Emily Carlson

Mothers use online resources frequently to obtain information on pregnancy, birth, and parenting. Yet, second-time mothers may have different concerns than first-time mothers given they have a newborn infant and another child at home. The current study conducted an on-line textual analysis of the posts of second-time mothers during pregnancy and the first months postpartum on the BabyCenter LLC website, one of the largest online parenting communities. Latent Dirichlet Allocation analysis on roughly 16,000 posts to BabyCenter birth clubs in 2017 by approximately 4,000 users revealed second-time mothers relied on the online support of the BabyCenter community to share and discuss topics of pregnancy, birth, and child rearing. Second-time mothers also raised questions about preparing their firstborn children for a new baby sibling, how they would care for two children, whether they would love the second one as much as the first, and how the second child would change family dynamics. Future research needs to recognize that second-time mothers may have distinct concerns surrounding the birth of their second baby, and antenatal education and parenting classes may need to be modified to be more inclusive of these women’s needs and perspectives. Online parenting communities offer avenues to support women as they make the transition from one child to two and may provide targeted opportunities to disseminate evidence-based practices that can assist these women and their children.

Body movement is a primary nonverbal communication channel in humans. Coordinated social behaviors, such as dancing together, encourage multifarious rhythmic and interpersonally coupled movements from which observers can extract socially and contextually relevant information. The investigation of relations between visual social perception and kinematic motor coupling is important for social cognition. Perceived coupling of dyads spontaneously dancing to pop music has been shown to be highly driven by the degree of frontal orientation between dancers. The perceptual salience of other aspects, including postural congruence, movement frequencies, time‐delayed relations, and horizontal mirroring remains, however, uncertain. In a motion capture study, 90 participant dyads moved freely to 16 musical excerpts from eight musical genres, while their movements were recorded using optical motion capture. A total from 128 recordings from 8 dyads maximally facing each other were selected to generate silent 8‐s animations. Three kinematic features describing simultaneous and sequential full body coupling were extracted from the dyads. In an online experiment, the animations were presented to 432 observers, who were asked to rate perceived similarity and interaction between dancers. We found dyadic kinematic coupling estimates to be higher than those obtained from surrogate estimates, providing evidence for a social dimension of entrainment in dance. Further, we observed links between perceived similarity and coupling of both slower simultaneous horizontal gestures and posture bounding volumes. Perceived interaction, on the other hand, was more related to coupling of faster simultaneous gestures and to sequential coupling. Also, dyads who were perceived as more coupled tended to mirror their pair's movements.

Although music is known to be a part of everyday life and a resource for mood and emotion management, everyday life has changed significantly for many due to the global coronavirus pandemic, making the role of music in everyday life less certain. An online survey in which participants responded to Likert scale questions as well as providing free text responses was used to explore how participants were engaging with music during the first wave of the pandemic, whether and how they were using music for mood regulation, and how their engagement with music related to their experiences of worry and anxiety resulting from the pandemic. Results indicated that, for the majority of participants, while many felt their use of music had changed since the beginning of the pandemic, the amount of their music listening behaviors were either unaffected by the pandemic or increased. This was especially true of listening to self-selected music and watching live streamed concerts. Analysis revealed correlations between participants’ use of mood for music regulation, their musical engagement, and their levels of anxiety and worry. A small number of participants described having negative emotional responses to music, the majority of whom also reported severe levels of anxiety.