Previous studies of seasonal effects on sleep have yielded unclear results, likely due to methodological differences and limitations in data size and/or quality. We measured the sleep habits of 216 individuals across the U.S. over four seasons for slightly over a year using objective, continuous, and unobtrusive measures of sleep and local weather. In addition, we controlled for demographics and trait-like constructs previously identified to correlate with sleep behavior. We investigated seasonal and weather effects of sleep duration, bedtime, and wake time. We found several small but statistically significant effects of seasonal and weather effects on sleep patterns. We observe the strongest seasonal effects for wake time and sleep duration, especially during the spring season: wake times are earlier, and sleep duration decreases (compared to the reference season winter). Sleep duration also modestly decreases when day lengths get longer (between the winter and summer solstice). Bedtimes and wake times tend to be slightly later as outdoor temperature increases.

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Assessing performance in the workplace typically relies on subjective evaluations, such as, peer ratings, supervisor ratings and self assessments, which are manual, burdensome and potentially biased. We use objective mobile sensing data from phones, wearables and beacons to study workplace performance and offer new insights into behavioral patterns that distinguish higher and lower performers when considering roles in companies (i.e., supervisors and non-supervisors) and different types of companies (i.e., high tech and consultancy). We present initial results from an ongoing year-long study of N=554 information workers collected over a period ranging from 2-8.5 months. We train a gradient boosting classifier that can classify workers as higher or lower performers with AUROC of 0.83. Our work opens the way to new forms of passive objective assessment and feedback to workers to potentially provide week by week or quarter by quarter guidance in the workplace.

Personalized predictions have shown promises in various disciplines but they are fundamentally constrained in their ability to generalize across individuals. These models are often trained on limited datasets which do not represent the fluidity of human functioning. In contrast, generalized models capture normative behaviors between individuals but lack precision in predicting individual outcomes. This paper aims to balance the tradeoff between one-for-each and one-for-all models by clustering individuals on mutable behaviors and conducting cluster-specific predictions of psychological constructs in a multimodal sensing dataset of 754 individuals. Specifically, we situate our modeling on social media that has exhibited capability in inferring psychosocial attributes. We hypothesize that complementing social media data with offline sensor data can help to personalize and improve predictions. We cluster individuals on physical behaviors captured via Bluetooth, wearables, and smartphone sensors. We build contextualized models predicting psychological constructs trained on each cluster's social media data and compare their performance against generalized models trained on all individuals' data. The comparison reveals no difference in predicting affect and a decline in predicting cognitive ability, but an improvement in predicting personality, anxiety, and sleep quality. We construe that our approach improves predicting psychological constructs sharing theoretical associations with physical behavior. We also find how social media language associates with offline behavioral contextualization. Our work bears implications in understanding the nuanced strengths and weaknesses of personalized predictions, and how the effectiveness may vary by multiple factors. This work reveals the importance of taking a critical stance on evaluating the effectiveness before investing efforts in personalization.

Over the past few years, new ideological movements like the Alt-Right have captured the attention and concern of both mainstream media, policy makers, and scholars alike. Today, the methods by which right-wing extremists are radicalized are increasingly taking place within social media platforms and online communities. However, no research has yet investigated methods for proactively detecting online communities that may be displaying overall warning signs of mass ongoing ideological and political radicalization. In our work, we use a variety of text analysis methods to investigate the behavioral patterns of a radical right-wing community on Reddit (r/altright) over a 6-month period until right before it was banned for violation of Reddit terms of service. We find that this community showed aggregated behavioral patterns that aligned with past literature on warning behaviors of individual extremists in online environments, and that these behavioral patterns were not seen in a comparison group of eight other online political communities, similar in size and user engagement. Our research helps build upon the established literature on the detection of extremism in online environments, and has implications for proactive monitoring of online communities.

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Introduction Twitter represents a mainstream news source for the American public, offering a valuable vehicle for learning how citizens make sense of pandemic health threats like Covid-19. Masking as a risk mitigation measure became controversial in the US. The social amplification risk framework offers insight into how a risk event interacts with psychological, social, institutional, and cultural communication processes to shape Covid-19 risk perception. Methods Qualitative content analysis was conducted on 7,024 mask tweets reflecting 6,286 users between January 24 and July 7, 2020, to identify how citizens expressed Covid-19 risk perception over time. Descriptive statistics were computed for (a) proportion of tweets using hyperlinks, (b) mentions, (c) hashtags, (d) questions, and (e) location. Results Six themes emerged regarding how mask tweets amplified and attenuated Covid-19 risk: (a) severity perceptions (18.0%) steadily increased across 5 months; (b) mask effectiveness debates (10.7%) persisted; (c) who is at risk (26.4%) peaked in April and May 2020; (d) mask guidelines (15.6%) peaked April 3, 2020, with federal guidelines; (e) political legitimizing of Covid-19 risk (18.3%) steadily increased; and (f) mask behavior of others (31.6%) composed the largest discussion category and increased over time. Of tweets, 45% contained a hyperlink, 40% contained mentions, 33% contained hashtags, and 16.5% were expressed as a question. Conclusions Users ascribed many meanings to mask wearing in the social media information environment revealing that COVID-19 risk was expressed in a more expanded range than objective risk. The simultaneous amplification and attenuation of COVID-19 risk perception on social media complicates public health messaging about mask wearing.

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