Emoticon-Based Ambivalent Expression: A Hidden Indicator for Unusual Behaviors in Weibo

Recent decades have witnessed online social media being a big-data window for testifying conventional social theories quantitatively and exploring much detailed human behavioral patterns. In this paper, by tracing the emoticon use in Weibo, a group of hidden “ambivalent users” are disclosed for frequently posting ambivalent tweets containing both positive and negative emotions. Further investigation reveals that this ambivalent expression could be a novel indicator of many unusual social behaviors. For instance, ambivalent users with the female as the majority like to make a sound in midnights and at weekends. They mention their close friends frequently in ambivalent tweets, which attract more replies and serve as a more private communication way. Ambivalent users also respond differently to public affairs from others and demonstrate more interests in entertainment and sports events. Moreover, the sentiment shift in ambivalent tweets is more evident than usual and exhibits a clear “negative to positive” pattern. The above observations, though being promiscuous seemingly, actually point to the self-regulation of negative mood in Weibo, which could find its basis from the traditional emotion management theories in sociology but makes an important extension to the online environment in this study. Finally, as an interesting corollary, ambivalent users are found connected with compulsive buyers and turn out to be perfect targets for online marketing.     

Social media user’s knowledge on soil plant relationship in Saudi Arabia

The study aimed to investigate the soil-plant relationship by looking at knowledge levels of social media users. The study examined the relationship between the users’ characteristics and their knowledge on soil-plant relationship. Online survey was designed and distributed to gather the data. The number of response was received from 383 respondents where 375 participants provided completed information and the remaining eight responses were eliminated due to quality standards. The results show most of the participants (68.8%) are moderately depend on social media to acquire knowledge on soil-plant relationship and indicated “Twitter” as the highly utilized platform followed by the “Youtube”. Meanwhile, 48.8% of the participants indicated that social media have a high impact on their knowledge-based information on soil-plant relationship and agricultural contents. Inferential analysis shows there was a significant positive relationship (p < 0.01) between independent variables; Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, and Snapchat and the degree of trust on these platforms, and the level’s knowledge on soil-plant relationship (dependent variable). Only 13% of the variance accounted for the impact of social media on participants’ agricultural knowledge-base can be predicted from the combination of participants’ reliance on a set of social media platforms (Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, and Snapchat). The study revealed the trust and confidence of the users using social media on agricultural information/soil plant relationship had a medium effect in social and educational research.     

Is the Excessive Use of Microblogs an Internet Addiction? Developing a Scale for Assessing the Excessive Use of Microblogs in Chinese College Students

More and more college students are using microblogs, with some excessive users demonstrating addiction-like symptoms. However, there is currently no published scale available for use in assessing excessive use of these microblogs, a significant impediment to advancing this area of research. We collected data from 3,047 college students in China and developed a Microblog Excessive Use Scale (MEUS) for Chinese college students, comparing it with criteria used for assessing Internet addiction. Our diagnostic scale featured three factors, two of which–“withdrawal and health problem” and “time management and performance”–are already included in Internet addiction assessment scales. The third factor, “social comfort,” does not appear in Internet addiction assessment scales. Our study found that females have significantly higher MEUS scores than males, and that total MEUS scores positively correlated with scores from “self-disclosure” and “real social interaction” scales. These findings differ from results obtained in previous investigations into Internet addiction. Our results indicate that some characteristics of the excessive use of microblogs are different to those of Internet addiction, suggesting that microblog overuse may not correspond exactly to the state of Internet addiction.     

Does Twitter Trigger Bursts in Signature Collections?

Introduction

The quantification of social media impacts on societal and political events is a difficult undertaking. The Japanese Society of Oriental Medicine started a signature-collecting campaign to oppose a medical policy of the Government Revitalization Unit to exclude a traditional Japanese medicine, “Kampo,” from the public insurance system. The signature count showed a series of aberrant bursts from November 26 to 29, 2009. In the same interval, the number of messages on Twitter including the keywords “Signature” and “Kampo,” increased abruptly. Moreover, the number of messages on an Internet forum that discussed the policy and called for signatures showed a train of spikes.

Methods and Findings

In order to estimate the contributions of social media, we developed a statistical model with state-space modeling framework that distinguishes the contributions of multiple social media in time-series of collected public opinions. We applied the model to the time-series of signature counts of the campaign and quantified contributions of two social media, i.e., Twitter and an Internet forum, by the estimation. We found that a considerable portion (78%) of the signatures was affected from either of the social media throughout the campaign and the Twitter effect (26%) was smaller than the Forum effect (52%) in total, although Twitter probably triggered the initial two bursts of signatures. Comparisons of the estimated profiles of the both effects suggested distinctions between the social media in terms of sustainable impact of messages or tweets. Twitter shows messages on various topics on a time-line; newer messages push out older ones. Twitter may diminish the impact of messages that are tweeted intermittently.

Conclusions

The quantification of social media impacts is beneficial to better understand people’s tendency and may promote developing strategies to engage public opinions effectively. Our proposed method is a promising tool to explore information hidden in social phenomena.     

Assessing the Impact of the National Smoking Ban in Indoor Public Places in China: Evidence from Quit Smoking Related Online Searches

Background

Despite the tremendous economic and health costs imposed on China by tobacco use, China lacks a proactive and systematic tobacco control surveillance and evaluation system, hampering research progress on tobacco-focused surveillance and evaluation studies.

Methods

This paper uses online search query analyses to investigate changes in online search behavior among Chinese Internet users in response to the adoption of the national indoor public place smoking ban. Baidu Index and Google Trends were used to examine the volume of search queries containing three key search terms “Smoking Ban(s),” “Quit Smoking,” and “Electronic Cigarette(s),” along with the news coverage on the smoking ban, for the period 2009–2011.

Findings

Our results show that the announcement and adoption of the indoor public place smoking ban in China generated significant increases in news coverage on smoking bans. There was a strong positive correlation between the media coverage of smoking bans and the volume of “Smoking Ban(s)” and “Quit Smoking” related search queries. The volume of search queries related to “Electronic Cigarette(s)” was also correlated with the smoking ban news coverage.

Interpretation

To the extent it altered smoking-related online searches, our analyses suggest that the smoking ban had a significant effect, at least in the short run, on Chinese Internet users’ smoking-related behaviors. This research introduces a novel analytic tool, which could serve as an alternative tobacco control evaluation and behavior surveillance tool in the absence of timely or comprehensive population surveillance system. This research also highlights the importance of a comprehensive approach to tobacco control in China.     

Reality Check for the Chinese Microblog Space: A Random Sampling Approach

Chinese microblogs have drawn global attention to this online application’s potential impact on the country’s social and political environment. However, representative and reliable statistics on Chinese microbloggers are limited. Using a random sampling approach, this study collected Chinese microblog data from the service provider, analyzing the profile and the pattern of usage for 29,998 microblog accounts. From our analysis, 57.4% (95% CI 56.9%,58.0%) of the accounts’ timelines were empty. Among the 12,774 non-zero statuses samples, 86.9% (95% CI 86.2%,87.4%) did not make original post in a 7-day study period. By contrast, 0.51% (95% CI 0.4%,0.65%) wrote twenty or more original posts and 0.45% (95% CI 0.35%,0.60%) reposted more than 40 unique messages within the 7-day period. A small group of microbloggers created a majority of contents and drew other users’ attention. About 4.8% (95% CI 4.4%,5.2%) of the 12,774 users contributed more than 80% (95% CI,78.6%,80.3%) of the original posts and about 4.8% (95% CI 4.5%,5.2%) managed to create posts that were reposted or received comments at least once. Moreover, a regression analysis revealed that volume of followers is a key determinant of creating original microblog posts, reposting messages, being reposted, and receiving comments. Volume of friends is found to be linked only with the number of reposts. Gender differences and regional disparities in using microblogs in China are also observed.     

Experiences of Community-Living Older Adults Receiving Integrated Care Based on the Chronic Care Model: A Qualitative Study

BackgroundIntegrated care models aim to solve the problem of fragmented and poorly coordinated care in current healthcare systems. These models aim to be patient-centered by providing continuous and coordinated care and by considering the needs and preferences of patients. The objective of this study was to evaluate the opinions and experiences of community-living older adults with regard to integrated care and support, along with the extent to which it meets their health and social needs.MethodsSemi-structured interviews were conducted with 23 older adults receiving integrated care and support through “Embrace,” an integrated care model for community-living older adults that is based on the Chronic Care Model and a population health management model. Embrace is currently fully operational in the northern region of the Netherlands. Data analysis was based on the grounded theory approach.ResultsResponses of participants concerned two focus areas: 1) Experiences with aging, with the themes “Struggling with health,” “Increasing dependency,” “Decreasing social interaction,” “Loss of control,” and “Fears;” and 2) Experiences with Embrace, with the themes “Relationship with the case manager,” “Interactions,” and “Feeling in control, safe, and secure”. The prospect of becoming dependent and losing control was a key concept in the lives of the older adults interviewed. Embrace reinforced the participants’ ability to stay in control, even if they were dependent on others. Furthermore, participants felt safe and secure, in contrast to the fears of increasing dependency within the standard care system.ConclusionThe results indicate that integrated care and support provided through Embrace met the health and social needs of older adults, who were coping with the consequences of aging.     

Views of Swedish Commissioning Parents Relating to the Exploitation Discourse in Using Transnational Surrogacy

Transnational surrogacy, when people travel abroad for reproduction with the help of a surrogate mother, is a heavily debated phenomenon. One of the most salient discourses on surrogacy is the one affirming that Westerners, in their quest for having a child, exploit poor women in countries such as India. As surrogacy within the Swedish health care system is not permitted, Swedish commissioning parents have used transnational surrogacy, and the majority has turned to India. This interview study aimed to explore how commissioning parents negotiate the present discourses on surrogacy. Findings from the study suggest that the commissioning parents’ views on using surrogacy are influenced by competing discourses on surrogacy represented by media and surrogacy agencies. The use of this reproductive method resulted, then, in some ambiguity. Although commissioning parents defy the exploitation discourse by referring to what they have learnt about the surrogate mother’s life situation and by pointing at the significant benefits for her, they still had a request for regulation of surrogacy in Sweden, to better protect all parties involved. This study, then, gives a complex view on surrogacy, where the commissioning parents simultaneously argue against the exploitation discourse but at the same time are uncertain if the surrogate mothers are well protected in the surrogacy arrangements. Their responses to the situation endorse the need for regulation both in Sweden and India.     

2009 Society for Medical Anthropology Conference: Training,Communication, and Competence: The Making of Health Care Professionals

The role of medical anthropology in tackling the problems and challenges at the intersections of public health, medicine, and technology was addressed during the 2009 Society for Medical Anthropology Conference at Yale University in an interdisciplinary panel session entitled Training, Communication, and Competence: The Making of Health Care Professionals.The discipline of medical anthropology is not very formalized in the health setting. Although medical anthropologists work across a number of health organizations, including schools of public health, at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and at non-governmental organizations (NGOs), there is an emerging demand for an influential applied medical anthropology that contributes both pragmatically and theoretically to the health care field.The role of anthropology at the intersections of public health, medicine, and technology was addressed during the 2009 Society for Medical Anthropology Conference at Yale University in September. In a conference session entitled Training, Communication, and Competence: The Making of Health Care Professionals, health professional career issues, including training and education, medical entrepreneurship, and the maintenance of clinical relationships with patients were examined. The presentations encompassed macro approaches to institutional reform in training, education, and health care delivery, as well as micro studies of practitioner-patient interaction. Seemingly disparate methodological, disciplinary, and theoretical orientations were united to assess the increasing relevance of medically oriented anthropology in addressing the challenges of health care delivery, health education, and training.Margaret Bentley, a professor of public health at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, spoke about the increasing “epidemic of global health” in universities, noting a doubling of global health majors within the past three years. Despite this expansion of the field, a common discipline of global health continues to be developed. In September, the Association of Schools of Public Health (ASPH) and the University of Minnesota hosted a Global Health Core Competency Development Consensus Conference with the initiative to explore “workforce needs, practice settings, and to identify core constructs, competency domains, and a preliminary global health competency model”¹. Given the current variability in training, Bentley believes medical anthropology is uniquely suited to inform training in global health because of its offerings in the way of interdisciplinary methods and team-based applied field experience.Anthropologists Carl Kendall of Tulane University and Laetitia Atlani of Université de Paris X Nanterre have seen medical anthropologists examine models of health strictly within a clinical experience. Understanding of the social determinants of epidemiology, methodological issues of population health, and survey research is crucial. However, training individuals through a more formalized program (currently in development in Europe) will allow anthropologists to better understand context, explain complex models, humanize aggregate statistics, and articulate methods of the multidimensional “social field” of health outside of the clinical experience.The social field of health, however, as Robert Like of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey explained, shares an uncomfortable interface with clinical medicine. Recent efforts by the New Jersey Board of Examiners to incorporate cultural competency legislation have been robustly criticized. Evaluations of six-hour training sessions on cultural competency training have revealed health professionals’ frustration with the health care system’s inability to deal with “culturally different” individuals. In fact, the majority of health professionals who were required to complete the training believe cultural competency to be an area of study that is a “waste of time.”This opposition to cross-cultural education and the value of “cultural competence” training also has been a topic of great debate among anthropologists and health researchers. Despite the ubiquitous use of the term among research and health professionals, cultural competency is a term that cannot be defined precisely enough to operationalize.In “Anthropology in the Clinic: The Problem of Cultural Competency and How to Fix It,” Arthur Kleinman and Peter Benson asserted that the static notion of culture in the medical field “suggests that a culture can be reduced to a technical skill for which clinicians can be trained to develop expertise” [1]. T.S. Harvey, a linguistic and medical anthropologist at the University of California, Riverside, expounded on Kleinman’s opposition to competence as an acquired “technical skill” [1] and suggested reconceptualizing the approach to competence as communication. Although Kleinman’s explanatory models approach [2] provides a health care professional with what to ask the patient, Harvey pulls from Dell Hymes’ communicative competence [3] to understand how to ask it. Harvey recommended viewing competence as a “sociolinguistic acquisition … like a foreign language” where competencies are rule-governed and communication and speech events are formulaic.Harvey also noted that the “onus of cultural competency” is too often placed on the practitioner. Inevitably, there is an asymmetry in every clinical encounter, whereby the “would-be patient” is perpetually considered the “passive receptor.” Patients also share a stake in their health and, as such, should be taught communicative competence as well.Harvey also noted that the “onus of cultural competency” is too often placed on the practitioner. Inevitably, there is an asymmetry in every clinical encounter, whereby the “would-be patient” is perpetually considered the “passive receptor.” Patients also share a stake in their health and, as such, should be taught communicative competence as well.The role of the patient is made ever more complex by the power relationship that exists in the patient-provider context. Through ethnographic research, Sylvie Fainzang, director of research in the Inserm (Cermes), examines how doctors and patients lie. She argues that lying, in the context of secrecy, is an indication of a power relationship [4]. Fainzaing’s further research on the relationship between doctors and patients has yielded additional information on how patients learn about their diagnoses and how they will react to these diagnoses. Though a clinical encounter between a doctor and patient is expected to be one of informed consent, doctors often judge patients upon their ability to “intellectually understand” [4] and assess who is “psychologically ready” [4] to bear the information. This leads to manipulated, misinformed, and “resigned consent” [4]. This sort of social training of obligation of a subject to medical authority provides the patient with the choice either to conform or overthrow the rules as defined by society.Collectively, this interdisciplinary panel worked to inform the discussion on how medical anthropology can address training, communication, and competence at the intersections of medicine, public health, and education. By reviewing health professionals’ growing interest in public health, training in health education and competence, and the patient-provider relationship, medical anthropology can be seen as both relevant and necessary to addressing the challenges faced by the medical and health community today.     

Temporal Characteristics of Online Syntactic Sentence Planning: An Event-Related Potential Study

During sentence production, linguistic information (semantics, syntax, phonology) of words is retrieved and assembled into a meaningful utterance. There is still debate on how we assemble single words into more complex syntactic structures such as noun phrases or sentences. In the present study, event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to investigate the time course of syntactic planning. Thirty-three volunteers described visually animated scenes using naming formats varying in syntactic complexity: from simple words (‘W’, e.g., “triangle”, “red”, “square”, “green”, “to fly towards”), to noun phrases (‘NP’, e.g., “the red triangle”, “the green square”, “to fly towards”), to a sentence (‘S’, e.g., “The red triangle flies towards the green square.”). Behaviourally, we observed an increase in errors and corrections with increasing syntactic complexity, indicating a successful experimental manipulation. In the ERPs following scene onset, syntactic complexity variations were found in a P300-like component (‘S’/‘NP’>‘W’) and a fronto-central negativity (linear increase with syntactic complexity). In addition, the scene could display two actions - unpredictable for the participant, as the disambiguation occurred only later in the animation. Time-locked to the moment of visual disambiguation of the action and thus the verb, we observed another P300 component (‘S’>‘NP’/‘W’). The data show for the first time evidence of sensitivity to syntactic planning within the P300 time window, time-locked to visual events critical of syntactic planning. We discuss the findings in the light of current syntactic planning views.     

Discovering Social Events through Online Attention

Twitter is a major social media platform in which users send and read messages (“tweets”) of up to 140 characters. In recent years this communication medium has been used by those affected by crises to organize demonstrations or find relief. Because traffic on this media platform is extremely heavy, with hundreds of millions of tweets sent every day, it is difficult to differentiate between times of turmoil and times of typical discussion. In this work we present a new approach to addressing this problem. We first assess several possible “thermostats” of activity on social media for their effectiveness in finding important time periods. We compare methods commonly found in the literature with a method from economics. By combining methods from computational social science with methods from economics, we introduce an approach that can effectively locate crisis events in the mountains of data generated on Twitter. We demonstrate the strength of this method by using it to locate the social events relating to the Occupy Wall Street movement protests at the end of 2011.     

The Brain’s Response to the Human Voice Depends on the Incidence of Autistic Traits in the General Population

Optimal brain sensitivity to the fundamental frequency (F0) contour changes in the human voice is important for understanding a speaker’s intonation, and consequently, the speaker’s attitude. However, whether sensitivity in the brain’s response to a human voice F0 contour change varies with an interaction between an individual’s traits (i.e., autistic traits) and a human voice element (i.e., presence or absence of communicative action such as calling) has not been investigated. In the present study, we investigated the neural processes involved in the perception of F0 contour changes in the Japanese monosyllables “ne” and “nu.” “Ne” is an interjection that means “hi” or “hey” in English; pronunciation of “ne” with a high falling F0 contour is used when the speaker wants to attract a listener’s attention (i.e., social intonation). Meanwhile, the Japanese concrete noun “nu” has no communicative meaning. We applied an adaptive spatial filtering method to the neuromagnetic time course recorded by whole-head magnetoencephalography (MEG) and estimated the spatiotemporal frequency dynamics of event-related cerebral oscillatory changes in beta band during the oddball paradigm. During the perception of the F0 contour change when “ne” was presented, there was event-related de-synchronization (ERD) in the right temporal lobe. In contrast, during the perception of the F0 contour change when “nu” was presented, ERD occurred in the left temporal lobe and in the bilateral occipital lobes. ERD that occurred during the social stimulus “ne” in the right hemisphere was significantly correlated with a greater number of autistic traits measured according to the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ), suggesting that the differences in human voice processing are associated with higher autistic traits, even in non-clinical subjects.     

Chinese Social Media Reaction to Information about 42 Notifiable Infectious Diseases

This study aimed to identify what information triggered social media users’ responses regarding infectious diseases. Chinese microblogs in 2012 regarding 42 infectious diseases were obtained through a keyword search in the Weiboscope database. Qualitative content analysis was performed for the posts pertinent to each keyword of the day of the year with the highest daily count. Similar posts were grouped and coded. We identified five categories of information that increased microblog traffic pertaining to infectious diseases: news of an outbreak or a case; health education / information; alternative health information / Traditional Chinese Medicine; commercial advertisement / entertainment; and social issues. News unrelated to the specified infectious diseases also led to elevated microblog traffic. Our study showcases the diverse contexts from which increased social media traffic occur. Our results will facilitate better health communication as causes underlying increased social media traffic are revealed.     

A Delphi Technology Foresight Study: Mapping Social Construction of Scientific Evidence on Metagenomics Tests for Water Safety

Access to clean water is a grand challenge in the 21^st century. Water safety testing for pathogens currently depends on surrogate measures such as fecal indicator bacteria (e.g., E. coli). Metagenomics concerns high-throughput, culture-independent, unbiased shotgun sequencing of DNA from environmental samples that might transform water safety by detecting waterborne pathogens directly instead of their surrogates. Yet emerging innovations such as metagenomics are often fiercely contested. Innovations are subject to shaping/construction not only by technology but also social systems/values in which they are embedded, such as experts’ attitudes towards new scientific evidence. We conducted a classic three-round Delphi survey, comprised of 107 questions. A multidisciplinary expert panel (n = 24) representing the continuum of discovery scientists and policymakers evaluated the emergence of metagenomics tests. To the best of our knowledge, we report here the first Delphi foresight study of experts’ attitudes on (1) the top 10 priority evidentiary criteria for adoption of metagenomics tests for water safety, (2) the specific issues critical to governance of metagenomics innovation trajectory where there is consensus or dissensus among experts, (3) the anticipated time lapse from discovery to practice of metagenomics tests, and (4) the role and timing of public engagement in development of metagenomics tests. The ability of a test to distinguish between harmful and benign waterborne organisms, analytical/clinical sensitivity, and reproducibility were the top three evidentiary criteria for adoption of metagenomics. Experts agree that metagenomic testing will provide novel information but there is dissensus on whether metagenomics will replace the current water safety testing methods or impact the public health end points (e.g., reduction in boil water advisories). Interestingly, experts view the publics relevant in a “downstream capacity” for adoption of metagenomics rather than a co-productionist role at the “upstream” scientific design stage of metagenomics tests. In summary, these findings offer strategic foresight to govern metagenomics innovations symmetrically: by identifying areas where acceleration (e.g., consensus areas) and deceleration/reconsideration (e.g., dissensus areas) of the innovation trajectory might be warranted. Additionally, we show how scientific evidence is subject to potential social construction by experts’ value systems and the need for greater upstream public engagement on metagenomics innovations.     

Chest Radiographic Patterns and the Transmission of Tuberculosis: Implications for Automated Systems

BackgroundComputer-aided detection to identify and diagnose pulmonary tuberculosis is being explored. While both cavitation on chest radiograph and smear-positivity on microscopy are independent risk factors for the infectiousness of pulmonary tuberculosis it is unknown which radiographic pattern, were it detectable, would provide the greatest public health benefit; i.e. reduced transmission. Herein we provide that evidence.Objectives1) to determine whether pulmonary tuberculosis in a high income, low incidence country is more likely to present with “typical” adult-type pulmonary tuberculosis radiographic features and 2) to determine whether those with “typical” radiographic features are more likely than those without such features to transmit the organism and/or cause secondary cases.MethodsOver a three-year period beginning January 1, 2006 consecutive adults with smear-positive pulmonary tuberculosis in the Province of Alberta, Canada, were identified and their pre-treatment radiographs scored by three independent readers as “typical” (having an upper lung zone predominant infiltrate, with or without cavitation but no discernable adenopathy) or “atypical” (all others). Each patient’s pre-treatment bacillary burden was carefully documented and, during a 30-month transmission window, each patient’s transmission events were recorded. Mycobacteriology, radiology and transmission were compared in those with “typical” versus “atypical” radiographs.FindingsA total of 97 smear-positive pulmonary tuberculosis cases were identified, 69 (71.1%) with and 28 (28.9%) without “typical” chest radiographs. “Typical” cases were more likely to have high bacillary burdens and cavitation (Odds Ratios and 95% Confidence Intervals: 2.75 [1.04–7.31] and 9.10 [2.51–32.94], respectively). Typical cases were also responsible for most transmission events—78% of tuberculin skin test conversions (p<0.002) and 95% of secondary cases in reported close contacts (p<0.01); 94% of secondary cases in “unreported” contacts (p<0.02).ConclusionAs a group, smear-positive pulmonary tuberculosis patients with typical radiographic features constitute the greatest public health risk. This may have implications for automated detection systems.     

Development and Evaluation of a Parenting Resilience Elements Questionnaire (PREQ) Measuring Resiliency in Rearing Children with Developmental Disorders

We developed a parenting resilience elements questionnaire (PREQ) measuring the degree to which mothers possess elements that aid in adapting to challenges and difficulties related to children with developmental disorders (DD). A total of 424 parents of children with DD were recruited from five medical institutes. Psychometric properties of PREQ were evaluated using data of 363 mothers of children with DD. Furthermore, multiple regression analysis was performed, predicting depressive symptoms and parenting behavior with PREQ subscales, a general health questionnaire, and the total difficulties score of a strength and difficulties questionnaire. Factor analysis revealed three reliable factors: “knowledge of the child’s characteristics,” “perceived social supports,” and “positive perceptions of parenting.” Moreover, multiple regression analysis showed that “knowledge of the child’s characteristics” was associated with parenting behavior, whereas “perceived social supports” predicted depressive symptoms; “positive perceptions of parenting” influenced both parenting behavior and depressive symptoms. These findings indicated that the PREQ may be used as a scale measuring resiliency in mothers of children with DD and is useful for evaluating their parenting ability in clinical interventions.     

Performance of Social Network Sensors during Hurricane Sandy

Information flow during catastrophic events is a critical aspect of disaster management. Modern communication platforms, in particular online social networks, provide an opportunity to study such flow and derive early-warning sensors, thus improving emergency preparedness and response. Performance of the social networks sensor method, based on topological and behavioral properties derived from the “friendship paradox”, is studied here for over 50 million Twitter messages posted before, during, and after Hurricane Sandy. We find that differences in users’ network centrality effectively translate into moderate awareness advantage (up to 26 hours); and that geo-location of users within or outside of the hurricane-affected area plays a significant role in determining the scale of such an advantage. Emotional response appears to be universal regardless of the position in the network topology, and displays characteristic, easily detectable patterns, opening a possibility to implement a simple “sentiment sensing” technique that can detect and locate disasters.     

Quantifying Collective Attention from Tweet Stream

Online social media are increasingly facilitating our social interactions, thereby making available a massive “digital fossil” of human behavior. Discovering and quantifying distinct patterns using these data is important for studying social behavior, although the rapid time-variant nature and large volumes of these data make this task difficult and challenging. In this study, we focused on the emergence of “collective attention” on Twitter, a popular social networking service. We propose a simple method for detecting and measuring the collective attention evoked by various types of events. This method exploits the fact that tweeting activity exhibits a burst-like increase and an irregular oscillation when a particular real-world event occurs; otherwise, it follows regular circadian rhythms. The difference between regular and irregular states in the tweet stream was measured using the Jensen-Shannon divergence, which corresponds to the intensity of collective attention. We then associated irregular incidents with their corresponding events that attracted the attention and elicited responses from large numbers of people, based on the popularity and the enhancement of key terms in posted messages or “tweets.” Next, we demonstrate the effectiveness of this method using a large dataset that contained approximately 490 million Japanese tweets by over 400,000 users, in which we identified 60 cases of collective attentions, including one related to the Tohoku-oki earthquake. “Retweet” networks were also investigated to understand collective attention in terms of social interactions. This simple method provides a retrospective summary of collective attention, thereby contributing to the fundamental understanding of social behavior in the digital era.     

“Liking” as an early and editable draft of long-run affective value

Psychological and neural distinctions between the technical concepts of “liking” and “wanting” pose important problems for motivated choice for goods. Why could we “want” something that we do not “like,” or “like” something but be unwilling to exert effort to acquire it? Here, we suggest a framework for answering these questions through the medium of reinforcement learning. We consider “liking” to provide immediate, but preliminary and ultimately cancellable, information about the true, long-run worth of a good. Such initial estimates, viewed through the lens of what is known as potential-based shaping, help solve the temporally complex learning problems faced by animals.

What is the distinction between ’liking’ and ’wanting’? Why could we ’want’ something that we do not ’like,’ or ’like’ something but be unwilling to exert effort to acquire it? This Essay argues that the primary hedonic phenomenon called ’liking’ might solve the temporal credit assignment problem for learning that arises when true reinforcement values are available slowly or late.     

Beauty Matters: Social Preferences in a Three-Person Ultimatum Game

Preference for beauty is human nature, as previous behavior studies have supported the notion of “beauty premium” in which attractive people were more easily to get promoted and receive higher salaries. In the present study, 29 males were recruited to participate in a three-person ultimatum game (UG) including a proposer, a responder and a powerless third player. Each subject, playing as the responder, had to decide whether to accept an offer from the allocator both for himself and a female third person. We aimed to elucidate how the facial attractiveness of the female subject affected the male subjects’ fairness and decision-making in social exchanges. Frontal feedback-related negativity (FRN) in response to four offers in an attractive-face condition revealed no significant differences between offers; however, when the companion was an unattractive female, an “unfair/fair” offer, which assigned a lower share to the responder and a fair share to the third player, elicited the largest FRN. Furthermore, when the third player was offered the smallest amount (“fair/unfair” offer), a larger FRN was generated in an attractive-face condition than unattractive-face condition. In the “unfair/fair” offer condition in which subjects received a smaller allocation than the third person, the beauty of their female counterparts attenuated subjects’ aversion to inequality, resulting in a less negative FRN in the frontal region and an increased acceptance ratio. However, the influence of the third player’s facial attractiveness only affected the early evaluation stage: late P300 was found to be immune to the “beauty premium”. Under the two face conditions, P300 was smallest following an “unfair/fair” offer, whereas the amplitudes in the other three offer conditions exhibited no significant differences. In addition, the differentiated neural features of processing facial attractiveness were also determined and indexed by four event-related potentials (ERP) components: N170, frontal N1, N2 and late positive potentials (LPPs).