Celebrity Deaths Research Articles

Public interest in America on cardiac arrest following cardiovascular events of Bronny and Damar: A Google trend study

BackgroundHeart disease is one of the leading causes of death in the United States. Increased education and utilization of BLS by first responders have had a significant impact, but certain populations remain high risk, such as African Americans. Raising awareness among at-risk populations may lead to more bystander CPR performed, improving mortality rates. The influence of celebrity deaths and illnesses is an important driver of public awareness. Therefore, the cardiac arrests of both Bronny James and Damar Hamlin may have influenced cardiac arrest awareness. MethodsGoogle Trends data was pulled for the following search terms from 8/21/2022–8/14/2023: Cardiac arrest (disease), Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (topic), Basic Life Support (topic), Myocardial Infarction (disease), Defibrillation (topic) and Automatic External Defibrillator (topic). The average relative search volume (RSV) for each search term was taken for a three-week period encompassing the week of and two weeks following the cardiac arrests of Damar Hamlin and Lebron James Jr., respectively. We used one-way ANOVA and independent sample t-tests to compare the average values of Damar Hamlin's and LeBron James Jr.'s incidents with their respective 12-month averages. ResultsRSV was significantly higher surrounding Hamlin's cardiac arrest compared to James Jr.'s for Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation and Automatic External Defibrillator. RSV for Basic Life Support was increased in LeBron James Jr.'s time compared to the 12-month average and Damar Hamlin's incident. Compared to the 12-month average, Cardiac arrest, Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation, Defibrillation, and Automatic External Defibrillator during Hamlin's incident. Myocardial infarction RSV was higher during James Jr.'s incident compared to baseline. Over the long term, the search terms showed a significant increase after Damar Hamlin's incident when compared to before.RSV was significantly higher surrounding Hamlin's cardiac arrest compared to James Jr.'s for “Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation” (23.56 vs. 22.0, p < 0.00) and “Automatic External Defibrillator” (19.59 vs. 19.4, p < 0.00). RSV for “Basic Life Support” was increased in LeBron James Jr.'s time compared to the 12-month average and Damar Hamlin's incident (80.9 vs. 66.88, p = 0.04). Compared to the 12-month average, “Cardiac arrest,” “Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation,” “Defibrillation,” and “Automatic External Defibrillator” during Hamlin's incident showed significant increases. “Myocardial infarction” RSV was higher during James Jr.'s incident compared to baseline (55 vs. 46.6, p = 0.026). Over the long term, the search terms showed a significant increase after Damar Hamlin's incident when compared to before (p < 0.05). ConclusionsIncreases in the search terms for Hamlin's cardiac arrest compared to James Jr.'s cardiac arrest were associated with seeing the event live and increasing cardiac arrest awareness. Hamlins Cardiac Arrest also showed a significant increase in search terms over the long term. The increase in searches for “Basic Life Support” during James Jr.'s cardiac arrest indicates increased awareness. Also, the increase in myocardial infarction searches during both incidents could show confusion between cardiac arrest and myocardial infarction.

Associations between news coverage, social media discussions, and search trends about celebrity deaths, screening, and other colorectal cancer-related events

ObjectiveColorectal cancer (CRC) is the third leading cause of cancer death among both men and women in the United States. CRC-related events may increase media coverage and public attention, boosting awareness and prevention. This study examined associations between several types of CRC events (including unplanned celebrity cancer deaths and planned events like national CRC awareness months, celebrity screening behavior, and screening guideline changes) and news coverage, Twitter discussions, and Google search trends about CRC and CRC screening. MethodsWe analyzed data from U.S. national news media outlets, posts scraped from Twitter, and Google Trends on CRC and CRC screening during a three-year period from 2020 to 2022. We used burst detection methods to identify temporal spikes in the volume of news, tweets, and search after each CRC-related event. ResultsThere is a high level of heterogeneity in the impact of celebrity CRC events. Celebrity CRC deaths were more likely to precede spikes in news and tweets about CRC overall than CRC screening. Celebrity screening preceded spikes in news and tweets about screening but not searches. Awareness months and screening guideline changes did precede spikes in news, tweets, and searches about screening, but these spikes were inconsistent, not simultaneous, and not as large as those events concerning most prominent public figures. ConclusionsCRC events provide opportunities to increase attention to CRC. Media and public health professionals should actively intervene during CRC events to increase emphasis on CRC screening and evidence-based recommendations.

Expecting the Expected? Documenting Nostalgia Effects on Baseball Card Prices

Identifying anomalies, or empirical facts that contradict theoretical predictions, is a common form of proof by contradiction in economics and finance. We identify an apparent pricing anomaly in the market for trading cards: large and persistent death effects of about 20% are observed following the death of legendary baseball players. Rational investors should anticipate each player's eventual death, so these results suggest that profit opportunities are being left on the table. The arguably causal estimates come from interrupted time series models that adjust flexibly for time pre- and post-death and the time of sale using high-frequency sales data. The effect is largest in the days immediately following the death, but prices remain elevated for at least 60 days. Generally, our findings reaffirm the presence of a causal “nostalgia effect” of celebrity deaths on consumer demand for collectibles and products associated with the celebrity.

Sentiment and Presentiment in Twitter: Do Trends in Collective Mood “Feel the Future”?

Meta-analyses of experiments investigating human behavioral and physiological reactions to unpredictable future events suggest the existence of a poorly understood ability to “feel the future.” Is this effect reflected in sentiment metrics based on social media posts? To find out, analysis of 13 years of daily Twitter sentiment data in 10 languages was examined two weeks prior to events assessed as significantly negative and unpredictable, including acts of terrorism, mass shootings, unexpected deaths of celebrities, etc. Results of the analysis was statistically significant (p = 0.001), suggesting the existence of a form of collective presentiment.

The death of the star: celebrity decay and the Gothic portrait in Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych

ABSTRACT This article uses Gothic studies to examine the preoccupation with death in Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych. Drawing on the Gothic convention of the decaying portrait, I argue that Marilyn Diptych communicates a wider tension between immortality and death at the heart of American celebrity culture in the 1960s. The decaying portrait is a traditional motif within the Gothic novel, but this article explores how the portrait itself embodies Gothic qualities of decay. While Warhol’s Electric Chair has been previously analysed within a Gothic framework, I uncover the Gothicness of the celebrity portrait and situate Marilyn Diptych in the context of Marilyn Monroe’s death and the wider culture of mediatised disaster in the 1960s. Ultimately, this article demonstrates how Marilyn Diptych epitomises the landscape of celebrity in the 1960s. As a period of technological modernity dominated by television, the 1960s is a media-saturated image culture that enables the creation and preservation of new kinds of celebrities. However, the period is also tainted by relentless global and domestic crises, within which high-profile celebrity deaths feature strongly. This overwhelming culture of death problematises media immortality by exposing celebrities as fragile Gothic bodies prone to decay.

A longitudinal study of topic classification on Twitter.

Twitter represents a massively distributed information source over topics ranging from social and political events to entertainment and sports news. While recent work has suggested this content can be narrowed down to the personalized interests of individual users by training topic filters using standard classifiers, there remain many open questions about the efficacy of such classification-based filtering approaches. For example, over a year or more after training, how well do such classifiers generalize to future novel topical content, and are such results stable across a range of topics? In addition, how robust is a topic classifier over the time horizon, e.g., can a model trained in 1 year be used for making predictions in the subsequent year? Furthermore, what features, feature classes, and feature attributes are most critical for long-term classifier performance? To answer these questions, we collected a corpus of over 800 million English Tweets via the Twitter streaming API during 2013 and 2014 and learned topic classifiers for 10 diverse themes ranging from social issues to celebrity deaths to the “Iran nuclear deal”. The results of this long-term study of topic classifier performance provide a number of important insights, among them that: (i) such classifiers can indeed generalize to novel topical content with high precision over a year or more after training though performance degrades with time, (ii) the classes of hashtags and simple terms contain the most informative feature instances, (iii) removing tweets containing training hashtags from the validation set allows better generalization, and (iv) the simple volume of tweets by a user correlates more with their informativeness than their follower or friend count. In summary, this work provides a long-term study of topic classifiers on Twitter that further justifies classification-based topical filtering approaches while providing detailed insight into the feature properties most critical for topic classifier performance.

Colorectal cancer conversations on Twitter: A content analysis of global perceptions and outreach efforts.

35 Background: Screening is highly effective at reducing colorectal cancer (CRC) mortality. Social media is extensively used to communicate about cancer care, yet little is known about the role of these online platforms in promoting CRC screening and early diagnosis. This study tracked Twitter discussions about CRC and characterized participating users to better understand public communication and perceptions of CRC on social media. Methods: Tweets containing references to CRC were collected from January 2020 to April 2021 using Twitter’s Application Programming Interface. Account metadata was used to predict user demographic information and classify users as either organizations, individuals, or influencers. Influencers represent high-impact users, defined by sizeable follower counts or verified Twitter status. Latent Dirichlet Allocation, a natural language processing model, was used to identify observed topics of discussion in the collected tweets. Results: There were 72,229 unique CRC-related tweets by 31,170 users. Tweets reached a daily maximum after Chadwick Boseman, a well-known American actor, died from CRC. Individuals accounted for the majority of users (62.8%); organizations (35.2%); influencers (2%). Influencers made the most median impressions (35,853 impressions). Tweets contained the following topics: bereavement (27.9%), appeals for early detection (19.4%), research (14.0%), National Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month (NCCAM) (13.7%), screening access (12.5%), and risk factors (12.4%). Tweets referencing bereavement had the most user engagement. Links to clinical trial enrollment information were the least shared type of embedded content (0.3%). Conclusions: Discussions about CRC largely focused on bereavement and early detection. Online coverage of NCCAM, personal experiences, and celebrity deaths related to CRC effectively stimulated goal-oriented tweets about early detection. Our findings suggest that Twitter may be a suitable platform for promoting and communicating future public health recommendations about CRC.

Mamba in the Mirror: Black Masculinity, Celebrity, and the Public Mourning of Kobe Bryant

In this manuscript, the author describes their unexpected grieving process in dealing with the death of Kobe Bryant. In particular, the author focuses on the mourning process on tragic celebrity deaths and the relationship between celebrity, mortality, and the ways in which people make sense of themselves through celebrity figures. The author attempts to highlight the complicated nature of mourning celebrity figures who are not personally known, especially those that have a complicated history in the public eye. The author moves into and through their own personal experiences as a Black man in order to make sense of public mourning, race, and the Black Masculinity of Kobe Bryant.

A nonrandom walk down Hollywood boulevard: Celebrity deaths and investor sentiment

AbstractMotivated by psychological evidence that shows the public experiences emotional distress in response to the deaths of popular figures, I employ the deaths of 1,391 Hollywood Walk of Fame celebrities as natural experiments to identify exogenous public mood changes over the period 1926–2009. Consistent with the psychological theories which maintain that sadness encourages individuals to favor high‐risk/high‐reward investments, I find that U.S. stock returns are abnormally high immediately after the death of a major celebrity. This effect is particularly large during periods of high market‐level uncertainty (+0.40%) and for stocks headquartered in the city where the celebrity died (+0.26%).

A Non-Random Walk Down Hollywood Boulevard: Celebrity Deaths and Investor Sentiment

Media communication scholars document that the general public exhibits a psychological attachment to celebrities and may emotionally react to their death. In this paper, I take advantage of this insight and I adopt an event study approach to test the impact of exogenous and incidental negative affect (i.e. grief, proxied by the death of Hollywood Walk of Fame celebrities) on people’s willingness to invest in risky assets (proxied by the daily performance of the U.S. stock market). Using a sample of 1,374 celebrity deaths over the period 1926-2009 and controlling for seasonalities, economic/environmental factors, and market liquidity, I find that the death of popular and beloved celebrities is immediately followed by a 16 basis point increase in stock returns, which is consistent with a rise in the net demand for risky instruments. I also find evidence that the size of this celebrity-death effect is increasing in the popularity/media coverage of the celebrity in question, and is larger for stocks that are more affected by investor sentiment. Overall, my findings are consistent with the lab research on the affect management model, which maintains that incidental negative affect promotes risk-prone behavior.

Association between suicide reporting in the media and suicide: systematic review and meta-analysis

ObjectiveTo examine the association between reporting on suicides, especially deaths of celebrities by suicide, and subsequent suicides in the general population.DesignSystematic review and meta-analysis.Data sourcesPubMed/Medline, PsychInfo, Scopus, Web of Science,...

Anomie or imitation? The Werther effect of celebrity suicides on suicide rates in 34 OECD countries, 1960–2014

Anomie and imitation have been prominent mechanisms explaining the Werther effect, i.e., the effect of celebrity suicides on a general population's suicide rate. This study presents a new approach to empirically disentangle both mechanisms. Imitation theory suggests that celebrities act as role models, and that the Werther effect is triggered by the status of the celebrity in question. Anomie theory, on the other hand, suggests that the Werther effect is triggered by the unexpectedness of the event. To this end, we empirically compare the effects of celebrity suicides with the effects of celebrities who died unexpectedly from causes other than suicide (accidents, illnesses, alcohol abuse). Based on language and page-link data from 3855 Wikipedia pages of the 495 celebrities who died from suicide between 1960 and 2014, we measure the status a celebrity has in a particular country and calculate the potential country-specific imitation effect of their suicide. In the same manner, we measure the status of celebrities who died unexpectedly from accidents, illnesses, or alcohol abuse to reflect anomie-related effects. We use these measures in an ecological study based on a time-series cross-sectional dataset for 34 OECD countries to assess their effects on a country's overall annual suicide rate. Fixed-effects analyses reveal that the country-specific status of celebrity suicides is associated with significant increases in overall suicide rates, while anomie-related, unexpected celebrity deaths are not associated with the overall suicide rates. The findings remain robust across a number of alternative specifications, such as controlling for further anomic factors at the macro level (divorce or unemployment rate, for instance). We conclude that the results support the imitation mechanism as an essential social explanation for the Werther effect.

Changes in Internet Suicide Search Volumes Following Celebrity Suicides.

Celebrity suicides that are reported heavily in the media may increase risk for others' suicidal behavior. This study examined whether Internet search volumes for suicide-related terms changed after three celebrity suicide deaths (Robin Williams, Chester Bennington, and Alexander McQueen) and three celebrities who died by means other than suicide (David Bowie, Azzedine Alaia, and Paul Walker). Suicide search terms included suicide, how to suicide, commit suicide, depression, hanging, and suicide prevention. Observed suicide search volumes in the United States were collected from Google Trends for the 10 weeks before and the 2 weeks following each celebrity's death. Predicted search volumes for the 14 days postdeath were forecasted from the predeath search volumes and predicted search volumes were then compared to the true, observed search volumes. Search volumes for suicide terms significantly increased following Robin Williams' suicide death. Some of the terms increased in search volume following Chester Bennington's and Alexander McQueen's suicide deaths, but not significantly. Most search volumes for nonsuicide celebrity deaths did not change following their deaths. Celebrity suicide deaths can lead to significant, national increases in Internet search volumes for suicide-related terms for celebrities of high prominence. Results highlight the critical importance of reporting suicide deaths in the media responsibly.

The quantitative measure and statistical distribution of fame.

Fame and celebrity play an ever-increasing role in our culture. However, despite the cultural and economic importance of fame and its gradations, there exists no consensus method for quantifying the fame of an individual, or of comparing that of two individuals. We argue that, even if fame is difficult to measure with precision, one may develop useful metrics for fame that correlate well with intuition and that remain reasonably stable over time. Using datasets of recently deceased individuals who were highly renowned, we have evaluated several internet-based methods for quantifying fame. We find that some widely-used internet-derived metrics, such as search engine results, correlate poorly with human subject judgments of fame. However other metrics exist that agree well with human judgments and appear to offer workable, easily accessible measures of fame. Using such a metric we perform a preliminary investigation of the statistical distribution of fame, which has some of the power law character seen in other natural and social phenomena such as landslides and market crashes. In order to demonstrate how such findings can generate quantitative insight into celebrity culture, we assess some folk ideas regarding the frequency distribution and apparent clustering of celebrity deaths.

Suicide contagion in response to widely publicized celebrity deaths: The roles of depressed affect, death-thought accessibility, and attitudes.

Suicide contagion often occurs when a suicide death that is widely publicized (typically by the media) results in increases in suicide rates. However, the underlying cognitive and emotional mechanisms behind how and when suicide contagion occurs have been, up to this point, hazily understood. The present study: (a) tested whether individuals with depressed affect respond differently to celebrity suicides widely publicized by the media compared with those who do not have depressed affect, (b) measured 2 potential cognitive mechanisms that may be involved in suicide contagion, death-thought accessibility and attitudes about the acceptability and normality of suicide, and (c) compared responses to widely publicized suicide versus accidental death and natural death. The findings highlight a key moderator--depressive affect--that predicts the likelihood of being susceptible to suicide contagion effects following media coverage of a suicide death, clarify that its boundary conditions include cases of accidental death, and elucidate 2 cognitive mechanisms, death-thought accessibility and attitudes toward suicide acceptability and normality. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved) Language: en

TwitterSports: Real Time Detection of Key Events from Sports Tweets

Twitter users play a role of human sensors and update information about real-life events by posting their tweets about them. Event detection in Twitter is the process of detecting an event which is an occurrence causing change in the volume of tweets that discuss the associated topic at a specific time and a location by Twitter users. Twitter has been extensively used to detect major social and physical events such as earthquakes , celebrity deaths , presidential elections , traffic jam and others. Real time event detection in Twitter is detecting real-life events from live tweets instantly as soon as the event has occurred. Real time event detection from Cricket sports using Twitter media is an interesting, yet a complex problem. Because, event detection algorithm needs live tweets streamed at real-time about the game and should detect events such as boundary and sixer , at near real-time within few seconds from their occurrences. In this paper, a novel real-time event detection approach is proposed for the Cricket sports domain. The proposed approach first computes the post rate of an adaptive window, which is the ratio between the volumes of tweets in the second half window and the volume of tweets in the first half. An event has occurred if the post rate is above the pre-defined threshold, otherwise the algorithm selects the next big window in an adaptive manner. The predefined threshold helps to filter out the small spikes in the streaming tweets volume. Once an event is detected in a time window along the tweet stream, the event represented inside the window is recognized using the event lexicon representing different events of a cricket game. The proposed real-time event detection algorithm is extensively evaluated on 2017 IPL T20 Cricket sports dataset using ROC and AUC evaluation measures. The experimental results on the performance of the proposed approach show that the adaptive sliding window detects sports events with over 80% true positives and around 15% false positive rates.

A Longitudinal Study of Topic Classification on Twitter

Twitter represents a massively distributed information source over a kaleidoscope of topics ranging from social and political events to entertainment and sports news. While recent work has suggested that variations on standard classifiers can be effectively trained as topical filters (Lin, Snow, and Morgan 2011; Yang et al. 2014; Magdy and Elsayed 2014), there remain many open questions about the efficacy of such classification-based filtering approaches. For example, over a year or more after training, how well do such classifiers generalize to future novel topical content, and are such results stable across a range of topics? Furthermore, what features and feature classes are most critical for long-term classifier performance? To answer these questions, we collected a corpus of over 800 million English Tweets via the Twitter streaming API during 2013 and 2014 and learned topic classifiers for 10 diverse themes ranging from social issues to celebrity deaths to the “Iran nuclear deal”. The results of this long-term study of topic classifier performance provide a number of important insights, among them that (1) such classifiers can indeed generalize to novel topical content with high precision over a year or more after training and (2) simple terms and locations are the most informative feature classes (despite training on classes labeled via hashtags).

Drug-related celebrity deaths: A cross-sectional study.

BackgroundCelebrities are at risk for premature mortality as well as drug-related death. Despite being a vulnerable patient group, celebrities influence people’s health behaviours through biological, psychological and social processes. Therefore, celebrity endorsement of the topic could be one way to challenge the current “opioid endemic”. Our aim was to better understand the factors surrounding drug-related celebrity deaths by investigating the incidence as well as substances used between 1970 and 2015 using a cross-sectional study design.MethodWe searched public databases for drug-related celebrity deaths between 1970 and 2015. They were categorized for sex, profession, age at death, year of death and substances involved. The main outcome measures are descriptive values including number of drug deaths per year and substances involved. Secondary outcome measures are analytical questions to examine whether and which factors influence age at death and year of death (e.g. type of substance use disorder).ResultsWe identified 220 celebrities who died a drug-related death with a clear indication of involved substances between 1970 and 2015. The average age at death was 38.6 years; 75% were male. Most celebrities died between the age of 25 and 40. The number of drug-related deaths increased in the 21st century, with a significant increase in the use of prescription opioids. Deaths involving prescription opioids and heroin were associated with a significantly lower mean age at death compared to deaths where these substances were not involved.ConclusionsCompared to the 20th century, the total number of celebrities who died from a drug-related death in the 21st century increased, possibly due to an increased involvement of prescription opioids. Negative effects on individual health decisions of celebrity’s followers could be the result.

Exploring Demand toward Celebrity Memorabilia: Do Celebrities Never Really Die?

&lt;p&gt;Celebrities always seem larger than life; it is when they die that we remember they are only human. With the emergence of the Internet and social networking sites, consumers are able to follow the daily activities of their favorite celebrities. After a celebrity’s death, consumers exhibit a stronger interest in the lives of these celebrities and demand for celebrity-related products increases sharply. The aim of the present study is to examine young consumers’ responses to celebrity deaths and explore the major factors that lead to increased demand for celebrity memorabilia and merchandise. Specifically, this research will attempt to present why young consumers exhibit such a sudden and strong interest in celebrity-related products after their death and why these products are cherished so greatly. Factor analysis is applied and the results indicate that a celebrity’s death increases young consumers’ demand for memorabilia due to five major factors. These factors include immortality of the celebrity, keepsake value &amp;amp; deep-felt love as well as uniqueness of the celebrity, prestige and financial value attached with the product and wide availability &amp;amp; increased media promotion. Based on these factors, it can be argued that consumption of celebrity merchandise is motivated by the attachment and significance of the celebrity to the young consumer before death. These results are important for marketers to grasp the effect of death on the consumption of celebrity merchandise. Online and traditional retailers need to understand the major factors attracting consumers to celebrity memorabilia and merchandise so that they can respond quickly and efficiently to sudden demand fluctuations.&lt;/p&gt;

Finding meaning in a celebrity’s death: The relationship between parasocial attachment, grief, and sharing educational health information related to Robin Williams on social network sites

Celebrity health events can have a positive effect on public health education and awareness, in part because people spread health information related to the celebrity on social network sites. This may be particularly true in the event of celebrity deaths or other tragedies, when social network sites provide a convenient, public space to connect with others to mourn. However, little is understood about the circumstances that encourage health information sharing following these events. Using a Mechanical Turk sample (N = 281), this study employed a questionnaire to examine the role of parasocial attachment to Robin Williams and experienced grief following his suicide in explaining health information sharing on social network sites (i.e., sharing information about clinical depression, suicide prevention, substance abuse treatment, and Parkinson’s disease). Grief mediated the effect of parasocial attachment on health information sharing, but a moderated mediation analysis revealed that grief motivated health education on social network sites only for individuals who were coping by trying to find positive meaning in his death.