Limbic platform capitalism: understanding the contemporary marketing of health-demoting products on social media

The purposive design, production and marketing of legal but health-demoting products that stimulate habitual consumption and pleasure for maximum profit has been called 'limbic capitalism'. In this article, drawing on alcohol and tobacco as key examples, we extend this framework into the digital realm. We argue that 'limbic platform capitalism' is a serious threat to the health and wellbeing of individuals, communities and populations. Accessed routinely through everyday digital devices, social media platforms aggressively intensify limbic capitalism because they also work through embodied limbic processes. These platforms are designed to generate, analyse and apply vast amounts of personalised data in an effort to tune flows of online content to capture users' time and attention, and influence their affects, moods, emotions and desires in order to increase profits. Social media are central to young people's socialising, identities, leisure practices and engagement in civic life. Young people actively appropriate social media for their own ends but are simultaneously recruited as consumers who are specifically targeted by producers of limbic products and services. Social media platforms have seen large increases in users and traffic through the COVID-19 pandemic and limbic capitalism has worked to intensify marketing that is context, time and place specific, driving online purchases and deliveries of limbic products. This has public health implications that require immediate attention as existing regulatory frameworks are woefully inadequate in this era of data-driven, algorithmic marketing.

Reading habits of students of higher learning institutions during COVID-19 lockdown period

This research aims to examine the leisure reading habits of students during the COVID-19 lockdown period (N = 156). The study identified that most of the students have the habit of reading newspapers, and they preferred to read literary works in the areas of novel, story and poem. The majority of students enjoy reading books. Students are regularly reading books to update themselves, and they have a regular habit of reading books other than textbooks. Moreover, the study result proves that doing a part time job, time spent in the SNS, and playing mobile/online games are substantially curtailed the students' reading habits.

THE ECONOMY AND POLICY TRADE-OFFS

Good evening. It is a pleasure and an honour to be here at NIESR to give the annual Dow lecture. We are very lucky in the UK to have high-quality independent institutions such as NIESR focusing on the policy landscape, and in my time on the MPC I have always valued their commentary and research.

Schadenfreude, politics, and social media. Malicious joy towards politicians during the pandemic

This work investigates Schadenfreude, the malicious joy for the misfortunes of others. This under-investigated emotion expresses a refusal to empathize with the misfortunes of others, to the point of enjoying them. Recent classification models identify three types of Schadenfreude: for Aversion, if the pleasure is due to pure antipathy towards the victim;for Injustice, if you think that the misfortune suffered by the Victims punishes them for wrongs caused in the past;and for Image, when the misfortune of others makes those who feel Schadenfreude have a better consideration of themselves or of someone or something in which they believe. The Covid-19 pandemic unleashed in 2020 is a misfortune that has aroused malicious joy in some people. The research presented here analyses 1940 expressions of Schadenfreude collected on Facebook and Twitter in 26 Italian newspapers, referred to two political leaders, an Italian and a British one, when they contracted Covid: Nicola Zingaretti, one of the leaders of the government coalition in Italy, and Boris Johnson, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. The research distinguishes cases of Schadenfreude for Aversion and Injustice towards them and singles out thirteen ways of expressing them: insults, derisions, irony, curses, negative wishes, expressions of pleasure, displeasure for a misfortune not serious enough, refusal to empathize, clarification of the wrong perpetrated or of the causes of aversion;and also, appeals to the divine, and direct references to justice and one's aversion. The distribution of the expressions in the two types makes it possible to distinguish different motivations and levels of intensity of the Schadenfreude felt towards the two victims, differentiating the functions both of the emotion itself and of its manifestation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

PANCOE: A fresh alternative to post-Covid-19 challenges in education: The case of tourism education

Some authors have alerted on the state of crisis generated by Covid-19 in the tourism industry worldwide. The restrictive measures disposed by governments generated not only an unparalleled economic crisis but also serious social maladies in society and education (i.e., higher dropout rates and low academic grades). Needless to say that the tourism education was in crisis much time earlier than the Covid-19 pandemic. Echoing Sigala and Ratten, the authors hold the pungent thesis that Covid-19 introduced a new opportunity to reform the epistemology and the basis of the tourism education curricula. Centerd on the role played by pleasure and joy, which is boosted by the digital technologies, this chapter synthesizes the findings of PANCOE, a successful experiment conducted by the University of Palermo, Argentina, to reduce the dropout rates while improving students' academic performance. The experiment was drawn and applied in the years before and after the pandemic. Results show how pleasure plays a vital role giving students better opportunities in contexts of fear and deprivation. © 2023 by Alejandra Zuccoli and Maximiliano E. Korstanje.

Millennials' virtual reality experiences pre- and post-COVID-19

Drawing upon the stimuli-organism-response framework, we investigate the effects of the possible actions and self-location of virtual reality experiences on perceived enjoyment, affecting millennials' attitude changes and visit intentions. The results show a significant influence of possible actions on perceived enjoyment, leading to attitude change and visit intention, while self-location leads to perceived enjoyment and thus attitude change. Through two independent samples (i.e., pre- and post-COVID-19), we examine the moderating effects of a change in circumstances on structural relationships. Our findings suggest that self-location is critical to changing attitudes toward destinations during the pandemic. Thus, we demonstrate that VR plays a critical role in helping tourism destinations recover and building tourism resilience. This study extends current knowledge of spatial presence by examining the respective roles of self-location and possible actions in tourism destinations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Beyond pleasure: Effects of depression, anhedonia, and COVID-19 stress on hedonic and eudaimonic reward functioning

Reward processing encompasses multiple psychological processes, including appraisals of the incentive value of a reward (reward valuation), behavioral motivation to earn it (reward wanting), and affective responses to its receipt (reward liking). Disruptions in reward processing and the vulnerability of this system to chronic stress are argued to contribute to the development of a depressive disorder and anhedonia specifically. However, research has been limited to examining responses to "hedonic" rewards as the study of "eudaimonic" reward processing presents methodological challenges. Addressing these aims, this study developed the Hedonic and Eudaimonic Incentive Delay Task (HEID) for a comprehensive assessment of reward processing across multiple reward domains, including hedonic (HE), eudaimonic (EU), and neutral-intrinsic (NT-I) rewards. The central objectives were to examine the effects of (1) depression and anhedonia-related symptoms (e.g., wellbeing, anhedonia), (2) chronic stress exposure, using the COVID-19 pandemic and case fatality rates (CFR) as objective stress measures, and (3) interventions, such as the cultivation of dispositional mindfulness and self-affirmation, on reward processing across multiple reward domains. Two samples of participants were recruited, before (N = 180) and during the COVID-19 pandemic (N = 189), completing self-report measures of depression, anhedonia, wellbeing, and mindfulness, and the HEID. Participants during COVID-19 were also randomly assigned to one of three induction conditions (Stressor Salience, Self-Affirmation, Control) to investigate stress and intervention effects. Consistent with hypotheses, (1) depression and anhedonia were associated with impaired reward processing;however, depression was more robustly associated with impairments in reward wanting, particularly the wanting of EU rewards, while reward valuation and liking were uniquely implicated in anhedonia. Chronic stress hypotheses (2) were partially supported, such that COVID-19 was associated with blunted reward wanting across reward domains (particularly NT-I), but not reward valuation and liking. Consistent with theory (3), self-affirmation helped buffer the effects of stress on reward wanting, but only at high CFR, while dispositional mindfulness was associated with greater wellbeing during COVID-19 by virtue of enhanced reward valuation and liking. This study provides new insights into reward pathways underlying stress, depression, and wellbeing/anhedonia, shedding light on disruptions to target in treatment. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Football is "the most important of the least important things": The illusion of sport and COVID-19

In his book, On the Pleasure Principle in Culture (2014), Robert Pfaller argued that our relationship to sport is one grounded in "illusion". Simply put, our interest in and enjoyment of sport occurs through a process of "knowing better". Here, one's knowledge of the unimportance of sport is achieved by associating the illusion of sport with a naive observer-i.e. someone who does believe in sport's importance. In the wake of the global pandemic, COVID-19, it would seem that Pfaller's remarks have taken on an added significance. With major sporting events and domestic competitions being indefinitely postponed or canceled, Liverpool manager, Jurgen Klopp, commented that football was "the most important of the least important things". In light of these remarks, this paper will critically locate sport's sudden unimportance in relation to Pfaller's contention that sport reflects an "illusion without owner". (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

The International tourism and the pandemic. A comparative analysis of Cancun and Mallorca

The COVID-19 pandemic has generated a major crisis in international tourism. The restrictions imposed after the WHO declaration gave way to a selective opening of the borders, with the intention of recovering the economy and tourist travel. The objective of this article is to carry out a comparative study between Cancun (Quintana Roo, Mexico) and Mallorca (Balearic Islands, Spain), through the analysis of their tourist data and the restrictions dictated by their respective governments. This case study shows how the recovery has been driven by the interests of the industry, which is trying to rush back to the old normal, disregarding academic advice that encourages structural change based on sustainability and resilience. The pleasure peripheries of the Turner model continue to define the main movements of international tourism, despite the pandemic.

Consumption, identity, and surveillance during COVID-19 as a crisis of pleasure

The global COVID-19 pandemic was the latest instance of a crisis of pleasure. Crises of pleasure are periodic eruptions of discontent when consumption is disrupted by external forces. In this case, the pandemic also disrupted expressions of identity on social media, where identity is made legible through conspicuous consumption on social media in the early 2020s. Drawing from six qualitative focus group interviews conducted in the summer of 2020, we analyze how social media users interpret the accounts they follow posting content that seemingly violates social distancing guidelines during COVID-19. We find that consumption during the pandemic was highly contested and surveilled, with participants describing the disciplining power of social media and their use of news and public health guidelines to inform their identities. Both trends illustrate how surveilled modes of consumption characterize the post-lockdown consumption reality, which is polarized and partisan leading towards hedonist and puritanical models.

Music engagement is negatively correlated with depressive symptoms during the COVID-19 pandemic via reward-related mechanisms.

The COVID-19 pandemic has deeply affected the mental health of millions of people. We assessed which of many leisure activities correlated with positive mental health outputs, with particular attention to music, which has been reported to be important for coping with the psychological burden of the pandemic. Questionnaire data from about 1000 individuals primarily from Italy, Spain, and the United States during May-June 2020 show that people picked music activities (listening to, playing, singing, etc.) most often as the leisure experiences that helped them the most to cope with psychological distress related with the pandemic. During the pandemic, hours of engagement in music and food-related activities were associated with lower depressive symptoms. The negative correlation between music and depression was mediated by individual differences in sensitivity to reward, whereas the correlation between food-related activities and improved mental health outputs was explained by differences in emotion suppression strategies. Our results, while correlational, suggest that engaging in music activities could be related to improved well-being with the underlying mechanism being related to reward, consistent with neuroscience findings. Our data have practical significance in pointing to effective strategies to cope with mental health issues beyond those related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Effect of COVID-19 on Tourism Affection: A Pleasure-Arousal-Dominance Framework Perspective

Based on the data of COVID-19 epidemic and online tourism review, this paper explores the impact of COVID-19 on tourists' tourism emotion. First, based on the existing theory, the hypothetical relationship between COVID-19 and tourists' PAD (Pleasure-Around-Dominion) emotion is established. Then, the PAD emotion variables in tourism reviews are extracted through the emotion analysis method, and then an empirical econometric model is established. Finally, the model is estimated using the double difference method, and a series of robustness tests are conducted. The empirical results show that COVID-19 has a significant negative impact on tourists' PAD sentiment. © 2022 IEEE.

Beyond pleasure: Effects of depression, anhedonia, and COVID-19 stress on hedonic and eudaimonic reward functioning

Reward processing encompasses multiple psychological processes, including appraisals of the incentive value of a reward (reward valuation), behavioral motivation to earn it (reward wanting), and affective responses to its receipt (reward liking). Disruptions in reward processing and the vulnerability of this system to chronic stress are argued to contribute to the development of a depressive disorder and anhedonia specifically. However, research has been limited to examining responses to "hedonic" rewards as the study of "eudaimonic" reward processing presents methodological challenges. Addressing these aims, this study developed the Hedonic and Eudaimonic Incentive Delay Task (HEID) for a comprehensive assessment of reward processing across multiple reward domains, including hedonic (HE), eudaimonic (EU), and neutral-intrinsic (NT-I) rewards. The central objectives were to examine the effects of (1) depression and anhedonia-related symptoms (e.g., wellbeing, anhedonia), (2) chronic stress exposure, using the COVID-19 pandemic and case fatality rates (CFR) as objective stress measures, and (3) interventions, such as the cultivation of dispositional mindfulness and self-affirmation, on reward processing across multiple reward domains. Two samples of participants were recruited, before (N = 180) and during the COVID-19 pandemic (N = 189), completing self-report measures of depression, anhedonia, wellbeing, and mindfulness, and the HEID. Participants during COVID-19 were also randomly assigned to one of three induction conditions (Stressor Salience, Self-Affirmation, Control) to investigate stress and intervention effects. Consistent with hypotheses, (1) depression and anhedonia were associated with impaired reward processing;however, depression was more robustly associated with impairments in reward wanting, particularly the wanting of EU rewards, while reward valuation and liking were uniquely implicated in anhedonia. Chronic stress hypotheses (2) were partially supported, such that COVID-19 was associated with blunted reward wanting across reward domains (particularly NT-I), but not reward valuation and liking. Consistent with theory (3), self-affirmation helped buffer the effects of stress on reward wanting, but only at high CFR, while dispositional mindfulness was associated with greater wellbeing during COVID-19 by virtue of enhanced reward valuation and liking. This study provides new insights into reward pathways underlying stress, depression, and wellbeing/anhedonia, shedding light on disruptions to target in treatment. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Impact of social influence on users' continuance intention toward sports and fitness applications.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how social influence (SI), which is disaggregated into subjective norms (SN), social image (SIM), and social identity (SID), predicts perceived usefulness (PU), perceived pleasure (PP), and continuance intention (CI) toward sports and fitness applications. The underlying context is the socialization and gamification of exercise during the Covid-19 pandemic. Based on the theory of SI and the technology acceptance model, a theoretical framework was built where PU and PP mediate the influence of SI on CI, and proposed hypotheses were tested. The responses of 296 Keep users (a popular sports and fitness application in China) to a questionnaire survey were analyzed. SN and SIM were found to have significant positive effects on SID; SID has significant positive effects on PU and PP; both PU and PP have significant positive effects on the CI of users; SID and PU positively and significantly mediate the relationship between SN/SIM and CI; PU positively and significantly mediates the SID-CI relationship. However, the role of PP in mediating the influence of SI on CI is non-significant. This paper deepens the current understanding of the mechanisms that influence the relationship between SI and CI under the context of socialization and gamification services.

Institutional Independence and Accountability of the Judiciary

It is an honour to have been asked to give this Lionel Cohen Lecture deferred from 2020 when the covid pandemic was sweeping the world. It is a great pleasure to be with you at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Post-Covid Tourisms: Virtual Tourisms As The New Travel Trends

This conceptual paper discussed about the COVID-19 pandemic caused many industries to face their downfall, and one of the industries is the tourism industry. As a corollary, a new type of tourism, virtual tourism, is required to promote and restore the tourist sector to its former glory while not dismissing the need for social distancing. Through virtual tourism, people no longer need to travel to a particular tourist destination to experience tourism, but they can now stay at their home and escape to another destination virtually. Aside from giving tourists another level of tourism pleasure, virtual tourism also contributes a lot to the industries such as heritage preservation, tourism marketing, tourism planning and as an opportunity for disabled person to experience tourism. Even though virtual reality technology does not provide the users with enough authentic experience due to the inability to touch the object in the virtual environment, but it can be considered as a good start to advertise virtual tourism as an alternative to conventional tourism especially during the pandemic era where every movement is limited.

A pleasure syllabus (or countering trauma with pleasure in the classroom)

Gabrielle Civil, a Black feminist performance artist and professor, discusses developing and teaching her "Pleasure Syllabus," a three-lecture module for a mandatory first-year undergraduate writing course. Grounded in Black feminism, especially adrienne maree brown's call for "pleasure activism" and Audre Lorde's embrace of the erotic, this syllabus aimed to consider and activate embodied knowledge. Contemplating pleasure ("what does and does not feel good") also became a way to confront rape culture. With this module, Civil hoped to intervene in the rampant sexual violence happening on college campuses. She acknowledges the challenges of negotiating trauma and gender-based violence in the classroom. (Teaching about desire, sexuality, violation, and consent on Zoom during the COVID-19 pandemic was especially tough.) She shares specific strategies that supported her pedagogy and offers some suggestions for curricular planning while emphasizing that no one-size-fits-all approach exists to trauma-informed teaching. Her curriculum included visual art, music, graphics, and movement exercises along with critical/creative writing. Civil includes her actual "Pleasure Syllabus" and her module's signature assignment. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Differences in Important Components of Sexual Satisfaction as Identified and Experienced by Undergraduate Males and Females

Few studies explore the components of sexual satisfaction as specified by college students. This cross-sectional study examined sexual satisfaction at the event level for undergraduate students (n = 1,090), focusing on differences between males/females. Survey results revealed for both males and females, being comfortable with a partner, experiencing orgasm, and having a partner "with skills" predicted sexual satisfaction. Satisfied males reported feeling safe with their partners, spent time touching/kissing, and had "romantic" partners. Satisfied females had partners with previous sexual experience, whom they desired, and vice-versa. These findings can inform comprehensive sexuality education efforts to incorporate the teaching of satisfaction into sexual health.

Welcome to the Metaverse: Social Media, the Phantasmatic Big Other, and the Anxiety of the Prosthetic Gods

In Algorithmic Desire: Toward a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media, Matthew Flisfeder develops an alternative structuralist theory of social media. As a Žižekian analysis of social media, this book is an important contribution to the field of Žižekian studies. While Flisfeder theorizes social media in relation to Slavoj Žižek’s idea of the big Other, he nonetheless proposes an unorthodox understanding, importantly choosing not to engage Žižek’s analysis of technology, which develops in the context of his discussion of artificial intelligence and virtual reality in relation to Freud’s “prosthetic God” and Lacan’s lathouses. The present essay suggests that Žižek’s analysis of technology has radical implications for understanding social media, providing an important perspective that shifts the emphasis of theorizing social media from desire to anxiety in a zone “beyond the pleasure principle,” an analysis that Žižek situates in the context of the global COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on the big Other.

Sociability of Alcohol Consumption and Alcoholism in Times of COVID-19 Crisis

COVID-19 has changed the social context, but also our ability to act in it. This new normal also influenced the patterns of alcohol consumption. In this sense, the main goal of this paper is a theoretical analysis of COVID-19 context of sociability of alcohol consumption. The paper analyses the ways of establishing the individual meaningfulness of alcohol consumption. The stratification of collective patterns in the context of a pandemic is analysed and the implications of stratification on future drinking patterns, but also on the potential risks of higher alcoholism rates in the future are theo-retically considered. The analysis is based on previous research on the habits of alcohol consumption during quarantine. The rate of alcohol consumption in the studies did not differ significantly from that before quarantine. In some cases, a lower rate of alcohol consumption has been reported. However, the rate of excessive drinking, and socially unregulated drinking, individual drinking, and drinking of a larger number of alcoholic beverages on occasion was on the rise. The theoretical explanation that can be set on the basis of previous research supports the fact that society is responsible for regulating the acceptable alcohol consumption. In the absence of social/cultural influences, an individual consumes alcohol for his own pleasure-it is directed towards himself and not towards society. If this social and value meaningfulness of alcohol consumption is lost, the individual will have a higher risk of developing alcohol dependence. Society is a protec-tive factor in the development of alcohol dependence. During the COVID-19 pandemic, most individuals did not consume alcohol because of the social patterns that that consumption implies (or is an integral part of), but they consumed it because of internal anxiety. The use of alcohol for the purpose of calming the anxiety caused by the pandemic, without an individual reflection on the sociability of alcohol consumption, is a potential public health problem of the future.