Communications Psychology最新文献

The practice of microtargeting in politics, involving tailoring persuasive messages to individuals based on personal vulnerabilities, has raised manipulation concerns. As microtargeting's persuasive benefits are well-established and its use facilitated by AI tools and personality-inference models, ethical and regulatory concerns are magnified. Here, we explore countering microtargeting effects by creating a warning signal deployed when users encounter personality-tailored political ads. Three studies evaluated the effectiveness of warning "popups" against potential microtargeting by comparing persuasiveness of targeted vs. non-targeted messages with and without popups. Using within subject-designs, Studies 1 (N = 666), 2a (N = 432), and 2b (N = 669) reveal a targeting effect, with targeted ads deemed more persuasive than non-targeted ones. More important, the presence of a warning popup had no meaningful impact on persuasiveness. Overall, across the three studies, personality-targeted ads were significantly more persuasive than non-targeted ones, and this advantage persisted despite warnings. Given the focus on transparency in initiatives like the EU's AI Act, our finding that warnings have little effect has potential policy implications.

Cognitive reserve, a component of resilience, may be conceptualized as the ability to overcome accumulating neuropathology and maintain healthy aging and function. However, research measuring and evaluating it in American Indians is needed. We recruited American Indians from 3 regional centers for longitudinal examinations (2010-13, n = 818; 2017-19, n = 403) including MRI, cognitive, clinical, and questionnaire data. We defined cognitive reserve by measuring the residual from individual regressions of cognitive tests over imaged brain volumes, adjusted for age and sex. Analyses examined three different metrics of cognitive reserve against sociodemographic, clinical, and longitudinal cognitive data in causal mediation models. Better cognitive reserve was significantly associated with more education, higher income, lower prevalence of depression, lower prevalence of diabetes, and lower prevalence of kidney disease, but we found no statistically significant evidence for an association with plasma biomarkers for Alzheimer's disease and related dementias, APOE e4 carrier status, alcohol use, body mass, or hypertension. Better cognitive reserve was associated with better cognitive function over mean 6.7 years follow-up (range 4-9 years); and the association for education with cognition over time was mediated in part (15-24%) by cognitive reserve. Cognitive reserve, although challenging to measure, appears important for understanding the range of cognitive aging in American Indians.

We investigate the role of values in motivating the dissolution of marriage. Drawing on comprehensive value frameworks, we study how cultural values explain cross-national variation in divorce, how personal values explain further variation within nations, and how the two value systems interact together. In three archival studies, including more than 100,000 participants from over 55 countries, we study attitudes toward divorce as well as actual divorce. We found that divorce was more justifiable and likely in nations emphasizing autonomy values, and among individuals ascribing importance to self-direction, stimulation, and hedonism values. Divorce was less justifiable and likely in nations emphasizing embeddedness values, and among individuals ascribing importance to tradition and conformity values. Overall, the impact of personal values was stronger the more the culture emphasizes autonomy (vs. embeddedness) values. Understanding the role of values in divorce may inform individuals as to the values they desire in their future spouses.

The generation and distribution of hyper-partisan content on social media has gained millions of exposure across platforms, often allowing malevolent actors to influence and disrupt democracies. The spread of this content is facilitated by real users' engaging with it on platforms. The current study tests the efficacy of an 'inoculation' intervention via six online survey-based experiments in the UK and US. Experiments 1-3 (total N = 3276) found that the inoculation significantly reduced self-reported engagement with polarising stimuli. However, Experiments 4-6 (total N = 1878) found no effects on participants' self-produced written text discussing the topic. The implications of these findings are discussed in the context of the literature on polarisation and previous interventions to reduce engagement with disinformation.

Group cooperation is a cornerstone of human society, enabling achievements that surpass individual capabilities. However, groups also define and restrict who benefits from cooperative actions and who does not, raising the question of how to foster cooperation across group boundaries. This study investigates the impact of voluntary mobility across group boundaries on intergroup cooperation. Participants, organized into two groups, decided whether to create benefits for themselves, group members, or everyone. In each round, they were paired with another participant and could reward the other's actions during an 'enforcement stage', allowing for indirect reciprocity. In line with our preregistered hypothesis, when participants interacted only with in-group members, indirect reciprocity enforced group cooperation, while intergroup cooperation declined. Conversely, higher intergroup cooperation emerged when participants were forced to interact solely with out-group members. Crucially, in the free-mobility treatment - where participants could choose whether to meet an in-group or an out-group member in the enforcement stage - intergroup cooperation was significantly higher than when participants were forced to interact only with in-group members, even though most participants endogenously chose to interact with in-group members. A few 'mobile individuals' were sufficient to enforce intergroup cooperation by selectively choosing out-group members, enabling indirect reciprocity to transcend group boundaries. These findings highlight the importance of free intergroup mobility for overcoming the limitations of group cooperation.

Much research in the behavioral sciences aims to characterize the "typical" person. A statistically significant group-averaged effect size is often interpreted as evidence that the typical person shows an effect, but that is only true under certain distributional assumptions for which explicit evidence is rarely presented. Mean effect size varies with both within-participant effect size and population prevalence (proportion of population showing effect). Few studies consider how prevalence affects mean effect size estimates and existing estimators of prevalence are, conversely, confounded by uncertainty about effect size. We introduce a widely applicable Bayesian method, the p-curve mixture model, that jointly estimates prevalence and effect size by probabilistically clustering participant-level data based on their likelihood under a null distribution. Our approach, for which we provide a software tool, outperforms existing prevalence estimation methods when effect size is uncertain and is sensitive to differences in prevalence or effect size across groups or conditions.

Psychological states influence our happiness and productivity; however, estimates of their impact have historically been assumed to be limited by the accuracy with which introspection can quantify them. Over the last two decades, studies have shown that introspective descriptions of psychological states correlate with objective indicators of cognition, including task performance and metrics of brain function, using techniques like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Such evidence suggests it may be possible to quantify the mapping between self-reports of experience and objective representations of those states (e.g., those inferred from measures of brain activity). Here, we used machine learning to show that self-reported descriptions of experiences across tasks can reliably map the objective landscape of task states derived from brain activity. In our study, 194 participants provided descriptions of their psychological states while performing tasks for which the contribution of different brain systems was available from prior fMRI studies. We used machine learning to combine these reports with descriptions of brain function to form a 'state-space' that reliably predicted patterns of brain activity based solely on unseen descriptions of experience (N = 101). Our study demonstrates that introspective reports can share information with the objective task landscape inferred from brain activity.

Postpartum depression and mother-to-infant bonding difficulties (MIBD), two issues crucial to maternal and infant mental health, often coexist and affect each other. Our study aims to dissect their complex relationship through a graphical LASSO network analysis of individual symptoms in 5594 Japanese postpartum women, whose geographical distribution was nationally representative. We identified 'fear', 'enjoyment', 'overwhelm', and 'insomnia' as common bridge symptoms linking postpartum depression and MIBD across three distinct postpartum periods. Moreover, 'self-harm' emerged as a bridge symptom in the first 6 months and the 7-12 month period, while 'laugh' was a bridge symptom in the first 6 months and the 13-24 month period. Notably, 'self-blame' was identified as a unique bridge symptom specific to the 13-24 month period. Our analysis highlights the complexities of symptom connectivity across postpartum stages and underscores the critical need for interventions that address both common and stage-specific bridge symptoms to effectively support maternal mental health and strengthen mother-to-infant bonding.

During impression formation, perceptual cues facilitate social categorization while person-knowledge can promote individuation and enhance person memory. Although there is extensive literature on the cross-race recognition deficit, observed when racial ingroup faces are recognized more than outgroup faces, it is unclear whether a similar deficit exists when recalling individuating information about outgroup members. To better understand how perceived race can bias person memory, the present study examined how self-identified White perceivers' interracial contact impacts learning of perceptual cues and person-knowledge about perceived Black and White others over five sessions of training. While person-knowledge facilitated face recognition accuracy for low-contact perceivers, face recognition accuracy did not differ for high-contact perceivers based on person-knowledge availability. The results indicate a bias towards better recall of ingroup person knowledge, which decreased for high-contact perceivers across the five-day training but simultaneously increased for low-contact perceivers. Overall, the elimination of racial bias in recall of person-knowledge among high-contact perceivers amid a persistent cross-race deficit in face recognition suggests that contact may have a greater impact on the recall of person-knowledge than on face recognition.