Valence-Dependent Implicit Action Generalization Among Group Members.

People implicitly generalize the actions of known individuals in a social group to unknown members. However, actions have social goals and evaluative valences, and the extent to which actions with different valences (helpful and harmful) are implicitly generalized among group members remains unclear. We used computer animations to simulate social group actions, where helping and hindering actions were represented by aiding and obstructing another's climb up a hill. Study 1 found that helpful actions are implicitly expected to be shared among members of the same group but not among members of different groups, but no such effect was found for harmful actions. This suggests that helpful actions are more likely than harmful actions to be implicitly generalized to group members. This finding was replicated in Study 2 by increasing the group size from three to five. Study 3 found that the null effect for generalizing harmful actions among group members is not due to the difficulty of detecting action generalization, as both helpful and harmful actions are similarly generalized within particular individuals. Moreover, Study 4 demonstrated that weakening social group information resulted in the absence of implicit generalization for helpful actions, suggesting the specificity of group membership. Study 5 revealed that the generalization of helping actions occurred when actions were performed by multiple group members rather than being repeated by one group member, showing group-based inductive generalization. Overall, these findings support valence-dependent implicit action generalization among group members. This implies that people may possess different knowledge regarding valenced actions on category-based generalization.

Social environment and anogenital distance length phenotype interact to explain testosterone levels in a communally rearing rodent: Part 1: The male side.

In vertebrates, male testosterone levels vary across the year being generally higher during the mating season relative to the offspring rearing season. However, male testosterone levels may also be associated with male anogenital distance (AGD) length (a proxy of prenatal androgen exposition), and influenced by the social group environment. In social species, it has been proposed that high levels of testosterone could be incompatible with the development of an amicable social environment. Thus, in these species, it is predicted that males have relatively low levels of testosterone. Our goal was to examine the potential association between male serum testosterone levels, season, male AGD length, and the social environment in the rodent Octodon degus under natural conditions. We quantified male serum testosterone levels during the mating and offspring rearing seasons, and we determined the number of females and males in each social group, as well as the composition of groups, in terms of the AGD length of the female and male group mates, from 2009 to 2019. Our results revealed that male testosterone levels covary with season, being highest during the offspring rearing season. Additionally, male testosterone levels vary with male AGD length, and female and male social group environments. More importantly, male degus exhibit low levels of testosterone that are indistinguishable from female levels during offspring rearing season. Similar to other highly social mammals, where males and females live together year-round, male amicable behavior could be the best male mating strategy, thus leading to a reduction in circulating testosterone levels.

Social environment and anogenital distance length phenotype interact to explain testosterone levels in a communally rearing rodent: Part 2: The female side.

Testosterone is known as a "male" hormone; however, females also synthetize testosterone, which influences female sexual and aggressive behavior. In female vertebrates, as in males, testosterone levels can vary seasonally. However, female testosterone levels may also be related with female anogenital distance (AGD) length phenotype (a proxy of prenatal androgen exposure), and the social group environment. We used data from a long-term rodent study (2009-2019) in a natural population of degus (Octodon degus) to examine the potential associations between female serum testosterone levels, season, female AGD phenotype, and social group composition. We quantified female serum testosterone levels during the mating and offspring rearing seasons, and we determined the number of females and males in social groups, as well the composition of groups, in terms of the AGD of the female and male group mates. Our results indicate that female testosterone levels vary with season, being highest during the offspring rearing season. Additionally, female testosterone levels were associated with the number of male group-members and the AGD of male group-members but were not associated with female social environment and focal female AGD phenotype. Together, our results suggest that female testosterone levels are sensitive to intersexual interactions. Our results also reveal that female and male testosterone levels do not differ between the sexes, a finding previously reported only in rock hyraxes. We discuss how the complex social system of degus could be driving this physiological similarity between the sexes.

A latent profile analysis of the nature of social group memberships and their contribution to retirement outcomes.

Positive experiences of groups (e.g., the extent to which groups are important and supportive) tend to be associated with better retirement adjustment outcomes. However, group experiences are not always positive, and we know little about their varied contribution to adjustment outcomes. We addressed this gap by exploring the nature of social group memberships - in terms of varying positive and negative experiences of groups - to better understand how social group memberships shape retirement adjustment, life satisfaction and mental health. A latent profile analysis (using data from 489 retirees and their membership of 1887 groups) identified four profiles of social group memberships: optimal (63%), slightly straining (13%), low-supportive (18%) and ambivalent (6%). Subsequent regression analysis showed that these different profiles of group membership were differentially associated with retirement adjustment outcomes: belonging to more optimal groups was associated with better perceived adjustment, higher life satisfaction and better mental health, while belonging to slightly straining and ambivalent groups contributed to poorer adjustment, lower life satisfaction and greater depression. These findings have implications for theory and practice, not least because they advance our understanding of the diversity of people's group memberships and their contribution to retirement and health outcomes.

Gradual Loss of Social Group Support during Competition Activates Anterior TPJ and Insula but Deactivates Default Mode Network.

Group forming behaviors are common in many species to overcome environmental challenges. In humans, bonding, trust, group norms, and a shared past increase consolidation of social groups. Being a part of a social group increases resilience to mental stress; conversely, its loss increases vulnerability to depression. However, our knowledge on how social group support affects brain functions is limited. This study observed that default mode network (DMN) activity reduced with the loss of social group support from real-life friends in a challenging social competition. The loss of support induced anterior temporoparietal activity followed by anterior insula and the dorsal attentional network activity. Being a part of a social group and having support provides an environment for high cognitive functioning of the DMN, while the loss of group support acts as a threat signal and activates the anterior temporoparietal junction (TPJ) and insula regions of salience and attentional networks for individual survival.

Sex, age, and family structure influence dispersal behaviour after a forced migration.

Dispersal does not only mean moving from one environment to another, but can also refer to shifting from one social group to another. Individual characteristics such as sex, age and family structure might influence an individual's propensity to disperse. In this study, we use a unique dataset of an evacuated World War II Finnish population, to test how sex, age, number of siblings and birth order influence an individual's dispersal away from their own social group at a time when society was rapidly changing. We found that young women dispersed more than young men, but the difference decreased with age. This suggests that young men might benefit more from staying near a familiar social group, whereas young women could benefit more from moving elsewhere to find work or spouses. We also found that having more younger brothers increased the propensity for firstborns to disperse more than for laterborns, indicating that younger brothers might pressure firstborn individuals into leaving. However, sisters did not have the same effect as brothers. Overall, the results show that individual characteristics are important in understanding dispersal behaviour, but environmental properties such as social structure and the period of flux after World War II might upend the standard predictions concerning residence and dispersal. Social media summary: Individual characteristics influence dispersal away from social group after a forced migration in a Finnish population.

COVID-19 and Vaccination: Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices of People Working on Illegal Gold Mining Sites in French Guiana.

INTRODUCTION: French Guiana is a French territory bordering Brazil and Suriname where the COVID-19 pandemic has severely strained the French Guianese health system. The people working on illegal gold mining sites in French Guiana, also known as garimpeiros, are mainly of Brazilian origin. Their health conditions are precarious, they live under the radar of the surveillance system and therefore, assessment of their health is quite challenging.. The objective of this study was to describe their knowledge, attitudes and practices regarding COVID-19 and vaccination against this infection. METHODS: We conducted an international multicenter cross-sectional survey between 1 March 2022 and 30 April 2022 in French Guiana and Suriname, using a structured questionnaire. RESULTS: Eighty persons were included, 95.0% of whom were Brazilian. Most had good general knowledge of COVID-19. Antibiotic prophylaxis had been practiced by 10.0% of participants. Forty-three people thought they had been infected with COVID-19 (53.8%). Self-medication was frequent, often with antibiotics (32.6%, mostlychloroquine, ivermectin or azithromycin) and most had not consulted a physician for symptoms of COVID-19. A majority (62.5%) had received at least one dose of vaccine. Those who were ever tested for COVID-19 were the most likely to be vaccinated (PR = 1.98, p = 0.009). CONCLUSIONS: Garimpeiros have a good level of knowledge about COVID-19 but the high consumption of antibiotics raises concerns about the selection of resistant bacteria. The vaccination rate was higher than that of the Guianese population. The most vaccinated individuals were those who had already taken a COVID test suggesting that these individuals had more exposure to the disease, were more health conscious, or had easier access to health centers.

Event-related potential and behavioural evidence of goal-based expectations for consistent actions among group members.

PLACEHOLDER TEXT: ABSTRACT: People expect group members to act consistently. However, because actions are organized hierarchically, incorporating deep-level goals and shallow-level movements, it remains unclear what level of action is expected to be consistent among group members. We determined that these two levels of action representations can be dissociated in object-directed actions and measured the late positive potential (LPP), which indicates expectation. We found that participants identified a new agent's actions more quickly when this agent pursued a consistent goal while moving in a manner inconsistent with group members than when this agent pursued an inconsistent goal while moving in the same manner as group members. Moreover, this facilitation effect disappeared when the new agent was from a different group, revealing goal-based expectations for consistent actions among group members. The LPP amplitude during the action-expectation phase was greater for agents from the same group than for agents from a different group, suggesting that people implicitly generate clearer action expectations for group members than for other individuals. Additionally, the behavioural facilitation effect was observed when the goal of actions was clearly identifiable (i.e. performing rational actions to reach an external target) rather than when there was no clear association between actions and external targets (i.e. performing irrational actions). The LPP amplitude during the action-expectation phase was greater after observing rational actions than after observing irrational actions performed by two agents from the same group, and the expectation-related increase in LPP predicted the behavioural measurements of the facilitation effect. Hence, the behavioural and event-related potential evidence suggest that people implicitly expect group members to behave consistently according to goals rather than movements per se.

Affiliation to a Social Group as a Preventive Factor in Suicidal Behaviors in Children and Adolescents during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Suicide is one of the most common causes of death in the population of children and adolescents. Available data show the continuous growth of this phenomenon and the ineffectiveness of prevention programs. Additionally, the COVID-19 pandemic significantly affected young people's mental health, including an increased risk of suicidal behaviors due to limited direct contact with the school and peer groups in favor of the home environment. Therefore, the aim of this narrative review was to consider the risk factors and protective factors for suicidal behavior in the under-18 population, with a particular focus on the importance of belonging to a social group and building identification with it as a phenomenon protecting against suicidal behavior. Additionally, in this review, we evaluate how the COVID-19 pandemic affected these relationships. The PubMed database was used in the search with the following keywords: suicide, suicide behaviors, child and adolescent suicide behaviors, group affiliation, family affiliation, ethnicity, religious affiliation, and the COVID-19 pandemic, with articles published between 2002 and 2022 analyzed. Research conducted to date indicates that both sustained and stable family and peer relationships, as well as a sense of identification and belonging, noticeably reduce the risk of suicidal behavior. Ethnic or cultural affiliation seems to have been particularly important during the isolation in the home environment caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, it has been shown that while in lockdown, contact through social media with individuals' identification groups was associated with a reduced chance of emotional crises. Furthermore, regardless of cultural background, attachment to a particular group correlates with enhanced psychiatric state of children and adolescents. Thus, available data highlight the need for building and maintaining affiliations with suitable groups as a protective factor against suicidal behaviors.

Building representations of the social world: Children extract patterns from social choices to reason about multi-group hierarchies.

How do children learn about the structure of the social world? We tested whether children would extract patterns from an agent's social choices to make inferences about multiple groups' relative social standing. In Experiment 1, 4- to 6-year-old children (N = 36; tested in Central New York) saw an agent and three groups (Group-A, Group-B, and Group-C) and observed the agent choose between pairs of individuals from different groups. Across pairwise selections, a pattern emerged: The agent chose individuals from Group-A > Group-B > Group-C. Children tracked the agent's choices to predict that Group-A was "most-preferred" and the "leader" and that Group-C was "least-preferred" and the "helper." In Experiments 2 and 3, we examined children's reasoning about a more complex pattern involving four groups and tested a wider age range. In Experiment 2, 5- to 10-year-old children (N = 98; tested in Central New York) used the agent's pattern of pairwise choices to infer that the agent liked Group-A > Group-B > Group-C > Group-D and to make predictions about which groups were likely to be "leaders" and "helpers." In Experiment 3, we found evidence for social specificity in children's reasoning: 5- to 10-year-old children (N = 96; from 26 US States) made inferences about groups' relative social but not physical power from the agent's pattern of affiliative choices across the four groups. These findings showcase a mechanism through which children may learn about societal-level hierarchies through the patterns they observe over time in people's group-based social choices. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Children in our sample extracted patterns from an agent's positive social choices between multiple groups to reason about groups' relative social standing. Children used the pattern of an agent's positive social choices to guide their reasoning about which groups were likely to be "leaders" and "helpers" in a fictional town. The pattern that emerged in an agent's choices of friends shaped children's thinking about groups' relative social but not physical power. Children tracked social choices to reason about group-based hierarchies at the individual level (which groups an agent prefers) and societal level (which groups are privileged).

Social Group Identification as a Predictor of Pretreatment Suicidal Ideation and Intent in those Receiving cCBT: Evidence from a Scottish Primary Care Sample.

Suicidal ideation and intent are strongly linked with suicidal attempts and completions; however, no study to date has explored the predictors of ideation and intent within a sample receiving computerized cognitive behavioral therapy (cCBT) as an intervention for mild to moderate depression. The current study investigates the impact of social group identification and socioeconomic deprivation, together with a number of important clinical and demographic factors, on suicidal ideation and intent within a Scottish primary care sample. Participants (N = 1062) were recruited from referrals to a cCBT program, "Beating the Blues" (BtB), over a 33-month period. Participants completed three versions of the group identifications scale (GIS), one for each of three groups: family, community, and a social group of choice. Single-item questions on suicidal ideation and intent were delivered through the BtB program, and demographic and clinical information were collected on commencing BtB. More severe psychological distress, fewer group identifications, younger age, and being male, all significantly predicted the presence of suicidal ideations, however only greater severity of psychological distress was associated with more serious suicidal intent. These results provide valuable insight into factors associated with suicidal ideation and intent within a clinical population from a psychosocial, psychopharmacological, and demographic perspective.

Mental Healthcare through Cognitive Emotional Regulation Strategies among Prisoners.

Prisoners are exposed to a deprived environment, which triggers mental illness and psychological problems. Abundant research has reported that mental illness problems, suicide, aggression, and violent behaviors occur in incarcerated people. Although the mental healthcare system for incarcerated people is emphasized, little research has been conducted due to their limited environment. In particular, the regulation of negative emotion is significantly associated with mental illness and anti-social and violent behaviors. However, mental healthcare through cognitive emotional regulation based on cognitive behavioral therapy has not been fully investigated. This study identified four different patterns in cognitive strategies for regulating negative emotions. Cognitive emotional regulation strategies (i.e., self-blame, other-blame, rumination, catastrophizing, putting into perspective, positive refocusing, positive reappraisal, acceptance, and refocus on planning) were examined and addressed their vulnerable psychological factors. We analyzed a total of 500 prisoners' responses to the cognitive emotional regulation questionnaire (CERQ) by latent class profiling analysis. A four-class model was identified based on the responses of CERQ. In addition, the significant effect of depression on classifying the four classes was found. Furthermore, differences in the average number of incarcerations were also shown across four classes. In conclusion, Class 2 (Negative Self-Blamer) uses dysfunctional/negative strategies that may place the group at a high risk of psychological disorder symptoms, including depression and post-traumatic stress. Class 3 (Distorted Positivity) uses positive/functional strategies but seems to utilize the positive strategies in distorted manners to rationalize their convictions. Class 1 (Strong Blamer) and Class 4 (Moderator Blamer) showed similar patterns focused on the "other-blame" strategy for regulating negative emotion, but they are at different levels, indicating that they attribute incarceration to external factors. These findings provide useful information for designing mental healthcare interventions for incarcerated people and psychological therapy programs for clinical and correctional psychologists in forensic settings.

Collective Action for Wellness in the Malaysian Workplace: Protocol for a Feasibility Study.

BACKGROUND: Chronic diseases and the associated risk factors are preventable with lifestyle changes such as eating a healthier diet and being more physically active. In Malaysia, the prevalence of chronic diseases, including diabetes, hypertension, and heart diseases, has risen. In the present study, we explore the potential of co-designing and implementing a digital wellness intervention to promote socially-driven health knowledge and practices in the workplace in Malaysia, drawing on social cognitive theory, social impact theory, and social influence theory. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to co-design and assess the feasibility of a socially-driven digital health intervention to promote healthy behavior and prevent chronic diseases in a workplace in Malaysia. METHODS: This study involves two phases: (i) identifying the barriers and facilitators to healthy behaviors at work and co-designing the intervention activities with the employees, (ii) implementing and evaluating the intervention's feasibility. Phase 1 will involve qualitative data collection and analysis through semi-structured, in-depth interviews and co-design workshops with the employees, while Phase 2 will consist of a feasibility study employing quantitative measurements of health behaviors through accelerometers and questionnaires. RESULTS: This study was funded in June 2021 and ethics approval for Phase 1 was obtained from the Monash University Human Research Ethics Committee in January 2022. As of August 2022, qualitative interviews with 12 employees have been completed and the data has been transcribed and analyzed. These results will be published in a future paper with results from all Phase 1 activities. CONCLUSIONS: The study will help us to better understand the mechanisms through which digital technologies can promote socially-driven health knowledge and behaviors. This research will also result in a scalable wellness intervention that could be further tailored and expanded to other employers and social groups across the region. INTERNATIONAL REGISTERED REPORT IDENTIFIER (IRRID): PRR1-10.2196/39238.

A new approach for social group detection based on spatio-temporal interpersonal distance measurement.

Visual-based social group detection aims to cluster pedestrians in crowd scenes according to social interactions and spatio-temporal position relations by using surveillance video data. It is a basic technique for crowd behaviour analysis and group-based activity understanding. According to the theory of proxemics study, the interpersonal relationship between individuals determines the scope of their self-space, while the spatial distance can reflect the closeness degree of their interpersonal relationship. In this paper, we proposed a new unsupervised approach to address the issues of interaction recognition and social group detection in public spaces, which remits the need to intensely label time-consuming training data. First, based on pedestrians' spatio-temporal trajectories, the interpersonal distances among individuals were measured from static and dynamic perspectives. Combined with proxemics' theory, a social interaction recognition scheme was designed to judge whether there is a social interaction between pedestrians. On this basis, the pedestrians are clustered to identify if they form a social group. Extensive experiments on our pedestrian dataset "SCU-VSD-Social" annotated with multi-group labels demonstrated that the proposed method has outstanding performance in both accuracy and complexity.

NEAWalk: Inferring missing social interactions via topological-temporal embeddings of social groups.

Real-world network data consisting of social interactions can be incomplete due to deliberately erased or unsuccessful data collection, which cause the misleading of social interaction analysis for many various time-aware applications. Naturally, the link prediction task has drawn much research interest to predict the missing edges in the incomplete social network. However, existing studies of link prediction cannot effectively capture the entangling topological and temporal dynamics already residing in the social network, thus cannot effectively reasoning the missing interactions in dynamic networks. In this paper, we propose the NEAWalk, a novel model to infer the missing social interaction based on topological-temporal features of patterns in the social group. NEAWalk samples the query-relevant walks containing both the historical and evolving information by focusing on the temporal constraint and designs a dual-view anonymization procedure for extracting both topological and temporal features from the collected walks to conduct the inference. Two-track experiments on several well-known network datasets demonstrate that the NEAWalk stably achieves superior performance against several state-of-the-art baseline methods.

Exploring the roles of trust and social group preference on the legitimacy of algorithmic decision-making vs. human decision-making for allocating COVID-19 vaccinations.

In combating the ongoing global health threat of the COVID-19 pandemic, decision-makers have to take actions based on a multitude of relevant health data with severe potential consequences for the affected patients. Because of their presumed advantages in handling and analyzing vast amounts of data, computer systems of algorithmic decision-making (ADM) are implemented and substitute humans in decision-making processes. In this study, we focus on a specific application of ADM in contrast to human decision-making (HDM), namely the allocation of COVID-19 vaccines to the public. In particular, we elaborate on the role of trust and social group preference on the legitimacy of vaccine allocation. We conducted a survey with a 2 × 2 randomized factorial design among n = 1602 German respondents, in which we utilized distinct decision-making agents (HDM vs. ADM) and prioritization of a specific social group (teachers vs. prisoners) as design factors. Our findings show that general trust in ADM systems and preference for vaccination of a specific social group influence the legitimacy of vaccine allocation. However, contrary to our expectations, trust in the agent making the decision did not moderate the link between social group preference and legitimacy. Moreover, the effect was also not moderated by the type of decision-maker (human vs. algorithm). We conclude that trustworthy ADM systems must not necessarily lead to the legitimacy of ADM systems.

Stability analysis based parameter tuning of Social Group Optimization.

Swarm-based optimization algorithms have been popularly used these days for optimization of various real world problems but sometimes it becomes hard to estimate the associated characteristics due to their stochastic nature. To ensure a steady performance of these techniques, it is essential to have knowledge about the range of variables, in which a particular algorithm always provides stable performance and performing stability analysis of an algorithm can help in providing some knowledge regarding the same. Many researchers have performed the stability analysis of several optimization algorithms and analyzed their behavior. Social Group Optimization (SGO) is a newly developed algorithm which has been proven to yield promising results when applied to many real world problems but in literature no work can be found on stability analysis of SGO. In this paper, Von Neumann stability analysis approach has been used for performing stability analysis of Social Group Optimization (SGO) to analyze the behavior of its algorithmic parameters and estimate the range in which they always give stable convergence. The results obtained have been supported by sufficient experimental analysis and simulated using eight benchmark function suite along with their shifted and rotated variations which prove that the algorithm performs better within the stable range and hence convergence is ensured.

New group memberships formed after an acquired brain injury and posttraumatic growth: A prospective study.

Predicting positive psychosocial outcomes following an Acquired Brain Injury (ABI) remains a challenge. Considerable research demonstrates that social group memberships can have positive effects on psychological well-being, particularly during life transitions. Social group memberships are argued to help people derive a sense of self. This prospective study examined if social group memberships (number of groups and connectedness with groups) could predict posttraumatic growth (PTG) in those affected by ABI. Thirty-six participants (10 females, Mage = 46.56, SD = 11.46) engaged in community rehabilitation services completed measures at two time-points. Mediation analyses demonstrated that the number of new group memberships (groups formed post-injury) predicted greater PTG at time 2, via stronger connectedness with these new group memberships (controlling for initial PTG). The observed results suggest that a focus on developing and strengthening connections with new group memberships may promote positive adjustment after brain injury.

Measuring Social Engagement among Low-Income, Depressed Homebound Older Adults: Validation of the Social Engagement and Activities Questionnaire.

Objectives: To investigate the psychometric properties of the 10-item Social Engagement and Activities Questionnaire (SEAQ) to assess social-group, interpersonal interaction, and solitary activities among low-income, depressed homebound older adults (n = 269).Methods: We used principal component analysis (PCA) to evaluate the underlying dimensions of the 10-item full SEAQ and a 6-item abbreviated item set. We assessed evidence of validity for the SEAQ by examining relationships between the SEAQ and older adults' clinical characteristics: perceived social support, disability, and depressive symptoms.Results: PCA results showed two components: (1) a general social-group activities engagement component; and (2) a low level of socialization (i.e., strong negative coefficients on the recreational activities and self-enrichment/educational activities and a negative coefficient for interpersonal interaction activities). The general social-group activities engagement component in both the full and abbreviated SEAQ were significantly positively correlated with the full and abbreviated SEAQ and perceived social support, providing evidence for convergent validity, and they were significantly negatively correlated with disability and depressive symptoms, providing evidence for discriminant validity.Conclusions: The present study provides evidence of validity for the use of the SEAQ to assess social engagement and activities among low-income, depressed homebound older adults.Clinical Implications: The SEAQ may be used in future studies measuring changes in social engagement and activities in these older adults.