Publications by Ahmad Abu-Akel

United States politicians' tone became more negative with 2016 primary campaigns

Robert West, Ahmad Abu-Akel, Andreas Oliver Spitz

There is a widespread belief that the tone of political debate in the US has become more negative recently, in particular when Donald Trump entered politics. At the same time, there is disagreement as to whether Trump changed or merely continued previous t ...

Nature Portfolio2023

Who Is Listening? Spokesperson Effect on Communicating Social and Physical Distancing Measures During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Robert West, Ahmad Abu-Akel, Andreas Oliver Spitz

Effective communication during a pandemic, such as the current COVID-19 crisis, can save lives. At the present time, social and physical distancing measures are the lead strategy in combating the spread of COVID-19. In this study, a survey was administered ...

Frontiers Media2021

The effect of spokesperson attribution on public health message sharing during the COVID-19 pandemic

Robert West, Ahmad Abu-Akel, Andreas Oliver Spitz

It is urgent to understand how to effectively communicate public health messages during the COVID-19 pandemic. Previous work has focused on how to formulate messages in terms of style and content, rather than on who should send them. In particular, little ...

2021

Interventions for Softening Can Lead to Hardening of Opinions: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial

Robert West, Ahmad Abu-Akel, Andreas Oliver Spitz

Motivated by the goal of designing interventions for softening polarized opinions on the Web, and building on results from psychology, we hypothesized that people would be moved more easily towards opposing opinions when the latter were voiced by a celebri ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2021

Universal Patterns in Color-Emotion Associations Are Further Shaped by Linguistic and Geographic Proximity

Maya Roinishvili, Amer Chamseddine, Christine Mohr, Niloufar Pouyan, Ahmad Abu-Akel, Meng Zhang

Many of us "see red," "feel blue," or "turn green with envy." Are such color-emotion associations fundamental to our shared cognitive architecture, or are they cultural creations learned through our languages and traditions? To answer these questions, we t ...

SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC2020

The sun is no fun without rain: Physical environments affect how we feel about yellow across 55 countries

Maya Roinishvili, Amer Chamseddine, Christine Mohr, Niloufar Pouyan, Nevena Dimitrova, Ahmad Abu-Akel, Meng Zhang, Ramiro Tau

Across cultures, people associate colours with emotions. Here, we test the hypothesis that one driver of this cross-modal correspondence is the physical environment we live in. We focus on a prime example - the association of yellow with joy, - which conce ...

ACADEMIC PRESS LTD- ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD2019