Journal of General Psychology最新文献

Many concepts describe how individuals sustain effort despite challenging circumstances. For example, scholars and practitioners may incorporate discussions of grit, hardiness, self-control, and resilience into their ideas of performance under adversity. Although there are nuanced points underlying each construct capable of generating empirically sound propositions, the shared attributes make them difficult to differentiate. As a result, substantial confusion arises when debating how these related factors concomitantly contribute to success, especially when practitioners attempt to communicate these ideas in applied settings. The model proposed here-psychological endurance-is a unified theory to explore how multiple concepts contribute to sustained goal-directed behaviors and individual success. Central to this model is the metaphor of a psychological battery, which potentiates and sustains optimal performance despite adversity. Grit and hardiness are associated with the maximum charge of the psychological battery, or how long an individual could sustain effort. Self-control modulates energy management that augments effort required to sustain endurance, whereas resilience represents the ability to recharge. These factors are constrained by both psychological and physiological stressors in the environment that drain the psychology battery. Taken together, these ideas form a novel framework to discuss related psychological concepts, and ideally, optimize intervention to enhance psychological endurance.

Increased social power-defined as one's influence on another's behavior-guides activation of one's behavioral activation system which, in turn, elicits greater positive emotion. Positive emotion has also been linked to greater health. The current research assessed whether power and positive emotion are related to health. In Study 1, participants (N = 403; M_age = 48.33 years) wrote a narrative about a time in which they felt powerful or powerless. Greater self-reported feelings of power, concurrent with more frequent use of positive emotional words within the narrative, was associated with fewer references to health within the narrative. In Study 2, participants (N = 401; M_age = 33.05 years) primed with the concept of power (vs. powerlessness) reported greater health competency through enhanced positive emotion. Findings provided preliminary data supporting the continued study of power to better understand the link between positive emotion and health. Future research should elucidate the long-term relationships between these variables to examine whether increased power can produce downstream positive effects on health and health behavior.

Existing research has demonstrated a significant directed forgetting (DF) effect in memory. However, it remains unclear whether this phenomenon would occur in the context of interpersonal collaboration. Additionally, the contribution of emotional valence to the DF effect in item memory and source memory (which are subtypes of episodic memory) also needs to be explored. To address these issues, we conducted two experiments that combined the collaborative memory paradigm with the item-method procedure of DF. In both experiments, positive, neutral, or negative words were presented as stimuli, each followed by an R/F cue during encoding. We conducted two recalls, labeled Recall 1 and Recall 2, which consisted of both memory tasks. Recall 1 was performed either individually or collaboratively, whereas Recall 2 was done individually. Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 adopted the free-flowing procedure and the turn-taking procedure of collaborative memory, respectively. We obtained three implications from our current findings. (a) The occurrence of the DF effect in item memory was found regardless of the procedure of collaborative memory, and it was insensitive to the emotional valence of words or to whether participants had collaborated or not. These patterns demonstrate that both the mechanisms of elaborative rehearsal and active suppression/encoding blocking were engaged across words of different emotional valences and in nominal and collaborative circumstances. (b) In source memory, the DF effect showed different patterns in ongoing and post-collaborative memory, which underpins the dual-process models. (c) The amplitude of the DF effect was sensitive to the interaction of emotional valence by the status of collaboration, and the impact of collaboration differed between the two experiments, offering telling evidence of different aspects of the retrieval strategy disruption hypothesis (RSDH). Directions for identifying more influential factors are put forward.

Recent studies have revived the issue of whether the five-factor personality model or Big Five is the most valid to summarize the most relevant personality traits or whether, on the contrary, the basic structure of personality traits would better fit a six-factor model such as the HEXACO model: Honesty-Humility (H), Emotionality (E), Extraversion (X), Agreeableness (A), Conscientiousness (C), and Openness to Experience (O). In a Spanish community sample of 682 adults, the factorial structure of the 30 facets of the NEO-Revised Personality Inventory (NEO PI-R) and its 16 facets common to the HEXACO model was analyzed. In two subsamples of participants, the internal structure of the NEO PI-R, of 30 and 16 facets, fit the five-factor Big Five model better than the six-factor HEXACO model. In addition, the internal 30-facet structure of the NEO-PI-R replicated that obtained in the original US validation and those previously obtained in Spain, although the latter used different participant samples (people evaluated in personnel selection processes, university students). These results suggest that, at least in Spain, the five-factor personality model or Big Five is still the most valid taxonomy of personality traits.

High suicide rates are a major issue in Spain, to the extent that they are the main non-natural cause of death in this country. The present study analyses the relationship between Internet searches and actual suicide rates in Spain. For this purpose, we employ data from actual suicide rates and Google^® searches for Spain, differencing by the means used to commit suicide. Our results show that suicide ("suicidio") search term seems to be positively associated with higher total suicide rates, in addition to suicides using poison, suffocation and jumping. The suicide ("suicidio") topic presents similar results to the suicide search term, and suicide by car crash also seems to be associated with Internet searches of this topic.

Three experiments were conducted to examine gullibility as measured by people's bias to respond with a True response when performing sentence verification judgment task. The experiments manipulated the location of unfamiliar concepts such that some sentences contained unfamiliar concepts in the subject while other sentences contained unfamiliar concepts in the predicate, hence measuring the bias to judge an idea to be true when one cannot make the decision relying on background knowledge. The results indicated: 1) a higher frequency of True response when an unfamiliar concept is located in the subject compared to when it is in the predicate; and 2) the frequency of True response was lower than chance level even when unfamiliar information is located in the subject. The results were discussed in relation to gullibility and how the verification judgment is processed as a plausibility judgment.

In English, head is associated with rationality and logic, whereas heart is related to feeling and emotionality. In Chinese, these head- and heart-related metaphors also exist. Could these head- and heart-related conceptual metaphors influence people's moral decision-making and personality? This seems so based on the previous findings that (a) simply pointing an index finger to heart (versus head) position caused participants to produce more emotional responses in a moral decision task, and (b) participants who believed themselves to be heart locators, relative to those who regarded themselves as head locators, scored higher in affect intensity, femininity, and intimacy related activities. The current study attempted to replicate these findings, following the same design and procedure of previous work, with Chinese participants from Hong Kong and Chinese mainland. In Experiments 1a and 1b, 203 participants performed the moral decision task on dilemmas with their index fingers pointing to head or heart. In Experiments 2a and 2b, 304 participants completed the scales of self-location, affective intensity, femininity, and intimacy related activities. In these high-powered experiments, we failed to replicate the findings of previous work. Bayesian analyses further showed that no head- and heart-related conceptual metaphor effect was likely to occur. Potential reasons for our inconsistent results with those of previous studies and the implications of our current findings were discussed.

Anxiety is a pervasive phenomenon in contemporary society. With increased internet use in recent years, more people in the general population are seeking and providing help and participating in community online. The goal of our study was to evaluate the content of internet narratives among those who post about anxiety and determine what stakeholder groups are saying online. We used the bifurcated method; it is a multi-method (qualitative) approach with inductive, thematic analyses, and with quantification of content-related words via a computer program that crawls websites and counts the occurrences of specified terms (for cross-checking purposes). Themes of posts and webpages about anxiety were: using/reporting treatment strategies (83.3% saturation), providing help (77.8% saturation), telling personal stories (72.2% saturation), seeking help (61.1% saturation), and illustrating interpersonal impact (50% saturation). We argue that anxiety stakeholders may take part in health co-inquiry online (i.e., cooperating with others) in many of the same ways that they might collaborate in person. We recommend that clinicians query their clients about use of the internet in ways related to their anxiety (e.g., seeking information/treatment strategies, offering help to others, telling their personal stories, etc.) so that they might help them process what they experience online.

Self-face recognition denotes the process by which a person can recognize their own face by distinguishing it from another's face. Although many research studies have explored the inhibition effect of negative information on self-relevant face processing, few researchers have examined whether negative scenes influence self-relevant face processing. Fearful and disgusting scenes are typical negative scenes, but little research to data has examined their discriminative effects on self-relevant face recognition. To investigate these issues, the current study explored the effect of negative scenes on self-relevant face recognition. In Study 1, 44 participants (20 men, 24 women) were asked to judge the orientation of a target face (self-face or friend-face) pictured in a negative or neutral scene, whereas 40 participants (19 men, 21 women) were asked to complete the same task in a fearful, disgusting, or neutral scene in Study 2. The results showed that negative scenes inhibited the speed of recognizing self-faces. Furthermore, the above effect of negative scenes on self-relevant face recognition occurred with fearful rather than disgusting scenes. Our findings suggest the distinct effects of fearful scenes and disgusting scenes on self-relevant face processing, which may be associated with the automatic attentional capture to negative scenes (especially fearful scenes) and the tendency to escape self-awareness.

Previous studies suggested that individuals with prosocial motivation have better job performance in mission-driven organizations. However, the mediating mechanisms underlying this link remain unclear. On the basis of person-environment theory, this research proposed that work as a calling and job involvement are two important mediators between employees' prosocial motivation and their job performance in mission-driven organizations. Through a multi-wave and muti-source approach, 420 independent subordinate-immediate supervisor dyads from 173 divisions or stations of the police department in Taiwan were obtained. Our results illustrated that the prosocial motivation-job performance relationship is sequentially mediated by work as a calling and job involvement. We further discuss implications for future research and practices in light of these findings.