Inertia in cognitive processes: the case of the COVID-19 vaccine.

Developments in factor analysis (Spearman in Am J Psychol 15:201-292, 1904); Thurstone in Multiple factor analysis, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1947), multidimensional scaling (Torgerson in Theory and methods of scaling, Wiley Hoboken, New Jersey, 1958; Young and Householder in Psychometrika, 3:19-22, 1938), the Galileo model (Woelfel and Fink in The measurement of communication processes: galileo theory and method, Academic Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1980), and, more recently, in computer science, artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, network analysis and other disciplines (Woelfel in Qual Quant 54:263-278, 2020) have shown that human cognitive and cultural beliefs and attitudes can be modeled as movement through a high-dimensional non-Euclidean space. This article demonstrates the theoretical and methodological contribution that multidimensional scaling makes to understand attitude change associated with the COVID-19 vaccine.

How Americans Make Sense of Two Novel Pandemics.

Using Galileo theory and method of multidimensional scaling (MDS), we compared the psychological distances between concepts related to two pandemic viruses, Zika and COVID-19. Surveys (Zika,  410; COVID-19, = 291) were used to investigate the role of media use and interpersonal communication on the relationship between 10 concepts in multidimensional spaces. We asked these four research questions: Do the two spaces represent the two pandemics similarly? What is the relationship of and of to each pandemic? What is the effect of virus-related media use and interpersonal talk on the pandemic space? What are optimal messages for moving closer to and to ? Media use influenced the distances for both pandemics: With greater media use, the concepts were closer in the Zika space and further apart in the COVID-19 space.

Modeling posttraumatic growth among cancer patients: The roles of social support, appraisals, and adaptive coping.

Objective: The purpose of the study was to build a model to explain the relationships between social support, uncontrollability appraisal, adaptive coping, and posttraumatic growth (PTG) among cancer patients in China.

Methods: The participants who were cancer patients in a cancer hospital in China filled out a survey. The final sample size was 201.