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Music has strong emotional powers. How are we to understand affective responses to music? What does music teach us about emotions? Why are musical emotions important? Despite the rich literature in philosophy and the empirical sciences, particularly psychology and neuroscience, little attention has been paid to integrating these approaches. This extensive review aims to redress this imbalance and establish a mutual dialogue between philosophy and the empirical sciences by presenting the main philosophical puzzles from an affective science perspective. The chief problem is contagion. Sometimes, listeners perceive music as expressing some emotion and this elicits the same emotion in them. Contagion is perplexing because it collides with the leading theory of emotions as experiences of values. This article mostly revolves around the critical presentation of the philosophical solutions to this problem in light of recent developments in emotion theory and affective science. It also highlights practical issues, particularly the role of musical emotions in well-being and health, by tackling the paradox of sad music, i.e., the question of why people enjoy sad music. It thus bridges an important gap between theoretical and real-life issues as well as between philosophical and empirical investigations on affective responses to music.

In May of 1939, DC Comics introduced their popular Batman series, but it was a year later when the iconic villain, the Joker, entered the story. What began as a lighthearted pulp comic has since evolved, with Batman’s enemies growing darker and more sinister. In the film, the Joker is now less “clown prince” than violent madman, determined to wreak havoc and spread his warped view of society. Through a thematic discourse analysis, this article explores how Batman films featuring the Joker routinely naturalize and reinforce sanist beliefs about mental illness and are deployed as narrative prostheses to rationalize his heinous crimes. Blending work from both disability studies and mad studies, we explore the cultural construction of madness as animated by filmic representations of the Joker and consider how these narratives inform perceptions of mental illness and subsequently rationalize the disciplining of mad people.

Cryptocurrencies are relatively new and innovative financial assets. They are a topic of interest to investors and academics due to their distinctive features. Whether financial or not, extraordinary events are one of the biggest challenges facing financial markets. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, considered by some authors a “black swan”, is one of these events. In this study, we assess integration and contagion in the cryptocurrency market in the COVID-19 pandemic context, using two entropy-based measures: mutual information and transfer entropy. Both methodologies reveal that cryptocurrencies exhibit mixed levels of integration before and after the onset of the pandemic. Cryptocurrencies displaying higher integration before the event experienced a decline in such link after the world became aware of the first cases of pneumonia in Wuhan city. In what concerns contagion, mutual information provided evidence of its presence solely for the Huobi Token, and the transfer entropy analysis pointed out Tether and Huobi Token as its main source. As both analyses indicate no contagion from the pandemic turmoil to these financial assets, cryptocurrencies may be good investment options in case of real global shocks, such as the one provoked by the COVID-19 outbreak.

Contagious diseases were among the most vexing problems in ancient theories of health, which could not easily account for how a corruption of one person's humors could cause a similar corruption in another's. One useful explanatory concept for Renaissance doctors tackling this theoretical gap was the phenomenon of resonance or "sympathetic vibration" - where one stationary string begins to vibrate spontaneously when a similarly tuned string is plucked nearby - as both resonance and contagion involved some mysterious, insensible action at a distance between an agent and a patient. Tracing the writings of Marsilio Ficino, Girolamo Fracastoro, and Girolamo Cardano, this essay explores the relationships between the writers' accounts of sympathetic vibrations and their contagion theories. It argues that different conceptions of the acoustic phenomenon - either as a manifestation of a Neo-Platonic World-Soul that underpinned the universe or else as a physical effect - revealed the writers' cosmological views that, in turn, informed their accounts of the human body and disease., (© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For commercial re-use, please contact reprints@oup.com for reprints and translation rights for reprints. All other permissions can be obtained through our RightsLink service via the Permissions link on the article page on our site—for further information please contact journals.permissions@oup.com.)

Tolin et al. (2004) developed the Chain of Contagion Task (CCT) to experimentally test the law of contagion and looming vulnerability (LV). In the CCT, contaminated pencils are brought into contact with clean pencils. The degree of contamination transferred to further new pencils refers to the level of biased contagious beliefs. Although this could be an important transdiagnostic tool, the usability of the original paradigm has been very laborious. Therefore, an imagery- and video-based CCT is introduced and validated in Study 1 in a nonclinical sample with 85 participants. In Study 2, the imagery-based CCT was validated in a clinical study with 15 participants diagnosed with contamination-related obsessive-compulsive disorder (C-OCD), 15 participants suffering from an anxiety disorder, and 15 nonclinical controls. The number of participants is consistent with those in Tolin's original sample and the statistical evaluation of Study 2 was preregistered. Both CCT could be validated and the results could be replicated. In the imagery-based CCT, the C-OCD group displayed significantly higher contamination ratings, avoidance tendencies and LV than the two control groups. We argue that this open access diagnostic instrument can be applied in research as well as in therapeutic practice (Download CCT videos and imagery: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7730459)., (Copyright © 2024 Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Empathy is a complex, multi-dimensional capacity that facilitates the sharing and understanding of others' emotions. As our closest living relatives, bonobos (Pan paniscus) and chimpanzees (P. troglodytes) provide an opportunity to explore the origins of hominin social cognition, including empathy. Despite certain assumptions that bonobos and chimpanzees may differ empathically, these species appear to overlap considerably in certain socio-emotional responses related to empathy. However, few studies have systematically tested for species variation in Pan empathic or socio-emotional tendencies. To address this, we synthesise the growing literature on Pan empathy to inform our understanding of the selection pressures that may underlie the evolution of hominin empathy, and its expression in our last common ancestor. As bonobos and chimpanzees show overlaps in their expression of complex socio-emotional phenomena such as empathy, we propose that group comparisons may be as or more meaningful than species comparisons when it comes to understanding the evolutionary pressures for such behaviour. Furthermore, key differences, such as how humans and Pan communicate, appear to distinguish how we experience empathy compared to our closest living relatives., (© 2024 The Authors. Biological Reviews published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Cambridge Philosophical Society.)

We provide the mathematical and empirical foundations of the friendship paradox in networks, often stated as "Your friends have more friends than you." We prove a set of network properties on friends of friends and characterize the concepts of ego-based and alter-based means. We propose a network property called inversity that quantifies the imbalance in degrees across edges and prove that the sign of inversity determines the ordering between ego-based or alter-based means for any network, with implications for interventions. Network intervention problems like immunization benefit from using highly connected nodes. We characterize two intervention strategies based on the friendship paradox to obtain such nodes, with the alter-based and ego-based strategy. Both strategies provide provably guaranteed improvements for any network structure with variation in node degrees. We demonstrate that the proposed strategies obtain several-fold improvement (100-fold in some networks) in node degree relative to a random benchmark, for both generated and real networks. We evaluate how inversity informs which strategy works better based on network topology and show how network aggregation can alter inversity. We illustrate how the strategies can be used to control contagion of an epidemic spreading across a set of village networks, finding that these strategies require far fewer nodes to be immunized (less than 50%, relative to random). The interventions do not require knowledge of network structure, are privacy-sensitive, are flexible for time-sensitive action, and only require selected nodes to nominate network neighbors., Competing Interests: Competing interests statement:The authors declare no competing interest.

Across six experiments, the authors demonstrate that superficial imperfections in the form of packaging damage can engender negative consumer reactions that shape subsequent attitudes and behaviors in ways that are not always objectively justified. Their findings show that these reactions function in a relatively automatic fashion, even emerging under conditions in which the packaging damage does not convey information about a health and safety threat from the product. The authors extend work on contagion to show that superficial packaging damage can act as a contamination cue, automatically activating thoughts of contamination and health and safety concerns. This tendency to avoid superficial packaging damage can be eliminated by counteracting these thoughts of contamination. This can be donewith positive brand associations (i.e., by branding the product as organic) or by creating a physical buffer between the packaging damage and the product itself. The authors close with a discussion of implications for marketers, consumers, and public policy makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rules form an important part of our everyday lives. Here we explore the role of social influence in rule-breaking. In particular, we identify some of the cognitive mechanisms underlying rule-breaking and propose approaches for how they can be scaled up to the level of groups or crowds to better understand the emergence of collective rule-breaking. Social contagion plays an important role in such processes and different dynamics such as linear or rapid nonlinear spreading can have important consequences for interventions in rule-breaking. A closer integration of cognitive psychology, microsociology and mathematical modelling will be key to a deeper understanding of collective rule-breaking to turn this field of research into a predictive science. Social influence can play an important role in collective rule-breaking. Using a collective behaviour approach, rule-breaking dynamics have been modelled, allowing for quantitative predictions of the behaviour of groups. Cognitive psychology provides important insights into the underlying mechanisms of collective rule-breaking such as motor contagion and perceptual and attentional processes. These cognitive processes can inform models which scale up rule-breaking from individuals to collectives, taking into account that group decisions develop dynamically through interactions over time and space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prosper Lucas (1808–1885) est un aliéniste qui propose en 1847 une théorie élaborée de l'hérédité. Celle-ci devient, pour plus d'un demi-siècle, la référence utilisée par les médecins et les biologistes dans leurs travaux mais aussi par les écrivains dans leurs romans. Après une brève biographie de Lucas, nous proposons non seulement une étude de ses idées développées sur l'hérédité mais aussi celle contenue dans son intéressante thèse consacrée à l'imitation des comportements et le rôle de celle-ci dans l'origine des pathologies mentales. Prosper Lucas (1808–1885) was an alienist who in 1847 proposed an in-depth theory of heredity. This theory became, for more than half a century, the reference used by physicians and biologists in their work and research, but also by writers in their novels. Following a brief account of Lucas's life, this article will not only explore the ideas he developed on heredity but also the content of his interesting thesis on the imitation of behavior and the role of imitation in the origin of mental pathologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the intersection between posthumanism and ecological thought in Beckett's Endgame. Based on a reception-informed approach, this article revisits Beckett's Endgame with a special focus on how the recent context of pandemic affects our reading of the human in his work. Building on the existing body of critical response to Beckett's re-evaluation of the human, we particularly contend that Beckett's conception of the (post)human as a molecular being overcomes the humanist notion of human sovereignty and affirms, instead, continuity and relatedness of all lifeforms. We further want to argue that the metaphor of molecular (d)evolution evoked in Endgame undermines the unity of the self-contained subject and serves as a basis for an ethical response to the human and nonhuman other. To explicate this molecular vision, we examine how the play's metaphorical engagement with cross-species contagion undermines humans' claims to species exceptionalism and allows for inter-species connections. In this connection, we seek to align Beckett's apocalypse in Endgame with Colebrook's conception of the apocalypse as an 'inhuman event,' with 'a sense of a certain mode of humanity reaching its end and giving way to other forms.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Contaduría y Administración is the property of Facultad de Contaduria y Administracion-Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article draws on the concept of the chronotope – spatiotemporal entanglements theorized in literary and anthropological studies – and extends the same to an engagement with and an understanding of the experiential and ontological defamiliarization, deceleration and suspension of space, time and security generated by the COVID-19 pandemic. This article, thus, offers a study of COVID-19 as a connective metaphor and a crisis chronotope – denoting the un-certain space–time marked and defamiliarized by changed orders and vocabularies of presence, distance, trust, tactility and memory – characterizing a world of alienation, insecurity and fear of infection. In arguing how the globality of COVID-19 has ironically informed isolation, incomplete identification and new fiction-formations, while also foregrounding the difference between human time and planetary time, the article will re-examine the crisis chronotope through a study of sudden death and the defamiliarized public space, exemplified in the city of New Delhi during the second wave of the pandemic in April–May 2021. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Financial, Accounting & Managerial Studies is the property of Journal of Financial, Accounting & Managerial Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Building on Deleuze's materialist philosophical lineage, the article will seek to excavate different accounts of virality of affect. By focusing on the affective flows that are involuntarily transmitted between encountering bodies, thus breaking down their boundaries and compromising their supposed unity, our analysis will examine a variety of contagious affects ranging from compassion to paranoia. In addition to theorizing their contagious nature, these affective states will be considered from the perspective of Deleuzian ethics and politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this contribution, I will draw parallels between the notion of contagion of diseases and the potential effect of movement as contagion, while juxtaposing some of the selected theoretical approaches that analyse the term contagion as a threat on the one hand and as a potential weapon in the processes of sensibilization of humanity, emphasizing empathy as a tool and medium for social politicization on the other. I will try to answer to the following questions: what does it mean to see the contagioned body as infectious toward other bodies? What is the impact of the medical-epidemiological concept of infection on the wider political discourse? How have the metaphoric notions of contagion been used as its counter-side? How contagious are social and artistic practices and what are the reasons for their success or/and their downfall? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using crip theory, specifically Barounis' formulation of antiprophylactic citizenship, Piepzna-Samarasinha's conceptualisation of care work, and Shotwell's calls against purity, this paper analyses the making of the film HIV in the Rust Belt during the COVID-19 crisis. HIV in the Rust Belt (directed by Holly Hey) documents some of the experiences of local HIV survivors. During the course of filming, however, a story emerged about the importance of an AIDS facility, David's House Compassion, which had served as a hospice and a resource centre between 1988 to 2003. When COVID-19 arrived in the USA, we were mid-way through filming. Doing this work during the COVID-19 pandemic opened up a host of questions about the porousness of bodies as well as the slippage of time and stigma between the two pandemics. As we continued filming, we were made more aware that the story of David's House Compassion could be just as much as story of COVID-19, representative of antiprophylactic citizenship, an idea of belonging that comes from an openness and vulnerability that only sickness can offer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although social media plays an increasingly important role in communication around the world, social media research has primarily focused on Western users. Thus, little is known about how cultural values shape social media behavior. To examine how cultural affective values might influence social media use, we developed a new sentiment analysis tool that allowed us to compare the affective content of Twitter posts in the United States (55,867 tweets, 1,888 users) and Japan (63,863 tweets, 1,825 users). Consistent with their respective cultural affective values, U.S. users primarily produced positive (vs. negative) posts, whereas Japanese users primarily produced low (vs. high) arousal posts. Contrary to cultural affective values, however, U.S. users were more influenced by changes in others' high arousal negative (e.g., angry) posts, whereas Japanese were more influenced by changes in others' high arousal positive (e.g., excited) posts. These patterns held after controlling for differences in baseline exposure to affective content, and across different topics. Together, these results suggest that across cultures, while social media users primarily produce content that supports their affective values, they are more influenced by content that violates those values. These findings have implications for theories about which affective content spreads on social media, and for applications related to the optimal design and use of social media platforms around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Le bâillement est une stéréotypie comportementale observée chez tous les vertébrés, qu'ils soient homéothermes ou poïkilothermes, vivant sur terre, dans l'eau ou dans les airs. Le bâillement apparaît donc comme un vestige ancestral commun maintenu sans variation morphologique notable, tout au long de l'évolution. On distingue trois types différents de bâillements. Le bâillement « universel » est associé aux rythmes circadiens, c'est-à-dire aux alternances sommeil/éveil et aux sensations de faim/satiété. Présent seulement chez les mammifères (et peut-être les oiseaux), un autre type de bâillements est associé aux émotions et à la sexualité dans quelques espèces. Il exerce une fonction d'homéostasie apportant le calme après le stress. Les éthologues appellent ce type de comportement une activité dérivative. Enfin, le bâillement dit contagieux n'est observé que chez les grands singes et l'Homme, les éléphants, le chien sous certaines conditions et peut-être quelques perroquets, les rats et les porcs. Cette capacité à répondre involontairement aux bâillements des autres nécessite d'être capable d'attribuer un état mental à l'autre (théorie de l'esprit) et de décoder les émotions d'autrui afin d'en partager le ressenti (empathie). La contagion du bâillement n'apparaît chez l'enfant que vers quatre ans, ce qui indique la nécessité d'une maturité fonctionnelle des régions corticales qui la sous-tend. L'étude de cette réplication comportementale involontaire est une voie de recherches, méconnue, des processus sociaux mimétiques. Yawning is a stereotyped behavior, observed in cold-blooded and warm-blooded vertebrates, from reptiles with rudimentary "archaic" brains to human primates, in water, air, and land environments. Yawning appears to be an ancestral vestige maintained throughout evolution with little variation, bearing witness to its early phylogenetic origins. Three different types of yawning can be distinguished. "Universal yawning", which is seen in all vertebrates, is associated with daytime circadian rhythms, i.e. sleep/arousal and hunger/satiety. "Emotional yawning", which is only seen in mammals (and perhaps birds), has a calming effect after stress. Ethologists call this type of behavior a displacement activity. Finally, "contagious yawning", which is observed only in great apes, in humans, in elephants, in dogs under certain conditions and perhaps in social parrots (budgerigar), rats and pigs, is the ability to respond to yawning in others. Experimental research indicates that contagious yawning relies on the capacity known as mental state attribution on one hand, and the capacity to build knowledge of mental states in oneself, on the other. These two conditions involve a "theory of mind" (TOM). This ability to infer mental states and emotions in others represents an evolved psychological capacity most highly developed in humans and, up to a point, in non-human primates and elephants. In addition, humans can also empathize with others, that is, share their feelings and emotions in the absence of any direct emotional stimulation to themselves. Innate emotional and motivational processes are found to exert unconscious and automatic influences on social judgments and behavior. Contagious yawning, the onset of a yawn triggered by seeing, hearing, reading, or thinking about another person yawning, occurs as a consequence of the ability to infer or empathize with what others want, know, or intend to do, requiring the neurological substrate responsible for self-awareness and empathic modeling, by which a corresponding response is produced in oneself. Functional imaging suggests that activation of the underlying network integrating these processes is also responsible for decoding cognitive empathy. As a neocortical activity (inferior-frontal cortex, superior temporal sulcus, ventral premotor cortex, right parietal cortex, posterior cingulate, anterior insula, and amygdala), contagious yawning is a sign of involuntary empathy. Thus, we see that, through evolution, a behavior can be recycled for different purposes according to the increasing complexity of the central nervous system, correlated with the richness of social interactions. Researches on this involuntary behavioral replication are an unrecognized avenue to study mimetic social processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Si la réalité de la contagion suicidaire est un fait maintenant bien établi, il n'en a pas toujours été de même les siècles passés. L'important volume de littérature consacré au sujet a permis de mieux le comprendre et de tenter d'en expliquer les mécanismes. Ainsi, le phénomène des suicides de masse (Mass Cluster) s'oppose à des phénomènes de contagion suicidaire plus localisés appelés Point Cluster : dans le premier cas, le rôle délétère des médias dans la diffusion du phénomène a pu être établi, il est connu sous le nom d'effet « Werther ». L'importance de ce dernier est telle que les plus grandes autorités de santé font maintenant des recommandations à destination de la presse quant à la diffusion de ces informations. La contagion suicidaire remplit tous les critères de ce que nous avons nommé sous le terme de Phénomènes Psychogéniques Collectifs dont le caractère syndromique s'applique à de nombreux faits et permet de les modéliser. If suicidal contagion is now a well-established fact, the past centuries have demonstrated that it wasn't previously accepted as it is now. But, thanks to the voluminous literature then published, we can better comprehend and try to explain the mechanisms entailed in this process. Thus, the phenomenon of mass suicide (mass cluster) is opposed to more localized phenomenon of contagion (point cluster). In the first case, the deleterious role of media could be established in the broadcast of the phenomenon; it is known under the term "Werther effect". Its importance is such that the highest Health's Authorities recommend prudence to the press when it comes to broadcasting these informations. Suicidal contagion satisfies all the criterions of what we have called Collective Psychogenic Phenomenons and this syndrome, applied to many facts, allows to modelized them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

L'électrohypersensibilité (EHS) est un phénomène, apparu dans les années 1980, qui semble attribuer la survenue de certains symptômes à une exposition aux champs électromagnétiques (CEM). Depuis cette apparition, le nombre de cas n'a cessé d'augmenter, laissant imaginer une sorte de contagion. Cependant, le lien de corrélation entre exposition et apparition des symptômes a été testé à de nombreuses reprises et n'a jamais été confirmé. L'hypothèse qu'un effet psychogénique, l'effet nocebo, pouvait être à l'œuvre a alors pris corps, amenant avec elle une prise de conscience quant à notre exposition sans cesse croissante à des informations anxiogènes sur la présence des CEM. Ce contexte d'attentes négatives démultiplie l'action de l'effet nocebo, déjà contagieux en lui-même, mais n'explique pas, à lui seul, le cheminement d'une majorité des victimes chez qui la survenue des symptômes a précédé la connaissance d'un possible effet nocif des CEM. Différents travaux ont montré que dans ce dernier cas, il pourrait s'agir d'un phénomène de mauvaise attribution des symptômes. Les victimes, laissées sans réponse par la communauté médicale, vont se mettre en recherche d'une cause et seront confrontées à l'orientation du marché cognitif vers les CEM. Cette confrontation sera d'autant plus déséquilibrée que la victime ignore qu'elle est soumise à de nombreux biais cognitifs dans sa manière d'appréhender les informations qui lui sont proposées. Dès lors que l'attribution est constituée, l'effet nocebo pourra à nouveau entrer en jeu et venir consolider la sensation, pour la personne, d'être atteinte d'EHS. Quel que soit le cheminement, la victime entre dans un cercle vicieux duquel il apparaît très compliqué de s'extraire. Electro-hypersensitivity (EHS) is a phenomenon that emerged in the 1980s and which seems to attribute the occurrence of some symptoms to an exposure to electromagnetic fields (EMF). Since it has appeared, the number of cases has not stopped increasing, suggesting some kind of contagion. However, the correlation between exposure and the onset of symptoms has been tested repeatedly and has never been confirmed. The hypothesis that a psychogenic effect named the "nocebo effect" could be at work then took shape, bringing us to an awareness of our ever-increasing exposure to anxiety-inducing news about the presence of EMFs. This context of negative expectations reinforces the action of the nocebo effect (an effect which is inherently contagious) but does not, in itself, explain the path of a majority of victims in whom the onset of symptoms preceded knowledge of a possible harmful effect of EMFs. Different studies have shown that in the latter case, it could be a phenomenon of wrong attribution of symptoms. The victims, left unanswered by the medical community, will seek a cause and will be confronted with the orientation of the cognitive market towards EMF. This confrontation will be all the more unbalanced as the victim is unaware that it is subject to many cognitive biases in its way of understanding the information offered to it. Once the attribution is established, the nocebo effect can again come into play and strengthen the feeling of being a victim of EHS. Whatever the path, the victim enters a vicious circle from which it appears very complicated to escape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To fight the spread of the plague, early modern Mediterranean states commonly quarantined goods and people on the move inside complexes called lazzaretti. These institutions, managed by the health magistracies of different Mediterranean cities, formed a transnational plague-preventative system. Based on an exploration of both the early modern theory of contagion and the eighteenth-century quarantine procedures shared between Health Offices across the Mediterranean, this article demonstrates that goods were categorised into different levels of contagion depending on their materials. Different disinfection practices were followed according to the level of danger posed by different types of goods. Anxieties caused by the interaction between surfaces and the human body shaped the procedures, the architecture and the everyday routine inside lazzaretti. While analysing the materiality of quarantined goods, the regulations and the architecture of the lazzaretti, this article highlights the relevance of material culture to early modern medical preventative practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the effects of an intervention aimed at identifying and containing outbreaks in a network model of contagion where social distance is endogenous. The intervention induces a fall in the risk of contagion, to which agents respond by reducing social distance. If the intervention relies on infrequent or inaccurate testing, this crowding out effect may fully offset the intervention's direct effect, so that the risk of contagion increases. In these circumstances, we show that "slow" interventions – which allow the outbreak to spread to immediate neighbors before being contained – may generate higher ex-ante welfare than "fast" ones and may even "crowd in" social distance. The theory thus identifies a trade off between (i) the swiftness of the intervention and (ii) the scope for crowding out. Simulations on a real world network confirm that the infection rate is not necessarily monotonically decreasing in the accuracy of the intervention and that slow interventions may outperform fast ones for intermediate levels of accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We conducted a longitudinal (3‐month) qualitative study to examine elite military personnel's (N = 32) experiences and perspectives of team resilience emergence following two team‐oriented training courses within an 18‐month high‐stakes training programme where personnel are required to operate in newly formed tactical teams for extended periods. Our thematically informed interpretations of the participants' subjective experiences of reality were constructed according to five key themes: (i) adversity is an enduring, shared experience of an event; (ii) individuals recognise adversity through physiological and/or behavioural states; (iii) social resources bind together individual self‐regulatory capacities when confronted with adversity to support team functioning; (iv) shared experiences of adversity and collective structures strengthen social bonds and mental models needed for resilience emergence; and (v) behavioural processes and shared states are how collectives turn individual and team capacities into performance under adversity. These findings provide novel insights that supplement our current understanding of team resilience emergence, including the varying means by which adversity may be collectively experienced, synergies between specific forms of adversity and resilience processes or protective factors, and the unique influence of performance context (e.g., task type). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the relationship between the BRICs' and the advanced economies' stock markets from 2000 to 2016 utilizing continuous wavelet transform. The continuous wavelet transform allows us to explore these relationships in the time-frequency domain to capture shortand long-term investors' perspectives. Bi-directional spillovers are captured in terms of returns and volatility. In addition to covering the periods of the dot.com crash, the 11 September 2001 events, the pre-2007 financialization bubble period and the resulting Global Financial Crisis, we study volatility spillovers arising from the BRIC, U.S. and European market shocks post the Global Financial Crisis. Based on our results, we confirm findings in relatively fragmented literature that document time-varying and imperfect BRIC markets' integration with mature economies. Overall, we show that arbitrage opportunities continue to exist in international stock market portfolios with respect to BRIC assets. In a major addition to the literature, our study captures spillovers from the advanced economies' shocks to BRIC markets, as well as contagion from BRIC markets' shocks to advanced economies' markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concerns about climate change have seen increased attention across virtually all media after 2000. In addition to raising ecological awareness, these concerns have inspired numerous gothic fictions, in which the polar thaw consequent on global warming becomes a source of paranoia, fear and horror. This article explores a specific group of twenty-first-century cultural products that associate polar melting with epidemics triggered by pathogens or infectious insects released after lying dormant in the ice. Often called "zombie" viruses or bacteria, these pathogens appear in a wide range of fictions as well as in sensational articles that use gothic paraphernalia to describe the spread of terrible diseases. Like spectres, these agents of contagion return from the past to haunt the present; they also cast a dark shadow upon the future, as they become the invisible protagonists of "dystopian ecological visions" in which humankind and other species are at risk of annihilation. Four types of products are analysed to demonstrate that they convey similar anxieties by combining images of environmental disaster with pandemics. Different though they are in genre and medium, novels like Thaw's Hammer (2010), films like The Thaw (2009) and TV series like Fortitude (2015-18) not only interrogate the epistemological limits of science; they also shed light onto dangerous socioeconomic dynamics while posing ethical dilemmas about the human meddling with nature. Mostly produced before the spread of coronavirus, these fictions are made more appealing by the current pandemic, which has encouraged speculation over new potential sources of contagion. Their appeal is confirmed by the 2020 proliferation of newspaper/magazine articles focusing on "zombie" pathogens. By merging objectivity with sensationalism, these articles turn pathogens into spectral agents that seek revenge for human crimes against nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the high incidence of COVID-19 case numbers internationally, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a Public Health Emergency of global relevance, advising countries to follow protocols to combat pandemic advance through actions that can reduce spread and consequently avoid a collapse in the local health system. This study aimed to evaluate the dynamics of the evolution of new community cases, and mortality records of COVID-19 in the State of Pará, which has a subtropical climate with temperatures between 20 and 35 °C, after the implementation of social distancing by quarantine and adoption of lockdown. The follow-up was carried out by the daily data from the technical bulletins provided by the State of Pará Public Health Secretary (SESPA). On 18 March 2020, Pará notified the first case of COVID-19. After 7 weeks, the number of confirmed cases reached 4756 with 375 deaths. The results show it took 49 days for 81% of the 144 states municipalities, distributed over an area of approximately 1 248 000 km2 to register COVID-19 cases. Temperature variations between 24.5 and 33.1 °C did not promote the decline in the new infections curve. The association between social isolation, quarantine and lockdown as an action to contain the infection was effective in reducing the region's new cases registration of COVID-19 in the short-term. However, short periods of lockdown may have promoted the virus spread among peripheral municipalities of the capital, as well as to inland regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BackgroundDepression is a common and important cause of morbidity, and results in a significant economic burden. Recent human studies have demonstrated that that depression is contagious, and depression in family and friends might cumulatively increase the likelihood that a person will exhibit depressive behaviors. The mechanisms underlying contagion depression are poorly understood, and there are currently no animal models for this condition.MethodsRats were divided into 3 groups: depression group, contagion group, and control group. After induction of depression by 5 weeks of chronic unpredictable stress, rats from the contagion group were housed with the depressed rats (1 naïve rat with 2 depressed rats) for 5 weeks. Rats were then subjected to sucrose preference, open field, and forced swim tests.ResultsThe sucrose preference was significantly reduced in the depressed rats (p

In Love’s Labour’s Lost, the creation of an academe where study is posited as the antidote to the diseases of the mind caused by worldly desire results in an epidemic of lovesickness. Lovesickness, otherwise known as ‘erotic melancholy’ or ‘erotomania’, was treated in contemporary medical documents as a real, diagnosable illness, a contagious disease thought to infect the imagination through the eyes, which could be fatal if left untreated. Such representation of love as a communicable disease is drawn, I suggest, from a neoplatonic tradition led by the work of Marsilio Ficino, particularly his fifteenth-century treatise Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love. Ficino’s construction of eros as a kind of ‘vulgar love’, distinctive from ‘heroic love’, emphatically denotes lovesickness as a kind of material contagion with the eye as its primary means of transmission, an idea that had a more significant influence in England and on the work of playwrights like William Shakespeare than has previously been acknowledged. For all its lighthearted conceits, Love’s Labour’s Lost takes lovesickness and its etiology very seriously, in ways that have been almost entirely ignored by scholarship on this play.

The performance of the Ghana Stock Exchange (GSE) over the years has been susceptible to both crises and country-specific factors reflected in its macroeconomic fundamentals. Accordingly, the GSE composite index (GSECI) has experienced rapid fluctuations across time, coupled with a declining market capitalisation from a reduction in the number of existing firms. The plunge in the number of firms is partly linked to the banking sector clean-up in 2017, which induced the collapse and consolidation of some financial institutions as well as weaknesses in other macroeconomic variables. This ignites an investigation into whether the synergistic impact of listed firms that represent the financial sector and the soundness of the banking sector measures are dominant factors that could drive or respond to shocks. Hence, the study investigates the lead-lag relationships and degree of integration among two indicators of the GSE—GSECI and GSE financial index (GSEFI), seven banking financial soundness indicators and eight interest rate measures. The wavelet approaches (biwavelet and wavelet multiple) are utilised to address the research problem. The DCC-GARCH connectedness approach is then employed as a robustness check. We found high interconnectedness between the indicators of the GSE and banking sector financial soundness, relative to the interest rates. Notwithstanding, the Treasury bill measures drive the GSE indicators in the short-, and medium-terms. In comparison with the two indicators of the GSE, significant comovements are dominant between the GSEFI and the two forms of selected macroeconomic variables. We advocate that the comovements among the indicators of the GSE, banking sector financial soundness and interest rate measures are heterogeneous and adaptive, especially during crises, but more significant comovements are germane to the GSEFI. The study provides further implications for policy, practice, and theory.