Mental Health Stigma and Social Contact Revisited: The Role of Network Closeness and Negativity

Researchers and policymakers are increasingly interested in the extent to which mental health stigma can be mitigated through social contact with people who disclose mental health issues. Empirical research on contact and stigma, however, largely focuses on the presence of contact without fully examining the nature of relationships. Interpersonal ties, for example, can be enduring and supportive, enduring and stressful, or weak yet cooperative. Using a novel egocentric network survey, this study contributes by measuring contact with respect to both the presence of alters with perceived mental health issues and the nature of those connections. Results show that, compared to respondents without any contact, naming more mental health contacts is associated with a reduction in stigma only when those relations are characterized by closeness and a lack of negativity. Among individuals with contact, a higher proportion of relationships perceived as negative or “difficult” exacerbates stigma. Implications of these findings for stigma reduction are discussed.

Socio-Economic Questions of Motivating Collaborators in the Context of Remote Work

Motivation and involvement of individual and collective subjects of social and labor relations in work in the traditional format of building work processes is based on strong and diverse interpersonal ties, supported by constant repetitive interaction. Remote work (work outside the office) leads to the need to rethink the impact of the manager on the employee from the standpoint of motivation and control. Distributed work involves a new approach to building interactions between employees in a team, rethinking and reconfiguring group relationships in a team. In the context of social isolation measures caused by the pandemic, almost all enterprises (with the exception of a rather narrow list of strategically important industries) faced the need to change the approach to organizing work processes in general, and managers discovered new problem areas in the field of motivation. In the event of a sudden lockdown, the first to solve the social and psychological problems of maintaining the involvement of employees in work processes, at the same time, problems of a socioeconomic nature receded into secondary positions, since physical and mental health was recognized as an absolute priority. The article is devoted to the analysis of the main approaches to resolving problem areas in the field of socio-economic approaches to motivating employees of enterprises and organizations in a format of remote distributed work that is unexpected for companies and employees.

Public intimacy in social media: The mass audience as a third party

This study presents a novel analysis of social network sites as a staged performance of interpersonal ties in front of a third party, here defined as public intimacy. This concept moves away from the current focus on the presentation of self in social media to the performance of relationships. Users of social media are compared to an interactive audience in a round theater. As inner circle network members display their exclusive ties in front of ther users they may also tease them into joining the conversation. Building on studies of Simmelian ties, interactive exchange, and phatic communication the study presents six characteristics of public intimacy along with brief examples drawn from users’ experiences on Facebook and Twitter. It is concluded that by mediating the shift from dyad to triad and from triad to mass community social media do not necessarily entail a reduction in intimacy but rather a concretization of social relations. The recursive relationship between interpersonal ties and mass solidarity is sustained and reaffirmed thanks to triadic interactions of public intimacy.

THE ROLE OF SELF-DEVELOPMENT PROCESS IN THE FORMATION OF SOCIAL COMPETENCE IN FUTURE BACHELORS OF LAW

The importance of the process of self-development for the forming specialist is quite obvious. However, as a result of self-improvement is usually perceived only as a personal benefit (egocentric effects). Taking into account L. С. Vygotsky’s approach to the phenomenon of «interiorization,» the authors suggest that society is the source and ultimate consumer of all the effects of personal self-improvement. In other words, all important personal psychological phenomena are not only caused by communicative processes within a given society, but are also aimed at strengthening them. Consequently, the integration of the individual into society is mediated by two grounds: 1) strengthening interpersonal ties, which is a guarantor of the security of society; 2) development of the personality itself. A rich personal inner world becomes a tool of self-knowledge and an effective tool of interaction with society. It is assumed that at a deep level fundamental psychological regularities are unified for all representatives of society, and personal reflection allows to reveal all the latent regularities of its development. We will also strengthen our judgments by the fact that self-improvement is a structural element of such a new formation as social competence. Finally, it should be clarified that the scientific interest of the authors is related to such a professional community as future bachelors of law. Therefore, the aim of the study is to clarify the significance of personal self-actualization within the mastered profession for the formation of social competence. Theoretical and empirical research was conducted to verify the hypothesis. Practical verification was made on the basis of the results of the test of Communicative Social Competence (CSC). At the end of the study it was revealed that future bachelors of law, who actively participated in the sessions on self-development, finding their purpose for society, showed a confident growth of social competence skills.

Promoters versus Adversaries of Change: Agent-Based Modeling of Organizational Conflict in Co-Evolving Networks

The social adoption of change is usually hard because in reality, forces opposing the social adoption of change manifest. This situation of organizational conflict corresponds to the case where two competing groups of influential agents (“promoters” versus “adversaries” of change) operate concurrently within the same organizational network. We model and explore the co-evolution of interpersonal ties and attitudes in the presence of conflict, taking into account explicitly the microscopic “agent-to-agent” interactions. In this perspective, we propose a new ties-attitudes co-evolution model where the diffusion of attitudes depends on the weights and the evolution of weights is formulated as a “learning mechanism” (weight updates depend on the previous values of both weights and attitudes). As a result, the co-evolution is intrinsic/endogenous. We simulate representative scenarios of conflict in 4 real organizational networks. In order to formulate structural balance in directed networks, we extended Heider’s definition of balance considering directed triangles. The evolution of balance involves two stages: first, negative links pop up disorderly and destroy balance, but after some time, as new negative links are formed, a “new” balance is re-established. This “new” balance is emerging concurrently with the polarization of attitudes or domination of one attitude. Moreover, same-minded agents are positively linked and different-minded agents are negatively-linked. This macroscopic self-organization of the system is due only to agent-to-agent interactions, involving feedbacks on weight updates at the local microscopic level.

The Strength of Fan Ties: Emotional Support in Sport Fan Egocentric Networks

Sport management researchers have increasingly noted a relationship between sport spectatorship and well-being, with the line of inquiry predicated on transformative sport service research. In this study, the authors contribute to transformative sport service research by utilizing multilevel egocentric network analysis to examine the consumption networks of National Football League fans over the course of one season. The authors utilized a network theory approach to explore how emotional support is created and embedded within sport fans’ networks of interpersonal ties and social relationships. Through multilevel modeling, the authors highlighted how attributes of both the ego (i.e., focal actor) and alter (i.e., individual with whom ego shares a tie) affect emotional support. Previous studies of transformative sport service research and the link between well-being outcomes and sport spectatorship have implicitly examined only ego-level attributes (i.e., team identification), yet the present work suggests that emotional support depends on the interpersonal ties and network structures within which sport fans are embedded.

Resisting Displacement: Leveraging Interpersonal Ties to Remain despite Criminal Violence in Medellín, Colombia

Although civilians across the globe are fleeing conflict in record numbers, the reality is that far more remain behind. In addition to traditional wars, people stay in territories governed by criminal organizations. How might individuals threatened with displacement by a criminal gang manage to resist? Drawing on intensive participant observation and interviews in marginal neighborhoods of Medellín, Colombia, I argue that the urban residents most likely to remain despite being at risk of displacement are the “well connected.” Despite threats, they leverage ties to a community figure or member of the armed group to stay. I test a number of related hypotheses using an original survey and survey experiment. Unlike other work stressing that residents are trapped by scant resources or remain only by joining local associations or belligerents, my theory reveals residents’ agency and neutrality as they seek safety and security in conditions of state absence.