During the COVID-19 outbreak, lockdown measures have been deployed worldwide. In the wake of these measures, internet and social media use has reached unprecedented peaks. We hypothesize that social media can, in the context of the pandemic, be a placeholder for collective resilient processes modulated by cognitive and emotional components. An online survey (N = 1408) using a cross-sectional design was carried out over nine weeks from the beginning of March 2020 to the end of May 2020. The triangulation via SEM statistical modeling, text mining, and sentiment, discriminant, and entropy analyses revealed the granular functional role of social media use in promoting a positive perception towards stressors during the pandemic. This study provides an empirically tested theoretical framework to understand the evolution of buffering mechanisms of social media use as a result of collective resilience. Recommendations on social media use for future lockdown scenarios were provided.

No abstract

Three experiments examined the influence of briefly presented, pattern-masked prime stimuli on target word recognition at varying eccentricities. The prime was either the same word as the targets or a different word, and prime position varied horizontally from a central fixation point. The targets were either in the same location as the primes (Experiment 1A) or always centrally located (Experiments 1B and 2). In Experiment 1A, target word recognition showed a typical right visual field advantage, and priming effects diminished with increasing prime and target eccentricity. With centrally located targets, priming effects tended to be more constrained by prime location. After eye fixation location and prime visibility were controlled for (Experiment 2), a right visual field advantage for priming effects was also evident for central targets, suggesting an influence of endogenous attentional biases in masked repetition priming.

The affect-as-information hypothesis (e.g., Schwarz & Clore, 2003), predicts that the positive or negative valence of our mood differentially affects our processing of the details of the environment. However, this hypothesis has only been tested with mood induction procedures and fairly complex cognitive tasks in humans. Here, six baboons (Papio papio) living in a social group had free access to a computerized visual search task on which they were over-trained. Trials that immediately followed a spontaneously expressed emotional behavior were analyzed, ruling out possible biases due to induction procedures. RTs following negatively valenced behaviors are slower than those following neutral and positively valenced behaviors, respectively. Thus, moods affect the performance of nonhuman primates tested in highly automatized tasks, as it does in humans during tasks with much higher cognitive demands. These findings reveal a presumably universal and adaptive mechanism by which moods influence performance in various ecological contexts.

The influence of Facebook in social life keeps constantly growing. Recently, the communication of information has been vital to the success of the Tunisian revolution, and Facebook was its main "catalyst." This study examines the key reasons that explain Facebook's contribution to this historical event, as perceived by Tunisian Internet users. To do so, we launched this study 5 days after the fall of the regime using an online questionnaire in which participants (N=333) first rated the importance of Facebook in the Tunisian revolution and then explained the reasons for their ratings. A cluster analysis based on the Euclidean distance between the most frequent words in the participants' text corpus (6,640 words), revealed three main clusters that we interpret as follows: 1: Facebook political function, 2: Facebook informational function, and 3: Facebook media platform function. It is likely that these factors reflect the dynamic of Tunisian cyberspace and the Tunisian Internet users' collective consciousness during the revolution.

Humans have the capacity to use stimuli interchangeably by forming equivalence classes, and this ability seems to be supported by our language system. According to Sidman and Tailby (Conditional discrimination vs. matching to sample: an expansion of the testing paradigm. J Exp Anal Behav 37:5-22, 1982), the formation of equivalence classes require that three relations are derived among the class members, and past experiments have shown that one of these relations, i.e., symmetry, corresponding to the ability to reverse a relation (if A → B, then B → A), is extremely difficult to obtain in non-human animals. Because language development and the ability to form equivalence classes both co-occur in children with an increased ability to form categories, the current study tested the idea that category learning might promote symmetry in a nonhuman primate species. In Experiment 1, twelve Guinea baboons (Papio papio) were trained to associate 60 pictures of bears and 60 pictures of cars to two category labels, before being tested in symmetry trials. In Experiment 2, symmetry was trained and tested by reversing the association order between labels and pictures, using a new set of stimuli. In both experiments, the baboons successfully demonstrated category discrimination, but had only a weak (though significant) tendency to respond in accordance with symmetry during test trials. Altogether, our results confirm that symmetry is inherently difficult in non-human animals. We discuss possible explanations for such a limitation and give reasons for thinking that the effects of categorization on symmetry should be further investigated.

No abstract

International Conference on Cross-Cultural Decision Making (CCDM), FL, JUL 27-31, 2016International audienceWe describe the emergence of an online community from naturally occurring social media data. Our method uses patterns of word choice in an online social platform to characterize how a community forms in response to adverse events such as a terrorist attack. Our focus is English Twitter messages after the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack in Paris in January 2015). We examined the text to find lexical variation associated with measures of valence, arousal and concreteness. We also examine the patterns of language use of the most prolific twitter users (top 2 % by number of tweets) and the most frequent tweets in our collection (top 2 % by number of retweets). Differences between users and tweets based on frequency are revealing about how lexical variation in tweeting behavior reflects evolution of a community in reaction to crisis events on an international scale