Reporting like there was no pandemic Cultural journalism during the COVID-19 pandemic in Finland, Sweden, and Latvia

The 2020 COVID-19 outbreak led to business closures and social activity restrictions. In particular, the cultural sector was severely hit by lockdowns, placing cultural journalism within exceptional circumstances. In this article, we analyse how journalists overcame restrictions by developing a proactive approach to the cultural sphere. As cultural journalism largely leans on the coverage of pre-planned events, exploring the journalistic approaches employed during the pandemic may unveil essential factors in the cultural-journalistic concept of culture and country differences. Our data comprise three consecutive sample weeks from 2020-2021 (weeks 17, 47, and 15) from the culture pages of the largest dailies of Finland, Sweden, and Latvia. Through comparative content analysis, we investigated the journalistic strategies of cultural desks. Using a story entity as the unit of analysis, we examined three aspects of story ideation: reliance on pseudo-events, choice and development of cultural-journalistic genres, and staging and storytelling methods regarding newsroom proactivity. We found differences in cultural concepts, including (dis)connections between art and society, which are frequently discussed in the literature. The results further indicate that proactivity can be a useful tool for developing future cultural journalism. © 2023 by Animal Bioscience.

An empirical analysis of depolicing behavior

Depolicing is a behavior that occurs when law enforcement officers disengage from proactive police work. Despite the term's more recent popularity, these behaviors have been identified in policing literature for decades. Scholars have primarily tried to quantify the depolicing phenomenon through the lens of public scrutiny and the Ferguson Effect. However, there are currently no quantitative studies that have attempted to examine the multitude of reasons as to why depolicing behavior could potentially occur. The current inquiry uses survey data retrieved from eight municipal law enforcement agencies to further examine potential predictors of depolicing. The predictor variables consisted of public scrutiny, liability concerns, organizational unfairness, burnout, physical danger, COVID-19, and years of experience. Our results indicate that public scrutiny, liability concerns, COVID-19, and years of experience are all significant and positive predictors of depolicing. We also found that agency location and rank significantly impacted depolicing behavior. The findings and limitations are discussed. © 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Does anti-poverty intervention strengthen mental resilience? Evidence from the COVID-19 shock on targeted poverty alleviation program in China

Resilience is beneficial for poor households to overcome the negative shocks and shake off the poverty trap completely in the long run. In this article we evaluate the impact of poverty alleviation intervention on mental resilience by exploiting the natural experiment of the COVID-19 shock. Using the survey data collected in early March 2020 from underdeveloped region in West China, we address the impact of targeted poverty alleviation program (TPAP) on confidence level of off-farm and total income recovery using the difference-in-difference method. We find that the program enhances mental resilience for the out of poverty households rather than the in poverty households, especially in terms of confidence level of off-farm income recovery. In addition, we also find that proactivity of employment takes account of the impact of TPAP on confidence level of off-farm income recovery.

Study of the adaptability to change and proactive behavior of students in a university context in face of the COVID-19 health emergency

The objective of this study is to analyze the variables of adaptability to change and organizational behavior of the students of the Tecnologico Nacional de Mexico Campus Coatzacoalcos, in the state of Veracruz-Mexico. The research has a qualitative and quantitative approach, it is a cross-sectional study with a single cut in time, developed in the period corresponding to the month of November 2021 and June of this year. The method used is hypothetical-deductive. A non -probabilistic sampling was determined with the convenience technique, obtaining the participation of 513 students from the different careers offered at the institution. A measurement instrument was applied that analyzes the perception of the eight dimensions to be studied: need for change, leadership and management, attitude to change, communication, adaptation to change, proactive behavior oriented towards the organization, proactive behavior oriented towards others and behavior proactive proactive towards oneself. Through a parametric test, Kolmogorov-Smirnov hypothesis testing and Whitney's Mann's U, male and female students adapt to change in the institution and that males are more likely to have change-oriented behavior that the women.

Design and Evaluation of Proactive Behavior in Conversational Assistants: Approach with the Eva Companion Robot

The importance of providing emotional support and assistance to older adults has been highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic. An increasing number of older adults live alone, which promotes loneliness and depression risks. Also, the digital divide exacerbates these issues and other social difficulties, since older adults are not able to use technology to communicate. A socially assistive robot could help to address these loneliness and digital divide problems. However, it is critical to incorporate affectiveness and naturalness to promote the user acceptance of the robot. This project makes use of the existing EVA open-source robotics platform. The aim is to improve the quality of life of older adults by boosting their independence and alleviating loneliness or other emotional issues that can arise. To improve the user acceptance and to get a more natural, affective, non-passive behavior, this paper contributes to integrate several aspects to the EVA robot: a) assistiveness through conversations and a social messaging end-user skill to reduce the digital divide;b) proactivity by means of proactive interventions so EVA is able to start conversations;c) affectivity by means of showing emotions with eyes expressions, user recognition and emotion analysis in user input;and d) naturalness by blending all these characteristics with a low response time in the interaction and the novel wakeface activation method. Finally, a technical evaluation of the proposed solution provides evidence of its appropriate performance. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Perceived overqualification, felt organizational obligation, and extra‐role behavior during the COVID‐19 crisis: The moderating role of self‐sacrificial leadership: International Review of Applied Psychology

Past research has found that employees who view themselves as overqualified for their jobs tend to hold negative job attitudes and be unwilling to go beyond the call of duty. In challenging situations such as during the COVID‐19 crisis, when having “all hands‐on deck” may be important to an organization's survival, mitigating the negative tendencies of these employees becomes important. Adopting a sensemaking perspective on crisis management, we examine whether supervisors' self‐sacrificial leadership can mitigate these negative tendencies. First, we propose that employee perceived overqualification is associated with lower levels of felt obligation to the organization and thereby lower levels of extra‐role behaviors (i.e., helping and proactivity). We next propose that supervisors' self‐sacrificial leadership during the COVID‐19 crisis can evoke, especially when COVID‐19 more strongly impacts the organization, a sense of collectivism toward the organization, which mitigates the negative association of perceived overqualification with felt obligation and thus extra‐role behaviors. We tested our theorizing in samples from the UK (n = 121, pilot study) and US (n = 382, main study) in studies with a multi‐wave, time‐lagged design. Findings from both studies provide support for our theorizing. We discuss implications for research and practice concerning perceived overqualification during a crisis.

The impact of COVID-19 on police officer activities.

Objective: This study examined the impact of COVID-19 on police reactive and proactive activities in Houston, Texas. Seven types of police officer reactivity and three distinct categories of proactivity were examined. Methods: Weekly calls for service data from January 1, 2018-December 31, 2020 were analyzed through interrupted time series using ARIMA models. Results: Police responses to property, traffic-related activities, and service-related calls all decreased when compared to previous years. A significant increase was observed for violent crime calls. Self-initiated activities performed by specialized crime units significantly decreased, but there was a significant increase in self-initiated patrol. Activities performed by a specialized response unit initially increased, but then went back to pre-pandemic levels following the death of George Floyd. Conclusions: Observed decreases in reactivity may be attributed to changes in citizens' routine activities. COVID-19 was associated with increased demands for police responses to violence, consistent with extant research. A unique contribution of this study was the incorporation of officer proactivity. Changes to proactive patrol could also be attributed to changes in the routine activities of citizens. This study adds to the growing body of literature examining the impact of COVID-19 on police services.

COVID-19 avoidance behavior: The significance of personality and the relation with increases in working from home

The COVID-19 pandemic can be understood as a situation that triggers a specific form of trait activation;that is, one in which personality can influence the chance of becoming infected. This research examines the relations between HEXACO personality and COVID-19 avoidance behaviors, which is operationalized in terms of the threat that people experience and the extent to which they comply with the COVID-19 rules of conduct. In addition, the study examines the extent to which COVID-19 avoidance behaviors relate to an increase in working from home. In a stratified Dutch sample of 932 adults (of which N = 526 were employed) in September 2020, we found that - in addition to age - high emotionality and conscientiousness and low extraversion were the main unique personality predictors of COVID-19 avoidance behaviors. A selection of six facets (fearfulness, sociability, diligence, inquisitiveness, unconventionality, and proactivity) predicted COVID-19 avoidance behaviors better than the HEXACO domain scales. The main predictors of an increase in working from home were having an office job and a high level of education. The study shows that individual differences play an important role in how people deal with the pandemic, and that differences in education and type of job were most important for the extent to which people started working from home.