Coming together in a digital age: Community twitter responses in the wake of a campus shooting.

Campus mass shootings have become a pressing policy and public health matter. Twitter is a platform used for processing events among interested community members. Examining the responses of invested community members to a mass shooting on a college campus provides evidence for how this type of violence affects the immediate community and the larger public. These responses may reflect either content (e.g. context-specific) or emotions (e.g. humor). Aims Using Twitter data, we analyzed the emotional responses as well as the nature of non-affective short-term reactions, in response to the April 2019 shooting at UNC Charlotte. Methods Drawn from a pool of tweets between 4/30/19-5/7/19, we analyzed 16,749 tweets using keywords related to the mass shooting (e.g. "shooting," "gun violence," "UNC Charlotte"). A coding team manually coded the tweets using content and sentiment analyses. Results Overall, 7,148 (42.67%) tweets contained negative emotions (e.g. anger, sadness, disgust, anxiety), 5,088 (30.38%) contained positive emotions (e.g. humor, hope, appreciation), 14,892 (88.91%) were communal responses to the shooting (e.g. prayers, healing, victim remembrance), 8,329 (49.73%) were action-oriented (e.g. action taken, policy advocacy), and 15,498 (92.53%) included information (e.g. death/injury, news). All tweets except positive emotions peaked one day following the incident. Conclusions Our findings point to peaks in most emotions in the 24 hours following the event, with the exception of positive emotions which peaked one day later. Social media responses to a campus shooting suggest college preparedness for immediate deployment of supportive responses in the case of campus violence is needed.

Desire for control and the integrated motivational-volitional model of suicidal behavior: Results from a pilot investigation of adults in the United Kingdom.

BACKGROUND: Suicidal behavior remains a pressing problem in the United Kingdom. Continued theory development is a critical step toward designing effective prevention. AIMS: The present study tested a novel element to suicide theory, the Desire for Control, for its direct and moderating roles within the Integrated Motivational-Volitional (IMV) Model of Suicidal Behavior. METHOD: An online-administered cross-sectional suicide risk survey study (n = 116) was conducted among adults living in the United Kingdom. RESULTS: Mean suicidal ideation scores were in the non-clinical range. DOC Leadership and Destiny Control were associated with good mental health. DOC Decision Avoidance was associated with poor mental health. DOC Decision Avoidance also acted as a motivational moderator in which the entrapment-suicidal thinking link was worse among those high in decisional avoidance. CONCLUSION: DOC represents a novel, valuable addition to suicide theory and may inform suicide-specific psychotherapeutic intervention. Additional research is needed to full understand the role of DOC and its factor structures in the IMV.