The Social Media in Society Research Team Seeks High School and Undergraduate Apprentices for Summer 2019
The Army Research Office is providing summer funding for one high school apprentice and one undergraduate apprentice to work up eight to ten weeks, up to 300 hours on our grant funded research project “Firestorms of Emotion” between May 27 and August 15th. The application deadline has been extended to March 12.
The goal of the research program is to understand the dynamics of social-emotion firestorms that drive collective social and political behavior to develop strategies to detect and defuse them through human or automated interventions. We use a phased multi-method approach to studying causal processes driving contagion of emotion regulation strategies (signals to up- or down-regulate emotion). The project explores how emotions surrounding shocking events are shared via social media to give rise to activism. The Keith Lamont Scott shooting and protests in Charlotte in September 2016 and the Black Lives Matter movement are examples we are investigating in summer 2019.