Communications Psychology最新文献

People affiliate with others who share their psychological traits. Does the same phenomenon occur with AI instructed to mimic human psychology? Large language models (LLM) were prompted to use language that mimicked anxious symptoms or their absence (Experiment 1; n = 100), extroversion or introversion (Experiment 2; n = 100), and an exact mirror or inverse of participants' personality (preregistered Experiment 3; n = 100). With full knowledge that they were interacting with an artificial system, participants engaged in written interactions with both LLM versions and then evaluated their engagement. Those with anxiety reported a stronger connection to the LLM that mimicked anxiety, a distinction also reflected in the sentiment of the messages they exchanged. Extroverted participants affiliated more with the AI that mimicked extroversion. Finally, when participants interacted with LLMs that mimicked either their own personality profile or the inverse of their personality (i.e., the opposite pattern of their Big-Five scores), they reported more affiliation with the LLM mimicking their personality; this distinction was also reflected in the sentiment of their messages. Results support affiliation in human-AI interactions based on the linguistic presentation of a shared psychology. We propose that through socioaffective tuning, LLMs might achieve greater human-like correspondence.

Amidst growing global challenges, perceptions of human cooperation-a cornerstone of societal progress-appear to be in decline. Despite empirical evidence showing that people in both the USA and China exhibit increased cooperation in experimental games, the public remains convinced that morality and trust-two key ingredients of cooperation-have declined over time. To investigate this paradox, this study examines trends in cooperation that people perceive from the past into the future, along with the reasons they perceive to underlie these trends. We conducted a cross-cultural survey of 628 Americans and 449 Chinese, asking them to estimate the likelihood of others' cooperative behavior in a prisoner's dilemma game and to rate four cooperation-related traits-warmth, morality, assertiveness, and competence-at various times between 1960 and 2030. Participants also provided reasons for their beliefs. Our findings revealed a stable belief in declining cooperative behavior in the game, along with all four traits, with a relatively small decline in competence, in both the USA and China. Moreover, over 60% of respondents believed in a more general decline in cooperation. Declining social trust and increasing stress and wealth were the primary perceived reasons for their beliefs in both countries; also, increasing exposure to social media was a stronger perceived reason for U.S. participants, whereas increasing education was stronger for Chinese participants. This study reveals a widespread belief in the declining cooperation in two of the world's largest nations and highlights the profound influence of sociocultural factors on public beliefs.

Efficient information sampling is crucial for human inference and decision-making even for young children. It is also closely associated with the core symptoms of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), since both the social interaction difficulties and repetitive behaviors suggest that autistic people may sample information from the environment distinctively. However, the specific ways in which autistic children sample information, especially when facing explicit costs and adapting to environmental changes, remain unclear. Thirty-two autistic and 41 IQ-matched neurotypical children aged five to eight participated in a computerized bead task, where children decided to gather samples sequentially from an unknown target to infer which of the two options was the target. Autistic children showed lower sampling efficiency under costly conditions compared to neurotypical peers, resulting from increased variability in sample numbers across trials, rather than solely systematic sampling bias. Computational models indicated that while both groups shared a similar decision process, autistic children's sampling decisions were less influenced by dynamic changes and more by recently gathered evidence. This led to higher sampling variation and lowered the efficiency of autistic children. These findings offer valuable insights into the cognitive mechanisms underlying fundamental behaviors in autistic children.

Who we are at any given moment depends not only on our psychological dispositions but also the situational forces we experience. Here, we explore how stress - an intrapsychic situational force - impacts momentary personality expression. In Study 1 (N = 792), we experimentally induced stress, showing that the experience of stress is causally related to lower levels of state Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and higher levels of state Neuroticism. In Study 2 (N = 713; 17,853 observations), we used experience sampling to capture naturally occurring stress and show that stress is associated with lower levels of state Extraversion and Agreeableness, and higher levels of state Neuroticism and Openness in everyday situations. Notably, across both studies, the associations between stress and personality state expressions are largely robust when accounting for momentary affect. Together, our work highlights stress as a distinct and dynamic driver of personality state variability in everyday life.

Visual inputs during natural perception are highly ambiguous: objects are frequently occluded, lighting conditions vary, and object identification depends significantly on prior experiences. However, why do certain images remain unidentifiable while others can be recognized immediately, and what visual features drive subjective clarification? To address these critical questions, we developed a unique dataset of 1854 ambiguous images and collected more than 100,000 ratings (from a total of 947 participants) evaluating their identifiability before and after seeing undistorted versions of the images. Relating the representations of a brain-inspired neural network model in response to our images with human ratings, we show that subjective identification depends largely on the extent to which higher-level visual features from the original images are preserved in their ambiguous counterparts. In line with these results, an image-level regression analysis showed that the subjective identification of ambiguous images was best explained by high-level visual dimensions. Notably, the predominance of higher-level features over lower-level ones softens after participants disambiguate the images, suggesting that the visual system flexibly shifts between top-down guessing to bottom-up matching after disambiguation. Moreover, we found that the process of ambiguity resolution was accompanied by a notable decrease in semantic distance and a greater consistency in object naming among participants. However, the relationship between information gained after disambiguation and subjective identification was non-linear, indicating that acquiring more information does not necessarily enhance subjective clarity. Instead, we observed a U-shaped relationship, suggesting that subjective identification improves when the acquired information either strongly matches or mismatches prior predictions. Collectively, these findings advance our understanding on how we resolve ambiguity and extract meaning from incomplete visual information.

Short video-based prebunking reduces misinformation susceptibility by forewarning viewers about manipulation tactics. However, its effectiveness across older populations (45 + ), diverse cultures, and election-related misinformation remains unclear. To address this, we conducted 13 surveys across 12 EU nations (N = 19,735), testing three inoculation videos developed for the largest prebunking campaign to date, which reached 120M+ YouTube users before the 2024 EU Elections. These videos targeted three widely used misinformation tactics-scapegoating, decontextualization, and discrediting-which were prevalent across EU nations leading up to the elections. The videos improved manipulation (measured through manipulativeness assessments) and technique (measured through the correct identification of tactics) discernment of manipulative content from non-manipulative content and enhanced sharing decisions. Though effects were small (ds ≈ 0.08-0.38), they were significant across surveys. Longer (50s) videos showed more consistent improvements in discernment than shorter (20s) ones, but both improved technique discernment. Moderation analyses revealed country-level (e.g., education index) and socio-demographic (e.g., personal educational attainment) influences that could inform future interventions. These findings demonstrate that scalable video-based inoculation interventions can be deployed to counter election misinformation across nations, but future work should explore how repeated or context-specific prebunking can sustain resistance to misinformation in diverse electoral and media environments.

Diversity is a hotly debated topic in public discourse, which motivates scholars to investigate how group diversity impacts observers' judgments of the group. Recent findings have suggested a positive link between group diversity and perceived morality of the group because people perceive diverse (vs. non-diverse) groups to be more capable of perspective-taking. However, studies testing this theory have been predominantly conducted in the WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) societies. In this conceptual replication and extension, we tested whether the "diversity → perceived perspective-taking → perceived morality" link could be generalized across societies differing in cultural tightness-looseness (i.e., whether a culture prescribes tight or loose adherence to collective norms). Across five replication studies (N = 3659), we found that while the positive impacts of group diversity on perceived perspective-taking and morality replicated among loose cultures, no credible evidence supported the effects for participants in tight cultures, or those who perceived their culture as tight. By directly manipulating cultural tightness-looseness, we obtained causal evidence that tight (vs. loose) cultural contexts elevate perceived perspective-taking and, subsequently, perceived morality of non-diverse groups, thereby attenuating differences in perceived morality between diverse and non-diverse groups. The results call for more attention to the views of diversity across different cultures.

Electroencephalographic neurofeedback (EEG-NF) has been proposed as a promising technique to modulate brain activity through real-time EEG-based feedback. Alpha neurofeedback in particular is believed to induce rapid self-regulation of brain rhythms, with applications in cognitive enhancement and clinical treatment. However, whether this modulation reflects specific volitional control or non-specific influences remains unresolved. In a preregistered, double-blind, sham-controlled study, we evaluated alpha upregulation in healthy participants receiving either genuine (n = 30) or sham (n = 30) EEG-NF during a single-session design. A third arm composed of a passive control group (n = 32) was also included to differentiate between non-specific influences related or not to the active engagement in EEG-NF. Throughout the session, alpha power increased robustly, yet independently of feedback veracity, engagement in self-regulation, or feedback update frequency. Parallel increases in theta and sensorimotor rhythms further suggest broadband non-specific modulation. Importantly, these results challenge the foundational assumption of EEG-NF: that feedback enables volitional EEG control. Instead, they point to spontaneous repetition-related processes as primary drivers, calling for a critical reassessment of neurofeedback efficacy and its underlying mechanisms.

Movements in humans and other animals are known to be hierarchically organized, with simple movements forming the building blocks to more complex, sequential movements, a phenomenon often referred to as chunking. Neuroimaging studies have highlighted this layered structure, implicating the primary motor cortex in simple movements, and pre-motor and parietal areas in sequences of movements. Behavioral experiments designed to study this hierarchy have required extensive training of simple movement sequences, such as key presses, using error rates and reaction times as indirect markers of chunking. In this work, we provide kinematic evidence that the hierarchical organization of movements naturally emerges during reaching movements toward large targets, without the need for extensive training. Through model-based analyses of the observed trajectories' geometry in a sequential pointing task (N = 20 participants), we infer the underlying hierarchy of the mechanism guiding movement generation. Our results show that most participants adapt their strategy dynamically using hierarchical planning, depending on the sequence. These findings offer insights into the process of chunking, as well as the conditions on how and when humans switch between flat and hierarchical planning during movement.

Individual differences modulate our thoughts and emotional experiences, yet how thought and emotion interact in daily life remains largely unclear. We leverage alexithymia, a trait reflecting atypical emotional awareness, to reveal these interactions in naturalistic settings. Using multi-dimensional experience sampling via smartphones, we captured moment-to-moment thought patterns and concurrent affective states (valence, arousal, stress) in people's daily life (N  =  190 undergraduate students, age range = 18 to 36, 159 females). Using Principal Component Analysis and Linear Mixed Models, we identified four thought dimensions that relate differently to these affective states: future-self orientation, intrusive distraction, sensory engagement, and task-focus. Alexithymia modulated these relationships. High overall alexithymia predicted fewer future-self-oriented thoughts and greater variability in sensory engagement across affective and social contexts, while difficulty identifying feelings selectively reduced future-self orientation during intense sadness, and externally oriented thinking rendered thought patterns less sensitive to affective context. By mapping affective experiences onto thought dimensions, these findings uncover cognitive pathways that connect to emotional well-being, providing a scalable framework for understanding variability in human affective experience.