10.31234/osf.io/a53zb

Family functioning has changed as a result of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. Research on previous epidemics and pandemics suggest that families, specifically mothers, may be at an increased risk for mental health challenges. The current study (1) described prevalence rates of maternal depressive and anxiety symptoms, (2) identified risk and protective factors for clinically significant symptoms, and (3) described mental health service use and barriers. Participants (N = 643) were mothers of children age 0-8 years, including expectant mothers. Prevalence rates for depressive symptoms (33.9%, 42.2%, and 43.9%) and anxiety symptoms (34.4%, 32.6, 30.1%) were evaluated by child age group: age 0-18 months, 18 months to 4 years and 5 to 8 years, respectively. Risk and protective factors were identified for elevated mental health symptoms across child age groups. Results are discussed in terms of mental health prevention and intervention strategies and family policy recommendations.

Maternal Psychological Distress & Mental Health Services Use during the COVID-19 Pandemic

10.31234/osf.io/br67g

Ethical statements typically involve rules. All rules can vary in accuracy and specificity depending on the context to which they are applied. Codes of ethics often involve ethical rules that are written generally to cover the wide-ranging set of possible situations any one member of the profession may encounter. But, despite being written generally, codes of ethics are applied to specific situations that professional members encounter. The application of general rules to specific contexts can sometimes be challenging and complex. Healthcare organizations have several options to help their employees behave ethically. One approach is to appoint a single ethics coordinator (Brodhead & Higbee, 2012). In contrast, the dominant approach in most healthcare organizations is to develop an organizational ethics committee (Moon, 2009). Despite the popularity of the ethics committee in other professions, it is unknown the extent to which organizations that provide ABA services have established and operate ethics committees. Ethics coordinator roles and ethics committees each have benefits and drawbacks. This article reviews the benefits and drawbacks of appointing an ethics coordinator and establishing an ethics committee. And, for interested organizations, this article outlines the steps and considerations that organizations can use to guide the creation of an ethics committee.

A guide to establishing ethics committees in behavioral health settings

COVID-19 Futures, Explained With Playable Simulations

What Happens Next?

10.31234/osf.io/5gskw

Objective: The COVID-19 pandemic has powerfully shaped people’s lives. The current work investigated the emotional and behavioral reactions people experience in response to COVID-19 through their internet searches. We hypothesized that when the prevalence rates of COVID-19 increase, people would experience more fear, which in turn would predict greater rates of protective behaviors, seeking health-related knowledge, and panic buying. Methods: Prevalence rates of COVID-19 in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, were used as predictors. Fear-related emotions, protective behaviors, seeking health-related knowledge, and panic buying were indicated by internet search volumes in Google Trends. Cross-temporal analyses were conducted. Results: We found that increased prevalence rates of COVID-19 were associated with more searches for protective behaviors, health knowledge, and panic buying. This pattern was consistent across four countries, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. Fear-related emotions explained the associations between COVID-19 and the content of their information searches. Conclusion: Findings suggest that exposure to prevalence rates of COVID-19 and fear-related emotions may motivate people to search for relevant health-related information so as to protect themselves from the pandemic.

COVID-19 Increases Online Emotional and Health-Related Searches

10.31234/osf.io/ryv8g

The paper presents the first part of the results of a planned longitudinal survey. Researchers asked the question: What is people’s quality of life during the COVID19 pandemic in its growth, peak, and subsidence phases. The survey was conducted based on a sample of adult Poles in electronic form. Three hundred fifty-three comprehensive responses were collected. Respondents were asked about the quality of life, coping with the objectively difficult situation, and about resource gains and losses over the past six months. The results obtained indicate that a high global quality of life correlates with higher gains and minor losses, as well as coping with the difficult situation through planning, positive reframing, emotional support seeking and reduced substance use tendency, low self-blaming, avoidance, and disengagement. Factors that may reduce people’s quality of life during the COVID 19 pandemic are low resource gains and losses experienced over the last six months preceding the pandemic, and coping strategies that are characteristic of those experiencing helplessness. Also, helplessness-based coping strategies were found to mediate both the relationship between resource gains and quality of life and resource loss and quality of life.

Quality of life and its factors in the COVID19 pandemic situation. Results of Stage 1 studies during the pandemic growth period

10.31234/osf.io/7xa4b

Many Indian COVID-19 suicide cases are turning the press-media attentions and flooding social media platforms although, no particular studies assessed the COVID-19 suicide causative factors to a large extent. Therefore, the present study presents 34 COVID-19 suicide cases (aged 19 to 65 years; 27 cases were males). The suicide causalities are included as follows – fear of infection (12-cases), suicide at quarantine center/home without specific reasons (7-cases), COVID-19 related stress (5-cases), being isolated, and lonely (3-cases), tested positive with COVID-19 (3-cases) etc. Considering the extreme psychological impacts related to COVID-19, there emerges a need for countrywide extensive tele-mental health care services.

Aggregated COVID-19 suicide incidences in India: Fear of COVID-19 infection is the prominent causative factor

10.31234/osf.io/u4pqy

This article describes a psychological practice reference to provide peer support via social media, derived from the experience learned from our intervention project, which was developed and carried out by a group of experienced mental health professionals, offering peer psychological support to healthcare professionals working at the frontline of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, China. The authors describe the infrastructure of the team and the novel model of peer-to-peer crisis intervention via social media. This offers a model for intervention that can be used elsewhere for current pandemic and future crises.

Mental Health Peer to Peer Support via Social Media practice reference During COVID-19 Pandemics

10.31234/osf.io/bnkve

Given the high COVID-19 mortality, the disease itself may be experienced as a life-threatening and traumatic event. Therefore, in the article we try to answer three questions that are relevant to public mental health: Should mental health professionals prepare for the increase in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) prevalence due to the pandemic? Can we define groups of COVID-19 survivors who are at higher risk of developing PTSD? How can health specialists prepare for it? Given the results of previous research on PTSD in epidemic survivors (e.g. SARS), we suggest that mental health professionals in countries touched by the pandemic should prepare for an increase in the PTSD prevalence in individuals who have had COVID-19. The PTSD risk group includes mainly individuals: from groups at increased risk of complications or who have experienced complications; who were not provided healthcare due to health service overload; experiencing additional mental health problems; healthcare workers; and stigmatized groups. We postulate that individuals who experienced COVID-19 should be routinely screened for PTSD; particular attention should be given to individuals at risk. Mental health services should prepare for providing therapeutic interventions for individuals with PTSD, and support to families, especially children, of COVID-19 survivors with PTSD.

Risk of Developing Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in COVID-19 Survivors: What Should Mental Health Specialists Prepare For?

10.31234/osf.io/j9h76

In response to the Covid-19 pandemic citizens around the globe were urged to practice social distancing. Although many complied, not everyone did. These violations led to sharp moral outrage about the alleged immoral behavior. However, it is an open question whether violators fully realized the severity of the virus threat. We therefore surveyed (n = 1657) to what extent people condemned social distancing rules violations, to what extent they respected these rules, and how likely they felt that not respecting the rules would get them and others infected. Results indicated that people who respect social distancing less and find these violations more permissible also believe that the virus is less likely to infect them or others. This implies that violators do not necessarily care less about others; they simply see the virus as less threatening. Therefore, caution is needed when attributing social distancing violations to a lack of moral character.

MORAL OUTRAGE AND SOCIAL DISTANCING: BAD OR BADLY INFORMED CITIZENS?

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A century ago, Einstein (1919) distinguished between two kinds of theory - theories of principle, and constructive theories. These have separate but complementary roles to play in the advancement of knowledge, in the manner in which they relate to data, and how they are developed. The different kinds of theory carry implications for what kinds of data we produce, and how they are put to use. We outline Einstein’s distinction and the model of theory formation that it involves. We then use the distinction to look at some of the discussion of scientific practice in psychology, particularly recent work on the need for more theoretical, rather than purely methodological, sophistication. We argue in agreement with Einstein that the distinction is a useful one, and that adopting it as a tenet of theoretical development requires a renewed commitment to a natural history of psychology.

Two Kinds of Theory: What Psychology Can Learn From Einstein

10.31234/osf.io/ebd6r

While uncertainty is present in most data analysis pipelines, reasoning with uncertainty is challenging for novices and experts alike. Fortunately, researchers are making significant advancements in the communication of uncertainty. In this chapter, we detail new visualization methods and emerging cognitive theories that describe how we reason with visual representations of uncertainty. We describe the best practices in uncertainty visualization and the psychology behind how each approach supports viewers' judgments. This chapter begins with a brief overview of conventional and state-of-the-art uncertainty visualization techniques. Then we take an in-depth look at the pros and cons of each technique using cognitive theories that describe why and how the mind processes different types of uncertainty information.

Uncertainty Visualization

R 4.0.0 was released in source form on Friday, and binaries for Windows, Mac and Linux are available for download now. As the version number bump suggests, this is a major update to R that makes some significant changes. Some of these changes — particularly the first one listed below — are likely to affect the results of R's calculations, so I would not recommend running scripts written for prior versions of R without validating them first. In any case, you'll need to reinstall any packages you were using for R 4.0.0. (You might find this R script useful for checking what packages you have installed for R 3.x.) You can find the full list of changes and fixes in the NEWS file (it's long!), but here are the biggest changes:

R 4.0.0 now available, and a look back at R's history

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The exploration/exploitation trade-off (EE trade-off) describes how, when faced with several competing alternatives, decision-makers must often choose between a known good alternative (exploitation) and one or more unknown but potentially more rewarding alternatives (exploration). Prevailing theory on how humans perform the EE trade-off states that uncertainty is a major motivator for exploration: the more uncertain the environment, the more exploration that will occur. The current paper examines whether exploratory behaviour in both choice and attention may be impacted differently depending on whether uncertainty is onset suddenly (unexpected uncertainty), or more slowly (expected uncertainty). It is shown that when uncertainty was expected, participants tended to explore less with their choices, but not their attention, than when it was unexpected. Crucially, the impact of this "protection from uncertainty" on exploration only occurred when participants had an opportunity to learn the structure of the task prior to experiencing uncertainty. This suggests that the interaction between uncertainty and exploration is more nuanced than simply more uncertainty leading to more exploration, and that attention and choice behaviour may index separate aspects of the EE trade-off.

Protection from uncertainty in the exploration/exploitation trade-off

10.31234/osf.io/mt3p4

COVID-19 pandemic has led to popular conspiracy theories regarding its origins and widespread concern over the level of compliance with preventive measures. In the current preregistered research, we recruited 1,088 Turkish participants and investigated (a) individual differences associated with COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs; (2) whether such conspiracy beliefs are related to the level of preventive measures; and (3) other individual differences that might be related to the preventive measures. Higher faith in intuition, uncertainty avoidance, impulsivity, generic conspiracy beliefs, religiosity, and right-wing ideology, and a lower level of cognitive reflection were associated with a higher level of belief in COVID-19 conspiracy theories. There was no association between COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs and preventive measures while perceived risk was positively and impulsivity negatively correlated with preventive measures. We discuss the implications and directions for future research.

Psychological Correlates of COVID-19 Conspiracy Beliefs and Preventive Measures: Evidence from Turkey

The phrase following the science is repeated frequently in relation to government policies to address COVID-19. However, what this science might be and how it is better than other ‘sciences’ is less frequently explained. In this post, Jana Bacevic reviews the UK government’s initial response to the COVID-19 outbreak and argues that a key factor determining the UK government’s approach was a closed advisory system that enabled particular scientific or epistemic communities to have disproportionate influence on policymaking. To address this deficiency, scientific advisory systems need both a greater variety of experts and greater transparency.

Science in inaction – The shifting priorities of the UK government’s response to COVID-19 highlights the need for publicly accountable expert advice.

10.31234/osf.io/apg9e

Social distancing is one of the most effective measures to prevent coronavirus from rapidly spreading. Our analysis investigates the role of some variables (political partisanship, income, professional status, social norms, and uncertainty avoidance) in intentions of not complying with social distancing measures, which can lead to higher infection rates and to compromising the capacity of health systems worldwide. We applied an online questionnaire to 2,056 Brazilian participants. Our findings indicate that individuals that support right-wing parties, have lower wages, are currently unemployed, and have a higher uncertainty avoidance tendency are more prone to violating social distancing measures. Social norms also play a significant role on the intentions but only when using ingroup members (family and friends) as referents. On the basis of our findings, we discuss the need for support from relevant political figures to social distancing policies. We also indicate that providing psychological support and cash transfer programs may increase compliance with physical distancing. Plus, our results indicate that initiatives to persuade individuals to stay at home would be more effective if they focus on ingroup members.

Violating social distancing amid COVID-19 pandemic: Psychological factors to improve compliance

10.31234/osf.io/42xfm

Mass media routinely present data on COVID-19 diffusion using either a log scale or a linear scale. We show that the scale adopted on these graphs has important consequences on how people understand and react to the information conveyed. In particular, we find that when we show the number of COVID-19 related deaths on a logarithmic scale, people have a less accurate understanding of how the pandemic has developed, make less accurate predictions on its evolution, and have different policy preferences than when they are exposed to a linear scale. Consequently, merely changing the scale can alter public policy preferences and the level of worry, despite the fact that people are exposed to a lot of COVID-19 related information. Reducing misinformation can help improving the response to COVID-19, thus, mass media and policymakers should always describe the evolution of the pandemic using a graph on a linear scale, or at least they should show both scales. More generally, our results confirm that policymakers should not only care about what information to communicate, but also about how to do it, as even small differences in data framing can have a significant impact.

COVID-19 Data: The Logarithmic Scale Misinforms the Public and Affects Policy Preferences

10.31234/osf.io/qrm69

Misinformation often continues to influence inferential reasoning after clear and credible corrections are provided; this effect is known as the continued influence effect. It has been theorized that this effect is partly driven by misinformation familiarity. Some researchers have even argued that a correction should avoid repeating the misinformation, as the correction itself could serve to inadvertently enhance misinformation familiarity and may thus backfire, ironically strengthening the very misconception it aims to correct. While previous research has found little evidence of such familiarity backfire effects, there remains one situation where they may yet arise: when correcting entirely novel misinformation, where corrections could serve to spread misinformation to new audiences. The present paper presents three experiments (total N = 1,718) investigating the possibility of familiarity backfire within the context of correcting novel misinformation claims. While there was variation across experiments, overall there was substantial evidence against familiarity backfire. Corrections that repeated novel misinformation claims did not lead to stronger misconceptions compared to a control group never exposed to the false claims or corrections. This suggests that it is safe to repeat misinformation when correcting it, even when the audience might be unfamiliar with the misinformation.

Can Corrections Spread Misinformation to New Audiences? Testing for the Elusive Familiarity Backfire Effect

10.31234/osf.io/5bpfz

Background: The COVID-19 quarantine has affected more than 860 million children and adolescents worldwide but, to date, no study has been developed to examine the psychological impact on their lives. The present study aims to examine for the first time the emotional impact of the quarantine on children and adolescents from Italy and Spain, two of the most affected countries by COVID-19. Methods: 1,143 parents of Italian and Spanish children aged 3 to 18 years completed a survey providing information about how the quarantine affects their children and themselves, compared to before the home confinement. Findings: 85.7% of the parents perceived changes in their children´s emotional state and behaviors during the quarantine. The most frequent symptoms were difficulty concentrating (76.6%), boredom (52%), irritability (39%), restlessness (38.8%), nervousness (38%), feelings of loneliness (31.3%), uneasiness (30.4%), and worries (30.1%), and Spanish parents reported more symptoms than Italians. As expected, children of both countries used monitors more frequently, spent less time doing physical activity, and slept more hours during the quarantine. Furthermore, when family coexistence during quarantine became more difficult, the situation was more serious, and the level of stress was higher, parents tended to report more emotional problems in their children. Interpretation: The quarantine impacts considerably on Italian and Spanish youth, reinforcing the need to detect children with emotional and behavioral problems as early as possible to improve their psychological well-being.

Immediate psychological effects of the COVID-19 quarantine in youth from Italy and Spain

10.31234/osf.io/7afmd

Adolescence is a period of life characterized by heightened sensitivity to social stimuli and the increased need for peer interaction. In this interdisciplinary review, we describe recent literature from a variety of domains that highlights how social deprivation in adolescence might have far-reaching and long-term consequences. Human cognitive studies have demonstrated the im-portance of peer acceptance and peer influence in the adolescent age group. In turn, research in animals has shown that social deprivation and isolation have unique effects on brain and behav-iour in adolescence compared to other stages of life. Yet current adolescents are also increasingly digitally connected, meaning that face-to-face social deprivation might be less impactful due to access to technologies such as social media. In light of the current social distancing measures engaged in globally to contain the spread of COVID-19, these findings highlight how such so-cietal changes might be especially harmful for an age group to whom peer interaction is a vital aspect of development, and demonstrate the need for urgent research in this area.

The effects of social deprivation on adolescent social development and mental health

10.31234/osf.io/3sv6r

The COVID-19 outbreak and the ensuing confinement measures are expected to bear a significant psychological impact on the affected populations. Here, we publish a dataset from CoVidAffect​, a citizen science project that was launched to provide direct, geolocalized data of changes in subjective feeling and physical arousal following the COVID-19 crisis. These publicly available data are continuously updated and visual summaries are displayed on the project website. The data can be further analyzed to identify affected geographical regions, quantify emotional responses to specific measures and policies, and to understand the effect of context variables, such as living space, socioeconomic status, and practice of physical exercise, on emotional regulation and psychological resilience. Our goal is to offer a resource that will help to anticipate the needs for psychosocial support and facilitate evidence-based policy making.

CoVidAffect: Real-time Monitoring of Mood Variations Following the COVID-19 Outbreak

We read with interest the Editorial1The LancetRedefining vulnerability in the era of COVID-19.Lancet. 2020; 3951089Summary Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (0) Google Scholar about redefining vulnerability in the era of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). The Editors recognise underserved and marginalised populations enduring the COVID-19 pandemic, and that the category of vulnerable individuals or groups is not fixed but evolves in response to policies that might create or reinforce vulnerability. When we ask what being vulnerable means, are we also creating the spaces needed to question what it means to be made vulnerable?The Editors' opening question, “What does it mean to be vulnerable?”1The LancetRedefining vulnerability in the era of COVID-19.Lancet. 2020; 3951089Summary Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (0) Google Scholar strongly suggests that more groundwork is needed to shift the landscape from an individual pathologising of capacity, autonomy, and agency to the identification of divisions that define vulnerability within cultures, communities, and particular social groups.

What does it mean to be made vulnerable in the era of COVID-19?

10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30979-X

10.31234/osf.io/7w9kv

When seeking information about the influence of generations, policy makers are often faced with more questions than answers. One reason for this is the nearly ubiquitous nature of generations. Generations have been used to explain everything from shifts in broadly defined social phenomena (e.g., anti-war movements; Dunham, 1998) to the demise of marmalade (Gough, 2018). Likewise, owing to the fact that the modern workplace offers increasing opportunities for interactions among (relatively) older and younger co-workers, generations and especially generational differences have been used to describe a number of work-related phenomena, processes, and policies (see Costanza, Badger, Fraser, Severt, & Gade, 2012; Costanza & Finkelstein, 2015 for reviews). Despite these attributions, most generations research is suspect, and many supposed generational effects are likely not generational at all. Collectively, our author team has been studying the idea of generations for over 25 years. Over time, we have been asked numerous questions about what impact generations and generational differences have, especially in the workplace and for work-related policies adopted by organizations. In the present manuscript, we have collected the most common, policy-relevant questions regarding generations and generational differences, and attempted to answer them. Our goal in doing so is to “clear the air” about generations and generational differences in a way that informs better policy making regarding complex processes associated with age(ing) at work. We start here by asking and answering a broad question: “What are generational differences?” Then, to help parse truth from fiction, we offer answers to 10 common questions about generations and generational differences, with a specific focus on how these assumed differences manifest in the workplace and affect work-related policies. These 10 questions are classified as addressing two overarching questions: (1) What issues surround research and methodology for understanding generational differences at work? and (2) What are the policy and practice issues concerning generational differences in the workplace and beyond?

Answers to 10 Questions About “Generations” and “Generational Differences” in the Workplace

10.1016/S2215-0366(20)30150-4

In these times of rapid change, with high levels of uncertainty, anxiety, social isolation, and financial pressure, mental health worldwide is likely to be at risk. Researchers are rightly ensuring that mental health research is included in the response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.1Balmer N MQ and AMS convene expert group to rapidly develop a mental health research response to COVID-19.https://www.mqmentalhealth.org/news-blog/post/mq-and-ams-convene-expert-group-to-rapidly-develop-a-mental-health-research-response-to-covid-19Date: March 25, 2020Date accessed: March 31, 2020Google Scholar Here, we reflect on ethical issues to consider when conducting research on self-harm, suicide, and the broader impacts of COVID-19 in the midst of a global pandemic, and provide some recommendations to consider when researching these topics.

Key ethical questions for research during the COVID-19 pandemic

On 11th March, 2020, the World Health Organisation (WHO) announced that the spread of COVID-19 was such that they could characterise it as a pandemic, advising countries to escalate their response so as to pre-empt, as much as possible, the rising numbers of cases and of deaths (WHO, 2020). Suggested actions included social distancing and quarantine measures, including the closures of schools and universities, implementation of remote working policies, and avoidance of all but essential travel and use of public transport.

Mental health scientists stand up to COVID-19

As the far-reaching impacts of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic expand to more and more countries, key questions about transmission dynamics and optimal intervention strategies remain unanswered. In particular, the age profile of susceptibility and infectivity, the frequency of super-spreading events, the amount of transmission in the household, and the contribution of asymptomatic individuals to transmission remain debated. The study by Qifang Bi and colleagues1Bi Q Wu Y Mei S et al.Epidemiology and transmission of COVID-19 in 391 cases and 1286 of their close contacts in Shenzhen, China: a retrospective cohort study.Lancet Infect Dis. 2020; (published April 27.)https://doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(20)30287-5Google Scholar in The Lancet Infectious Diseases explores some of these questions by analysing detailed contact tracing data from Shenzhen, a large and affluent city in southern China at the border with Hong Kong. To dissect the drivers of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) transmission, the authors modelled PCR-confirmed infections in 391 cases and 1286 of their close contacts from Jan 14 to Feb 12, 2020.1

10.1016/S1473-3099(20)30357-1

Impact of contact tracing on SARS-CoV-2 transmission

This fact sheet serves as a basic overview of reasonable accommodations in the workplace and includes some examples and a brief review of the reasonable accommodation process. This document has information that may be useful for employees, employers, human resources staff, and others. Because this is a very general, baseline document, more specific questions may be answered by the reader’s local ADA Center.

Reasonable Accommodations in the Workplace

COVID-19 literature search powered by advanced NLP algorithms.

10.7326/M19-3692

Making a diagnosis is perhaps the most frequently performed and important procedure in an internist's wheelhouse. Indeed, a patient's therapeutic options and prognosis often center around the right diagnosis being made in a timely fashion. Unfortunately, diagnostic errors are common, with frequency estimates ranging from 10% to 40% in some studies (1, 2). Furthermore, misdiagnosis is more likely to be considered negligent and have proportionately higher morbidity and morbidity than other errors (3, 4).

Annals Clinical Decision Making: Avoiding Cognitive Errors in Clinical Decision Making

Seven emerging trends from the COVID-19 pandemic that have led to the return of experts and evidence

How COVID-19 has changed the use and communication of evidence

10.31234/osf.io/hz4c7

COVID-19—and the ensuing economic fallout—exposed society’s vast inequalities. Current stimulus plans and ongoing debates revolve around restoring society to its pre-COVID-19 state, a singular focus driven by a prevalent status quo bias. We propose that policymakers should adopt a more ambitious goal: to take advantage of the change momentum of COVID-19 to reduce social inequalities in order to build society’s resilience for the next time disaster strikes. We suggest that this redesign will require a focus on the multidimensional nature of social and economic inequalities, and a shift toward strengthening communities rather than a sole focus on individual households and businesses. This crisis should be seen as a unique window for restructuring society by creating new norms and ideals rather than returning to the pre-COVID-19 status quo.

COVID-19 Provides a Rare Opportunity to Create a Stronger, More Equitable Society

10.31234/osf.io/8whkg

The COVID-19 pandemic entails challenging psychological conditions for the population, requiring them to make many decisions under stress. In this study, 641 participants were presented with different moral decision-making tasks, and completed a survey on mental health status and experiences, concerns, behaviors and beliefs related to the COVID-19. Results showed that the pandemic is placing a great psychological burden on the population. Also, that decision-making processes are being affected during the crisis, in a dichotomous way. Altruistic behaviors are promoted when people are suffering with high levels of psychological impact, and when they are concerned about others contracting the disease. However, egoistic behaviors are facilitated when concerns affect the self. Similarly, psychological impact, concerns about the self, and worsened physical health predict more automatic responses to framing problems and moral dilemmas. Nevertheless, when concerns relate to the others, or when people are more informed and/or carefree, more controlled responses emerge.

Moral decision-making and mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic

10.31234/osf.io/8fhkp

Auditors often have prior information about the auditee before starting the substantive testing phase. For example, an auditor might have performed an audit last year, they might have information on certain controls in place, or they might have performed analytical procedures in an earlier stage of the audit. In this article, we show that applying Bayesian statistics in substantive testing allows for integration of this information into the statistical analysis through the prior distribution. This enables auditors to tailor their sampling procedure to the auditee, thereby increasing audit transparency, efficiency, and quality. However, defining a suitable prior distribution can be difficult because what constitutes a suitable prior depends on the specifics of the audit and the auditee. To help the auditor construct a prior distribution we discuss five methodologies, discuss their pros and cons, and give examples of how to apply them in practice.

Priors in a Bayesian Audit: How Integration of Existing Information into the Prior Distribution Can Increase Transparency, Efficiency, and Quality

Pan·dem·ic /panˈdemik/ (of a disease) prevalent over a whole country or the world. As humans have spread across the world, so have infectious diseases. Even in this modern era, outbreaks are nearly constant, though not every outbreak reaches pandemic level as the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) has. Today’s visualization outlines some of history’s most deadly pandemics, from the Antonine Plague to the current COVID-19 event.

Visualizing the History of Pandemics

As the coronavirus crisis continues to take its deadly toll across the world, it does so with varying degrees of severity depending on the country. Some states are considering relaxing preventive measures against the disease, others are doing so already. Many analysts and politicians are beginning to turn their attention from short-term measures to contain the virus and save economies from collapse to longer-term challenges, such as the pandemic’s impact on international governance, defence, foreign policy and the international debt market

Coronavirus: Impact and challenges [What Think Tanks are thinking]

New accessibility feature in @ChromeDevTools: simulate vision deficiencies, including blurred vision & various types of color blindness. Find out how people with vision deficiencies experience your web app, and resolve contrast issues you didn’t even know you had!

COVID-19 psychology preprints

COVID-19 psych papers

10.1103/PhysRevE.101.042123

Understanding the topological characteristics of complex networks and how they affect navigability is one of the most important goals in science today, as it plays a central role in various economic, biological, ecological, and social systems. Here we apply first-passage analysis tools to investigate the properties and characteristics of random walkers in networks with different topology. Starting with the simplest two-dimensional square lattice, we modify its topology incrementally by randomly reconnecting links between sites. We characterize these networks by first-passage time from a significant number of random walkers without interaction, varying the departure and arrival locations. We also apply the concept of first-passage simultaneity, which measures the likelihood of two walkers reaching their destination together. These measures, together with the site occupancy statistics during the processes, allowed us to differentiate the studied networks, especially the random networks from the scale-free networks, by their navigability. We also show that small-world features can also be highlighted with the proposed technique.

Characterizing network topology using first-passage analysis

“The Evidence and Tradeoffs for a ‘Stay-at-Home’ Pandemic Response: A multidisciplinary review examining the medical, psychological, economic and political impact of ‘Stay-at-Home’ implementation in America”

Josh Rushton writes: I’ve been following your blog for a while and checked in today to see if there was a thread on last week’s big-splash Stanford antibody study (the one with the shocking headline that they got 50 positive results in a “random” sample of 3330 antibody tests, suggesting that nearly 2% of the population has been infected “under the radar”). I didn’t see anything, so I thought I’d ask if you’d consider opening a discussion. This paper is certainly relevant to the MrP thread on politicization of the covid response, in that the paper risks injecting misinformation into an already-broken policy discussion. But I think it would be better to use it as a case study on poor statistics and questionable study design. I don’t mean to sound harsh, but if scientists are afraid to “police” ourselves, I don’t know how we can ask the public to trust us. Simply put, I see two potentially fatal flaws with the study (full disclosure: I [Rushton] haven’t read the entire paper — a thousand apologies if I’m jumping the gun — but it’s hard to imagine these getting explained away in the fine print): The authors’ confidence intervals cannot possibly be accounting for false positives correctly (I think they use the term “specificity” to mean “low rate of false-positives). I say this because the test validation included a total of 30+371 pre-covid blood tests, and only 399 of them came back negative. I know that low-incidence binomial CIs can be tricky, and I don’t know the standard practice these days, but the exact binomial 95% CI for the false-positive rate is (0.0006, 0.0179); this is pretty consistent to the authors’ specificity CI (98.3%, 99.9%). For rates near the high end of this CI, you’d get 50 or more false positives in 3330 tests with about 90% probability. Hard to sort through this with strict frequentist logic (obviously a Bayesian could make short work of it), but the common-sense take-away is clear: It’s perfectly plausible (in the 95% CI sense) that the shocking prevalence rates published in the study are mostly, or even entirely, due to false positives. So the fact that their prevalence CIs don’t go anywhere near zero simply can’t be right. Recruitment was done via facebook ads with basic demographic targeting. Since we’re looking for a feature that affects something like 2% of the population (or much, much less), we really have to worry about self selection. They may have discussed this in the portions of the paper I didn’t read, but I can’t imagine how researchers would defeat the desire to get a test if you had reason to believe that you, or someone near you, had the virus (and wouldn’t some people hide those reasons to avoid being disqualified from getting the test?)…

Concerns with that Stanford study of coronavirus prevalence

10.1101/2020.04.15.20066407

Background: The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic caused >1 million infections during January-March 2020. There is an urgent need for robust antibody detection approaches to support diagnostics, vaccine development, safe individual release from quarantine and population lock-down exit strategies. The early promise of lateral flow immunoassay (LFIA) devices has been questioned following concerns about sensitivity and specificity. Methods: We used a panel of plasma samples designated SARS-CoV-2 positive (from SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR-positive individuals; n=40) and negative (samples banked in the UK prior to December-2019 (n=142)). We tested plasma for SARS-Cov-2 IgM and IgG antibodies by ELISA and using nine different commercially available LFIA devices. Results: ELISA detected SARS-CoV-2 IgM or IgG in 34/40 individuals with an RT-PCR-confirmed diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 infection (sensitivity 85%, 95%CI 70-94%), vs 0/50 pre-pandemic controls (specificity 100% [95%CI 93-100%]). IgG levels were detected in 31/31 RT-PCR-positive individuals tested ≥10 days after symptom onset (sensitivity 100%, 95%CI 89-100%). IgG titres rose during the 3 weeks post symptom onset and began to fall by 8 weeks, but remained above the detection threshold. Point estimates for the sensitivity of LFIA devices ranged from 55-70% versus RT-PCR and 65-85% versus ELISA, with specificity 95-100% and 93-100% respectively. Within the limits of the study size, the performance of most LFIA devices was similar. Conclusions: The performance of current LFIA devices is inadequate for most individual patient applications. ELISA can be calibrated to be specific for detecting and quantifying SARS-CoV-2 IgM and IgG and is highly sensitive for IgG from 10 days following symptoms onset.

Evaluation of antibody testing for SARS-Cov-2 using ELISA and lateral flow immunoassays

10.1056/NEJMp2008193

n South Sudan, all schools and churches have been closed to promote social distancing. In South Africa, President Cyril Ramaphosa declared a 3-week total lockdown of his country’s 57 million citizens. In Uganda, pop star Bobi Wine’s newly recorded song “Sensitise to Sanitise” is playing on radios throughout the country to raise awareness about reducing coronavirus transmission. At the large regional hospital in Kisumu, Kenya, teams of health workers have set up tents to provide information on Covid-19 and to take visitors’ temperatures and log their travel histories before they enter the hospital. The coronavirus is coming to Africa, and with creative actions, large and small, Africans are aiming to meet it head on.

Africa in the Path of Covid-19

10.31234/osf.io/tm69k

The COVID-19 outbreak has had a huge impact on how people go about their day to day life. This sudden change, along with necessary measures such as self-isolation and social distancing may be particularly challenging for children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) and their families, given the reliance of many on carefully established routines and relationships as well as professional and informal support. Two hundred and thirty four parents of children with SEND completed an online survey during the first two weeks of the social distancing measures introduced by the UK Government. Whilst a minority (~11%) felt adequately supported, most respondents felt that more support was needed from schools, health and social care services, the government, and other sources. The different types of support mentioned by parents are described further. These findings shed new light on how parents of children with SEND would like to be supported during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Supporting Families with Children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities During COVID-19