Communications Psychology最新文献

Whether psychosocial interventions containing active psychological components prolong survival in cancer patients has been studied for decades, yet findings from primary (RCTs) and secondary research (meta-analyses) remain inconclusive. Our preregistered systematic review, meta-analysis, and multiverse meta-analysis aimed to clarify this research question using contemporary methods of research synthesis. We searched Web of Science, Scopus, MEDLINE, PsycINFO, Embase, and Google Scholar for RCTs of structured psychosocial interventions for cancer patients published until October 17, 2025. We calculated the overall effect; assessed its robustness; estimated a median survival benefit, characterized the psychological components included in the interventions; examined risk of bias, study quality, meta-analytic post hoc power, and sponsorship bias; explored 25 substantive and methodological moderators; and considered publication bias as well as p-hacking. Using multiverse meta-analysis, we calculated multiple overall effects based on reasonable specifications employed in prior meta-analyses (descriptive analysis) and compared them with the 95% CI band of 1000 simulated overall effects assuming no true effect (inferential analysis). Psychosocial interventions, provided alongside medical treatment, demonstrated a small, positive and robust overall effect on survival in cancer patients, with an HR of 0.80, 95% CI [0.71, 0.90] across 32 RCTs comprising 5704 participants. Heterogeneity was moderate to substantial with an I² = 48% and a wide 95% PI (HR 0.49-1.29). Median survival time benefit was estimated at 3.9 months, 95% CI [ - 0.7, 8.5], based on data from 16 trials. The psychological components most frequently applied were educational, cognitive-behavioral, emotionally expressive, and group-based social support. Low average meta-analytic post hoc power (17%) likely contributed to inconsistent findings among trials. Multiverse meta-analysis confirmed the presence of a general overall survival effect and indicated that previously conflicting meta-analytic conclusions primarily stemmed from differences in effect size metrics and analytic decisions. Psychosocial (psychological) interventions appear to improve survival in cancer patients, with effect sizes comparable in magnitude to effects previously reported in the literature for medical cancer treatments such as chemo-, radio-, and hormone therapy. The certainty of evidence was rated moderate, primarily due to statistical heterogeneity, hence effects might not generalize equally to all populations. Considering survival impact, established psychological benefits, favorable safety profile, and comparatively low cost, the findings support a paradigm shift toward establishing psychosocial interventions alongside medical therapy as a standard component of comprehensive cancer care; potentially guiding future research and clinical practice.

Prior research shows that individuals with higher cognitive ability tend to be more patient and less risk-averse, while childhood environments also exert a strong influence on the development of these preferences. This raises the question of whether associations between cognition and economic preferences are consistent across early-life contexts. I test this using incentivized experimental ($N=$ 624) and survey ($N=$ 5,881; 11,521 person-wave observations) measures of risk and time preferences, detailed indicators of childhood environments, and a polygenic score for educational attainment-capturing genetic variances associated with cognitive and non-cognitive traits relevant to educational success. I find that genetic variance related to educational success is associated with lower risk aversion and greater patience, but only among individuals raised in more advantaged childhood environments. Among those who experienced childhood adversity, this genetic variance instead predicts greater risk aversion, and its association with patience is substantially attenuated. These patterns suggest that early adversity may canalize, constrain, or redirect the developmental expression of cognitive-relevant genetic variances in ways that are adaptive to context. Causal research is needed to ascertain if such environmentally contingent expression of genetic variances can reinforce patterns of social immobility.

Anxiety has been linked to increased generalisation of threat expectations to perceptually similar stimuli. Such generalisation can arise either from a failure to distinguish threatening from non-threatening stimuli (perceptual mechanism) or from the transfer of learned values between stimuli (value-based mechanism). Yet, how these mechanisms contribute to generalisation remains unclear. Here we assess how participants (n = 140) generalise outcome expectancies to perceptually similar stimuli, using personalised stimulus spaces. Computational modelling revealed that individuals differ in the extent to which they generalise value and in the underlying value function. We further found that stronger generalisation in trait anxiety was best explained by greater reliance on value transfer. In this work, we characterise individual differences in the generalisation of aversive stimuli and link stronger generalisation in trait anxiety to preferential reliance on value transfer.

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.

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.

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.

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.