Communications Psychology最新文献

Exposure therapy for the treatment of pain-related disability relies on extinction learning, forming new safety memories inhibiting fear expression. However, fear often returns. The behavioral memory updating hypothesis posits that a fear memory can be 'updated' to a safe memory while in a malleable state, preventing return-of-fear. To test this hypothesis, 78 adolescents with and without chronic pain (age: Mean=15 y, range=10-24 y) were recruited for a two-day neuroimaging study. Due to incomplete data/excess motion, 55 participants (pain=38; pain-free=17) were included in MRI data analysis. Participants underwent a fear conditioning protocol with a within-subjects 'updating' manipulation: one CS+ (CS+Reminded [CS+R]) was reactivated to achieve a malleable state before extinction, while a second (CS+Not Reminded [CS+NR]) was not. We observed significantly less functional connectivity between the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the amygdala for the CS+R and CS- compared to the CS+NR, consistent with the purported change in neural circuitry underlying the 'updating' effect, however observed no credible difference in fear ratings between the CS+R and CS+NR. This discrepancy may be crucial to understanding the mixed findings in the field and indicates that while some form of 'updating' may occur, it may be insufficient to reduce reported fear.

Level and variability are two key aspects of momentary self-esteem that are associated with mental health from early adolescence onwards, but little is known about their determinants. The current study examines how the trait-level use of four emotion regulation strategies-reappraisal, reflection, expressive suppression, social sharing-is associated with the level and variability of momentary self-esteem in the developmentally critical period of adolescence. Using mixed-effects location scale models, we analyzed experience sampling data from 408 adolescents (14-22 years, 81.62% girls) who reported their momentary self-esteem up to 35 times across one week. Two findings stand out: first, adolescents who tended to engage more in reappraisal, reflection, and social sharing to regulate their emotions experienced higher momentary self-esteem levels, whereas those who tended to engage more in expressive suppression experienced lower levels. Second, the tendency to use expressive suppression was consistently linked to more variability in momentary self-esteem. We discuss the contribution of emotion regulation strategies to levels of momentary self-esteem in adolescence and highlight the need for further research into the mechanisms underlying its variability.

When assessing our decisions, the normative strategy involves giving equal weight to each evidence sample when computing confidence. However, recent findings suggest that the brain tends to overweight decision-congruent information when forming confidence judgements (i.e., positive-evidence bias; PEB). Here, we re-analyzed nine datasets (total N = 176) from human participants who judged the average color of eight shapes and gave their confidence. This task precisely allowed us to disentangle the impact of choice-confirming and choice-conflicting evidence on the formation of confidence. Strikingly, participants overly relied on evidence that conflicts with their choice, contrary to the normative model and the PEB. To explain this response-incongruent evidence effect in the computation of confidence, we fitted an extended log-posterior-ratio for confidence model to our data and show that the same robust averaging principle that influences decisions also accounts for these confidence effects: incongruent evidence receives a stronger weight in the computation of confidence because it lies closer to the category boundary around which there is heightened sensitivity. In a preregistered experiment (N = 32), we then empirically demonstrate that an experimentally induced shift in the category boundary affects the computation of confidence in otherwise identical stimuli. We conclude that confidence depends on dis-confirmatory evidence due to downstream consequences from decision-making mechanisms.

This longitudinal study examined the relationship between social connections and personal agency, as well as their association with loneliness over time. Utilizing four waves of data from the Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing, analyses found four distinct prototypes within each data wave that reflect combinations of social connection and personal agency. Subsequent analyses showed that one prototype (low agency, low communion) experienced the highest levels of loneliness, while another (high agency, high communion) reported the lowest. The remaining two prototypes exhibited intermediate loneliness despite differences in the social connection levels between them. Tracking transitions between prototypes across waves revealed that shifts toward less favorable prototypes were associated with increased loneliness, whereas transitions toward more favorable prototypes were associated with reduced loneliness. These findings enhance our understanding of loneliness, an experience generally thought to be driven by relational deficits, highlighting the role of personal agency.

How do we understand actions performed by others? Recent studies suggest that actions can be represented as points in a multidimensional space, where the perceived similarity of two actions is thought to be related to their proximity within this space. Here we present a data-driven approach to reveal key dimensions underlying this space using a carefully selected stimulus database of 768 one-second video clips spanning 256 action categories. We gathered similarity ratings for these videos from 6,036 participants and used a computational modeling procedure to identify key dimensions underlying these ratings. This approach revealed 28 meaningful dimensions (e.g. interaction, sport and craft) which capture information concerning human actions as well as a broad range of related domains (e.g. living and non-living things). Explicit ratings of actions along these dimensions gathered in a separate group of participants revealed a high correlation between ratings and weights along these dimensions, demonstrating that these dimensions are interpretable and can be used by participants. The multidimensional action space established in the current study enables the quantification of the similarity between different actions, which will be useful for the generation of hypotheses and future experimental manipulations. Together, our results provide a window into the nature of the representations underlying the ability to interpret other people's actions and pave the way for future lines of research.

Adaptation to climate change continues to fall short of needs. Emerging research in psychology and other social sciences suggests that hope may be an important emotion and cognitive process for enabling climate action, and for keeping despair at bay. Drawing on and extending this research, we present a theoretical model to show how hope has the capacity to be a powerful driving force for adaptation. We suggest that hope can, in theory, spur adaptation to climate change in situations where individuals and collectives identify adaptation goals and pathways to achieve those goals; and that effective collective adaptation can in turn reinforce hope. We propose a program of systematic research in communities experiencing climate change impacts to assess the relationship between hope and adaptation, and explore conditions where hope could be leveraged to promote much-needed momentum in climate change adaptation.

Past work has long recognized the important role of context in guiding how humans search their memory. While context-based memory models can explain many memory phenomena, it remains unclear why humans develop such architectures over possible alternatives in the first place. In this work, we demonstrate that foundational architectures in neural machine translation - specifically, recurrent neural network (RNN)-based sequence-to-sequence models with attention - exhibit mechanisms that directly correspond to those specified in the Context Maintenance and Retrieval (CMR) model of human memory. Since neural machine translation models have evolved to optimize task performance, their convergence with human memory models provides a deeper understanding of the functional role of context in human memory, as well as presenting alternative ways to model human memory. Leveraging this convergence, we implement a neural machine translation model as a cognitive model of human memory search that is both interpretable and capable of capturing complex dynamics of learning. We show that our model accounts for both averaged and optimal human behavioral patterns as effectively as context-based memory models using a publicly available free recall experiment dataset involving 171 participants. Further, we demonstrate additional strengths of the proposed model by evaluating how memory search performance emerges from the interaction of different model components.

Every social situation that people encounter in their daily lives comes with a set of unwritten rules about what behavior is considered appropriate or inappropriate. These everyday norms can vary across societies: some societies may have more permissive norms in general or for certain behaviors, or for certain behaviors in specific situations. In a preregistered survey of 25,422 participants across 90 societies, we map societal differences in 150 everyday norms and show that they can be explained by how societies prioritize individualizing moral foundations such as care and liberty versus binding moral foundations such as purity. Specifically, societies with more individualistic morality tend to have more permissive norms in general (greater liberty) and especially for behaviors deemed vulgar (less purity), but they exhibit less permissive norms for behaviors perceived to have negative consequences in specific situations (greater care). By comparing our data with available data collected twenty years ago, we find a global pattern of change toward more permissive norms overall but less permissive norms for the most vulgar and inconsiderate behaviors. This study explains how social norms vary across behaviors, situations, societies, and time.

How do people learn about their own abilities? Often, people receive rewards that offer information about their performance level. Yet, even when two people perform equivalently on a task, they may receive disparate rewards. In these cases, could rewards still influence self-evaluations of ability? In two behavioral experiments, we asked whether people feel more capable and confident when they receive more rewards, even when their performance is held constant, and they know how they objectively performed. Participants played a perceptual game in which they received trial-by-trial accuracy feedback; a staircase procedure held their objective performance constant. However, participants were assigned to either a high or low-reward condition, which varied the probability of receiving a reward for a correct answer. In Experiment 1 (N = 340), we found evidence that rewards bias overall self-evaluations of ability after the task-particularly estimations of objective accuracy. Next, in Experiment 2 (N = 342), we examined whether reward feedback would inflate participants' trial-by-trial expectations of their own accuracy before each round of the game. Results indicated that participants updated their expectations to a greater extent when a correct response was accompanied with a reward. These findings suggest that rewards enhance how much people integrate accuracy feedback into their dynamic self-beliefs.