Objective: Loneliness and the onset of depression in old age are growing problems related to the greater life expectancy nowadays. This review investigated the longitudinal association between loneliness and depressive symptoms in the elderly. Design: A comprehensive search was conducted using three databases (Scopus, PsycInfo, and PubMed) combing for empirical studies published up until July 2020. A total of 4.549 abstracts and 221 full-text articles were assessed. Three authors independently reviewed titles and abstracts; disagreements were resolved by consensus. Results: Ten studies were included in the final review. We identified two categories of studies based on the outcome considered in each article: 1) the longitudinal effect of loneliness on depressive symptoms and 2) the clinical course of depression and its association with loneliness. All the articles reported a significant and positive association between loneliness and depressive symptoms in their longitudinal design research, ranging from an odds ratio of 0.41 to 17.76. The heterogeneity regarding the effect size in the analyses can be explained by the multifactorial design implemented by most of the studies included. Conclusions: Future research should investigate the moderators' role and how it may influence the longitudinal association between loneliness and depression over the years.

Online reputational systems are nowadays widely and effectively adopted by several online platforms to support and improve peoples’ interactions and communication. Despite the research approached and modeled social dynamics of reputational systems in different domains, adopting different frameworks, the role played by psycho-social factors, and personality traits, determining the individual susceptibility to online reputation is still elusive. To study such mediation effects, we implemented a modified online version of the Ultimatum Game, in which participants (215 adolescents) played before as proposers, and then as responders, always knowing the reputation of their interactors. Furthermore, after the reception phase, participants could evaluate the received offers, giving positive or negative feedback to their proposers. Despite the participants’ belief they were playing with their schoolmates, the interactors’ role was always fulfilled by bots characterized by standardized behaviors. Our results show how psychological traits influence the participants’ behavior in all the game phases, as well as in the rating dynamics. Reputation seems to have a direct effect only in the allocation behavior, while, in regards the other dynamics of the game (i.e., acceptance and rating), it comes into play in a complex interaction with the psychological dimensions.

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No abstract

We report the results of a game-theoretic experiment with human players who solve problems of increasing complexity by cooperating in groups of increasing size. Our experimental environment is set up to make it complicated for players to use rational calculation for making the cooperative decisions. This environment is directly translated into a computer simulation, from which we extract the collaboration strategy that leads to the maximal attainable score. Based on this, we measure the error that players make when estimating the benefits of collaboration, and find that humans massively underestimate these benefits when facing easy problems or working alone or in small groups. In contrast, when confronting hard problems or collaborating in large groups, humans accurately judge the best level of collaboration and easily achieve the maximal score. Our findings are independent on groups’ composition and players’ personal traits. We interpret them as varying degrees of usefulness of social heuristics, which seems to depend on the size of the involved group and the complexity of the situation.