Hearts and Politics: Metrics for Tracking Biorhythm Changes during Brexit and Trump

Our internal experience of time reflects what is going in the world around us. Our body's natural rhythms get disrupted for a variety of external factors, including exposure to collective events. We collect readings of steps, sleep, and heart rates from 11K users of health tracking devices in London and San Francisco. We introduce measures to quantify changes in not only volume of these three bio-signals (as previous research has done) but also synchronicity and periodicity, and we empirically assess how strong those variations are, compared to random expectation, during four major events: Christmas, New Year's Eve, Brexit, and the US presidential election of 2016 (Donald Trump's election). While Christmas and New Year's eve are associated with short-term effects, Brexit and Trump's election are associated with longer-term disruptions. Our results promise to inform the design of new ways of monitoring population health at scale.Comment: 5 page

Use It or Lose It : How Online Activism Moderates the Protective Properties of Gender Identity for Well-Being

Regardless of criticisms that online activism does nothing but increase positive feelings, there is merit to understanding the role of online activism for well-being. This research sought to integrate two separate but complimentary lines of research (the well-being effects of activism and social identity) by suggesting that online activism may enhance the ability of social identity to protect against the negative well-being consequences of pervasive discrimination. Three studies, each with different operational definitions of online activism, showed a similar pattern: online activism enhanced the relationship between gender identity and well-being. Consistent with theory on activism’s role as a dynamic predictor of social identity (e.g., Drury & Reicher, 1999), this research suggests that online activism, as a means by which social identity can be enacted, can strengthen the protective ability of social identity for well-being. Theoretical and practical implications of the benefits of online activism are discussed