To which world regions does the valence–dominance model of social perception apply?

Over the past 10 years, Oosterhof and Todorov’s valence–dominance model has emerged as the most prominent account of how people evaluate faces on social dimensions. In this model, two dimensions (valence and dominance) underpin social judgements of faces. Because this model has primarily been developed and tested in Western regions, it is unclear whether these findings apply to other regions. We addressed this question by replicating Oosterhof and Todorov’s methodology across 11 world regions, 41 countries and 11,570 participants. When we used Oosterhof and Todorov’s original analysis strategy, the valence–dominance model generalized across regions. When we used an alternative methodology to allow for correlated dimensions, we observed much less generalization. Collectively, these results suggest that, while the valence–dominance model generalizes very well across regions when dimensions are forced to be orthogonal, regional differences are revealed when we use different extraction methods and correlate and rotate the dimension reduction solution

A multi-country test of brief reappraisal interventions on emotions during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased negative emotions and decreased positive emotions globally. Left unchecked, these emotional changes might have a wide array of adverse impacts. To reduce negative emotions and increase positive emotions, we tested the effectiveness of reappraisal, an emotion-regulation strategy that modifies how one thinks about a situation. Participants from 87 countries and regions (n = 21,644) were randomly assigned to one of two brief reappraisal interventions (reconstrual or repurposing) or one of two control conditions (active or passive). Results revealed that both reappraisal interventions (vesus both control conditions) consistently reduced negative emotions and increased positive emotions across different measures. Reconstrual and repurposing interventions had similar effects. Importantly, planned exploratory analyses indicated that reappraisal interventions did not reduce intentions to practice preventive health behaviours. The findings demonstrate the viability of creating scalable, low-cost interventions for use around the world

Amazon's Impact on the Seattle Office Market

The 2019 Baker Program Class trip to Seattle was an eye-opening experience. Among the biggest surprises was the dominance of Amazon within the city. As we met with developers, alumni and even Uber drivers, everyone was talking about the company’s impact on the growth of the community. According to CoStar, Amazon is the dominant space user in the Seattle office market, accounting for almost 45% of all the gross leasable class A office space. Amazon occupies more office space than the city’s next 40 biggest employers combined.11_Seattle_Trek_Dunham.pdf: 266 downloads, before Aug. 1, 2020

Amazon\u27s Impact on the Seattle Office Market

The 2019 Baker Program Class trip to Seattle was an eye-opening experience. Among the biggest surprises was the dominance of Amazon within the city. As we met with developers, alumni and even Uber drivers, everyone was talking about the company’s impact on the growth of the community. According to CoStar, Amazon is the dominant space user in the Seattle office market, accounting for almost 45% of all the gross leasable class A office space. Amazon occupies more office space than the city’s next 40 biggest employers combined

Operationalizing an open-source dashboard for communicating results of wastewater-based surveillance

COVID-19 saw the expansion of public health tools to manage the pandemic. One tool that saw extensive use was the public health dashboard, web-based visualization tools that communicate information to users in easy-to-read graphics. Dashboards were widely used prior to the pandemic, but COVID-19 saw expanded use and development. To date, dashboards have become an important part of public health surveillance programs around the world helping decisionmakers use data to evaluate different public health metrics including caseloads, hospitalizations, and environmental surveillance results from testing wastewater. Wastewater surveillance provides community-based, spatially relevant data on disease trends within communities to assess the scale of infection in a region, which makes it an excellent candidate for dashboard development to improve public health. We developed a dashboard for New York State's wastewater surveillance program using open-source, reproducible web programming. The dashboard we developed has been used for the COVID-19 response in New York, and our methods can be adapted to other programs and pathogens. We provide: • descriptions of how the dashboard was developed and maintained • specific guidance for reproducing our dashboard in other areas and for other pathogens • fully reproducible code with step-by-step instructions for researchers and professionals to make their own data dashboard