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Background: Nervous system post-acute sequelae of COVID-19 (NS-PASC) include cognitive and mental health symptoms. To further define these, we applied a Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) approach to examine motor, positive valence (PV) and negative valence (NV) systems, and social processing data in The COVID Mind Study of NS-PASC. Method(s): NS-PASC participants (>3 months after COVID-19) referred from a NeuroCOVID Clinic and non-COVID controls from New Haven, CT and Baltimore, MD completed an RDoC test battery for cognition (language, declarative and working memory, cognitive control, perception), motor, PV, NV, and social processes. To date, 3T MRI with diffusion tensor imaging was performed in 11 NS-PASC to assess white matter integrity (global white matter fractional anisotropy [FA]) as a contributor to alterations identified on the RDoC tests. Analysis of Covariance examined group differences after adjusting for sex, race, ethnicity, age, and years of education. Result(s): 25 NS-PASC participants (age 43.4+/-11.3 yrs, 76% female, 402 days after COVID-19 symptom onset) and 29 controls (age 46.2.6+/-13.1 yrs, 66% female) completed the battery. Controls were more racially diverse and less educated than NS-PASC (43% vs. 12% Black, p=0.005;14.5 vs. 16.1 yrs of education, p< 0.05). Means and statistics for RDoC between NS-PASC and controls are shown in Table. NS-PASC performed worse in language, verbal working and declarative memory, and perception and reported greater cognitive control difficulties (e.g., behavioral inhibition, set shifting) without issues on performance-based metrics (Stroop, Trail Making Test-Part B), and had slower motor function. NS-PASC reported more NV issues including greater symptoms of depression, rumination in response to depressive mood, apathy, childhood trauma, anxiety, and perceived stress. There were no differences in PV and social processing. In a subset of NS-PASC participants who underwent MRI, there was a dynamic range of FA values with a mean of 0.509 (IQR 0.481 - 0.536). Conclusion(s): Our findings extend previous PASC studies characterizing cognitive and mental health alterations, indicating that additional RDoC assessments warrant focus, including alterations in motor and the negative valence system. In future analyses, we will examine white matter integrity as a pathophysiologic contributor to these RDoC systems.
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An outbreak of the severe acute respiratory syndrome corona virus (SARS-CoV-2) made face masks use a norm in individuals' daily lives. The information individuals obtained with face perception is potentially affected by regular face mask use. This study investigated the effects of face masks, ethnicities, and sex on the social judgments including sex, age, trustworthiness, facial attractiveness, and approachability. Later, the effects of face masks, ethnicities, and sex, and facial expressions of happy, neutral, and sad faces on valence and arousal were studied. Likert-type scales and Self-Assessment Manikin were used in an online experiment by Psychopy to capture face perception. Only sex influences sex score in an apparent manner, and unmasked faces appear as more attractive. Face masks and ethnicities do not seem to have effects on sex, age, attractiveness, trustworthiness, and approachability. Faces with different expressions influence the scoring in valence and arousal scale. The results of the present study may be informative for the current pandemic for people to have fruitful social engagements. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
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Aim: To assess the pattern of alcohol consumption in the Chilean adult population in association with depressive symptoms in the context of the COVID-19 quarantine. Method(s): A correlational and transversal study was conducted. Alcohol consumption and depressive symptoms were measured through an online survey, including the PHQ-9 Chilean version and the item banks for alcohol use of the Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS). Mediational analysis models were conducted to assess whether the relationship between depressive symptoms and problematic drinking was mediated by drinking to cope with negative emotions. Result(s): 32% of the sample reported depression, 84% acknowledge having been drunk during the previous 30 days and 18% acknowledge an increase in the amount of alcohol use. The presence of depressive symptomatology positively predicts problematic alcohol consumption during the quarantine;however, when it includes analyzing the reasons for drinking alcohol, this relationship becomes negative and shows a significant mediation effect in the relationship between depressive symptomatology and problematic drinking through increased drinking to control negative emotions. Conclusion(s): The findings suggest that during quarantine, the increase in problematic drinking is related to depressive symptoms associated with an increased urge to drink to cope with negative emotions.Copyright © 2022 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
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Olfactory dysfunction is amongst the many symptoms of Long COVID. Whilst most people that experience smell loss post COVID-19 recover their sense of smell and taste within a few weeks, about 10% of cases experience long-term problems, and their smell recovery journey often begins a few months later when everyday items start to smell distorted. This is known as parosmia. The aim of this study was to identify the key food triggers of parosmic distortions and investigate the relationship between distortion and disgust in order to establish the impact of parosmia on diet and quality of life. In this cross-sectional study (n = 727), respondents experiencing smell distortions completed a questionnaire covering aspects of smell loss, parosmia and the associated change in valence of everyday items. There was a significant correlation between strength and disgust (p < 0.0001), and when the selected items were reported as distorted, they were described as either unpleasant or gag-inducing 84% of the time. This change in valence associated with loss of expected pleasure and the presence of strange tastes and burning sensations must certainly lead to changes in eating behaviours and serious longer-term consequences for mental health and quality of life.
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The COVID-19 pandemic continues to negatively impact people's mental health worldwide. Due to the rise in unemployment, loss of income, and lack of social interaction, people are now more likely to feel lonely, go on fewer outings, and dread the unexpected nature of viral transmission. Meanwhile, Public Health authorities are interested in monitoring people's mental and emotional well-being. In this paper, natural language processing is used to analyze human sentiments concerning the COVID-19 pandemic that has been dangerously affecting individuals' mental and physical well-being for more than two years now. Even though several waves of COVID-19 have passed, of which the first and third waves i.e., the initial pandemic period from 20th March 2020 and the rise of the Delta variant from January 2020 had the most impact on the mental health of individuals, this is further evident by the results of this paper. This research focuses on how severely this virus has affected people's mental health and emotions. After processing the data i.e., cleaning, formatting, and removing irregularities from the data, feature engineering models are applied to acquire the results. The results through VADER (valence-aware dictionary and sentiment reasoning) indicate an increase in overall negative sentiments between two mentioned periods. Additionally, the NRC-EIL (National Research Council of Canada - Emotion Intensity Lexicon) analysis showed that 'fear' and 'sadness' occurred during those times. © 2022 IEEE.
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PURPOSE: This study aimed to examine the associations between frequent exposure to positive/negative information about vaccine efficacy/safety on social media and intention of COVID-19 vaccination, and to test if media literacy and perceived information quality would moderate such associations. DESIGN: A multi-city cross-sectional survey. SETTING: At five universities in different regions of China. SUBJECTS: 6922 university students (a response rate of 72.3%). MEASURES: frequency of exposure to social media information about COVID-19 vaccination, media literacy, perceived information quality, intention of COVID-19 vaccination, and sociodemographic characteristics. ANALYSIS: Logistic regression analysis was conducted to test main and interaction effects. RESULTS: Higher exposure to positive information about vaccine efficacy (adjusted odds ratio [AOR] = 1.30, P < .001) and vaccine safety (AOR = 1.27, P < .001) were positively associated with vaccination intention. No significant associations were shown between exposure to negative information about vaccine efficacy/safety and vaccination intention. Higher net exposure to negative vs positive information was negatively associated with vaccination intention (AOR = .82, P < .001). High media literacy was further found to attenuate the effect of negative information exposure and strengthen that of positive information exposure. Perceived information quality was not a significant moderator. CONCLUSION: The valence of social media information regarding the efficacy and safety of COVID-19 vaccines and individuals' media literacy jointly shaped COVID-19 vaccination intention. The findings can inform the development of effective health promotion strategies for enhancing COVID-19 vaccination.
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The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are individualized, which means that our emotions and behaviors would experience changes of different degrees. These changes have led to subtle connections within the social media context. This study concentrates on pandemic diaries posted on microblog sites during the lockdown period in China and explores the association between gender, emotional valence in diaries, and social media content engagement behaviors. Through computational methods, this study found that males and females tended to present significantly different emotional valence and social media content engagement behaviors. A negative correlation existed between emotional valence and comment behavior in female diary texts. Moreover, the pandemic proximity had a moderating effect on emotional valence and social media content engagement behaviors. This article attempts to explain the emotional and behavioral characteristics related to social media diaries and express concerns for the emotional health of disadvantaged blog users in the severely affected area during the pandemic.
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In addition to showing greater memory positivity soon after negative events, older adults can be more likely than younger adults to show decreases in memory negativity as events grow more distant. We recently showed that this latter effect was not present when adults were asked to rate memories of the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic (March-May 2020): after a short (June/July 2020) and long delay (October/November 2020), older age was associated with greater reflections on positive aspects, but with no difference in negative aspects. We suggested that older adults did not show decreased negativity because the pandemic was still prevalent in their daily lives. The present study examines whether perceived event resolution-rather than time on its own-may be necessary to show age-related decreases in negativity by surveying participants during a time when many may have felt like the pandemic had resolved (Summer 2021). Once again, age was associated with increased ratings of the positive aspects, but at this timepoint, age was also associated with decreased ratings of the negative aspects. These results suggest that older adults may more successfully decrease the negativity of their memories compared to younger adults only when they feel that events have resolved.
Subject(s)
COVID-19 , Memory, Episodic , Humans , Aged , Aging , Pandemics , Mental Recall , EmotionsABSTRACT
Over the last decade, Twitter has emerged as one of the most influential forums for social, political, and health discourse. In this paper, we introduce a massive dataset of more than 45 million geo-located tweets posted between 2015 and 2021 from US and Canada (TUSC), especially curated for natural language analysis. We also introduce Tweet Emotion Dynamics (TED) - metrics to capture patterns of emotions associated with tweets over time. We use TED and TUSC to explore the use of emotion-associated words across US and Canada;across 2019 (pre-pandemic), 2020 (the year the pandemic hit), and 2021 (the second year of the pandemic);and across individual tweeters. We show that Canadian tweets tend to have higher valence, lower arousal, and higher dominance than the US tweets. Further, we show that the COVID-19 pandemic had a marked impact on the emotional signature of tweets posted in 2020, when compared to the adjoining years. Finally, we determine metrics of TED for 170,000 tweeters to benchmark characteristics of TED metrics at an aggregate level. TUSC and the metrics for TED will enable a wide variety of research on studying how we use language to express ourselves, persuade, communicate, and influence, with particularly promising applications in public health, affective science, social science, and psychology. © European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC-4.0.
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Background: Messages on one's stance toward vaccination on microblogging sites may affect the reader's decision on whether to receive a vaccine. Understanding the dissemination of provaccine and antivaccine messages relating to COVID-19 on social media is crucial; however, studies on this topic have remained limited. Objective: This study applies the elaboration likelihood model (ELM) to explore the characteristics of vaccine stance messages that may appeal to Twitter users. First, we examined the associations between the characteristics of vaccine stance tweets and the likelihood and number of retweets. Second, we identified the relative importance of the central and peripheral routes in decision-making on sharing a message. Methods: English-language tweets from the United States that contained provaccine and antivaccine hashtags (N=150,338) were analyzed between April 26 and August 26, 2021. Logistic and generalized negative binomial regressions were conducted to predict retweet outcomes. The content-related central-route predictors were measured using the numbers of hashtags and mentions, emotional valence, emotional intensity, and concreteness. The content-unrelated peripheral-route predictors were measured using the numbers of likes and followers and whether the source was a verified user. Results: Content-related characteristics played a prominent role in shaping decisions regarding whether to retweet antivaccine messages. Particularly, positive valence (incidence rate ratio [IRR]=1.32, P=.03) and concreteness (odds ratio [OR]=1.17, P=.01) were associated with higher numbers and likelihood of retweets of antivaccine messages, respectively; emotional intensity (subjectivity) was associated with fewer retweets of antivaccine messages (OR=0.78, P=.03; IRR=0.80, P=.04). However, these factors had either no or only small effects on the sharing of provaccine tweets. Retweets of provaccine messages were primarily determined by content-unrelated characteristics, such as the numbers of likes (OR=2.55, IRR=2.24, P<.001) and followers (OR=1.31, IRR=1.28, P<.001). Conclusions: The dissemination of antivaccine messages is associated with both content-related and content-unrelated characteristics. By contrast, the dissemination of provaccine messages is primarily driven by content-unrelated characteristics. These findings signify the importance of leveraging the peripheral route to promote the dissemination of provaccine messages. Because antivaccine tweets with positive emotions, objective content, and concrete words are more likely to be disseminated, policymakers should pay attention to antivaccine messages with such characteristics.
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People receive a wide variety of news from social media. They especially look for information on social media in times of crisis with the desire to assess the risk they face. This risk assessment, and other aspects of user reactions, may be affected by characteristics of the social media post relaying certain information. Thus, it is critical to understand these characteristics to deliver information with the reactions in mind. This study investigated various types of imagery used as thumbnails in social media posts regarding news about the COVID-19 pandemic. In an experimental design, 300 participants viewed social media posts containing each of the three types of imagery: data visualization (directly about risk information), advisory (not containing direct risk information, but instead help on how to lower risk), or clickbait (containing no risk-related information, just generic visuals). After observing the social media posts, they answered questionnaires measuring their emotions (valence, arousal, and dominance), risk perception, perceived credibility of the post, and engagement. The participants also indicated their emotions towards and interest in COVID-19 news coverage, age, gender, and how often and actively they use social media. These variables acted as controls. The data were analysed using mixed linear models. Results indicated that advisory imagery positively influenced valence, arousal, dominance, credibility, and (lower) risk perception. Alternatively, imagery showing data visualizations yielded low valence, arousal, dominance, credibility, and high risk perception. Clickbait-styled thumbnails which carry no information are usually measured between the other two types. The type of imagery did not affect the motivation to engage with a post. Aside from visual imagery, most variables were affected by COVID sentiment and the usual activity on social media. These study results indicate that one should use advisory imagery for more comfortable news delivery and data visualization when the poster wishes to warn users of existing risks.
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The topic of affective development over the lifespan is at the forefront of psychological science. One of the intriguing findings in this area is superior emotion regulation and increased positivity in older rather than younger adults. This paper aims to contribute to the empirical base of studies on the role of affect in cognition. We report a new dataset of valence (positivity) ratings to 3,600 English words collected from North American and British English-speaking younger (below 65 years of age) and older adults (65 years of age and older) during the COVID-19 pandemic. This dataset represents a broad range of valence and a rich selection of semantic categories. Our analyses of the new data pitted against comparable pre-pandemic (2013) data from younger counterparts reveal differences in the overall distribution of valence related both to age and the psychological fallout of the pandemic. Thus, we found at the group level that older participants produced higher valence ratings overall than their younger counterparts before and especially during the pandemic. Moreover, valence ratings saw a super-linear increase after the age of 65. Together, these findings provide new evidence for emotion regulation throughout adulthood, including a novel demonstration of greater emotional resilience in older adults to the stressors of the pandemic.
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COVID-19 , Pandemics , Humans , Aged , Adult , COVID-19/epidemiology , Emotions/physiology , Semantics , CognitionABSTRACT
Emotions are able to impact our ability to control our behaviors. However, it is not clear whether emotions play a detrimental or an advantageous effect on action control and whether the valence of the emotional stimuli differently affects such motor abilities. One way to measure reactive inhibitory control is the stop-signal task (SST), which estimates the ability to cancel outright a response to the presentation of a stop signal by means of the stop signal reaction times (SSRT). Impaired as well as facilitated action control has been found when faced with emotional stimuli such as stop signals in SSTs and mixed results were observed for positive versus negative stimuli. Here, we aimed to investigate these unresolved issues more deeply. Action control capabilities were tested in 60 participants by means of a SST, in which the stop signals were represented by a fearful and a happy body posture together with their neutral counterpart. Results showed that both positive and negative body postures enhanced the ability to suppress an ongoing action compared to neutral body postures. These results demonstrate that emotional valence-independent emotional stimuli facilitate action control and suggest that emotional stimuli may trigger increased sensory representation and/or attentional processing that may have promote stop-signal processing and hence improved inhibitory performance.
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Uncertainty is ubiquitous in life, and its impacts are seen in decision-making across diverse contexts (e.g., financial, health, and interpersonal/social). As a result, individual differences in response to emotional ambiguity, a special type of uncertainty, can have far-reaching impacts. A growing literature has explored these individual differences in valence bias, or the tendency to appraise ambiguous social signals as more positive or negative. Although these appraisals are generally characterized by an initial negativity, many individuals arrive at positive appraisals through regulatory processes. Chronic negativity appears to be linked to an increased risk of mood and anxiety symptoms and has spurred research assessing predictors of valence bias at the biological, psychological, and social levels, that support the overriding of initial negativity. Here, biological predictors are probed via resting-state functional connectivity, in particular among emotion regulation (i.e., amygdala and PFC) and task performance (i.e., cingulo-opercular) brain networks, which are leveraged to predict individual differences in valence bias with machine learning algorithms. Next, psychological predictors are explored in the context of a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction intervention - showing a malleability of the trait-like valence bias. Then, the broad-scale uncertainty stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic and its impacts on valence bias over the period of approximately 15 months is characterized, showing a generalized increase in negativity at the start of the pandemic but individual differences in this change after the pandemic's onset. Findings from each of these three levels of analysis are then discussed in the context of understanding sources of variability in individual differences in valence bias and improving physical and mental well-being. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)
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In this era of digitization, tasks can be performed from anywhere in the world that previously required manual movement. It is the same for investing and trading in stocks. With the ease of investing and trading in stocks via the internet, a more extensive segment of society has started investing. The stock price depends on multiple factors such as politics, economics, war, society, and news sentiment. Therefore stocks are really hard to predict due to such vast dependencies. Stock markets are an important issue in the financial world. Prediction of stock prices during the global pandemic of Novel Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) can be very helpful to stakeholders. The attempt of predicting the stock prices have been made by previous researchers using sentimental news analysis through Support Vector Machine (SVM), Neural Network, and Naive Bayes. However, they have low accuracy, and some even claim that news is not a crucial governing factor for the stock price. This paper aims to predict the stock market prices through news sentimental analysis using techniques such as Long Short Term Memory and Artificial Neural Network against classifier models like Natural Language Toolkit, Valence Aware Dictionary for Sentiment Reasoning, Recurrent Neural Network for price prediction. S.Mohan [1] MAPE scores came out to be 1.17, 2.43 for RNN and RNN with news polarity for Facebook stock prices. Our results came out to be 1.21 and 1.94, slightly better results, thus showing optimism in the dependence of stock prices on the news. © 2022 IEEE.
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Purpose This exploratory study aims to examine how wine stakeholders' are adopting innovative advancements in smart industry 4.0 application technology (SI4.0AT) coupled with electronic word-of-mouth (e-WOM) techniques to increase winery visitation and wine sales, prior to and during a global pandemic in the Yarra Valley in Victoria, Australia. Design/methodology/approach A qualitative interpretivist geographical bounded case study approach was used to collect data from fifteen Victorian wine stakeholder's prior to and during the global pandemic COVID-19. A thematic analysis was applied to interpret participant responses and how they viewed, reacted to and harnessed S14.0AT and e-WOM to continue and increase wine sales. Findings The findings suggest few wine stakeholders' were actively implementing SI4.0AT prior to the global pandemic, COVID -19. With the forced closure of wineries to visitors across Australia, most small to medium-sized wineries immediately changed their business models to concentrate on domestic e-commerce wine sales and home delivery. To support these new business models, e-WOM techniques were quickly adopted or increased whereas other S14.0AT technologies were not, due to financial restraints. Research limitations/implications The number of participants used in this study is a limitation, however, this can be overcome by replicating this study in other wine regions. This research focused on the wine stakeholders' viewpoint only and may not be easily generalised. Future studies may examine the "what" aspect of SI4.0AT is being used and e-WOM content such as investigating what consumers are saying about these wineries, the method of communication and the motivations for consumers to engage with a winery. Practical implications The implications for the wine industry and overall results offer insight into the wine stakeholders' perceptions of SI4.0AT and e-WOM and consequent marketing strategy of wineries in the Yarra Valley, Victoria, both pre- and during forced face-to-face winery closures due to a global pandemic. Wineries need to continue to harness and leverage the benefits of e-WOM wine marketing in their marketing strategies and continue to explore the affordability of 4.0 app technology and Tourism 4.0 options. Originality/value This study is the first attempt at investigating how wine stakeholders' view;react to and harness SI4.0AT and e-WOM through formalised online marketing strategies which should continue to be investigated in the future.
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Recent years have witnessed the rapid growth of an emerging digital healthcare service - online medical consultation (OMC). Despite its popularity, many OMC platforms have encountered issues in initial adoption and continuance use among patients. We posit that many of the hesitation and resistance may arise from a lack of trust toward OMC, which is a complex phenomenon that involves both interpersonal and technological-oriented considerations. This study seeks to clarify the conceptualization of online trust in the context of OMC. It compares two plausible explanations (i.e., trust as a direct cause vs. trust as a moderator) regarding how interpersonal and technological trust contributes to the service continuance decision in OMC. By contextualizing the valence framework, we identify the critical factors in making the risk-benefit assessment of patients' OMC decision. We conduct an online survey of 365 experienced OMC users and analyze our structural model using a partial least square approach. Our results show that the multidimensional conceptualization approach, which incorporates both interpersonal and technological aspects of trust, is superior to the unitary approach. Besides, our findings suggest that the role trust plays in determining service continuance decisions in OMC is more of a direct cause than a qualifier that buffers the impacts of risk-benefit evaluation. We believe the findings can help both researchers and practitioners recognize the multidimensional perspective of trust and better understand the role trust plays in OMC and other online healthcare delivery problems.
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Affective computing is an emerging research area focused on the development of devices and systems that have the ability to recognize, interpret, process and simulate human emotions in order to improve a user's experience when interacting with a software system. One of the possible fields of application of the techniques provided by affective computing is in the design and generation of multimedia content in the context of formal and non-formal education, which can generate greater interest in students through the transmission of different emotions throughout this content. Based on the above, in this article, an analysis of emotions is carried out on a set of content provided by the Ministry of Health of Colombia as a measure for the prevention and mitigation of contagion by COVID-19. For the development of the study, a tool has been built in the Java language, which allows the segmentation of the audio fragments of the multimedia content, as well as the extraction of the acoustic parameters of arousal and valence, and the application of clustering models on the set of properties extracted from the segments. Copyright © 2022 Praise Worthy Prize S.r.l.-All rights reserved. © 2022 Praise Worthy Prize S.r.l.-All rights reserved.
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Mobile grocery shopping has gained traction recently due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Hence, this study aims to investigate the antecedents that influence consumers’ buying intention through mobile grocery shopping. This was achieved through the use of a multi-perspective research model that includes the consumers’ positive and negative valences as well as consumer characteristics. Data was collected from 400 Malaysian consumers and analyzed using the Partial Least Squares-Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) analysis. The finding of the study indicated the significant effects of positive valences (e.g., hedonic and utilitarian value) but not negative valences (e.g., privacy concern and security risk) on consumer buying intention through mobile grocery shopping. This study among the first to examine the intricacies of varying consumer characteristics in the context of mobile grocery shopping. The implications derived from the findings of this study are discussed. © 2022 International Association for Computer Information Systems.