Race and the beauty premium: Mechanical Turk workers’ evaluations of Twitter accounts

ABSTRACT

Race, gender, and physical attractiveness strongly affect perceptions of trustworthiness and subsequent face-to-face interactions. This study examines how social media users’ perceived gender, race, and physical attractiveness can impact their standing online. We test these broad hypotheses by having Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) workers evaluate a sample of 816 Twitter accounts. Our results show a ‘beauty premium,’ where MTurk workers say they are more likely to follow Twitter accounts with attractive pro?le photos, and attractive photos are positively associated with evaluations of trust. However, very attractive Black male and female Twitter accounts are associated with lower evaluations of trust compared to their White counterparts. These findings suggest that social media users’ social characteristics, perceived from their username or profile image, can replicate offline inequality online.     

The correlated random walk in continuous time with barriers

In this paper correlation has been introduced between two successive transitions in the model investigated by Moyal and Heathcote (1959). The transition rate has been taken to be constant and for simplicity of mathematical expressions the time scale has been so chosen that this rate is unity. For the unrestricted walk we find that the mean position of the particle at time t is that position for which the probability of the particle arriving at some earlier instant from the left is 1/2. With both the barriers either absorbing or reflecting, we have obtained the Laplace Transform of the distributions, but because of the complicated nature of the mathematical expressions involved we are able to find only the asymptotic distributions. For the reflecting barrier case, we find that the process tends to a stationary distribution and that the expected position is eventually the middle point between the barriers.     

Moving Toward a Holistic Conceptual Framework for Understanding Healthy Aging Among Gay Men

In the last four decades, we have witnessed vast and important transitions in the social, economic, political, and health contexts of the lived experiences of gay men in the United States. This dynamic period, as evidenced most prominently by the transition of the gay rights movement to a civil rights movement, has shifted the exploration of gay men’s health from one focusing primarily on HIV/AIDS into a mainstream consideration of the overall health and wellbeing of gay men. Against this backdrop, aging gay men in the United States constitute a growing population, for whom further investigations of health states and health-related disparities are warranted. In order to advance our understanding of the health and wellbeing of aging gay men, we outline here a multilevel, ecosocial conceptual framework that integrates salient environmental, social, psychosocial, and sociodeomgraphic factors into sets of macro-, meso-, and micro-level constructs that can be applied to comprehensively study health states and health care utilization in older gay men.     

Associations of Perceived Parental Psychopathology with Mental Health Burden and Lifetime Drug Use in Gay,Bisexual, and other YMSM: The P18 Cohort Study

Parental mental health may be a critical component in understanding the overlapping health burdens of mental health symptomatology and drug use in young men who have sex with men (YMSM), yet studies of YMSM have not fully examined these associations. To understand these relationships, data drawn from a study of gay, bisexual, and other YMSM were used to examine associations between perceived parental psychopathology and the health of YMSM. Findings suggest that YMSM reporting at least one parent with perceived depression, manic depression, schizophrenia, or antisocial behavior anytime during their childhoods were more likely to report higher levels of both depressive symptomatology and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) than those reporting no perception of any of these psychopathologies in their parents. Number of different drugs used in one’s life were higher among participants who perceived at least one parent as depressed. Mediation analyses indicated that the relationship between perceived parental depression and lifetime drug use of YMSM was mediated both by YMSM depression and YMSM PTSD. These results suggest that parental psychopathology plays an important role in the health of sexual minority men, a population with elevated levels of mental health burden and drug use across the lifespan.     

Statistical Properties of Generalized Gini Coefficient with Application to Health Inequality Measurement

In this article, we report statistical properties of two classes of generalized Gini coefficients (G1 and G2). The theoretical results were assessed via Monte Carlo simulations. Further, we used G1 and G2 on life expectancy to measure health inequalities among the provinces of China and the states of the United States. For China, the results indicated that there was statistically significant health inequality by both G1 and G2. However, for the US, the results showed that there was significant health inequality by G1 but no statistical significance was found in health inequality by G2. Overall, from our study, China has higher health inequality than the United States.     

Associations Between Social Support Network Characteristics and Receipt of Emotional and Material Support Among a Sample of Male Sexual Minority Youths

Few studies have examined how social support network characteristics are related to perceived receipt of social support among male sexual minority youths. Using egocentric network data collected from a study of male sexual minority youths (N = 592), multivariable logistic regression analyses examined distinct associations between individual and social network characteristics with receipt of (1) emotional and (2) material support. In multivariable models, frequent communication and having friends in one's network yielded a twofold increase in the likelihood of receiving emotional support whereas frequent communication was associated with an almost threefold higher likelihood of perceived material support. Finally, greater internalized homophobia and personal experiences of gay-related stigma were inversely associated with perceived receipt of emotional and material support, respectively. Understanding the evolving social context and social interactions of this new generation of male sexual minority youths is warranted in order to understand the broader, contextual factors associated with their overall health and well-being.