The Angry Echo Chamber: A Study of Extremist and Emotional Language Changes in Incel Communities Over Time.

Involuntary celibates, or incels, are part of a growing online subculture. Incels are men who are unable to engage in a sexual relationship with a woman and who experience significant distress and anger as a result. In recent years, high-profile incidents of violence perpetrated by incels or those who share incel ideology have increased research attention. Incels communicate online and share several characteristics with other online extremist groups. While only a fraction of incels engage in such violence, a broader spectrum of violence should be considered, including online harassment or general violence against women. This study sought to examine how ongoing engagement on an online incel forum affects changes in incel comments in terms of expressed anger and sadness and use of incel violent extremist language. We collected comments made on an incel forum over a 3-month period. We then identified prolific users and included their comments in our analysis. To assess how their language changed, we used a text-processing program (LIWC: Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) to assess the extent to which anger, sadness, and incel violent extremist language were expressed in the comments. Our findings indicated that incels express more anger in their comments than users on other platforms such as Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter. However, they did not express greater sadness. Further, we found that incels are already quite angry and sad when they join the forum, and they already use a fair amount of incel vocabulary. Initially, these aspects of their language increase, but they flatten over time. This pattern suggests that introduction to and embracing of incel ideology occurs elsewhere on the Internet, and prior to people joining an incel forum. Implications in terms of prevention of online radicalization and future directions are discussed.

Job characteristics and personality change in young adulthood: A 12-year longitudinal study and replication.

OBJECTIVE: Personality changes are related to successfully performing adult occupational roles which require teamwork, duty, and managing stress. However, it is unclear how personality development relates to specific job characteristics that vary across occupations. METHOD: We investigated whether 151 objective job characteristics, derived from the Occupational Information Network (O*NET), were associated with personality levels and changes in a 12-year longitudinal sample followed over the school to work transition. Using cross-validated regularized modeling, we combined two Icelandic longitudinal datasets (total N = 1054) and constructed an individual-level, aggregated job characteristics score that maximized prediction of personality levels at baseline and change over time. RESULTS: The strongest association was found for level of openness (0.25), followed by conscientiousness (0.16) and extraversion (0.14). Overall, aggregated job characteristics had a stronger prediction for personality intercepts (0.14) than slopes (0.10). These results were subsequently replicated in a U.S. sample using levels of the Big Five as the dependent variable. This indicates that associations between job characteristics and personality are generalizable across life stages and nations. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings suggest that job titles are a valuable resource that can be linked to personality to better understand factors that influence psychological development. Further work is needed to document the prospective validity of job characteristics across a wider range of occupations and age.

How accurate are interest inventories? A quantitative review of career choice hit rates.

Vocational interests have a rich history throughout the last century of psychological research, playing an influential role in fields such as personality, development, education, counseling, and organizational psychology. Yet interest measures are typically developed with the goal of matching people to careers, and there has never been a quantitative review of interests and career choice. The present meta-analysis examines the validity of interest inventories for predicting educational choices and occupational membership. This analysis of predictive hit rates incorporates almost 100 years of research investigating the accuracy of interest inventories. Using a binomial-normal meta-analytic model, the present analysis found that measured interests attain an estimated overall hit rate of 50.8% for predicting career choice. Because of the vast amount of career choice possibilities, this effect size conveys a significant degree of predictive accuracy. We also tested several potential moderators to address historical debates surrounding interest measurement. In particular, accuracy was moderated by year of publication, interest inventory, type of interest inventory scale, type of career choice outcome, and hit rate calculation method. Finally, the present study reintroduces base rates into the evaluation of predictive accuracy. We demonstrate the importance of taking base rates into account by comparing interest category hit rates and employment rates within those categories. Overall, the results of this study demonstrate that interest inventories possess considerable validity for predicting career choice, supporting their use in research, education, and work contexts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).