Psychological Reports最新文献

Background: In recent years, mentalizing - the capacity to understand one's own and others' intentional mental states in social contexts - has been considered to be a protective capacity that enables adaptive processing of stress-related emotional arousal, benefits general well-being and underpins adaptive emotion regulation. Objective: Several studies using cross-sectional research designs have demonstrated the potential health-promoting effect of mentalizing in non-clinical samples. However, longitudinal evidence is scarce. The present study aimed to investigate whether mentalizing predicts well-being and emotion regulation strategies in a non-clinical sample of mainly young adults using a prospective longitudinal design. Methods: In a prospective research design, 135 participants completed questionnaires assessing well-being, psychological symptom severity and mentalizing capacity at baseline (T1). Twelve months later (T2), emotion regulation strategies (suppression and cognitive reappraisal), well-being and psychological symptom severity were assessed by self-report. The data were analyzed using multivariate linear regression analysis. Results: Impairments in mentalizing were a significant negative predictor of well-being 12 months later. Furthermore, impairments in mentalizing positively predicted suppression of emotional states at T2. No association was found between deficits in mentalizing and cognitive reappraisal of emotional states over the course of 1 year. Conclusion: The findings indicate that mentalizing is longitudinally associated with mental health indicators in a non-clinical adult sample. Specifically, ineffective mentalizing was associated with impaired psychological well-being and a tendency to suppress intense emotional states over a period of 1 year. Future research should replicate these findings using multiple measurement timepoints to etablish causality.

Direct relationships between perceived discrimination and eating pathology in ethnic minorities are well-documented. However, theoretical work examining unique risk and resilience factors that strengthen or weaken the relation between these constructs in ethnic minorities is lacking. The current study aims to address this gap by incorporating stress-process and tripartite frameworks to examine social and personal resources as they relate to perceived discrimination and eating pathology. In a sample of Black, Asian, and Latine women (N = 296, M age = 30.82), social support did not mediate the relationship between perceived discrimination and eating pathology. A significant interaction effect was observed for thin-ideal internalization strengthening the relation between perceived discrimination and negative emotional eating. Thin-ideal internalization moderated the relation between perceived discrimination and negative emotional eating in Latine Women, and disordered eating in Black Women. Overall, findings suggest ethnic minority Women have both personal and social resources that may influence the strength of effect on the relation between perceived discrimination on eating pathology.

While we know childhood experiences are influential on a child's later socioemotional awareness and behavior, we are still searching for specific mechanisms that influence the transferability of childhood experiences and adult relationship functioning. In this study, we seek to further this area of investigation by examining the interpretation of ambiguous social interactions and perceptions of emotional invalidation as potential mediators of the relationship between perceptions of childhood emotional invalidation and current relationship quality. Participants completed online measures of hostile intent attributions, perceptions of childhood emotional invalidation, and current relationship quality with a significant other. They read emotionally provocative interpersonal scenarios and then reported likely emotionally invalidating reactions from their significant other to measure current perceptions of emotional invalidation. Results supported our hypotheses that perceptions of current emotional invalidation in a close, personal relationship would mediate the relationship between perceptions of childhood maternal emotional invalidation and both current relationship support and relationship conflict. Furthermore, the strength of this mediational pathway outweighed the influence of a more general hostile attribution bias. These findings have implications for prevention and intervention strategies designed to enhance interpersonal functioning.

When completing a task, the ability to implement behavioral strategies to solve it in an effective and cognitively less-demanding way is extremely adaptive for humans. This behavior makes it possible to accumulate evidence and test one's own predictions about the external world. In this work, starting from examples in the field of spatial hearing research, I analyze the importance of considering motor strategies in perceptual tasks, and I stress the urgent need to create ecological experimental settings, which are essential in allowing the implementation of such behaviors and in measuring them. In particular, I will consider head movements as an example of strategic behavior implemented to solve acoustic space-perception tasks.

Previous research has demonstrated that a stronger belief in free will contributes to a variety of socially desirable behaviors. We assessed the correlation between free will beliefs and health behaviors. Four studies (N = 1172) provide evidence that belief in free will is positively associated with health protective behaviors (e.g., physical activity, fruit and vegetable consumption, low fat diet) and negatively associated with health risk behaviors (e.g., alcohol consumption, smoking, unhealthy snacking). In relation to the respective health protective and health risk behaviors, we found free will beliefs were more strongly correlated with physical activity and alcohol consumption, respectively. We also found free will beliefs were associated with key social cognition determinants (e.g., attitude, subjective norm, perceived behavioral control, and intention). Overall, our results suggest that belief in free will can have important consequences for health behavior. This contributes to current theorizing about the implications of believing in free will.

This study investigated gender differences in health-risk behaviour patterns among young adults and assessed the associations of anxiety and depression with these patterns. A cross-sectional survey was conducted with 1740 young Chinese adults aged 18-24 years. Latent class analysis (LCA) and multinomial logistic regression were conducted to identify the clusters of health-risk behaviours and their associations with anxiety and depression. Three common patterns were found for both genders: physical inactivity, substance use, and insufficient fruit intake (5.7% for males [M] and 11.6% for females [F]); a sedentary lifestyle only (48.4% for M and 48.9% for F); and a sedentary lifestyle, substance use, and an unhealthy diet (7.6% for M and 20.0% for F). Additionally, two additional unique patterns were found: physical inactivity and unhealthy diet in males (38.3%) and physical inactivity and insufficient fruit intake in females (19.6%). Sociodemographic variables exert different effects on health-risk behaviour patterns as a function of gender. Lower anxiety levels (odds ratio [OR]: 0.892; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.823-0.966) and greater depression levels (OR: 1.074; 95% CI: 1.008-1.143) were associated with a sedentary lifestyle, substance use, and unhealthy diet class only in female young adults compared with a sedentary-only class. These findings underscore the need for the implementation of targeted interventions based on gender differences.

Orthorexia Nervosa (ON) is characterized by an excessive preoccupation with healthy eating, accompanied by increasingly restrictive dietary practices over time. In light of the increased attention to ON, it is noteworthy that the existing body of research, specifically with regard to mindfulness and self-compassion remains constrained in scope and depth. A total of 151 participants over the age of 18 completed scales measuring Orthorexia, Self-Compassion, Mindfulness, and Perfectionism. The findings revealed that individuals exhibiting high levels of ON tended to have low levels of self-compassion and mindfulness, along with high levels of perfectionism. Furthermore, the results indicated that self-compassion and mindfulness acted as mediators in the relationship between perfectionism and orthorexia nervosa. These findings deepen our comprehension of orthorexia and underscore the role of self-compassion and mindfulness, or their absence, as mediating factors in this context. The implications of these results and potential future directions are discussed.

Decisions under risk are a particular case of decisional skills taking place in complex and mostly unpredictable situations, where affective connotation of deciding is highly relevant. We aimed at investigating decisional processes under risk by outlining individual risk-taking (RT) and risk management (RM) attitudes via realistic decision-making and, in keeping with the risk-as-feeling hypothesis, at exploring implicit physiological correlates of such processes. 35 participants were presented with realistic situations where they had to make decisions by choosing between alternatives connoted by different levels of riskiness. Concurrently, autonomic physiological activation (cardiovascular and electrodermal activity) was recorded. Data analysis highlighted that: (i) participants showed higher propensity towards risk management than risk-taking; (ii) the propensity towards both risk taking and risk management was significantly determined by physiological markers of autonomic activity; and (iii) risk taking and risk management indices showed associations with different autonomic measures, respectively heart rate and skin conductance metrics.

This paper situates current social psychological research on the symbolic use of firearms (e.g., as a source of personal safety) in broader historical context to motivate a more thorough consideration of collective power motives. Historically, firearms have been used to dominate racial outgroup members (e.g., White Americans use of firearms and firearm laws to dispossess indigenous people of land or control free and enslaved Black people) or, at times, attempt to resist group-based oppression (e.g., Black Americans use of firearms to struggle against White Jim Crow terrorism). Given most gun owners report self-protection as their primary reason for firearm ownership and yet anti-Black attitudes are still a consistently important predictor of firearm ownership among dominant group members (e.g., White Americans), this paper examines how guns may function as a perceived source of personal safety and collective power. I center the persistent role of White supremacy and anti-Blackness in original U.S. firearm psychology and policy to illuminate the interrelatedness of personal safety and collective power perceptions, and how perceived threats to in-group power may motivate the use of guns and policies that selectively regulate gun access to mitigate associated safety concerns. Seeking to nudge social psychology to more thoroughly examine firearms' potential function as a symbolic source of collective power, I end by discussing how considering collective power can help us better understand how historically dominant and historically marginalized groups view firearms today while also illuminating some barriers to the pursuit of gun safety for all.

Scholars tend to believe that effective leadership contributes to facilitating employee work engagement. Based on social identity theory and self-determination theory, this study explored how empowering leadership affects employee work engagement through the mediating roles of organisational identification and workplace well-being. A sample of 3645 front-line employees in China participated in this study. A structural equation model analysis was performed to examine the hypothetical model. Sex, age, degree of education, wage income per month (RMB), and subjective social class were covariables. The results indicated that (a) empowering leadership was positively related to work engagement, (b) organisational identification and workplace well-being played a partial mediating role in the relationship, and (c) organisational identification and workplace well-being had a chain mediating effect on empowering leadership and work engagement. These findings advance the understanding of the effect of empowering leadership on employees' working attitudes and behaviours. They also contribute to potential interventions that boost employee work engagement.