Major Coping-behavior and Risk-perception Factors for the COVID-19 Pandemic and their Psychobehavioral Characteristics

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has dramatically changed people’s behavior, to prevent infection and overcome the general adversity caused by the implementation of infection-prevention measures. Here, we investigated the main coping-behavior and risk-perception factors, and the underlying psychological mechanisms (e.g., psychobehavioral characteristics) of coping behavior. We recruited 2,885 Japanese participants (1,524 women, ages 20–91 years). First, we identified four coping-behavior factors (two related to infection and two related to general adversity) and three risk-perception factors (one related to medical aspects and two related to society). Second, we demonstrated that infection prevention was promoted by female sex and etiquette in the Power to Live scale. General-adversity coping behavior was facilitated by shortages of daily necessities. Thus, we identified four parsimonious coping-behavior factors, as well as the risk-perception factors and demographic and psychobehavioral characteristics that influenced them. These results will benefit strategic approaches to optimize the social response to the pandemic.

Pandemic: Legal and Social Response

The Covid-19 pandemic changed the world and accelerated processes that could have taken decades without a pandemic. In this paper, the authors discuss the public and government responses to the new normal, nowadays reality, and most importantly, the legal regulations that have been enacted in different countries in response to the challenges. The paper discusses in detail issues related to security measures, social distance, gender issues, abortion, education and student mobility, employment, and entrepreneurship. A pandemic that has survived more than a year needs to be addressed. The decision-makers made efforts to create a provision for the influenza virus after it became prominent in society. The intention is not to be pessimistic but to be optimistic enough to create provisions for the future. Countries are aiming to achieve their commitments to recover from the pandemic. A pandemic demands a legal response as well as a social response. The research paper aimed to divert the attention of the readers to the untouched aspects of the law that are related to emergency situations, including pandemics. In the paper, we discuss the paradox of the pandemic, lockdown, and post-lock- down situations, as well as protests/riots, gender-based violence, healthcare, and education topics related to the changes that have taken place due to the pandemic.

Anxiety and Frustration during the Covid-19 Pandemic

The lockdown and quarantine period set by authorities around the world in order to prevent the spread of the SARS-COV-2 virus has had a significant impact on the mental health of people around the world. The present research, carried out by qualitative methods, aimed at identifying the sources, but also the ways of expressing anxiety, frustration and anguish due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the measures to prevent the spread of the virus. The research was carried out on subjects of Romanian nationality, especially from the North Eastern Region of Romania. The main results of the research are: an extension of the medicalization of social life, the awareness of one's own finitude and the experience of helplessness, as sources of anxiety and frustration, and an accentuated social response to the risk society, manifested as a revolt against the authorities and the need to humanize every day life.

Historical socioecological transformations in the global tropics as an Anthropocene analogue

Large, low-density settlements of the tropical world disintegrated during the first and second millennia of the CE. This phenomenon, which occurred in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Mesoamerica, is strongly associated with climate variability and extensive landscape transformation. These profound social transformations in the tropical world have been popularized as “collapse,” yet archaeological evidence suggests a more complex and nuanced story characterized by persistence, adaptation, and resilience at the local and regional scales. The resulting tension between ideas of climate-driven collapse and evidence for diverse social responses challenges our understanding of long-term resilience and vulnerability to environmental change in the global tropics. Here, we compare the archetypal urban collapse of the Maya, in modern Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico, during the 8th to 11th centuries CE, and the Khmer in modern Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam during the 14th to 15th centuries CE. We argue that the social response to environmental stress is spatially and temporally heterogenous, reflecting the generation of large-scale landesque capital surrounding the urban cores. Divergences between vulnerable urban elite and apparently resilient dispersed agricultural settlements sit uncomfortably with simplistic notions of social collapse and raise important questions for humanity as we move deeper into the Anthropocene.

Some remarks about the failing state of Mexico in the light of newborn dictatorships

Modern Mexico is a country that has long ceased to perform its basic competences. This is particularly evident in the area of human rights protection. Decades of action by organized crime groups have led to the establishment of their power in occupied territories and, consequently, to their impunity. The social response to the crime groups’ activities was the creation of areas belonging to a “warlord” in which warlords exercise their own power, unlimited by law. In this context, several questions arise about what is currently the constitutional form of power and what form of power actually exists in Mexico, including how this power is exercised and, finally, what the current practice of human rights protection is. The answers to these questions can be found in the present article.

Pitirim Sorokin and COVID-19

In 1942, the sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, a survivor of the post-WorldWar I pandemic, published "Man and Society in Calamity," a comparative study of the human response (including political responses) to four recurrent mass-death events. One was "pestilence." Sorokin reached many general conclusions. In Fall of 2020, the author of this paper (Wilkinson) held a seminar whose students attempted to re-evaluate Sorokin's conclusions, based upon their own experiences, observations, and mutual dialogue. In general, the seminar found that Sorokin's conclusions were mostly still applicable, but that his social theory of pestilence needed drastic changes as concerned (a) the gendered, class-based, ethnic and national distribution of pestilence and its consequences of pestilence, (b) the much-changed capacity (from 1942) for the scientific and technological response to pestilence, and (c) the much changed capacity (again, since 1942) for international-organizational response to pestilence. With these updates, Sorokin's theory of the human social response to pestilence can serve as guidance both for study and for policy in regard not only to the current pandemic, but for epidemics and pandemics yet to come.

How to Write a Positivist Legal History: Lessons from the 18th and 19th Centuries English Jurists William Blackstone and James Fitzjames Stephen

This paper is about the shaping of the law understood as a positivist enterprise. Positivist law has been the object of contentious debate. Since the 1960s, and with the surfacing of revisionist histories, it has been suggested that the abstraction of the doctrine of criminal law is due to its categorisation in early histories. However, it is argued here that positivism was hardly an intentional master plan of autocratic social control. Rather, it is important to recognise that historians do not provide a value-free recount of history. This paper examines this assertion by drawing on the writings of the English jurists William Blackstone and his work Commentaries on the Law of England (1765), and James Fitzjames Stephen’s A History of the Criminal Law of England (1883). Taking these scholars not as mere a-historical writers but reflecting on the fact that they inevitably ‘functioned’ as conduits of their own social practise opens an inquiry into the social response to a social need, which was already under way long before their time.

Dynamic coupling between the COVID-19 epidemic timeline and the behavioral response to PAUSE in New York State counties

Behavioral epidemiology suggests that there is a tight dynamic coupling between the timeline of an epidemic outbreak, and the social response in the affected population (with a typical course involving physical distancing between individuals, avoidance of large gatherings, wearing masks, etc). We study the bidirectional coupling between the epidemic dynamics of COVID-19 and the population social response in the state of New York, between March 1, 2020 (which marks the first confirmed positive diagnosis in the state), until June 20, 2020. This window captures the first state-wide epidemic wave, which peaked to over 11,000 confirmed cases daily in April (making New York one of the US states most severely affected by this first wave), and subsided by the start of June to a count of consistently under 1,500 confirmed cases per day (suggesting temporary state-wide control of the epidemic). In response to the surge in cases, social distancing measures were gradually introduced over two weeks in March, culminating with the PAUSE directive on March 22nd, which mandated statewide shutdown of all nonessential activity. The mandates were then gradually relaxed in stages throughout summer, based on how epidemic benchmarks were met in various New York regions. In our study, we aim to examine on one hand, whether different counties exhibited different responses to the PAUSE centralized measures depending on their epidemic situation immediately preceding PAUSE. On the other hand, we explore whether these different county-wide responses may have contributed in turn to modulating the counties’ epidemic timelines. We used the public domain to extract county-wise epidemic measures (such as cumulative and daily incidence of COVID-19), and social mobility measures for different modalities (driving, walking, public transit) and to different destinations. Our correlation analyses between the epidemic and the mobility time series found significant correlations between the size of the epidemic and the degree of mobility drop after PAUSE, as well as between the mobility comeback patterns and the epidemic recovery timeline. In line with existing literature on the role of the population behavioral response during an epidemic outbreak, our results support the potential importance of the PAUSE measures to the control of the first epidemic wave in New York State.

ENDANGERMENT OF THE ELDERLY BY CRIME AND SOCIAL RESPONSE BASED ON COMMUNITY POLICING CONCEPT

According to the average age of the population, Serbia is one of the oldest countries in the world, which results in increasing problems characteristic for the elderly population.One of them is the endangerment of the elderly by crime. In practice, not enough attention is paid to this issue, nor it is recognized as special and urgent, although due to the current number, and especially growing elderly population, their security problems will be greater and more present in society. Considering that elderly people a particularly vulnerable and discriminated category of the population, it is necessary to devise an adequate safety policy and establish an appropriate system of their protection. Community policing is recognized as a model of policing that can meet these requirements and adapt to the security needs of the elderly. This is because this concept is based on partnership with citizens and problem-oriented work. The police shouldbe open to community representatives pointing out their needs and highlighting security priorities, and the police can identify problems with them and initiate mechanisms for joint action. Community policing is proactive policing in which formal and informal social control are mutually reinforcing one another.The paper presents the most significant findings on endangerment by crime of the elderly aged 60 and over in the city of Belgrade from 2015 to 2019., in terms of: types of criminal offences, time, place, perpetrators and means of execution, as well as injured parties by gender. Also, the paper will show the organizational, functional and other advantages of community policing concept in relation to the traditional way of policing and try to answer whether its implementation can improve the safety of the elderly or adjust its operation to the security needs of this population

Crisis and society: social response and directions for reducing conflict potential in society

The main types of society's response to crisis phenomena (anomalous, conflict, modernization) are considered. It characterizes the behavior of different categories of the population, their orientation and priorities. It is noted that the population of Belarus is most characterized by balanced behavior, oriented to the future through improvement and modernization of funds and approaches of socio-economic development. It emphasizes the need to actively study the processes taking place in society and the timely information of the authorities to make informed management decisions.