Pandemic prevention and personality psychology: Gender differences in preventive health behaviors during COVID-19 and the roles of agreeableness and conscientiousness

One of the greatest public health crises in recent times,the COVID-19 pandemic,has come with a myriad of challenges in terms of health communication and public cooperation to prevent the spread of the disease.Un-derstanding which are the key determinants that make certain individuals more cooperative is key in effectively tackling pandemics and similar future challenges.In the present study(N=800),we investigated whether gen-der differences in compliance with preventive health behaviors(PHB)at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic could be established,and,if so,whether the personality traits of agreeableness and conscientiousness could help explain this presumed relationship.Consistent with our theorizing,we found women to score higher than men on agreeableness and conscientiousness,and to be more willing to comply with a set of PHB.Importantly,both per-sonality traits were found to mediate the gender-compliance link.This means that women’s greater compliance levels with PHB could,at least in part,be attributed to their higher agreeableness and conscientiousness scores.A greater understanding of the determinants of PHB in terms of gender and associated personality traits may help identify options for developing more effective communication campaigns,both in terms of communication channel selection and message content.

Research on Unbounded Parallel-Batch Scheduling with Jobs Having Set-Up Times

We study the scheduling on an unbounded parallel-batch machine with jobs having set-up times to minimize a regular objective function which is either of the sumform or of the max-form.As we know,in the existing literature,the research about parallel-batch scheduling does not consider the set-up times of jobs.However,the set-up times of jobs are widely presented in practical applications.Each job considered in this paper has a set-up time.The set-up time of each batch is equal to the maximum set-up time of all jobs contained in the batch,and the processing time of each batch is equal to the longest processing time of the jobs contained in the batch.Depending on the different definitions of the completion time of a job,we consider two types of jobs:batch jobs and drop-line jobs.For batch jobs,the completion time of a job is given by the completion time of the batch containing this job.For drop-line jobs,the completion time of a job is given by the starting time of the batch containing this job plus the processing time of this job.In this paper,we give pseudo-polynomial time algorithms for the above scheduling problems in which the jobs have agreeable processing times and set-up times.In addition,when the objective functions are the total weighted completion time,the maximum lateness,and the maximum cost,we present a polynomial time algorithm,respectively.

Optimal Risk Sharing for Maxmin Choquet Expected Utility Model

This article analyzes the Pareto optimal allocations,agreeable trades and agreeable bets under the maxmin Choquet expected utility(MCEU)model.We provide several useful characterizations for Pareto optimal allocations for risk averse agents.We derive the formulation descriptions for non-existence agreeable trades or agreeable bets for risk neutral agents.We build some relationships between ex-ante stage and interim stage on agreeable trades or bets when new information arrives.

You don＇t actually want to get closer to the star： How LMX leads to workplace ostracism

High-quality leader-member exchange （LMX） is commonly seen as beneficial to employees. However, this is not always the case in the eyes of other members of the same team. Based on social comparison theory, we propose that members who have high-quality LMX relationships with team leaders might face workplace ostracism through being envied by other members of the same team. Further, we hypothesize that this indirect influence is mitigated by the high-quality LMX member＇s agreeableness. Based on data from 196 employees, we found that though ostensibly LMX quality directly led to less workplace ostracism, it had a positive effect on workplace ostracism through being envied by other team members, and agreeableness buffered this indirect positive effect. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.