Journal of Experimental Psychology-Applied最新文献

When one person harms another, the way lay jurors describe the perpetrator's mental state-whether they acted "knowingly" or "recklessly"-can significantly affect their culpability under U.S. criminal law. Five studies conducted in Fall 2017 show that the meanings of these crucial legal terms can shift depending on whether the jury instructions mention an alternative mental state. In Studies 1-3, lay participants, acting as mock jurors, were less likely to say an agent caused a harm "knowingly" when they could instead describe the person as acting "recklessly"-a less severe but still culpable state of mind. This pattern emerged whether or not participants received legal definitions of these terms. In Study 4, mock jurors were less likely to say an agent acted "knowingly" when "recklessly" appeared in the jury instructions as a contrast, even when they did not have any way to attribute the contrast term to the agent. In Study 5, mock jurors were also less likely to say an agent acted "recklessly" when the possibility of acting "negligently" appeared in the jury instructions. These studies provide evidence that "knowingly" and "recklessly" are contrast sensitive-that is, their meanings can shift based on what contrast concept is salient. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

A key component of mindful eating is paying attention to the sensory properties of one's food as one eats ("sensory eating"). Some studies have found this reduces subsequent food intake while others have failed to replicate these effects. We report four laboratory studies that (a) examine effects of sensory eating on subsequent intake and (b) explore potential mechanisms of action. In each study, participants ate a small high-calorie snack with or without sensory eating and, 5-15 min later, were given larger snack portions from which they could eat freely. Sensory eating reduced intake of the second snack and could not be explained by increased sensory-specific satiety or priming of health-related goals. However, this effect disappeared when we controlled eating rate for the first snack. Given evidence that slower eating increases satiation and reduces intake, we conclude that sensory eating reduces intake by slowing eating rate. Exploratory analyses also revealed that (among nondieters) effects of sensory eating were pronounced when participants reported higher hunger. Thus, for weight management, sensory eating may be most beneficial for those who are naturally fast eaters and/or in situations where people are inclined to eat more quickly, for example, when hungry or in a hurry. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Many job stress models emphasize the importance of job control as a resource that promotes well-being and performance. However, research has started to acknowledge that job control can sometimes also have negative effects. Our study adopts a self-control perspective to investigate these possible downsides. We hypothesized that job control should have negative effects on well-being and performance by enhancing self-control demands. However, we expected that only employees with low levels of trait self-control should experience negative effects of high job control due to increased self-control demands. We conducted a workplace simulation with an experimental manipulation of job control (high vs. low). We asked participants to complete an inbox task with work-related email inquiries and measured subjective well-being, as well as heart rate variability (HRV). Furthermore, we analyzed objective task performance. The findings revealed that, for individuals with low levels of trait self-control, job control negatively affected subjective well-being (i.e., anxiety and fatigue), but not HRV, through enhanced self-control demands. Although there was no evidence for mediating effects of self-control demands regarding performance, we found a (direct) moderation of trait self-control and job control in the form of lower performance of individuals with low trait self-control under high job control conditions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

We examined whether the potential to distinguish between accurate and inaccurate decisions on eyewitness lineups could be improved by combining information from three witness behaviors: confidence, decision time, and the language that witnesses use to justify their lineup decisions. We assessed the postdictive potential of these variables for both positive identifications and lineup rejections on both simultaneous and sequential lineups. All three behaviors independently postdicted the accuracy of both positive identifications and lineup rejections for both simultaneous and sequential lineups. The potential to distinguish between accurate and inaccurate lineup decisions was maximized by considering all three variables. Interestingly, the classifier trained to distinguish the language of accurate and inaccurate witnesses appeared to recover a distinction between use of absolute- and relative-judgment strategies. For both simultaneous and sequential lineups, accurate decisions were accompanied by absolute language and inaccurate decisions were accompanied by relative language. The applied implications of this work are clear-accurate witnesses are confident, fast, and reference an absolute-judgment strategy. This work also advances theory on why sequential lineups lead to worse discriminability than do simultaneous lineups. Sequential lineups do not increase use of absolute-judgment strategies, but might make it more difficult to determine the strongest match to memory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Plastic pollution control is imminent, and choosing biodegradable plastic bags instead of ordinary plastic bags is a critical way to control plastic pollution from the consumer side. This study constructs a prediction model of consumers' willingness to use biodegradable plastic bags under the influence of perceived behavioral control based on the stimulus-organism-response model from the consumer perspective's supply and demand sides. The empirical test results from 852 sample data points show that perceived product quality and price recognition have a significant positive effect on the willingness to use biodegradable plastic bags; attitude has a mediating effect on both paths; label cognition does not have a significant effect on the willingness to use biodegradable plastic bags, but label trust can play a mediating role; and the moderating effect of perceived behavioral control is also successfully verified. These findings can provide policy recommendations for promoting consumers' use of biodegradable plastic bags. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Prior research suggests that people often misunderstand visualizations of inflow (e.g., deposits in a banking context) and accumulation (e.g., cumulative savings) in dynamic systems. The present study aimed to examine participants' understanding of accumulation functions and to develop and test the effectiveness of video-based interventions for improving understanding of accumulation. In Experiment 1, we tested the effectiveness of an intervention seated in the context of understanding COVID-19 data. In Experiment 2, we addressed several limitations of Experiment 1 and developed an improved, more general intervention to teach about accumulation in contexts outside of epidemiological data. The two randomized control experiments demonstrated that people fail to understand even simple systems with a single inflow that accumulates over time, with 44%-60% of participants earning a 0% on our pretest measure. However, we also demonstrated that video-based interventions illustrating the relationship between multiple representations of the same underlying data are an effective way to improve the understanding of the relationship between inflow and accumulation, with Experiment 1 suggesting that the effects of our intervention lasted up to 6-7 weeks after testing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Amid a sea of requests for aid, what factors affect decisions to donate? Here, we investigate the efficacy of a manipulation of choice architecture to affect giving: increasing the number of bids available to donors to increase how much they give. Across six experiments (N = 6,153), participants recruited online responded to single- or multiple-bid donation requests. Viewing multiple bids for aid increased both intention to donate and actual donation without decreasing the proportion of people who donated at all. We rule out previously documented heuristics (i.e., 1/n, fairness), anchoring, and agency as explanations for our effect. Finally, we replicate our effect in a natural experiment (N = 10,000 donors): Presenting donors, giving their own money, with multiple bids increased the average donation by $8.77 (a 19.7% increase). Our findings have theoretical implications for invigorating prosocial behavior and offer practical suggestions for how charitable organizations can better engineer solicitations for aid. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

It is commonly claimed that higher domain knowledge enhances new learning-the knowledge-is-power hypothesis. However, a recent meta-analysis (Simonsmeier et al., 2022) has challenged this idea, finding no overall relationship between prior knowledge and new learning across hundreds of highly variable effect sizes. The authors note that this variability and lack of randomized controlled experiments preclude broad claims regarding the influence of prior knowledge on learning. The present study (conducted in 2020) provides an experimental assessment of the causal effect of prior domain knowledge on new learning. Participants were randomly assigned to receive training in one of two academic domains over 3 days before learning new information about topics in both domains for a later test. Training was specific to three of four topics within that domain, allowing the untrained topic in the trained domain to act as a measure of new learning in that domain. New learning, measured as final test performance or knowledge gains, did not differ between the high and low domain knowledge conditions. Experimentally induced prior domain knowledge did not affect new learning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

This eye tracking study run in 2019 examines the learning benefits of two common active learning approaches-generating predictions and retrieval practice-for young children. Both generating predictions and retrieval practice are active learning approaches that involve generating responses and then being provided with the correct information or retrieving previously provided correct information. Participants included 90 children (M_age = 7 years; female = 46, male = 42). Parents reported children's race and ethnicity as follows: 2% Asian/Pacific Islander, 5% African American, 74% Caucasian, 3% other, and 6% identified as two or more categories; demographics largely reflective of the county where the data were collected, but nevertheless the generalizability of these findings to more diverse populations may be limited. In this study, young children learned facts about insects (e.g., "Insects are hard on the outside.") while we measured their attention to the lesson using eye tracking technology. Then their knowledge was assessed on an immediate test. All children were presented with the same materials, but the presentation order was modified based on condition assignment. In the generating predictions condition, children saw examples of animals and were asked if an animal was an insect or they saw animals and were asked to identify which one was the insect, followed by the correct response. In the retrieve condition, the presentation order was reversed such that children first saw the correct response and then were asked if the animal was an insect, or which of two examples was an insect. Results suggest that although retrieval practice results in overall better learning outcomes, generating predictions increased children's attention to the materials (d = 1.92), and among children who were able to maintain attention, learning outcomes were equal among the two conditions in an immediate test. This work highlights the importance of considering student-level factors when deciding the best learning strategies to implement. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

We investigated the influence of childhood poverty on financial decision making under threat by replicating the findings of Griskevicius et al. (2011b), which found that individuals from lower socioeconomic backgrounds tend to make riskier financial decisions and prefer immediate over delayed gratification when exposed to mortality cues. Following an extension of life history theory to individual behaviors, the original research argued that these behaviors reflect a faster and riskier strategy to cope with survival threats. In a preregistered replication using the same procedures and instruments as the original study, we tested this hypothesis with a sample size 14.2 times larger than the original (1,010 vs. 71). We replicated the effect of mortality salience on risk-taking for people who experienced childhood poverty but with a substantially smaller effect size (η² = 0.004 vs. η² = 0.17 in the original). We failed to find any effect on time preferences in contrast to the original study's medium effect size (η² = 0.046). Although our findings partially support the results of Griskevicius et al. (2011b) on poverty and financial decision making, the drastically reduced effect sizes challenge the practical significance of these findings. Our replication results underscore the importance of large sample studies in understanding the effects of childhood socioeconomic status on future life decisions. They also suggest that frameworks beyond life history theory may be needed to reliably capture such relationships. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).