Understanding the Association between Online Social Support Obtainment and Coping during a Public Crisis.

This study aims to examine how the process of online support obtainment may affect cognitive and behavioral coping during a public crisis. A cross-sectional online survey (N = 555) was conducted during the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. Our findings revealed that informational support, obtained primarily through passive and private online involvement, led to increased risk perceptions of COVID-19; emotional support, obtained mainly via private online involvement, appeared to elicit higher perceived efficacy to cope with the crisis. People's engagement in preventive behaviors was found to be affected by efficacy perceptions, but not by risk perceptions. The results suggested that online social support functioned as a double-edged sword to affect people's coping with a public crisis.

Lower Baseline Variability Gives Rise to Lower Detection Thresholds in Midbrain than Hindbrain Electrosensory Neurons.

Understanding how the brain decodes sensory information to give rise to behaviour remains an important problem in systems neuroscience. Across various sensory modalities (e.g. auditory, visual), the time-varying contrast of natural stimuli has been shown to carry behaviourally relevant information. However, it is unclear how such information is actually decoded by the brain to evoke perception and behaviour. Here we investigated how midbrain electrosensory neurons respond to weak contrasts in the electrosensory system of the weakly electric fish Apteronotus leptorhynchus. We found that these neurons displayed lower detection thresholds than their afferent hindbrain electrosensory neurons. Further analysis revealed that the lower detection thresholds of midbrain neurons were not due to increased sensitivity to the stimulus. Rather, these were due to the fact that midbrain neurons displayed lower variability in their firing activities in the absence of stimulation, which is due to lower firing rates. Our results suggest that midbrain neurons play an active role towards enabling the detection of weak stimulus contrasts, which in turn leads to perception and behavioral responses.