Communications Psychology最新文献

Youth are often framed as victims or perpetrators of conflict. Yet, they also can disrupt conflict cycles as peacebuilders. Motivated by SDG 16 and UN Security Council Resolutions 2250, 2419, and 2535 - recognising and facilitating youth participation in fostering peace and social inclusion - we developed and validated a global Youth Peacebuilding Beliefs Scale (YPBS), a novel measure of different types of peacebuilding across levels of the social ecology (i.e., microsystem, mesosystem, and macrosystem). We used a sequential mixed-methods, cross-cultural design with adolescents (ages 14-17) and young adults (ages 18-26) across two studies (Study 1: Focus groups, N = 199, Northern Ireland n = 78, Colombia n = 60, Israel n = 41, Switzerland n = 20; Study 2: Survey, N = 2771, Northern Ireland n = 514, Colombia n = 806, Israel n = 833, Switzerland n = 618) across four diverse cases to explore youth's contributions along the peace continuum from active conflict to stable democracy. The YPBS provided an empirical test of the Developmental Peacebuilding Model and can be used by policymakers and researchers to support youth-driven quality peace.

Aging doesn't just dull our memories; it destabilizes our emotions while further impairing sleep quantity and NREM sleep quality. Emotional dysregulation and anxiety symptoms in older adults accelerate their risk of cognitive decline and dementia, yet the underlying mechanisms remain largely unclear. In young adults, reductions in deep sleep, specifically the loss of slow wave activity (SWA) during non-REM sleep, impair the brain's ability to regulate anxiety overnight. This raises a testable hypothesis: Does age-related decline in SWA contribute to increased anxiety symptoms in older adults? We test this hypothesis in 61 cognitively healthy older adults (>65 y) experiencing varying levels of anxiety. Each participant underwent polysomnography-recorded sleep in the lab, followed by a structural MRI the next morning to assess atrophy in anxiety-sensitive brain regions. A subset of 24 participants was tracked longitudinally over 4 ± 2.02 years. The findings were consistent. Greater impairment in nighttime SWA predicted higher next-day anxiety in older adults, both at baseline and at follow-up. Brain imaging revealed the mechanism: atrophy in key emotion-processing regions was associated with reduced capacity to generate robust slow waves needed for overnight anxiety regulation. Critically, mediation analysis showed that impaired SWA fully accounted for the relationship between regional atrophy and disrupted overnight anxiety regulation. These findings suggest that even in the presence of age-related brain atrophy, intact SWA may preserve emotional stability by rescuing the brain's nightly emotional recalibration process, protecting mental health in aging populations.

Loneliness is increasingly recognized not only as a stable trait but also as a dynamic affective process, marked by short-term fluctuations in mood, social perception, and behavior. This study examined how self-reported experiences of loneliness, perceived rejection, and social behavior unfold across time in daily life. A community sample of 157 midlife adults completed ecological momentary assessments five times daily for 20 days, reporting on feelings of loneliness, social threat, self-disclosure, and interaction frequency. Dynamic structural equation and multilevel models demonstrated reciprocal associations between momentary loneliness and perceived rejection. Greater variability in loneliness was associated with more unstable threat appraisals, and increases in loneliness predicted subsequent reductions in both social interaction and self-disclosure. These within-person dynamics were moderated by trait loneliness: individuals higher in trait loneliness exhibited more persistent loneliness, stronger coupling between loneliness and perceived rejection, and greater social withdrawal. Findings support a multi-timescale framework in which recursive patterns of emotion, perception, and behavior contribute to the maintenance of loneliness in everyday life.

Well-being is commonly defined in terms of comfort, happiness, functioning, and flourishing. Scholars distinguish between subjective well-being (i.e., perceiving life as pleasant) and psychological well-being (i.e., perceiving life as meaningful). While advances in natural language processing have enabled automated assessments of subjective well-being from language, their ability to capture psychological well-being remains underexplored. Across three studies (one preregistered), we examined how well language-based models predict self-reported subjective and psychological well-being. Participants provided verbal or written responses about their satisfaction with life and autonomy, along with standard questionnaire measures. We used contextual word embeddings from transformer-based models to predict well-being scores. Language-based predictions correlated moderately with questionnaire measures of both constructs (rs = .16-.63) and generalized across well-being domains (rs = .15-.50), though these associations were weaker than previously work (rs = .72-.85). Autonomy was consistently less predictable than satisfaction with life. Comparisons with GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 revealed that both models outperformed BERT in predicting satisfaction with life (r = .71 and .75) and modestly improved predictions of autonomy (r_GPT‑4 = .49). Supervised dimension projections revealed that satisfaction with life responses clustered around positive emotion and social themes, whereas autonomy responses showed more individualized linguistic patterns. These findings suggest that language-based tools are well-suited for assessing hedonic well-being but face challenges with more abstract, eudaimonic constructs. Future research should refine modeling approaches to enhance the detection of complex psychological states while striking a balance between interpretability, accuracy, and usability.

People's subjective conceptions of truth and honesty have undergone significant changes in recent decades. Parts of society increasingly favour the sincere expression of personal belief, however inaccurate, as a marker of honesty over verifiable facts. At the same time, political elites in many democracies have been increasingly violating democratic norms. Those violations have been identified as a major contributor to democratic backsliding, highlighting the need for a thorough examination of the nexus between democratic norm violations and conceptions of honesty. We present a series of four preregistered experiments (total n = 1537) that examined the conditions under which people acquiesce to democratic norm violations and politicians' dishonesty. We find that when participants are asked to take a perspective of honesty that emphasises sincerity over accuracy, which we call "belief-speaking", they are more willing to accept norm violations by politicians than if participants take a perspective that emphasizes accuracy as a criterion for honesty, which we call "fact-speaking". When a fictitious politician is presented as telling untruths, tolerance of norm violations is reduced compared to when the politician is presented as truthful. The findings highlight the need to develop a better understanding of how individuals interpret and respond to political leaders' behaviours, especially in a context of widespread democratic backsliding.

Interoception, the perception of internal bodily signals, is thought to be fundamental for emotional regulation and cognitive functioning. While previous studies have indicated a degree of shared variance in interoceptive processes across cardiac and respiratory systems, evidence remains limited due to methodological constraints and small sample sizes. This study aimed to investigate individual differences in cardiac and respiratory interoception, as well as auditory exteroception across sensitivity, precision, and metacognition using consistent psychophysical approaches. In a sample of 241 participants, we found no significant correlations between cardiac and respiratory interoceptive dimensions, with the exception of a modest positive association in subjective confidence. Bayesian analyses provided moderate evidence supporting the absence of correlations across most dimensions except confidence, suggesting that interoceptive processes may be largely modality-specific, while subjective confidence may be more domain-general. These findings refine theoretical models of interoception and highlight the importance of modality-specific psychophysical approaches in both cognitive and clinical research on interoceptive ability.

Recent advances in AI have enabled large language models to produce expressions that seem empathetic to human users, raising scientific and ethical questions about how people perceive and choose between human and AI sources of emotional support. Although an increasing number of studies have examined how people rate empathy generated by AI, little to no work has examined whether people would choose to receive empathy from AI. We conducted four studies investigating whether people prefer to receive empathetic expressions from humans or AI, and how they evaluate these expressions. Across diverse samples and stimuli, we found evidence for what we term the AI empathy choice paradox: participants significantly preferred to receive empathy from humans, yet they rated AI-generated empathetic responses as higher in quality, more effective at making them feel heard, and more effortful when they did choose them. These findings contribute to ongoing debates about AI empathy by demonstrating that while people may avoid AI as an empathy source, they nonetheless benefit from AI empathy when they experience it. Our results suggest potential applications for AI in supplementing human emotional support while highlighting the importance of respecting individual preferences for empathy sources.

The ability to transfer skills is critical for complex performance. However, performance in complex environments is often examined within single levels of analysis, neglecting interactions among characteristics of the task, person, and experience. Here, we examine how intervention-level factors (task consistency, stress), between-person differences (emotion-cognition traits, physiological traits), and within-person fluctuations (amount of practice) jointly influence transfer. Across six rounds of a gamified learning task, participants (N = 241) trained under stress or control conditions and in consistent or inconsistent task environments. They then either continued or switched to the other task environment. Results revealed that task consistency enhanced efficiency during learning, but switching to an inconsistent environment disrupted performance. Patterns in pre- to post-switch performance were shaped by physiological reactivity and emotion-cognition traits, including cognitive reappraisal and intolerance of uncertainty, revealing compensatory adaptations that group-level analyses may obscure. These findings advance existing transfer models by highlighting how emotional and physiological regulation interact with environment.

Anti-fat attitudes are pervasive and contribute to deleterious social and health outcomes. The following research investigates perceptual exposure (i.e., visual exposure to larger bodies) as a potential mechanism for reducing anti-fat attitudes across various contexts and methodologies. Perceptual exposure in primary environments (i.e., the body sizes of people encountered in daily life) was examined using aggregated county-level data from the United States. Regions with higher adult obesity rates, indicating greater exposure to larger bodies, were associated with lower explicit but higher implicit anti-fat attitudes. Perceptual exposure in media (i.e., the body sizes of people in advertisements) was assessed using France's ban on extremely thin fashion models. Prior to the ban, explicit anti-fat attitudes increased over time. Following the ban, and coinciding with increased representation of larger bodies in French media, explicit anti-fat attitudes decreased. The impact on implicit attitudes was inconsistent. To test the mechanism underlying the relationship between perceptual exposure and attitudes, a two-week longitudinal experiment exposed participants to thin or fat bodies for three minutes daily. Exposure to fat bodies increased the threshold for categorizing bodies as fat, whereas exposure to thin bodies lowered it. Attitudes did not significantly change after two weeks. Together, these findings suggest that perceptual exposure influences body size categorization thresholds and may, over time, contribute to improvements in explicit anti-fat attitudes. The differential effects on explicit and implicit attitudes, as well as limitations and future directions, are discussed.