Protean Kinematics: A Blended Model of VR Physics.

Avatar research largely focuses on the effects of the appearance and external characteristics of avatars, but may also warrant further consideration of the effects of avatar movement characteristics. With Protean kinematics, we offer an expansion the avatar-user appearances-based effects of the Proteus Effect to a systematic exploration into the role of movement in affecting social perceptions (about others) and idealized perceptions (about self). This work presents both a theoretical (typology) and methodological (physics-based measurement) approach to understanding the complex blend of physical inputs and virtual outputs that occur in the perceptual experience of VR, particularly in consideration of the collection of hippocampal (e.g., place cells, grid cells) and entorhinal neurons (e.g., speed cells) that fire topologically relative to physical movement in physical space. Offered is a novel method that distills the blend of physical and virtual kinematics to contribute to modern understandings of human-agent interaction and cognitive psychology.

Disrupting the COVID-19 Misinfodemic With Network Interventions: Network Solutions for Network Problems.

Amid the COVID-19 global pandemic, a highly troublesome influx of viral misinformation threatens to exacerbate the crisis through its deleterious effects on public health outcomes and health behavior decisions.This "misinfodemic" has ignited a surge of ongoing research aimed at characterizing its content, identifying its sources, and documenting its effects. Noticeably absent as of yet is a cogent strategy to disrupt misinformation.We start with the premise that the diffusion and persistence of COVID-19 misinformation are networked phenomena that require network interventions. To this end, we propose five classes of social network intervention to provide a roadmap of opportunities for disrupting misinformation dynamics during a global health crisis. Collectively, these strategies identify five distinct yet interdependent features of information environments that present viable opportunities for interventions.

A review of social media analytic tools and their applications to evaluate activity and engagement in online sexual health interventions.

Unprecedented public engagement with social media has provided viable and culturally relevant platforms for application in sexual health interventions, yet there are concerns that methods for evaluating engagement in these interventions have not kept pace with their implementation. More recently, the rise of social media analytics (SMA) and online marketing has spawned the development of analytic tools that boast promise for such a task. In this paper, we review a sample of the most popular of these tools, paying particular attention to: (1) the social media platforms that can be analyzed; (2) analytic capabilities; and (3) measures of engagement. We follow this with a review of sexual health intervention studies that apply these tools in evaluation efforts. Our findings suggest that these tools have numerous analytic capabilities that would be useful for evaluating interventions more efficiently. However, in nearly all cases, the tools we reviewed alone would not be sufficient to fully grasp engagement dynamics, as they need to be complemented with additional tools for textual analysis and social network analysis. Therefore, we consider this fertile ground for future collaborations between software developers and behavioral health scientists to develop more comprehensive analytic platforms with applications for public health research.