No relevant spectator impact on home advantage in male and female professional volleyball – A longitudinal multilevel logistic model analysis over 25 years

Home advantage (HA) regularly occurs in volleyball (Pollard et al., 2017: men: 56.62%, women: 55.26%). Research to date has investigated primarily small samples of mostly female matches and not looked into the potential impact of spectators on HA. This archival analysis uses multilevel modelling to examine HA in professional German volleyball (men & women) over 25 seasons in all regular and play-off matches (N = 6,833). We analyze how spectators drive HA and whether this projects to the COVID-19 season 2020/21.When intercepts varied between teams (2-level model, ICC = 27%), the winning probability increased when playing at home (men: 57.01%, OR_men = 2.39, d = 0.48; women: 55.39%, OR_women = 2.19, d = 0.43), while controlling for team strength, interaction with gender, and travelling distance. More spectators had a negligible effect on the men’s and women’s chances (|d| < 0.07). Similar trends were observed for the probability of winning sets. Contrary to other team sports (e.g., soccer), there is no HA-development over the last decades.     

Does partisan media make a pawn of mistrust? Institutional trust and preventive COVID-19 health behaviors in a polarized pandemic

In a rapidly developing crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic, people are often faced with contradictory or changing information and must determine what sources to trust. Across five time points (N = 5902) we examine how trust in various sources predicts COVID-19 health behaviors. Trust in experts and national news predicted more engagement with most health behaviors from April 2020 to March 2022 and trust in Fox news, which often positioned itself as counter to the mainstream on COVID-19, predicted less engagement. However, we also examined a particular public health behavior (masking) before and after the CDC announcement recommending masks on 3 April 2020 (which reversed earlier expert advice discouraging masks for the general public). Prior to the announcement, trust in experts predicted less mask-wearing while trust in Fox News predicted more. These relationships disappeared in the next 4 days following the announcement and reversed in the 2 years that follow, and emerged for vaccination in the later time points. We also examine how the media trusted by Democrats and Republicans predicts trust in experts and in turn health behaviors. Broadly we consider how the increasingly fragmented epistemic environment has implications for polarization on matters of public health.     

Core social motives explain responses to collective action issues

Managing collective action issues such as pandemics and climate change requires major social and behavioral change. Dominant approaches to addressing these issues center around information provision and financial incentives to shift behavior, yet, these approaches are rarely effective without integrating insights from psychological research on motivation. By accurately characterizing human motives, social scientists can identify when and why individuals engage, and facilitate behavior change and public engagement. Here, we use the core social motives model to sort social psychological theories into five fundamental social motives: to Belong, Understand, Control, self-Enhance, and Trust. We explain how each motive can improve or worsen collective action issues, and how this framework can be further developed towards a comprehensive social psychological perspective to collective action issues.     

Openness relates to COVID-19 vaccination rates across 48 United States but politics trump personality

Does geographic variation in personality across the United States relate to COVID-19 vaccination rates? To answer this question, we combined multiple state-level datasets: (a) Big Five personality averages (i.e., extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness; Rentfrow et al., 2008), (b) COVID-19 full-vaccination rates (CDC, 2021a), (c) health-relevant demographic covariates (population density, per capita gross domestic product, and racial/ethnic data; Webster et al., 2021), and (d) political and religiosity data. Analyses showed openness as the strongest correlate of full-vaccination rates (r = 0.51). Controlling for other traits, demographic covariates, and spatial dependence, openness remained significantly related to full-vaccination rates (r_p = 0.55). Adding political and religiosity data to this model diminished openness effects for full-vaccination rates to non-significance (r_p = 0.26); however, extraversion emerged as a significant correlate of full-vaccination rates (r_p = 0.37). Although politics are paramount, we suspect that states with higher average openness scores are more conducive to novel thinking and behavior—dispositions that may be crucial in motivating people to take newly-developed vaccines based on new technologies to confront a novel coronavirus.     

Collective views of vaccination predict vaccine hesitancy and willingness to receive a COVID-19 vaccine

We examined the association between sociodemographic factors, views of vaccines as being an individual choice to protect oneself versus a collective choice to protect others, general vaccine hesitancy, and willingness to receive a COVID-19 vaccine. In a sample of adults (N = 619; 33% non-white), we showed that demographic factors explain significant variance in both vaccine hesitancy and willingness to receive a COVID-19 vaccine. Viewing vaccines as an individual choice to protect oneself explained additional variance in vaccine hesitancy. However, people who viewed vaccines as a collective choice to protect others showed both less vaccine hesitancy and greater willingness to receive a COVID-19 vaccine. These findings suggest that promoting prosocial attitudes about vaccinations may decrease vaccine hesitancy and increase vaccine uptake.     

Fear of missing out and depressive symptoms during the COVID-19 pandemic

During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments issued public health safety measures (e.g., “stay-at-home” ordinances), leaving many people “missing out” on integral social aspects of their own lives. The fear of missing out, popularly shortened as, “FoMO,” is a felt sense of unease one experiences when they perceive they may be missing out on rewarding and/or enjoyable experiences. Among 76 participants (ages M = 69.36, SD = 5.34), who were at risk for hospitalization or death if infected with COVID-19, we found that FoMO was associated with depressive symptoms at Time 1, even when controlling for perceived stress, loneliness, and fear of COVID-19. However, FoMO did not predict future depressive symptoms, about 1 week later, when controlling for Time 1 depressive symptoms. These findings provide further evidence that FoMO is associated with depressive symptoms in a short period of time even when accounting for other powerful social factors such as loneliness. Future research should explore the potential causal relationships between FoMO and depression, especially those that may establish temporal precedence.     

Spirituality and intentions to engage in Covid-19 protective behaviours

Accumulating evidence points to spirituality as a belief system that contributes to low trust in science, with self-identified spiritual individuals reporting high levels of unwarranted scepticism towards science in general and vaccination specifically. We investigated whether self-identified spirituality also predicts intentions to engage with Covid-19 protective measures during the pandemic. In Studies 1–3 (N = 774), we asked participants to report their spirituality and desire to be vaccinated against Covid-19 shortly after the first vaccine rollout. In Studies 2–3, we included measures of scepticism towards and intentions to comply with Covid-19 prevention measures (handwashing, wearing face coverings, distancing). As expected, stronger self-reported spirituality involved lower desire to be vaccinated, controlling for various worldview and demographic variables. Yet, we found no evidence for spirituality to predict scepticism towards other Covid-19 preventative behaviours or intentions to engage with them. Our findings corroborate and extend previous literature on science rejection, demonstrating that spirituality is uniquely involved in vaccine rejection.     

Are moderate levels of stress particularly dangerous for relationship satisfaction? A conceptual replication of Tesser and Beach (1998)

The well-documented negative impact of daily stressors on relational well-being, juxtaposed with emerging evidence indicating that major stressors can have a positive impact on relational well-being, suggests that the association between stress and relational well-being may not be monotonic. Tesser and Beach originally raised this possibility in a 1998 study in which they found that the association between stress and individual well-being was linear, whereas the association with relational well-being was non-linear. The current study sought to conceptually replicate this study within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic by examining associations between stress and individual versus relational well-being, using a sample of 654 individuals who were in a committed relationship in the early weeks of the pandemic. Results were somewhat consistent with those of the original study: the association between stress and depression was linear, but the association between stress and relationship satisfaction was non-linear. However, the form of the association between stress and relationship satisfaction was different than observed in the original study. These results point toward the need to better understand how the severity of a stressor impacts relational outcomes, including the characteristics of stress that lead to stress spillover and the circumstances under which relational outcomes are resilient to high levels of stress.     

Romantic relationship quality during the COVID-19 pandemic: The longitudinal associations with relationship loneliness and depression

The COVID-19 pandemic created significant strain on both mental health and romantic relationships. Therefore, we examined longitudinal associations between romantic relationship quality, relationship loneliness, and depressive symptoms over 6 months of the COVID-19 pandemic. We surveyed 122 couples (n = 244 individuals) in approximately May, September, and November 2020. Using a dyadic mediation model, findings indicated that relationship quality at Time 1 was positively associated with depression at Time 3 for men, but not for women. A significant indirect effect of relationship quality on depression via relationship loneliness at Time 2 was found for both men and women. Self-mastery, or feeling in control of one's life circumstances, was an important covariate of women's depressive symptoms. Overall, these findings highlight relationship loneliness as particularly salient for mental health and demonstrate the importance of high-quality relationships for promoting well-being during stressful events, such as global pandemics.     

Why do U.S. conservatives take fewer COVID-19 precautions? The role of worry,perceived risk,and governmental trust

Research suggests a U.S. political ideology gap for taking COVID-19 precautions, but we do not know the role of cognitive risk (assessed here as perceived risk) and affective risk (assessed here as worry) in explaining why conservative Americans participated in fewer recommended precautions (e.g., mask wearing) and whether governmental trust attenuates the effect. We predicted that conservatives (compared with liberals) would take fewer precautions because they thought they were less at risk and were less worried about COVID-19, but that this would be more pronounced for those with low governmental trust. In this study, U.S. adults (representative sample: N = 738; M_age = 46.8; 52% women; 78% white) who had not had COVID-19 took two online surveys 2 weeks apart during the first wave of the pandemic (April 2020). Participants reported ideology, perceived risk of getting or dying of COVID-19, worry about COVID-19, and trust in the CDC and state officials at baseline. At follow-up, participants reported on COVID-19 precautions: (1) prevention behavior participation (e.g., mask wearing) and (2) behavioral willingness for future behaviors (e.g., vaccination). Results showed that, politically conservative Americans took fewer precautions due to lower worry (but unexpectedly not due to lower perceived risk). As predicted, when trust was high, the ideology gap was muted for predicting precautions as well as for predicting perceived risk and worry. In sum, conservatives worried less about COVID-19 which predicted fewer precautions, but trust in governmental institutions reduced this ideological gap. Improving governmental trust could be one fruitful path to increasing COVID-19 precautions.