Communications Psychology最新文献

Studies investigating the link between school achievement and social networks have shown that both cognitive and non-cognitive factors are integral to academic success. However, these investigations have predominantly been confined by two limitations: 1) they rarely combine cognitive and social data from the same individuals, and 2) when incorporating social data, it is often unidimensional, focusing only on a single type of relationship among children, such as friendship networks or time spent together. This research builds on prior findings by considering cognitive and social data, including preferences for schoolwork relations, leisure/play relations, and friendships, of nearly 5,000 students from Catalonia (Spain) aged 6 through 15. Our findings indicate that children prefer to interact with those who exhibit similar cognitive profiles, but that their preferences diverge between schoolwork and play-related relations during both primary and secondary school. The diverging preferences of children of older ages suggest a greater understanding of the different purposes and expectations of various social interactions.

Students who are the first in their family to go to college represent an essential pool of STEM talent, yet they are often underrepresented in STEM fields. In this study, we examined how faculty research mentors' beliefs about whether brilliance is required for success (brilliance beliefs) shape students' beliefs about who is allowed to be successful in STEM and, in turn, the extent to which they see science as an important part of who they are. Data from 3 universities involving 117 faculty mentors and 670 student researchers demonstrated that first-generation college students working with faculty mentors who held lesser brilliance beliefs expressed broader views about who can be successful in STEM and subsequently identified more as scientists three months later. Further, the more students identified as scientists the more they reported commitment to pursuing STEM careers. There were not statistically significant relationships between faculty brilliance beliefs and continuing-generation students' beliefs about who can be successful in STEM nor their science identity. These findings indicate that within faculty-led research labs - where participation is essential for STEM career advancement - faculty beliefs about who can participate and be successful in STEM can either undermine or promote equitable opportunities for first-generation college students to develop an identity in science that would motivate long-term STEM persistence.

Cooperation is essential for human societies, but not all individuals cooperate to the same degree. This is typically attributed to individual motives - for example, to be prosocial or to avoid risks. Here, we investigate whether cooperative behavior can, in addition, reflect what people pay attention to and whether cooperation may therefore be influenced by manipulations that direct attention. We first analyze the attentional patterns of participants playing one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma games and find that choices indeed relate systematically to attention to specific social outcomes, as well as to individual eye movement patterns reflecting attentional strategies. To test for the causal impact of attention independently of participants' prosocial and risk attitudes, we manipulate the task display and find that cooperation is enhanced when displays facilitate attention to others' outcomes. Machine learning classifiers trained on these attentional patterns confirm that attentional strategies measured using eye-tracking can accurately predict cooperation out-of-sample. Our findings demonstrate that theories of cooperation can benefit from incorporating attention and that attentional interventions can improve cooperative outcomes.

Third-party punishment of unfairness shows striking cross-societal variation in adults, yet we know little about where and when in development this variation starts to emerge. When do children across societies begin to pay a cost to prevent unfair sharing? We present an experimental study of third-party punishment of unfair sharing across N = 535 children aged 5-15 from communities in six diverse countries: Canada, India, Peru, Uganda, USA, and Vanuatu. We tested whether children were more likely to punish equal or selfish (maximally unequal) distributions between two absent peers. We also tested whether decisions depended on whether such punishment was costly-participants had to sacrifice their own rewards to punish-or free. Our study generated three main findings. First, children across societies engaged in third-party punishment of selfishness: they were more likely to punish selfish than equal distributions. Second, older children were more likely than younger children to punish selfish sharing in Canada, India, Peru, and the USA. Third, children in Canada and the USA punished more in general in the Free condition than in the Costly condition, whereas children in Uganda punished selfishness more in the Costly condition. These findings show that children from six diverse societal contexts consistently took a stance against unfair sharing, in some cases even sacrificing their own rewards to intervene against selfishness in their peers. We highlight and discuss similarities and differences in cross-societal patterns of age-related differences in third-party punishment and suggest potential explanations for these patterns.

Perception of a continuous world relies on our ability to integrate discontinuous sensory signals when we make saccadic eye movements, which abruptly change the retinal image. Here we investigate the role of oscillations in integrating pre-saccadic information with the current sensory signals. We presented to participants (N = 24) a brief pre-saccadic Gabor stimulus (termed the inducer) before voluntary 16° saccades, followed by a test Gabor stimulus at various times before or after saccadic onset. Orientation judgments of the test stimulus were biased towards the orientation of both the inducer and previous (1-back) test stimulus, consistent with serial dependence. In addition to the average bias, judgments oscillated in synchrony with saccadic onset at alpha frequencies (~9.5 Hz) towards the orientation of the inducer or 1-back stimulus. There was also a strong bias towards the mean orientation (central tendency): however, that bias was constant over time, not associated with saccade-synched oscillations. Perceptual oscillations in serial dependence (but not central tendency) suggest that alpha rhythms may be instrumental in communicating short-term (but not long-term) perceptual memory across saccades, helping to preserve stability during saccades. The distinction between the modes of communicating short- and long-term memory suggests that the two phenomena are mediated by distinct neuronal circuitry.

Excessive smartphone use has been linked to negative psychological outcomes and may also be associated with cognitive impairments and disruptions in mind-body interaction, though the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Here, we investigated attentional bias towards marginal smartphone stimuli and its relationship with interoceptive awareness and physiological cue reactivity in healthy young adults. Fifty-eight participants completed a letter detection task with varying perceptual loads, during which task-irrelevant smartphone-related or scrambled images were presented in the background. Cardiac responses were recorded to assess physiological reactivity. Participants also completed two questionnaires for interoceptive awareness and self-report smartphone addiction. Using a designed and automated clustering based on behavioural responses, participants were classified into two groups: one group exhibited distraction from smartphone background only under low perceptual load, while the other showed consistent attentional bias regardless of load. Notably, the latter group reported significantly lower interoceptive awareness and higher smartphone addiction scores. Additionally, they exhibited heart rate acceleration in response to smartphone stimuli, indicating heightened arousal, whereas the former group showed heart rate deceleration. These findings demonstrate that consistent attentional bias towards smartphone stimuli is associated with reduced interoceptive awareness, specifically a decreased tendency to notice and trust internal bodily sensations, and increased physiological reactivity.

This pre-registered systematic review aimed to examine whether online support groups affect the health and wellbeing of individuals with a chronic condition, and what mechanisms may influence such effects. In September 2024, literature searches were conducted across electronic databases (Medline, Embase, PsycInfo, Web of Science and Google Scholar), pre-publication websites (MedRxiv and PsyArXiv) and grey literature websites. Qualitative and quantitative studies were included if they explored the impact of online support groups on the health and wellbeing outcomes of individuals with a chronic condition. The Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool was used to appraise the quality of the included studies. In total 100 papers met the inclusion criteria with their findings presented in a thematic synthesis. Health and wellbeing outcomes were categorised as: physical health, mental health, quality of life, social wellbeing, behaviour and decision-making, and adjustment. Mechanisms reported in these studies related to exchanging support, sharing experiences, content expression, and social comparison. User and group characteristics were also explored. The included studies suggest that online support groups can have a positive impact on social wellbeing, behaviour, and adjustment, with inconclusive findings for physical health and quality of life. However, there is also the possibility of a negative effect on anxiety and distress, particularly when exposed to other group members' difficult experiences. Research comparing different online group features, such as platforms, size, and duration is needed. In particular, future research should be experimental to overcome the limitations of some of the cross-sectional designs of the included studies. The review was funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research Health Protection Research in Emergency Preparedness and Response. Pre-registration ID: CRD42023399258.

It is well known that sensory information from one modality can automatically affect judgments from a different sensory modality. However, it remains unclear what determines the strength of the influence of an irrelevant sensory cue from one modality on a perceptual judgment for a different modality. Here we test whether the strength of multisensory impact by an irrelevant sensory cue depends on participants' objective accuracy or subjective confidence for that cue. We created visual motion stimuli with low vs. high overall motion energy, where high-energy stimuli yielded higher confidence but lower accuracy in a visual-only task. We then tested the impact of the low- and high-energy visual stimuli on auditory motion perception in 99 participants. We found that the high-energy visual stimuli influenced the auditory motion judgments more strongly than the low-energy visual stimuli, consistent with their higher confidence but contrary to their lower accuracy. A computational model assuming common principles underlying confidence reports and multisensory integration captured these effects. Our findings show that automatic multisensory integration follows subjective confidence rather than objective performance and suggest the existence of common computations across vastly different stages of perceptual decision making.

Compositionality is a means of constructing complex objects through the transformation and combination of simpler elements. While it is common to view compositionality as inherently complex, and thus to assume that compositionality is a byproduct of advanced language expertise, we argue otherwise. We propose that, although compositionality produces complex outcomes, the underlying processes are simple and can often be reduced to the general mechanism of function application. Accordingly, we explore the origins of compositionality not only in compositional language but also, and at an earlier stage, in the development of compositional representations and thoughts in young infants. Infants correctly composed simple noun-verb sentences at 14 months, facial expressions with objects at 12 months, and mental physical transformations at 10 months. This offers evidence for function application, the essence of compositionality, in infancy-emerging well before and outside the development of compositional language.

A diverse portfolio of social relationships matters for people's wellbeing, including both strong, secure relationships with others ('close ties') and casual interactions with acquaintances and strangers ('weak ties'). Almost all of autism research has focused on Autistic people's close ties with friends, family and intimate partners, resulting in a radically constrained understanding of Autistic sociality. Here, we sought to understand the potential power of weak-tie interactions by drawing on 95 semi-structured interviews with Autistic young people and adults conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic. We analysed the qualitative data using reflexive thematic analysis within an essentialist framework. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, Autistic people deeply missed not only their close personal relationships but also their "incidental social contact" with acquaintances and strangers. These weak-tie interactions appear to serve similar functions for Autistic people as they do for non-autistic people, including promoting wellbeing. These findings have important implications both for future research into Autistic sociality and for the design of practical services and supports to enhance Autistic people's opportunities to flourish.