The COVID-19 framing dataset: How secondary data can be used to explore paradoxical attitudes during the COVID-19 pandemic

We present a data set containing data of five cross-cultural framing studies conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic (Austria, Germany, U.K. and U.S.). The dataset covers data on participants' conspiracy mentality, distrust in science, risk aversion, individualism-collectivism and the endorsement of preventive behaviors such as vaccination willingness. In addition, across all studies, we collected data of a newly developed scale measuring paradoxical, anti-prevention attitudes during the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-2021). We think that authors interested in the interplay of different traits and COVID-19 attitudes could be interested in the secondary use of the data set, and especially in the newly developed Paradox of Prevention Scale. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Data-driven techniques for human activity sensing in smart environments

The number of Internet-of-Things (IoT) and edge devices has exploded in the last decade, providing new opportunities to sense and enable many applications to transform everyday people's lives. Wide-scale time series data collected through such devices, coupled with advances in learning technologies, can transform how people interact with their environment. However, as we enter the era of ubiquitous computing, there is a growing need for methods that are easy to use, computationally feasible, and require minimal human supervision to sense human activities by analyzing large-scale data. The goal of this research work is to propose data-driven techniques that focus on human activity sensing at different scales.The first part of the thesis focuses on human activity sensing at building scale for smart indoor environments. Towards that end, this work emphasizes general-purpose human activity sensing using ambient sensors for context-aware computing in smart environments. A deep neural network-based technique for sensing human-environment interaction is proposed and experiments explored interpretability for different ambient sensors and their contribution to model performance to avoid data redundancy. Identifying the challenge of distribution shift in long-term activity sensing, the thesis next focuses on time series partitioning for unlabeled IoT sensor streams, which is an important step toward continuous human activity sensing. This work proposes Cadence, a generalized change point detection technique that detects change points through hypothesis testing by learning a data representation specifically with the segmentation objective. Experiments show that it is sample-efficient, unsupervised, and can robustly detect time-series events across different applications while needing only 9-93 seconds for training.The second part of the thesis focuses on human activity sensing at city scale using large-scale spatio-temporal data. A framework is introduced for sensing urban activity and policy compliance during the COVID-19 crisis using vision and language-based sensing from street view images. Understanding the challenges of street view image usage in urban sensing due to its large scale and distribution variance, a data-driven framework is proposed to evaluate the quality of information in urban scale street view images based on quality attributes capturing spatial, temporal, and content information present in the data. Our experiments show that such framework can be useful for ranking, querying, and improving spatio-temporal data quality and usage in urban computing and activity sensing. We believe such techniques can be useful to model our living patterns by analyzing large-scale data and improve the quality of our life through applications such as home automation, energy optimization, and personalized healthcare. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Financial uncertainty and anxiety during the COVID-19 pandemic: The mediating role of future orientation

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic involved many uncertainties, including financial uncertainty due to the global financial crisis. Previous research indicates that financial uncertainty is negatively related to mental health and wellbeing. Aims: We tested a model suggesting that the negative impact of financial uncertainty is explained by a restriction of individuals' view of their future possibilities. Specifically, this longitudinal study explored the relationship of financial uncertainty and anxiety, considering the mediating role of future orientation. Method: Data were collected with questionnaires administered to Israeli citizens in April, June and August 2020. Data analysis comprised 379 respondents who participated in all three times. Results: Future orientation mediated the relationship of financial uncertainty and anxiety over time. Tests of changes across time show that changes in financial uncertainty were related to changes in anxiety levels over time. Limitations: Our sample was biased toward younger ages and the measurement of future orientation referred to a general view of the future rather than specific areas. Conclusion: The results suggest that the stressor of financial uncertainty is generalized to a negative view of future possibilities, thereby increasing anxiety. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Attitude embeddedness and attitude consistency: Major factors in conceptualizing attitude properties

There were two broad goals pertaining to attitude strength that were explored in this dissertation. First, research and theory have suggested that many of the traditionally examined subjective attitude properties are distinct constructs. Yet, many attitude properties conceptually overlap with one another. In order to better understand the landscape of attitude properties, I examined the factor analytic structure of a comprehensive set of attitude strength antecedents. Participants reported attitudes toward the topic of GMOs (Study 1) or toward a topic they identified as important to them (Studies 2-6) and various subjective properties of their attitudes. In Studies 1-3, exploratory factor analyses revealed that the various strength antecedents reflected a two-factor structure that differentiated properties relating to an attitude's embeddedness in one's core values and identity from properties reflecting a consistency or entrenchment in an attitude. In Studies 4-6, confirmatory factor analyses determined that, in addition to the over-arching two-factor structure, including 'minor factors' reflecting each attitude property further improved model fit (see Appendix F for a summary of the indices of fit for each study). I therefore propose a hybrid model, wherein the various attitude properties form an over-arching two-factor structure in which each major factor includes additional 'minor' constructs. Across studies, moral basis loaded highly on an embeddedness factor along with values basis (all studies), importance (Studies 4-6), affective and cognitive meta-bases (Studies 5-6), self-definition, and subjective attitude strength (Study 6). The consistency factor was composed of subjective ambivalence (all studies), correctness, clarity (Studies 1-4), attitude-relevant knowledge (Studies 4-6), and certainty (Studies 5-6).The second goal of this dissertation was to understand, given the factor structure of the subjective attitude properties, which behavioral outcomes are better predicted by embeddedness versus consistency. I took an exploratory approach examining a variety of different behavioral domains, and found that attitude embeddedness (vs. consistency) predicted an increased attempt to shape one's environment by selectively exposing oneself to those who agree with one's position (Studies 4 and 7) and selectively exposing oneself to more biased news sources (Study 8). Attitude consistency (vs. embeddedness), on the other hand, better predicted the strength of relation between self-isolation attitudes and behaviors in the context of COVID-19 (Studies 9-10). I also examined the ability of each attitude feature to predict advocacy intentions (Studies 3-6). Embeddedness and consistency (as latent variables) each independently predicted advocacy intentions. It seemed that one way to understand these patterns would be that embeddedness plays a larger role when attitudes might serve value-expressive or social identify functions, whereas consistency might play a larger role when attitudes serve primarily utilitarian functions. Study 11 put that possibility to a confirmatory test, finding that in different contexts different attitude properties better predicted advocacy outcomes (Study 11). In particular, attitude embeddedness increased advocacy intentions for attitudes that served a social identity function, whereas attitude consistency increased advocacy intentions for attitudes that served a utilitarian function. Taken together, this work helps us to understand how attitude properties relate and the contexts under which different classes of attitude properties predict different outcomes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Determinants of COVID-19 vaccination readiness

The topic of the COVID-19 vaccination is widely present, and, since many countries struggle with vaccine hesitancy, the aim of this study was to examine determinants of vaccination readiness. The study involved 1,769 participants (76.3% females, 23% males, and 0.7% other) age range from 18 to 77 years. Participants completed online questionnaires related to demographic characteristics, personality traits (neuroticism and consciousness), vaccination readiness scale, and two scenarios related to social relations in the context of attitudes towards vaccination. The results showed that demographic characteristics were significant predictors of vaccination readiness, where women, the elderly, the more educated, those with higher socioeconomic status, and those who were not ill from COVID-19 had higher vaccination readiness. Contrary to expectations, persons high in neuroticism and low in conscientiousness had higher vaccination readiness. Vaccine-acceptant individuals, when compared to vaccine-resistant and vaccine-hesitant individuals, had higher vaccination readiness. Regarding the scenario in which the close person has similar or dissimilar attitudes towards vaccination, the obtained results showed that the manipulation with similar/dissimilar attitude has led to the attribution of different characteristics to close persons. A close person with similar attitudes was assessed more positively than a close person with different attitudes. The results of this study support the fact that individual factors are important for vaccination readiness and that differences in attitudes toward vaccination can affect close social relations, which has not been investigated so far in the context of COVID-19 vaccination. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Les représentations de l'épidémiede Covid-19 à l'épreuve des différences sociales et du temps

Les termes choisis pour évoquer ľépidémie de Covid-19 révěient plusieurs types de rapport á cet événement inserit dans la durée : les représentations changent seion le genre, l'âge, le diplome, la categorie socioprofessionnelle, et seion la position dans la sphere domestique et la confrontation directe â la maladie. Â partir de ľexpioitation statistique de réponses â une question ouverte posée lors de deux passations ďune enquete portant sur le coronavirus entre avril et juin 2020, sur un méme panel, nous mettons en lumiére deux rapports trés différents â ľépidémie : une relation personnels qui se rencontre davantage chez les femmes et consiste å appréhender les effets de la maladie â ľéchelle de ľespace domestique ou de sa santé individuelle, et une relation politique, plus masculine, qui se situe å une échelle plus globale. Alors que la relation personnels reste relativement stable, la relation politique est plus fluctuante, et fait l'objet de reformulations successives.Alternate :The terms people choose when speaking of the Covid-19 epidemic reveal several types of attitudes toward this long-lasting event. Representations vary by gender, age, educational level, socio-occupational category, position occupied in the home sphere, and whether or not the speaker has had direct experience of the disease. In a statistical study of responses to an open question asked of a single panel in two waves of a coronavirus survey conducted from April to June 2020, we found two sharply different attitudes to the epidemic: a personal attitude, more commonly found among women, where respondents apprehend the effects of the disease at the scale of the home or their own health;and a political attitude, more common among men, that references a more global scale. Whereas the personal attitude remains relatively stable over time, the political view of the problem fluctuates and responses are more likely to be reformulated.Alternate :Die gewählten Begriffe zur Bezeichnung der Covid-19 Epidemie enthüllen verschiedene Beziehungsarten zu diesem langdauernden Ereignis: Die Vorstellungen ändern sich entsprechend Gender, Alter, Diplom, sozloökonomischer Kategorie und nach der Stellung innerhalb der häuslichen Sphäre und der direkten Konfrontation mit der Krankheit. Anhand der statistischen Auswertung der Antworten auf eine offene Frage, die im zweimaligen Ablauf einer Untersuchung zum Coronavirus gestellt wurde, zwischen April und Juni 2020, bei einem identischen Panel, beleuchten wir zwei sehr unterschiedliche Beziehungen zur Epidemie: eine persönliche Beziehung, die vorwiegend bei Frauen vorliegt und darin besteht, die Auswirkungen der Krankheit auf der Ebene der häuslichen Sphäre und bezüglich der individuellen Gesundheit zu erfassen, und andererseits die politische eher männliche Beziehung, die auf einer mehr globalen Stufe liegt. Während die persönliche Beziehung relativ stabil bleibt, ist die politische Beziehung eher schwankend und gibt Anlass zu aufeinanderfolgenden Umformulierungen.

An exploration of quantitative measurement and qualitative experiences and understanding of loneliness in childhood and adolescence

Loneliness in childhood is particularly relevant in light of the Covid-19 pandemic, and subsequent school closures, reductions in social contact, and increased social isolation. Increased understanding in the conceptualisation of loneliness and the experience across the lifespan, indicate a need for a review of the reliability and validity of loneliness scales, and greater understanding of childhood loneliness directly.A systematic literature review (SLR) sought to investigate the robustness of development procedures in the three most used loneliness measures with youth. Subsequent studies exploring psychometric properties of these scales, published between 1978 and 2019, were identified using a PRISMA framework and an additional bespoke framework was used to explore subsequent reliability and validity with youth. With the absence of child view in development procedures of each measure, interviews with primary aged children were carried out to explore their experiences and understanding of loneliness first-hand.The SLR identified key stages of measure development absent in the generation of each loneliness measure. Subsequent papers demonstrating psychometric properties with youth, highlighted inconsistent item and response categories, reliability and validity. The qualitative exploration of child views highlighted that childhood experiences align somewhat with the existing literature, whilst key themes relating to solutions and play are absent.Implications for future practice are discussed, including the need for further review of loneliness measurement in youth, and exploration of child views. Implications for practitioners, intervention, and researchers are discussed. A dissemination strategy to increase the impact of this research is outlined, considering central stakeholders. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Nurses' knowledge and attitude towards COVID-19 in the context of the acute health care settings in Jordan

Purpose: Nurses are at the front line in facing the COVID-19 outbreak and are at increased risk of becoming infected and might be the source of transmission in health-care facilities and the community. The purpose of this study is to assess the knowledge and attitude toward COVID1-19 among nurses in acute care settings in Jordan. This is expected to help with the global initiative to combat the COVID-19 epidemic. Design/methodology/approach: A cross-sectional design was used to survey nurses' knowledge and attitude of COVID-19 among Jordanian nurses working in acute care settings. Findings: The grand mean of knowledge items response was 8.94, implying that respondents possessed a high level of knowledge. The overall attitude score was positive for the participants, with a mean score of 5.93. Moreover, the results showed a significant relationship between knowledge and attitude scores. Originality/value: The findings suggest that nurses in Jordan showed a high level of knowledge and a positive attitude toward COVID-19 during the outbreak's rapid rise period. This study showed specific aspects of knowledge and attitudes that should be focused on in future awareness and educational programs to promote all preventive and safety measures of COVID-19. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

The spirits covid has summoned. The real, the unfathomable and the magical. Effects of the pandemic on children and adolescents

In accordance with the central belief of the intersubjective revolution<< taking place in psychodynamic psychotherapy that internal and external reality are growing ever closer together, the article sets out to describe present reality as dictated by the coronavirus and to reflect on it in socio-psychoanalytic terms. The intention is to bring home to the reader the extraordinary degree to which the real danger of infection has demanded from every single individual the radical reorganisation of their everyday lives. Whichever way we look at it, fear of contagion and the effects of the measures undertaken to prevent the spread of the disease have changed our fundamental attitude to life and placed it under a serious, indefinite and unpredictable threat. The authors focus particularly on the regressive and above all magical patterns emerging in response to this overweening dominance of the reality principle and conclude by inquiring into what this development means both for children, adolescents and their immediate circles and for the assessment of their subjective psychic realities when they seek psychotherapeutic counselling and support. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved) (French) Si, a en croire le << tournant intersubjectif de la psychotherapie psychodynamique, la realite interieure et exterieure sont toujours etroitement liees, il s'agit ici de decrire et reflechir a la realite actuelle de la corona sur le plan socio-psychanalytique. L'article veut montrer comment le reel danger d'infection fait que l'on exige de tous les individus d'exceptionnels changements dans leur quotidien. Qu'on le veuille ou non, l'inquietude face a contagion ainsi que les mesures pour l'eviter affectent le mode de vie de chacun sous forme d'une serieuse charge, durable et peu previsible. En reaction a un principe de realite excessif, il faut principalement prendre en compte des modeles regressifs et surtout magiques pour finalement se demander ce que cela signifie pour les enfants, les adolescents et leur entourage ainsi que pour l'idee qu'ils se font de leur realite psychique subjective quand ils recherchent un conseil et une aide psychotherapeutique. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved) (German) Entsprechend dem Credo der intersubjektiven Wende<< in der psychodynamischen Psychotherapie, wonach innere und ausere Wirklichkeit immer eng miteinander verschrankt sind, soll die aktuelle Corona-Wirklichkeit dargestellt und soziopsychoanalytisch reflektiert werden. Es soll gezeigt werden, wie, initiiert durch die reale Infektionsgefahr, allen Menschen gleichermasen im Alltaglichen auserordentliche Umstellungen abverlangt werden. Die Sorge vor Ansteckung ebenso wie die Einschrankungen zu ihrer Vermeidung, tangieren - ob man will oder nicht - das Lebensgefuhl aller im Sinne einer ernsten, nachhaltigen und wenig kalkulierbaren Belastung. Als Reaktionsbildung auf das Ubermas an Realitatsprinzip sollen vor allem regressive, insbesondere magische Muster in den Blick genommen werden, um abschliesend zu fragen, was es fur die Kinder, die Jugendlichen und ihr Umfeld ebenso wie fur die Einschatzung ihrer subjektiven psychischen Wirklichkeit bedeutet, wenn sie psychotherapeutischen Rat und Unterstutzung suchen. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Psychometric Features of the Emergency Remote Teaching Attitude Scale and an Example Application

Existing research shows that emergency remote teaching (ERT), which has become mandatory with the COVID-19 Pandemic, has unique aspects and provides differentiating experiences for teachers and learners. This research aims to develop a scale to measure the attitudes of the teaching staff working in higher education towards ERT;besides the validity and reliability proofs, to make a sample application with the developed scale. For this purpose, the validity and reliability proofs of the "Emergency Remote Teaching Attitude Scale (ERTAS)" according to the Classical Test and Item Response Theories were determined in line with the data collected from 878 teaching staff working in the state and foundation universities throughout Turkey. ERTAS has three sub-dimensions measuring "Affective, Behavioral, and Cognitive" dimensions with a total of 22 items. According to the literature, the fit indexes of the ERTAS obtained from Confirmatory Factor Analysis are acceptable. It was determined that the attitudes measured by the sub-dimensions of ERTAS according to gender, seniority, and their interaction did not change. The teaching staff experienced that ERT relieved them of their teaching responsibility in line with the flexibility, accessibility, the facilitation of the presentation of visual and auditory content. Some suggestions have been made regarding the use of ERTAS.