Is there a dose-response relationship? Investigating the functional form between COVID-19 incidence rates and life satisfaction in a multilevel framework.

While there is plenty of research linking the effects of the global COVID-19 pandemic to a drastic reduction of life satisfaction in the population, there is little information on the functional form of this relationship. Until now, one could suspect that this association is linear and a higher number of COVID-19 infections in a region leads to a continuous decline of satisfaction. However, there are reasons to assume that this interrelation is indeed more complex and deserves further attention. To resolve this question, high-quality panel data of the first wave of COVID-19 from Germany are analysed in a fixed-effect multilevel framework. With information from more than 6,000 respondents (after imputation) nested in 339 federal districts, we estimate linear models with higher-order terms up to the fifth degree of median COVID-19 incidence rates and random intercepts for districts to describe the functional form. The results indicate that even regions with very low incidences are affected and a linear decline of satisfaction is only apparent for rather low incidence levels, quickly reaching a plateau, which is then quite constant, even for higher incidence levels. These findings indicate that at least in rich and industrialized countries like Germany, assuming a strictly linear relation between incidences and change of satisfaction is not appropriate.

How Trust Makes a Difference: The Impact of the First Wave of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Life Satisfaction in Germany.

The extraordinary COVID-19 pandemic is one of the most severe disruptions of human life since the end of World War II, even in rich and industrialized countries like Germany. The introduction of a rather comprehensive "lockdown" and the restriction of multiple basic civil rights have affected the population in many areas of life, like employment, economic prosperity, health and trust in public institutions. The question arises how life satisfaction is influenced by these measures in detail and whether there are interactions between institutional trust, life satisfaction and time of crisis. Fixed-effect regression analyses using German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) data demonstrate that life satisfaction has fallen sharply after the onset of the crisis and that interaction effects with institutional trust are present. Individuals with low levels of pre-crisis trust in institutions like the government, courts or the media report a stronger decrease of satisfaction than individuals with higher levels of trust. We believe that these results are relevant to explain the role of institutions in times of crisis and might serve as foundations for interventions to strengthen trust and increase overall satisfaction.

When problems just bounce back: about the relation between resilience and academic success in German tertiary education.

While in the past the concept of resilience was used to explain psychological well-being in extreme situations like enduring poverty, abuse, or war, it has now found broad application in numerous fields of research. It can also be applied to examine how everyday challenges and problems are dealt with, for example in the educational and university context. This raises the question of whether resilience and academic success are correlated. Using German longitudinal data including university and university of applied sciences students in their first four years (2010-2015) we investigate how resilience and various measurements of success (satisfaction, intention to drop out, grades) are correlated using multilevel growth-curve models. We demonstrate that resilient individuals have consistently more positive academic trajectories, have lower dropout intentions, report better grades and are more satisfied with their lives. The effects are exceptionally stable over time, statistically highly significant and of considerable magnitude. This demonstrates that resilience is associated with better outcomes in university students under control of a large number of potential confounding factors and influences.

New AMS 14C dates track the arrival and spread of broomcorn millet cultivation and agricultural change in prehistoric Europe.

Broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum L.) is not one of the founder crops domesticated in Southwest Asia in the early Holocene, but was domesticated in northeast China by 6000 BC. In Europe, millet was reported in Early Neolithic contexts formed by 6000 BC, but recent radiocarbon dating of a dozen 'early' grains cast doubt on these claims. Archaeobotanical evidence reveals that millet was common in Europe from the 2nd millennium BC, when major societal and economic transformations took place in the Bronze Age. We conducted an extensive programme of AMS-dating of charred broomcorn millet grains from 75 prehistoric sites in Europe. Our Bayesian model reveals that millet cultivation began in Europe at the earliest during the sixteenth century BC, and spread rapidly during the fifteenth/fourteenth centuries BC. Broomcorn millet succeeds in exceptionally wide range of growing conditions and completes its lifecycle in less than three summer months. Offering an additional harvest and thus surplus food/fodder, it likely was a transformative innovation in European prehistoric agriculture previously based mainly on (winter) cropping of wheat and barley. We provide a new, high-resolution chronological framework for this key agricultural development that likely contributed to far-reaching changes in lifestyle in late 2nd millennium BC Europe.

The relationship between height and leadership: Evidence from across Europe.

To better explicate the well-researched finding that taller individuals have higher wages on average, potential mechanisms should be studied in detail. The present analysis investigates the relationship between height and the probability of being in a leadership position in the workplace using multinational European Social Survey data from 19 countries. Studying full-time, employed individuals between 20 and 55 years of age reveals considerable country differences which is beneficial for the estimated multilevel models as variation is increased. The results indicate a statistically significant effect whereby women are 0.15 percentage points more likely to be in a leadership position for each additional centimetre of absolute height when controlling for education and occupational position whereas there is no effect for men. In order to study the relevance of absolute vs relative height, which is the difference to the local peer-group, regional data is utilized. The main findings are that there is no effect of relative height for men but a statistically significant effect for women. For them, absolute and relative effects are about equally strong.