The fear caused by the Covid-19 pandemic is changing our psychology and behavior. This ongoing negative event, imposing restrictions such as home isolation and social distancing, can result in heightened anxiety, depression and a sense of loneliness, with immediate effects on mental health. This study investigates adolescents’ reaction to the pandemic, by analyzing the behavioral mental health trends of depression, anxiety and sense of loneliness, in relation to personality traits. After controlling for demographics and family background, our results reveal strong relationships between several personality traits and psychological health indicators, during the pandemic in Greece. A total of 419 secondary school students (aged 12–18) were administered the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory for Children (STAIC), the Child Depression Inventory (CDI), the Big Five Inventory for measuring personality (BFI) and the Children’s Loneliness Questionnaire (CLS) during two time periods within pandemic. Overall, it appears that depression increased significantly in line with the escalation of the pandemic, while anxiety decreased, with the strongest predictors being the personality variables of extraversion, neuroticism and openness. Surprisingly, the study also revealed that the level of extraversion has a positive effect on changes in anxiety, while a negative one on changes in depression. On the other hand, neuroticism and openness seem to negatively correlate with anxiety changes and positively with depression changes. These findings highlight the importance of considering these variables in addressing individuals’ mental health behavior during the Covid-19 pandemic and elucidate the literature by offering a deeper understanding of the strong relationship between personality, depression and anxiety.

In this paper we investigate the impact of non-cognitive skills on the quality of task-specific outcomes by conducting a quasi-experiment on a well-known online crowdsourcing platform. We show that a worker's performance varies with personality traits, gender, human capital, crowdsourcing experience and work effort. Regarding the effects of non-cognitive skills, we find that workers' performance in online microtasks is positively related to extraversion and agreeableness. The positive impact of extroverts is also revealed when performance is adjusted for task completion time. These findings provide implications regarding the integration of selection mechanisms in online labour matching platforms aiming in uncovering microworkers soft skills to improve performance and consequently the allocation of resources in online microtasks.

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Today hundreds of millions of Internet users are using crowdsourcing platforms either to work to an online job as workers, or as a model of problem solving and production as requesters. This growing workforce makes it necessary from the perspective of the online platforms, to fully understand the factors which contribute on this emerging and innovative "online labor". We present a study comparing how crowdsourcing platforms have evolved over two time periods. The study explores in addition the effect of several factors of such websites on their traffic data and attention seeking. The results show that several website's characteristic are strong indicators of its attempting to get and optimize potential workers' or requesters' attention.