Opinion expression via user comments on news websites: analysis through the perspective of the spiral of silence

User comments have become an essential part of news websites. In this article, we examine this mode of public expression via the theory of the spiral of silence. This is done while adopting alternative measures, with regard to three major issues on the Israeli agenda, and in comparison to expression in public, as in the traditional theory. Based on an Internet survey (n?=?712), the present study results support the relevancy of the spiral of silence to the online comment sphere. Perceived support for one’s opinion by the majority was found to have a positive and significant effect on the willingness to express opinion in the online sphere. The explanatory role of fear of isolation was more significant in the online sphere than in face-to-face context.     

Internet Use and Subjective Well-Being in China

Using data from the 2010 China Family Panel Studies, we analyze the association between Internet use and various measures of subjective well-being (SWB) in a sample of 16- to 60-year-old Chinese. Our analysis shows that although intensive Internet use is significantly associated with lower levels of SWB, we hardly observe any associations when the focus is on participation in specific online activities. Nevertheless, SWB depends on the reasons for using the Internet and the extent to which individuals feel that their Internet use is displacing other activities. Our results suggest that, contrary to previous findings, differences in beneficial outcomes (the third level digital divide) do not necessarily arise from individuals’ actual Internet use (the second level digital divide) but rather may result from their subjective perceptions of such usage. Our findings also point to a possible cultural factor that puts Chinese Internet users at psychological risk.     

Psychophysiological Reactivity in Child Sexual Abuse

Sexual abuse has physiological and emotional implications. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the neurobiological sequels of childhood sexual trauma by monitoring physiological variables among sexually abused girls and women compared to controls. We assessed posttrauma and traumatic life events of 35 females sexually abused in their childhood (age range 7–51 years) and 25 control females (age range 7–54 years). Electroencephalography, frontalis electromyography, electrodermal activity, and heart rate parameters were recorded while watching sets of pictures representing neutral and trauma-suggestive stimuli. A minority of participants met the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder. Abused females displayed significant elevations in heart rate, electromyography, and electroencephalography while viewing allusive stimuli and elevated heart rate while viewing neutral stimuli. The dysfunctional regulation of the physiological stress system associated with child sexual abuse may endanger the victims with various stress and anxiety disorders.     

On complexity and lotteries' evaluation – three experimental observations

We present experimental evidence suggesting that human subjects penalize lotteries for complexity. Our results contradict the assumption that human agents follow the discounted expected utility model in multi-period choice with uncertainty. In particular, we show that the buying price offered for an inferior, simple multi-period lottery may sometimes significantly exceed the buying price offered for a better, yet more complicated, alternative, when the lotteries are sold to a group of subjects in a first-price auction. We discuss the possibility to modify the existing models of choice to this “complexity effect”.     

The Discursive Management of Financial Risk Scandals: The Case of Wall Street Journal Commentaries on LTCM and Enron

Scholars of financial risk culture have repeatedly identified its reliance upon popular confidence in the possibility and value of ??risk-management.?? The past two decades, however, have seen repeated outbreaks of scandalous financial failures involving some of the most idealized risk-management experts. Examining Wall Street Journal commentaries published in the aftermath of the ??Long-Term Capital Management?? and ??Enron?? debacles, the paper uncovers the discursive strategies involved in making sense of these financial scandals. It calls attention to the considerable retrospective interpretive space that the risk discourse enjoys, illustrating the degree to which it relies upon after-the-fact reconstructions of ??risk?? and ??risk-taking.?? Despite probabilistic rhetoric, commentaries moralize bad outcomes by working backwards in time, retrospectively linking the outcomes to narratives of earlier and irresponsible transgressions of supposedly obvious risk calculi. The paper discusses the implications of its findings for a variety of theoretical accounts of contemporary financial risk culture.     

A useful distribution for fitting discrete data: revival of the Conway–Maxwell–Poisson distribution

Summary.  A useful discrete distribution (the Conway–Maxwell–Poisson distribution) is revived and its statistical and probabilistic properties are introduced and explored. This distribution is a two-parameter extension of the Poisson distribution that generalizes some well-known discrete distributions (Poisson, Bernoulli and geometric). It also leads to the generalization of distributions derived from these discrete distributions (i.e. the binomial and negative binomial distributions). We describe three methods for estimating the parameters of the Conway–Maxwell–Poisson distribution. The first is a fast simple weighted least squares method, which leads to estimates that are sufficiently accurate for practical purposes. The second method, using maximum likelihood, can be used to refine the initial estimates. This method requires iterations and is more computationally intensive. The third estimation method is Bayesian. Using the conjugate prior, the posterior density of the parameters of the Conway–Maxwell–Poisson distribution is easily computed. It is a flexible distribution that can account for overdispersion or underdispersion that is commonly encountered in count data. We also explore two sets of real world data demonstrating the flexibility and elegance of the Conway–Maxwell–Poisson distribution in fitting count data which do not seem to follow the Poisson distribution.     

Modelling price paths in on-line auctions: smoothing sparse and unevenly sampled curves by using semiparametric mixed models

Summary.  On-line auctions pose many challenges for the empirical researcher, one of which is the effective and reliable modelling of price paths. We propose a novel way of modelling price paths in eBay's on-line auctions by using functional data analysis. One of the practical challenges is that the functional objects are sampled only very sparsely and unevenly. Most approaches rely on smoothing to recover the underlying functional object from the data, which can be difficult if the data are irregularly distributed. We present a new approach that can overcome this challenge. The approach is based on the ideas of mixed models. Specifically, we propose a semiparametric mixed model with boosting to recover the functional object. As well as being able to handle sparse and unevenly distributed data, the model also results in conceptually more meaningful functional objects. In particular, we motivate our method within the framework of eBay's on-line auctions. On-line auctions produce monotonic increasing price curves that are often correlated across auctions. The semiparametric mixed model accounts for this correlation in a parsimonious way. It also manages to capture the underlying monotonic trend in the data without imposing model constraints. Our application shows that the resulting functional objects are conceptually more appealing. Moreover, when used to forecast the outcome of an on-line auction, our approach also results in more accurate price predictions compared with standard approaches. We illustrate our model on a set of 183 closed auctions for Palm M515 personal digital assistants.     

The decline of motivation?: From commitment to dropping out of volunteering

This article studies volunteerism through the phenomenon of dropping out. By ascertaining the achievements, difficulties, and dilemmas of volunteers at the Center for Assistance to Victims of Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence, we explored the process of dropping out as an encore to understanding the meaning of volunteerism that ends with abandoning a desired activity. On the basis of a longitudinal study, we argue that dropping out is not always a product of waning motivation—for many volunteers, dropping out was extremely difficult—but rather the outcome of unabridged discrepancies between “ought” and “actual” experiences. Volunteers expect to feel good about themselves. In contrast, the organization expects them to act as free agents who can independently manage feelings of pain and self‐doubt. When such discrepancies between expectations and reality occur, feelings of anger and disappointment set in. As a result, devoted volunteers drop out in order to preserve their positive self‐feeling. It is our contention that in order to understand the nature of volunteers' dropout and perseverance, close attention should be paid to processes of self‐regulation in the context of the specific relations between the volunteers and the organization.