Investigating hyper-vigilance for social threat of lonely children

The hypothesis that lonely children show hypervigilance for social threat was examined in a series of three studies that employed different methods including advanced eye-tracking technology. Hypervigilance for social threat was operationalized as hostility to ambiguously motivated social exclusion in a variation of the hostile attribution paradigm (Study 1), scores on the Children’s Rejection-Sensitivity Questionnaire (Study 2), and visual attention to socially rejecting stimuli (Study 3). The participants were 185 children (11 years-7 months to 12 years-6 months), 248 children (9 years-4 months to 11 years-8 months) and 140 children (8 years-10 months to 12 years-10 months) in the three studies, respectively. Regression analyses showed that, with depressive symptoms covaried, there were quadratic relations between loneliness and these different measures of hypervigilance to social threat. As hypothesized, only children in the upper range of loneliness demonstrated elevated hostility to ambiguously motivated social exclusion, higher scores on the rejection sensitivity questionnaire, and disengagement difficulties when viewing socially rejecting stimuli. We found that very lonely children are hypersensitive to social threat

ELVIS: Entertainment-led video summaries

© ACM, 2010. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications, 6(3): Article no. 17 (2010) http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1823746.1823751Video summaries present the user with a condensed and succinct representation of the content of a video stream. Usually this is achieved by attaching degrees of importance to low-level image, audio and text features. However, video content elicits strong and measurable physiological responses in the user, which are potentially rich indicators of what video content is memorable to or emotionally engaging for an individual user. This article proposes a technique that exploits such physiological responses to a given video stream by a given user to produce Entertainment-Led VIdeo Summaries (ELVIS). ELVIS is made up of five analysis phases which correspond to the analyses of five physiological response measures: electro-dermal response (EDR), heart rate (HR), blood volume pulse (BVP), respiration rate (RR), and respiration amplitude (RA). Through these analyses, the temporal locations of the most entertaining video subsegments, as they occur within the video stream as a whole, are automatically identified. The effectiveness of the ELVIS technique is verified through a statistical analysis of data collected during a set of user trials. Our results show that ELVIS is more consistent than RANDOM, EDR, HR, BVP, RR and RA selections in identifying the most entertaining video subsegments for content in the comedy, horror/comedy, and horror genres. Subjective user reports also reveal that ELVIS video summaries are comparatively easy to understand, enjoyable, and informative

Loneliness, social relations and health and wellbeing in deprived communities

There is growing policy concern about the extent of loneliness in advanced societies, and its prevalence among various social groups. This study looks at loneliness among people living in deprived communities, where there may be additional barriers to social engagement including low incomes, fear of crime, poor services and transient populations. The aim was to examine the prevalence of loneliness, and also its associations with different types of social contacts and forms of social support, and its links to self-reported health and wellbeing in the population group. The method involved a cross-sectional survey of 4,302 adults across 15 communities, with the data analysed using multinomial logistic regression controlling for sociodemographics, then for all other predictors within each domain of interest. Frequent feelings of loneliness were more common among those who: had contact with family monthly or less; had contact with neighbours weekly or less; rarely talked to people in the neighbourhood; and who had no available sources of practical or emotional support. Feelings of loneliness were most strongly associated with poor mental health, but were also associated with long-term problems of stress, anxiety and depression, and with low mental wellbeing, though to a lesser degree. The findings are consistent with a view that situational loneliness may be the product of residential structures and resources in deprived areas. The findings also show that neighbourly behaviours of different kinds are important for protecting against loneliness in deprived communities. Familiarity within the neighbourhood, as active acquaintance rather than merely recognition, is also important. The findings are indicative of several mechanisms that may link loneliness to health and wellbeing in our study group: loneliness itself as a stressor; lonely people not responding well to the many other stressors in deprived areas; and loneliness as the product of weak social buffering to protect against stressors

Lighting up the Electrochemiluminescence of Carbon Dots through Pre- and Post-Synthetic Design

Carbon dots (CDs), defined by their size of less than 10\ua0nm, are a class of photoluminescent (PL) and electrochemiluminescent (ECL) nanomaterials that include a variety of carbon-based nanoparticles. However, the control of their properties, especially ECL, remains elusive and afflicted by a series of problems. Here, the authors report CDs that display ECL in water via coreactant ECL, which is the dominant mechanism in biosensing applications. They take advantage of a multicomponent bottom-up approach for preparing and studying the luminescence properties of CDs doped with a dye acting as PL and ECL probe. The dependence of luminescence properties on the surface chemistry is further reported, by investigating the PL and ECL response of CDs with surfaces rich in primary, methylated, or propylated amino groups. While precursors that contribute to the core characterize the PL emission, the surface states influence the efficiency of the excitation-dependent PL emission. The ECL emission is influenced by surface states from the organic shell, but states of the core strongly interact with the surface, influencing the ECL efficiency. These findings offer a framework of pre- and post-synthetic design strategies to improve ECL emission properties, opening new opportunities for exploring biosensing applications of CDs

Spreading in Social Systems: Reflections

In this final chapter, we consider the state-of-the-art for spreading in social systems and discuss the future of the field. As part of this reflection, we identify a set of key challenges ahead. The challenges include the following questions: how can we improve the quality, quantity, extent, and accessibility of datasets? How can we extract more information from limited datasets? How can we take individual cognition and decision making processes into account? How can we incorporate other complexity of the real contagion processes? Finally, how can we translate research into positive real-world impact? In the following, we provide more context for each of these open questions.Comment: 7 pages, chapter to appear in "Spreading Dynamics in Social Systems"; Eds. Sune Lehmann and Yong-Yeol Ahn, Springer Natur

Validation of the test need for cognition: a study in behavioral accounting

This study aimed to validate the Need for Cognition scale (NFC) in behavioral accounting. In addition, we sought to measure the possible correlations between the level of need for cognition and the existence of cognitive biases in decisions in accounting and financial information. Two validations were performed to carry out the process of full validation – criterion and construct. The analysis was done by the examination of a sample comprised by 128 graduation students. The statistical technique used for the validation of this test was a factorial analysis for it has the ability to determine the degree of influence of a particular variable in the explanation of a factor, and the processing logistic regression was used for the explanation of possible values as a function of known values or independent variables. The results of the construct of validity showed the legitimacy of the NFC as a unidimensional scale excluding three outputs of its original scale, since the criterion validity of the results confirmed the impact of the level of cognition in maximizing the occurrence of heuristics in managerial decisions

Life events and hemodynamic stress reactivity in the middle-aged and elderly

Recent versions of the reactivity hypothesis, which consider it to be the product of stress exposure and exaggerated haemodynamic reactions to stress that confers cardiovascular disease risk, assume that reactivity is independent of the experience of stressful life events. This assumption was tested in two substantial cohorts, one middle-aged and one elderly. Participants had to indicate from a list of major stressful life events up to six they had experienced in the previous two years. They were also asked to rate how disruptive and stressful they were, at the time of occurrence and now. Blood pressure and pulse rate were measured at rest and in response to acute mental stress. Those who rated the events as highly disruptive at the time of exposure and currently exhibited blunted systolic blood pressure reactions to acute stress. The present results suggest that acute stress reactivity may not be independent of stressful life events experience

Loneliness and Social Internet Use: Pathways to Reconnection in a Digital World?

With the rise of online social networking, social relationships are increasingly developed and maintained in a digital domain. Drawing conclusions about the impact of the digital world on loneliness is difficult because there are contradictory findings, and cross-sectional studies dominate the literature, making causation difficult to establish. In this review, we present our theoretical model and propose that there is a bidirectional and dynamic relationship between loneliness and social Internet use. When the Internet is used as a way station on the route to enhancing existing relationships and forging new social connections, it is a useful tool for reducing loneliness. But when social technologies are used to escape the social world and withdraw from the “social pain” of interaction, feelings of loneliness are increased. We propose that loneliness is also a determinant of how people interact with the digital world. Lonely people express a preference for using the Internet for social interaction and are more likely to use the Internet in a way that displaces time spent in offline social activities. This suggests that lonely people may need support with their social Internet use so that they employ it in a way that enhances existing friendships and/or to forge new ones

Childhood loneliness as a predictor of adolescent depressive symptoms: an 8-year longitudinal study

Childhood loneliness is characterised by children’s perceived dissatisfaction with aspects of their social relationships. This 8-year prospective study investigates whether loneliness in childhood predicts depressive symptoms in adolescence, controlling for early childhood indicators of emotional problems and a sociometric measure of peer social preference. 296 children were tested in the infant years of primary school (T1 5 years of age), in the upper primary school (T2 9 years of age) and in secondary school (T3 13 years of age). At T1, children completed the loneliness assessment and sociometric interview. Their teachers completed externalisation and internalisation rating scales for each child. At T2, children completed a loneliness assessment, a measure of depressive symptoms, and the sociometric interview. At T3, children completed the depressive symptom assessment. An SEM analysis showed that depressive symptoms in early adolescence (age 13) were predicted by reports of depressive symptoms at age 8, which were themselves predicted by internalisation in the infant school (5 years). The interactive effect of loneliness at 5 and 9, indicative of prolonged loneliness in childhood, also predicted depressive symptoms at age 13. Parent and peer-related loneliness at age 5 and 9, peer acceptance variables, and duration of parent loneliness did not predict depression. Our results suggest that enduring peer-related loneliness during childhood constitutes an interpersonal stressor that predisposes children to adolescent depressive symptoms. Possible mediators are discussed