Persona-PhysioSync AV: Personalized Interaction through Personality and Physiology Monitoring in Autonomous Vehicles.

The emergence of autonomous vehicles (AVs) marks a transformative leap in transportation technology. Central to the success of AVs is ensuring user safety, but this endeavor is accompanied by the challenge of establishing trust and acceptance of this novel technology. The traditional "one size fits all" approach to AVs may limit their broader societal, economic, and cultural impact. Here, we introduce the Persona-PhysioSync AV (PPS-AV). It adopts a comprehensive approach by combining personality traits with physiological and emotional indicators to personalize the AV experience to enhance trust and comfort. A significant aspect of the PPS-AV framework is its real-time monitoring of passenger engagement and comfort levels within AVs. It considers a passenger's personality traits and their interaction with physiological and emotional responses. The framework can alert passengers when their engagement drops to critical levels or when they exhibit low situational awareness, ensuring they regain attentiveness promptly, especially during Take-Over Request (TOR) events. This approach fosters a heightened sense of Human-Vehicle Interaction (HVI), thereby building trust in AV technology. While the PPS-AV framework currently provides a foundational level of state diagnosis, future developments are expected to include interaction protocols that utilize interfaces like haptic alerts, visual cues, and auditory signals. In summary, the PPS-AV framework is a pivotal tool for the future of autonomous transportation. By prioritizing safety, comfort, and trust, it aims to make AVs not just a mode of transport but a personalized and trusted experience for passengers, accelerating the adoption and societal integration of autonomous vehicles.

Characteristics of online user-generated text predict the emotional intelligence of individuals.

Emotional intelligence is a well-established indicator of performance and the ability to maintain successful social relationships. Moreover, it is potentially an important factor in social dynamics occurring on large digital platforms, e.g., opinion polarization, social conflict, and social influence. Users publicly exchange enormous amounts of text on digital platforms, which can potentially be used to extract real-life insights. Yet, currently, the prevalent approach to measuring emotional intelligence uses mainly self-report surveys and tasks-considerably limiting the feasibility of real-life large-scale studies. We analyze the online public texts of users, who also completed emotional intelligence measures, to find that characteristics of online public texts can be used to predict emotional intelligence at a level like that of commonly used psychometric indicators (e.g., SATs) to predict real-life outcomes. For example, we find that high emotional intelligence individuals consistently use more positive-affect language, less negative-affect language and use more social-oriented language than low emotional intelligence individuals. Our findings provide insight into the role of personality on digital platforms and open the possibility of studying emotional intelligence in large and diverse real-life data. To support the use of online public text as a tool to research emotional intelligence, we provide an anonymized version of the data.

Loneliness and Social Media Use Among Adolescents with Psychiatric Disorders.

Studies have demonstrated that a prolonged feeling of loneliness is a major risk factor for psychopathology among children and adolescents. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the association between patterns of social media use with loneliness and psychopathology among 65 adolescents who were diagnosed with psychiatric disorders and treated at a psychiatric outpatient clinic in Israel. Social capital (online and offline) was negatively associated with loneliness. There was no association between loneliness and patterns of social media use, age, gender, psychiatric diagnosis, or disease severity. Our findings indicate that both online and offline social capital are associated with loneliness, and highlight the importance of studying the effect of peer online social support in alleviating loneliness.

Adolescents who solely engage in online sexual experiences are at higher risk for compulsive sexual behavior.

In addition to its expression offline, sexual behavior is frequently expressed online. Some adolescents solely engage in online sexual activities, whereas others in offline and online activities, or have no sexual experience at all. In the current research, we examined whether those who solely engage in online sexual activities are at greater risk for compulsive sexual behavior. In Study 1 (n = 164), we examined differences in compulsive sexual behavior (CSB) and risky sexual action tendencies between study groups. In Study 2 (n = 713), we statistically replicated the classification into different sexual behaviors and examined differences between the clusters in CSB, social tendencies and socio-demographic measures. Results indicated that adolescents who only engaged in online sexual activities had significantly higher percentage of clinical CSB, were less likely boys and more likely to be religious. There were not more prone to risky sexual behavior, however. The current research expands the knowledge about offline or online sexually related activities among adolescence.

Factors Underlying Engagement in Facebook Support Groups of Female Infertility Patients.

Women dealing with infertility issues may well undergo a long process of treatments and they are also likely to feel empty, defective, inadequate and worthless. Some of these women join online support groups in order to share their experiences, get information and ease their pain. One important positive phenomenon of the Internet is the advent of online support groups. These are designed to foster well-being and increased social interaction, and to offer 24/7 availability with no geographical restrictions. This study, comprising 191 female participants who answered an online survey, focused on closed Facebook support groups, the members of which were women undergoing treatments for infertility. The study examined to what extent the degree of engagement by these women in online support groups could be predicted by external factors (family status, social and family support, the importance of the group and the duration of membership) and internal factors (extroversion, openness to experience, subjective happiness and loneliness). Findings show that higher levels of engagement in such Facebook support groups are predicted by the external factors, including having a child, longer duration of membership in the group, family support and the strongest predictor, perception of the group as important. Findings also show that higher levels of engagement in these groups are predicted by internal factors extroversion and openness to experience, as was found in previous studies of other populations. Results and future research are discussed.

The Personal Autonomous Car: Personality and the Driverless Car.

Road traffic accidents, congestion and their ensuing issues are of international concern. A recent technological development to alleviate this situation is the autonomic car. A driverless vehicle will transport its passengers to their destinations. User experience would be enhanced by adapting the workings of the vehicle in line with the personality of its user. An autonomic car information system preference questionnaire was designed, focusing on different components of a futuristic information system. Participants comprised 155 students. The results demonstrated two factors: willingness to share information and need for control. A regression analysis on the automatic car preferences, personality (the Big 5), gender, and age showed that openness, consciousnesses, and age were related to different preferences. The results are assessed, followed by a discussion on personality in relation to the autonomic car.

How well do older adults recognise mental illness? A literature review.

Older adults tend to underutilise mental health services. Mental health literacy plays a critical role in identifying and overcoming barriers to accessing mental health care. The ability to recognise mental illness is an essential component of mental health literacy, with important implications to whether the person will seek professional help. We conducted a review of the literature on older adults' abilities to recognise mental illness. Of the 421 papers that were retrieved in the comprehensive search in PubMed, 32 studies met inclusion criteria. Studies were heterogeneous in terms of target population and methodology, yet findings show that older adults are less likely to correctly recognise mental disorders. Cueing older participants with mental labels improved their recognition abilities. Recognition was particularly poor among immigrant and ethnic/racial older adults, likely due to linguistic and cultural barriers. Our findings demonstrate that older adults show low levels of mental illness recognition and tend to view some illnesses as normal parts of aging. Findings emphasise the need for developing educational programs tailored by the specific phenomenology, conceptualisations and cultural meanings of mental illness among older adults, with attention to informal sources of information and social networks.

Not All Selfies Took Alike: Distinct Selfie Motivations Are Related to Different Personality Characteristics.

Selfies have become a frequent and commonplace occurrence, though the reasons which lead people to take selfies remain unclear. This research explores what motivates selfie taking, and suggests that this is not a uniform phenomenon and varying motivations may be found among selfie takers. In addition, the connection between these distinct selfie motivations and personality characteristics, including the big five, narcissism, and self-esteem, as well as types of selfie behaviors are examined. At the first stage of the research, 117 participants filled out a questionnaire dealing with their reasons for taking selfies. An explanatory factor analysis revealed three distinct selfie motivations: self-approval, belonging, and documentation. At the second stage, 191 different participants answered both the same questionnaire, and personality traits questionnaires. A confirmatory factor analysis verified that the three selfie motivations model has a good fit. Our results suggested that each selfie motivator is differently related to personality characteristics: self-approval was negatively related to: conscientiousness, emotional stability, openness to experiences, and self-esteem, and positively correlated to frequent checking for "likes." Belonging was related to openness to experiences. Documentation was related to agreeableness and extroversion. Unlike previous studies, none of the selfie motivating factors was found to relate to narcissism. The reasons for these differences, as well as the need to refer to selfie taking as a multidimensional phenomenon, are discussed.

Intimacy and Smartphone Multitasking-A New Oxymoron?

This study investigated the relationship between smartphone multitasking and romantic intimacy. Participants currently in a romantic relationship (N = 128; 98 women; M age = 26.7 years, SD = 4.3) filled out two sets of questionnaires: The Emotional Intimacy Scale, measuring romantic intimacy, and the mobile phone interference in life scale, measuring multitasking on a smartphone. Participants filled out each questionnaire twice, once in relation to themselves and once in relation to their partner (for the partner questionnaire, statements were altered from the first person to the third person singular, he/she instead of I). Results suggested that only the partners' smartphone multitasking scores were negatively related to ratings of romantic intimacy, whereas participants' own smartphone multitasking scores were not related to ratings of romantic intimacy. These results can be explained by the actor-observer asymmetry, suggesting that participants attributed their multitasking behaviors to situations, but attributed their partners multitasking behaviors to behavior patterns or intentionality. This research suggests that smartphone multitasking has a negative association with face-to-face interactions. People should attend to the costs of smartphone use during face-to-face interactions.

Daily patterns of communication and contact between Italian early adolescents and their friends.

The goal of the present study was to explore patterns of communication between adolescents and their friends across both "online" and "in-person" contexts. The participants were adolescents (n = 727) aged 11-16 years attending middle schools in urban and rural areas of Italy. Participants completed daily logs of their in-person and online contacts with friends for 20 consecutive school days. Girls reported more total contacts with their friends than did boys as well as friendships that were closer and more intimate. However, boys indicated more contact than girls via electronic communication and online. Contacts with peers in general were less frequent among the older participants, perhaps because of increasing academic demands. Participants who complemented in-person contact with friends with electronic contact were less lonely than their counterparts who were less versatile in accessing different modalities of making contact with friends.

Personality characteristics of Wikipedia members.

Wikipedia is an online, free access, volunteer-contributed encyclopedia. This article focuses on the Wikipedians' (Wikipedia users) personality characteristics, studying Wikipedians' conceptions of Real-Me and BFI dimensions. To survey these aspects, we posted links to two online web questionnaires; one was targeted at Wikipedians and the second to non-Wikipedia users. One hundred and thirty-nine subjects participated in the study, of which 69 were active Wikipedia members. It was found that Wikipedia members locate their real me on the Internet more frequently as compared to non-Wikipedia members. Variance analysis revealed significant differences between Wikipedia members and non-Wikipedia members in agreeableness, openness, and conscientiousness, which were lower for the Wikipedia members. An interaction was found between Wikipedia membership and gender: introverted women were more likely to be Wikipedia members as compared with extroverted women. The results of this study are discussed with special emphasis on the understanding of the motivators of Wikipedia members.

Internet minimal group paradigm.

Over many years, social psychologists have sought to understand what causes individuals to form themselves into groups. Initially, it was believed that groups were formed when people bonded around a common goal. Later, it was found that, when individuals were divided into groups on a random basis, this in itself was sufficient for them to feel part of a group and show a preference for their own group over others. Since the environment in cyberspace is different from that of the offline world, for example, there is no physical proximity between participants; it may be assumed that it would be difficult to achieve feelings of affiliation among potential or actual group members. This pioneer study seeks to discover which components are requisite to the creation of a group identity among individuals surfing the Internet. For this experiment, 24 people were divided into two Internet chat groups according to their intuitive preference in a decision-making task. It was found that group members perceived their own group performance as superior on a cognitive task as compared with that of the other group. These results demonstrate that for surfers, the Internet experience is very real and even a trivial allocation of people to a group is likely to create a situation of ingroup favoritism.

Experiments in digital literacy.

Having digital literacy requires more than just the ability to use software or to operate a digital device; it includes a large variety of complex skills such as cognitive, motoric, sociological, and emotional that users need to have in order to use digital environments effectively. A conceptual model that was recently described by the authors suggests that digital literacy comprises five major digital skills: photo-visual skills ("reading" instructions from graphical displays), reproduction skills (utilizing digital reproduction to create new, meaningful materials from preexisting ones), branching skills (constructing knowledge from non-linear, hypertextual navigation), information skills (evaluating the quality and validity of information), and socio-emotional skills (understanding the "rules" that prevail in cyberspace and applying this understanding in online cyberspace communication). The present paper presents results from a performance-based pioneer study that investigated the application of the above digital literacy skills conceptual model among different groups of scholars. Results clearly indicate that the younger participants performed better than the older ones, with photo-visual and branching literacy tasks, whereas the older participants were found to be more literate in reproduction and information literacy tasks. Research results shed light on the cognitive skills that users utilize in performing with digital environments, and provide educators and software developers with helpful guidelines for designing better user-centered digital environments.

"On the Internet no one knows I'm an introvert": extroversion, neuroticism, and Internet interaction.

Social communication is one of the most common reasons for using the Internet. This paper examines how the personality characteristics of the user affect the meaning and importance of Internet social interaction in comparison with "real life," face-to-face interactions. Forty subjects all of whom were familiar with using "chat" participated in this study. After a at" session, they were instructed to answer several questionnaires. It was found that introverted and neurotic people locate their "real me" on the Internet, while extroverts and nonneurotic people locate their "real me" through traditional social interaction. The implications of our results for understanding the user-net interaction, the "real-me" location, extroversion, neuroticism, and Internet interaction, and the treatment of social phobics are examined.