Journal of General Psychology最新文献

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.

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.

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.

Prior research has indicated that positive affect, energy, and vitality are positively related to subjective well-being. Unfortunately, most scholars have overlooked the possibility that individuals may proactively manage their energetic, affective, and cognitive resources to boost their subjective well-being. Grounded in social cognitive theory, the current research focuses on explaining why students' proactive vitality management (PVM) leads to positive outcomes (i.e., meaning in life, subjective well-being) and considers how school support climate moderates these effects. One experimental study (Study 1) and a three-wave lagged survey (Study 2) were conducted to examine the benefits of PVM. The results demonstrated that PVM was positively related to students' meaning in life, further promoting their subjective well-being. Moreover, school support climate accentuated PVM's effect on meaning in life and its indirect effect on subjective well-being via meaning in life. Implications for research and practice are also discussed, along with study limitations and future research directions.

Research has indicated the critical role of responsiveness in facilitating close relationships, but what communication leads to enhanced responsiveness has not been fully explored. We hypothesized that gratitude and apologies facilitate responsiveness within friendship relationships in Japan. In Experiment 1 (n = 669), receiving gratitude, apologies, or both gratitude and apologies increased recipients' perceptions of the expresser's responsiveness more than receiving a message without either gratitude or apologies. In Experiment 2 (n = 139), the participants who received gratitude as well as receiving both gratitude and apologies (but not just apologies) wrote more responsive messages back to the expresser than those who received a message without either gratitude or apologies. Gratitude and apologies played unique roles in promoting responsiveness within friendship relationships.

A common method for assessing blatant dehumanization asks participants to rate "how evolved" they think members of various social groups are using the Ascent of Human scale (AOH) that transitions in stages from a crawling ape to a fully upright modern human. However, little is known about how task instructions affect participant ratings. In this pre-registered study, participants saw alternative forms of instruction including the traditional instructions emphasizing "evolution", a prompt without any reference to evolution, and a prompt that clearly explained that the scale assesses dehumanization. Instruction type had no effect on dehumanization ratings on the AOH scale. These results support the idea that the AOH scale is a robust means of assessing blatant dehumanization.

Corruption represents a complex problem firmly embedded within our societal structures, governments, and organizations. The current study aimed to build a clearer consensus on the extent to which perceptions of organizational corruption are associated with organizational hierarchy. Two high-powered close replications of studies 1c and 6 by Fath and Kay provide further evidence for the claim that taller organizational structures are associated with greater perceived potential for corruption, and that these perceptions may compromise subsequent trust-related outcomes. Our results reinforce the importance of organizational design and aim to inspire future works to consider the ways in which researchers and organizations can minimize corruption. Preregistration, data and materials can be found on the OSF: https://osf.io/zb5j2.

The literature indicated that deceivers in face-to-face communication experience psychological strains derived from guilt or distress associated with violating conversational rules. We proposed that this also applies to telephone-mediated deception. Drawing insights from the theoretical and empirical literature, we surmised that strategic trickery utilized by outsourced call center agents would elicit adverse psychological reactions that have unfavorable impacts on their well-being, cognition, and work motivation. We used structural equation modeling to test our hypotheses using data from a sample of 554 outsourced Filipino call service agents who worked graveyard shifts to cater to mainly American customers. The results suggested that strategic deception increases the experience of cognitive dissonance while negatively impacting psychological well-being and intrinsic work motivation. The results also showed that dissonance negatively influences well-being and intrinsic motivation and partially mediates the deception-motivation relationship. Unlike previous findings, however, our multivariate analyses revealed that well-being and motivation were not correlated. Our original findings have theoretical and practical implications.