Timescales of Massive Human Entrainment

The past two decades have seen an upsurge of interest in the collective behaviors of complex systems composed of many agents entrained to each other and to external events. In this paper, we extend concepts of entrainment to the dynamics of human collective attention. We conducted a detailed investigation of the unfolding of human entrainment - as expressed by the content and patterns of hundreds of thousands of messages on Twitter - during the 2012 US presidential debates. By time locking these data sources, we quantify the impact of the unfolding debate on human attention. We show that collective social behavior covaries second-by-second to the interactional dynamics of the debates: A candidate speaking induces rapid increases in mentions of his name on social media and decreases in mentions of the other candidate. Moreover, interruptions by an interlocutor increase the attention received. We also highlight a distinct time scale for the impact of salient moments in the debate: Mentions in social media start within 5-10 seconds after the moment; peak at approximately one minute; and slowly decay in a consistent fashion across well-known events during the debates. Finally, we show that public attention after an initial burst slowly decays through the course of the debates. Thus we demonstrate that large-scale human entrainment may hold across a number of distinct scales, in an exquisitely time-locked fashion. The methods and results pave the way for careful study of the dynamics and mechanisms of large-scale human entrainment.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figures, 6 tables, 4 supplementary figures. 2nd version revised according to peer reviewers' comments: more detailed explanation of the methods, and grounding of the hypothese

Security motives and negative affective experiences during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic

Objective: Self-regulation can help individuals cope during stressful events, but little is known about why and when this might occur. We examined if being more focused on prevention was linked to negative affective experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. We also examined possible underlying mechanisms for this association, and whether social support buffered it. Design: Pre-registered longitudinal study, with surveys every two weeks over one month (N = 1,269). Main outcome measures: Regulatory focus and worry for health (T1), adherence to self isolation and preventive health behaviors (T2), negative affective experiences, positive affect, frequency of online interactions, and perceived social support (T3). Results: Prevention focus was associated with health worries at baseline and linked to greater adherence to preventive health behaviors (T2). Only adherence to self-isolation was linked to more negative affective experiences (T3). Exploratory analyses showed that prevention focus was linked to more negative affective experiences (T3), but only for participants with fewer online interactions with their family and less perceived social support from family and friends. Conclusions: Prevention motives in threatening times can be a double-edged sword, with benefits for health behaviors and consequences for negative affective experiences. Having a strong social network during these times can alleviate these consequences.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Actively Participating in Live Events as an Avenue for Social Connection

Numerous studies document the benefits of social connection for both psychological and physical health, but less research exists on how social connection can be fostered in people’s day-to-day lives. One potential way people might build connection is through attending live events (e.g., going to a concert, wine tasting, book reading, fitness class, etc.). This project used machine learning to identify which characteristics of live events reliably predict feelings of social connectedness following event attendance. Across 1,551 longitudinal surveys of event-specific characteristics and experiences across a variety of event types, the strongest predictors of feeling socially connected were events that were in-person (versus virtual), involved active participation (versus passive participation), and those that were attended with others (versus alone), above and beyond baseline reports of socioemotional factors (e.g., loneliness, subjective happiness) and other individual differences (e.g., demographics, personality). These findings suggest that attending in-person, engaging events is a promising pathway through which people may build social connection with others