle fluctuations on divorce rate at the state level in the United States is analyzed in the paper. Using data for 45 states over the 1978-2009 sample period, the paper shows that the higher the level of transitory income, the higher is the incidence of divorce. In other words, divorce is pro-cyclical. Why do divorce decrease during recession and increase during expansion? When an economy is in crisis and people’s incomes are low, the cost of divorce will prevent a couple from divorcing irrespective of the quality of their marriage. In this case, divorce is not an effective option. Extending this reasoning to the Great Recession of 2007-9, it can be argued that scarce employment opportunities and reductions in the value of martial assets had forced couples to remain together, notwithstanding marital difficulties. As the economy moved into a slow and moderate recovery beginning in mid-2009, this pent-up demand for divorce was released and the rates increased. That, in large part, is why divorce generally follow a ‘pro-cyclical’ course, fluctuating in sympathy with the economy

The Double-edged Sword: A Mixed Methods Study of the Interplay between Bipolar Disorder and Technology Use

Human behavior is increasingly reflected or acted out through technology. This is of particular salience when it comes to changes in behavior associated with serious mental illnesses including schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Early detection is crucial for these conditions but presently very challenging to achieve. Potentially, characteristics of these conditions\u27 traits and symptoms, at both idiosyncratic and collective levels, may be detectable through technology use patterns. In bipolar disorder specifically, initial evidence associates changes in mood with changes in technology-mediated communication patterns. However much less is known about how people with bipolar disorder use technology more generally in their lives, how they view their technology use in relation to their illness, and, perhaps most crucially, the causal relationship (if any exists) between their technology use and their disease. To address these uncertainties, we conducted a survey of people with bipolar disorder (N = 84). Our results indicate that technology use varies markedly with changes in mood and that technology use broadly may have potential as an early warning signal of mood episodes. We also find that technology for many of these participants is a double-edged sword: acting as both a culprit that can trigger or exacerbate symptoms as well as a support mechanism for recovery. These findings have implications for the design of both early warning systems and technology-mediated interventions

"Uncertainty, Conventional Behavior, and Economic Sociology"

This paper addresses the problem of the conceptualization of social structure and its relationship to human agency in economic sociology. The background is provided by John Maynard KeynesÕs observations on the effects of uncertainty and conventional behavior on the stock market; the analysis consists of a comparison of the social ontologies of the French Intersubjectivist School and the Economics as Social Theory Project in the light of these observations. The theoretical argument is followed by concrete examples drawn from a prominent recent study of the stock market boom of the 1990s.

Uncertainty, Conventional Behavior, and Economic Sociology

This paper addresses the problem of the conceptualization of social structure and its relationship to human agency in economic sociology. The background is provided by John Maynard Keynes's observations on the effects of uncertainty and conventional behavior on the stock market; the analysis consists of a comparison of the social ontologies of the French Intersubjectivist School and the Economics as Social Theory Project in the light of these observations. The theoretical argument is followed by concrete examples drawn from a prominent recent study of the stock market boom of the 1990s.

Lessons Learned and Next Steps in Energy Efficiency Measurement and Attribution: Energy Savings, Net to Gross, Non-Energy Benefits, and Persistence of Energy Efficiency Behavior

This white paper examines four topics addressing evaluation, measurement, and attribution of direct and indirect effects to energy efficiency and behavioral programs: Estimates of program savings (gross); Net savings derivation through free ridership / net to gross analyses; Indirect non-energy benefits / impacts (e.g., comfort, convenience, emissions, jobs); and, Persistence of savings

When risk becomes illness: The personal and social consequences of cervical intraepithelial neoplasia medical surveillance

[Abstract] Background, After the early detection of cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN), medical surveillance of the precancerous lesions is carried out to control risk factors to avoid the development of cervical cancer. Objective. To explore the effects of medical surveillance on the personal and social lives of women undergoing CIN follow-up and treatment. Methodology. A generic qualitative study using a poststructuralist perspective of risk management was carried out in a gynecology clinic in a public hospital of the Galician Health Care System (Spain). Participants were selected through purposive sampling. The sample consisted of 21 women with a confirmed diagnosis of CIN. Semistructured interviews were recorded and transcribed, and a thematic analysis was carried out, including researcher triangulation to verify the results of the analysis. Findings. Two main themes emerged from the participants’ experiences: CIN medical surveillance encounters and risk management strategies are shaped by the biomedical discourse, and the effects of “risk treatment” for patients include (a) profound changes expected of patients, (b) increased patient risk management, and (c) resistance to risk management. While doctors’ surveillance aimed to prevent the development of cervical cancer, women felt they were sick because they had to follow strict recommendations over an unspecified period of time and live with the possibility of a life-threatening disease. Clinical risk management resulted in the medicalization of women’s personal and social lives and produced great uncertainty. Conclusions. This study is the first to conceptualize CIN medical surveillance as an illness experience for patients. It also problematizes the effects of preventative practices in women’s lives. Patients deal with great uncertainty, as CIN medical surveillance performed by gynecologists simultaneously trivializes the changes expected of patients and underestimates the effects of medical recommendations on patients’ personal wellbeing and social relations

Structural balance emerges and explains performance in risky decision-making.

Polarization affects many forms of social organization. A key issue focuses on which affective relationships are prone to change and how their change relates to performance. In this study, we analyze a financial institutional over a two-year period that employed 66 day traders, focusing on links between changes in affective relations and trading performance. Traders' affective relations were inferred from their IMs (>2 million messages) and trading performance was measured from profit and loss statements (>1 million trades). Here, we find that triads of relationships, the building blocks of larger social structures, have a propensity towards affective balance, but one unbalanced configuration resists change. Further, balance is positively related to performance. Traders with balanced networks have the "hot hand", showing streaks of high performance. Research implications focus on how changes in polarization relate to performance and polarized states can depolarize

Quantifying the invisible audience in social networks

This paper combines survey and large-scale log data to examine how well users’ perceptions of their audience match their actual audience on Facebook.AbstractWhen you share content in an online social network, who is listening? Users have scarce information about who actually sees their content, making their audience seem invisible and difficult to estimate. However, understanding this invisible audience can impact both science and design, since perceived audiences influence content production and self-presentation online. In this paper, we combine survey and large-scale log data to examine how well users’ perceptions of their audience match their actual audience on Facebook. We find that social media users consistently underestimate their audience size for their posts, guessing that their audience is just 27% of its true size. Qualitative coding of survey responses reveals folk theories that attempt to reverse-engineer audience size using feedback and friend count, though none of these approaches are particularly accurate. We analyze audience logs for 222,000 Facebook users’ posts over the course of one month and find that publicly visible signals — friend count, likes, and comments — vary widely and do not strongly indicate the audience of a single post. Despite the variation, users typically reach 61% of their friends each month. Together, our results begin to reveal the invisible undercurrents of audience attention and behavior in online social networks.Authored by Michael S. Bernstein, Eytan Bakshy, Moira Burke and Brian Karrer