Brief exposure to social media during the COVID-19 pandemic: Doom-scrolling has negative emotional consequences, but kindness-scrolling does not

People often seek out information as a means of coping with challenging situations. Attuning to negative information can be adaptive because it alerts people to the risks in their environment, thereby preparing them for similar threats in the future. But is this behaviour adaptive during a pandemic when bad news is ubiquitous? We examine the emotional consequences of exposure to brief snippets of COVID-related news via a Twitter feed (Study 1), or a YouTube reaction video (Study 2). Compared to a no-information exposure group, consumption of just 2–4 minutes of COVID-related news led to immediate and significant reductions in positive affect (Studies 1 and 2) and optimism (Study 2). Exposure to COVID-related kind acts did not have the same negative consequences, suggesting that not all social media exposure is detrimental for well-being. We discuss strategies to counteract the negative emotional consequences of exposure to negative news on social media.

Race and support for police use of force: Findings from the UK

The use of force is arguably the defining feature of police. Yet this power is often controversial: a key node in the contest and debate that almost always swirls around police, with the question of race never far from such contestation. In this paper, we consider the influence of race in responses to use of force incidents among British-based samples. Using two text-based vignette experiments and one video study, our aims are threefold: (1) to explore the influence of suspect race in how people respond to police use of force; (2) to test the interaction between participant ethnicity and suspect race; and (3) to understand what attitudes and beliefs influence how people respond to police use of force. We found no effect of suspect race on how people judged police use of force. White participants were slightly more accepting of police use of force than black participants, but there was no interaction with suspect race. The strongest predictor of acceptance of police use of force was trust in police, and, controlling for other relevant predictors, racial prejudice was also a significant positive predictor of acceptance of use of force. To our knowledge this is the first study of its kind to be fielded in the UK.

Back-off

Standstill behavior by a robot is deemed to be ineffective and inefficient to convey a robot’s intention to yield priority to another party in spatial interaction. Instead, robots could convey their intention and thus their next action via motion. We developed a back-off (BO) movement to communicate the intention of yielding priority to pedestrians at bottlenecks. To evaluate human sensory perception and subjective legibility, the BO is compared to three other motion strategies in a video study with 167 interviewees at the university and public spaces, where it excels regarding legibility. Implemented in a real encounter, objective motion behavior of 78 participants as a reaction to a stop-and-wait strategy, and two versions of BO (short and long), shows an improvement of the pedestrians’ efficiency in the second encounter with the robot’s short BO version compared to the stop strategy. Eventually, in the third encounter with all motion strategies, interaction causes only a small time consumption still required by the cognitive process of perceiving an object in the visual field. Hence, the design of kinematic parameters, BO path and time, exhibits the potential to increase the fluency of an interaction with robots at bottlenecks.

Assisting. Reconstructing a Cooperation Pattern on a Video Basis among Co-teachers in the Programme Jedem Kind ein Instrument

The programme “Jedem Kind ein Instrument”1 (JeKi) in Germany demands the cooperation between primary school and music school teachers, working in teams of two for one lesson each week during the first year of school to offer basic musical training and to present various musical instruments. The ideal that the teachers’ skills complement each other is guiding the programme but preliminary results from a study on JeKi showed that there is hardly any coordination prior to co-taught classes, mostly due to a lack of time. This leads to the relevant research question concerning how teachers collaborate for co-classes when the very requirements for successful collaboration, i.e., coordination and communication, are mostly missing, but co-teaching still takes place, albeit sporadically. In order to address this desideratum, this video study tries to reconstruct an interactional framing of assistance as the predominantly found model of cooperation between music teachers from different professional backgrounds.2

Det store i det lille: Detaljert videoanalyse av gruppearbeid

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the use of video data to analyze at the micro level how groups share resources and knowledge with each other and how this may relate to how we understand and conceptualize learning in a video study. Video gives us the opportunity to study interaction at a detailed level and observe situations repeatedly. It also creates a unique opportunity to understand what happens in the interaction between students in group work when the teacher is not present. This study focuses on the actual social practices and more specifically on how students express what they know to each other and how they negotiate knowledge when they work together with practical tasks in groups. It examines how students situationally negotiate knowledge in group work and tries to make visible and understand what is being done, moment by moment, in the social interaction and how it may be linked to learning as a social phenomenon.

Back-off: Evaluation of Robot Motion Strategies to Facilitate Human-Robot Spatial Interaction

Standstill behavior by a robot is deemed to be ineffective and inefficient to convey a robot's intention to yield priority to another party in spatial interaction. Instead, robots could convey their intention and, thus, their next action via motion. We developed a back-off movement to communicate the intention of yielding priority to pedestrians at bottlenecks. To evaluate human sensory perception and subjective legibility, the back-off is compared to three other motion strategies in a video study with N = 167 interviewees at the university and public spaces, where it excels regarding legibility. Implemented in a real encounter, objective motion behavior of N = 78 participants as a reaction to a stop & wait strategy, and two versions of back-off (short and long) shows an improvement of the pedestrians' efficiency in the second encounter with the robot's short back-off version compared to the stop strategy. Eventually, in the third encounter with all motion strategies, interaction causes only a small time consumption still required by the cognitive process of perceiving an object in the visual field. Hence, the design of kinematic parameters, back-off path and time, exhibits the potential to increase the fluency of an interaction with robots at bottlenecks.