ABSTRACT
Recently, researchers have modeled how reliability and political bias of news may affect Facebook users' engagement, as measured using interaction metrics such as the number of shares, likes, etc. However, the temporal dynamics of Facebook users' engagement with news of varying degrees of bias and reliability is less studied. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is also important to quantify how the pandemic changed user engagement with various news. This paper presents the first temporal study of Facebook users' interaction dynamics, accounting for both the bias and reliability of the publishers. We consider a dataset of 992 U.S. publishers, and the study spans the period from Jan. 2018 to July 2022. This allows us to accurately assess the effect of the covid outbreak on the temporal dynamics of Facebook users' interactions with different classes of news. Our study examines these two parameters' effect on Facebook user engagement using both per-publisher and aggregated statistics. Several findings are revealed by our analysis, including that publishers in different bias and reliability classes experienced significantly different levels of engagement dynamics during and following the covid outbreak. For example, we show that the least reliable news exhibited the most considerable growth of followers during the covid period and the most reliable news sources exhibited the greatest growth rate of followers during the post-covid period. We also show that the interaction rate (number of interactions normalized over the number of followers) with Facebook news posts during the post-covid period is smaller than it was even before the outbreak. Furthermore, we demonstrate how the COVID-19 outbreak caused statistically significant structural breaks in the temporal dynamics of engagement with several types of news, and quantify this effect. With social media becoming a popular news source during crises, the observed temporal dynamics provide important insights into how information was consumed over the recent years, benefiting both researchers and public sectors. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
Non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) is described as behaviors that directly and intentionally inflict damage to body tissue without suicidal intent and for reasons not linked to cultural expectations or norms. Literature has confirmed several "specific risk factors" related to NSSI behaviors; emotional reactivity, internalizing problems, alexithymia traits, and maladaptive family functioning can predispose an individual to intrapersonal and interpersonal vulnerabilities related to difficulties in regulating one's own cognitive-emotional experience. The present study aims to analyze and define the psychopathological and family interactive-relational characteristics of adolescents with NSSI through a case-control study. Thirty-one patients with NSSI and thirty-one patients without NSSI paired for sex, age, and psychiatric diagnosis (ICD-10) were recruited in Padua among two Child Neuropsychiatry Units before the COVID-19 pandemic. Results show a higher prevalence of internalizing problems, alexithymia trait related to "difficulty identifying feelings", and lower quality of family functioning related to inclusion of partners, child involvement, and child self-regulation. These results carry significant implications for the clinical management and therapeutic care of non-suicidal self-injury patients and further confirm the need for an in-depth investigation of internalizing problems, alexithymia, and quality of family interactions.
ABSTRACT
The worldwide epidemic of novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has led to a strong demand for highly efficient immunobinding to achieve rapid and accurate on-site detection of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies. However, hour-scale time-consumption is usually required to ensure the adequacy of immunobinding on expensive large instruments in hospitals, and the common false negative or positive results often occur in rapid on-site immunoassay (e.g. immunochromatography). We solved this dilemma by presenting a reciprocating-flowing immunobinding (RF-immunobinding) strategy. RF-immunobinding enabled the antibodies in fluid contacting with the corresponding immobilized antigens on substrate repeatedly during continuous reciprocating-flowing, to achieve adequate immunobinding within 60 s. This strategy was further developed into an immunoassay method for the serological detection of 13 suspected COVID-19 patients. We obtained a 100% true negative and true positive rate and a limit of quantification (LOQ) of 4.14 pg/mL. Our strategy also can be a potential support for other areas related to immunorecognition, such as proteomics, immunopharmacology and immunohistochemistry.