Journal of General Psychology最新文献

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.

A considerable amount of research has revealed that there exists an evolutionary mismatch between ancestral environments and conditions following the rise of agriculture regarding the contact between humans and animal reservoirs of infectious diseases. Based on this evolutionary mismatch framework, we examined whether visual attention exhibits adaptive attunement toward animal targets' pathogenicity. Consistent with our predictions, faces bearing heuristic infection cues held attention to a greater extent than did animal vectors of zoonotic infectious diseases. Moreover, the results indicated that attention showed a specialized vigilance toward processing facial cues connoting the presence of infectious diseases, whereas it was allocated comparably between animal disease vectors and disease-irrelevant animals. On the other hand, the pathogen salience manipulation employed to amplify the participants' contextual-level anti-pathogen motives did not moderate the selective allocation of attentional resources. The fact that visual attention seems poorly equipped to detect and encode animals' zoonotic transmission risk supports the idea that our evolved disease avoidance mechanisms might have limited effectiveness in combating global outbreaks originating from zoonotic emerging infectious diseases.

Prospective memory is an important and complex social cognitive ability, which is easily disturbed by negative emotions. According to the relationship between prospective memory cues and ongoing tasks, prospective memory can be divided into focal prospective memory and non-focal prospective memory. This study focuses on the influence of negative emotions on different types of prospective memory. In Experiment 1, 117 participants were recruited, using a 2 (emotion: negative, neutral) × 2 (cue focality: focal, non-focal) between-subjects design to initially explore whether negative emotions can interfere with the prospective memory of both focal cue and non-focal cue. The results show that negative emotions simultaneously reduce both types of prospective memory performance. At the same time, negative emotions occupy additional attention resources and impair the prospective component of prospective memory with non-focal cues. In Experiment 2, 64 participants were recruited to improve the difficulty of the retrospective component of prospective memory with non-focal cues, and the influence of negative emotions on different components of prospective memory with non-focal cues was further explored. The results show that negative emotions can impair both the prospective and retrospective components of prospective memory. In short, the results of this study indicate that negative emotion can impair prospective memory, and the impairment effect is not limited by the cue type of prospective memory. Meanwhile, negative emotion will occupy more attentional resources and simultaneously affect the prospective and retrospective components of prospective memory.

Extant research has demonstrated the positive roles of workplace friendships and has recently found the negative effect or the double-edged effect on employees and organizations. Unfortunately, little is known about the boundary condition of the double-edged effects of workplace friendships and the elaborated understanding of the mechanism of positive and negative effects of workplace friendship simultaneously. Our purpose is to reveal that workplace friendship is a mixed blessing by investigating when and how workplace friendships are likely to promote versus inhibit voice behavior. We propose that the double-edged effect of workplace friendship hinges on the competitive climate. Specifically, when the competitive climate is low, workplace friendship is positively related to employees' psychological safety, promoting voice behavior. In contrast, workplace friendship is positively related to employees' face concern, inhibiting voice behavior when the competitive climate is high. Our hypotheses were supported across the three waves of surveys and experimental studies. Taken together, our findings reveal the perils and benefits of workplace friendship and the importance of boundary conditions resulting in employees' differential psychological processes in friendship interaction.

Are moral judgments to sacrificial dilemmas shaped by a latent social norm? The present research addresses this issue. We report a set of six studies (plus a supplementary one) which question the existence of a social norm in the longstanding deontism/utilitarian debate by relying on two original tools, namely substitution technique and self-presentation paradigm. Study 1 showed that American participants asked to answer like most Americans would do gave more utilitarian responses than control participants who answered in their own name (Study 1). Study 2 showed that participants instructed to answer in a disapproval fashion were more utilitarian than both participants instructed to answer in an approval fashion and control participants. Importantly, no difference was observed between the approval and control conditions, suggesting that participants naturally align their moral judgments with a latent norm they think is the most socially desirable. Studies 3-5 explored in addition the effect of the activation of a deontism-skewed norm using the substitution instruction on subsequent impression formation. For the latter task, participants were instructed to evaluate a random participant selected from a previous study who gave utilitarian-like responses (Studies 3a-3b), or to evaluate a fictitious politician who endorsed either a deontic or utilitarian orientation (Studies 4-5). Although we consistently replicated the effect of substitution instruction, we failed to show that attempts to activate a norm in a given individual shaped their evaluation of other people who do not align with this norm. Finally, we report a mini meta-analysis targeting the pooled effect and homogeneity among our studies.

Objective: During March 2020, the UK entered a national lockdown, causing a sudden change in undergraduate students' routines. This study uses this event to investigate the impact routine change had on students' mental wellbeing; in particular looking at depression, anxiety, sleep disturbance, and eating behaviors.

Method: Participants reported their daily routine timings (waking, breakfast, lunch, evening meal and bedtime) and activities (e.g. exercise amount, time with friends, time studying, etc) on a typical Monday, Wednesday and Saturday during term time and lockdown. Additionally they completed the PROMIS measures of anxiety, depression, and sleep disturbance, and the Eating Pathology Symptom Inventory.

Results: Lockdown saw small but significant shifts in routine timing (on average 1.5 h) However, there was no clear overall pattern of relationships between mental wellbeing and routine structure or magnitude of routine change. There was some evidence of changes in amount of exercise relating to reported anxiety.

Discussion: These findings are consistent with the current literature reporting lockdown effects on behavior. Routine timings shifted, but this change was small and largely did not affect the mental wellbeing reported by undergraduate students. The change in amount of exercise posed by lockdown did appear to be an important factor in wellbeing, and more research should focus on the wellbeing implications of closing places for exercise.

Classical theories of reasoning equate System 1 with biases and System 2 with correct responses. Refined theories of reasoning propose the parallel model to explain the two systems. The first purpose of the present article is to give a contribution to the debate on the parallel and default-interventionfist models: we hypothesized when logic and belief conflict both logical validity and belief judgments will be affected with greater level of response errors and/or longer response times. The second purpose of this article is to assess the relationship between decisional styles and performance in deductive reasoning. Seventy-two participants participated in the experiment and completed 64 modus ponens and modus tollens syllogistic reasoning tasks. Accordingly, we found that belief and logic judgments were affected by the conflict condition, both in easy syllogisms (i.e., modus ponens) and in complex syllogisms (i.e., modus tollens). Findings showed also that participants with a rational decision-making style were more strongly influenced by logic than belief, whereas those with an intuitive decision-making style were more strongly influenced by belief than logic.

Highly trained team sports players possess highly developed visual attentional skills, compared with non-athletes. These athletes also have much better motor control than non-athletes. This study compared the performance of intensively trained handball players with non-athletes in a modified version of the multiple object tracking (MOT) task, in which participants were instructed to point at the moving targets with their fingers. We hypothesized that athletes will perform better in the MOT task than non-athletes, and that the increased visual attentional load in the MOT task will affect pointing movements to a smaller degree in athletes than in non-athletes. The results partially support our hypotheses. Highly trained handball players performed much better in the MOT task than non-athletes, which confirms that athletes have better visual attentional skills. Considering the influence of attentional load on motor performance during the MOT task, the results suggest that among athletes, this influence may be present, but limited. However, this result should be interpreted with caution.