Communications Psychology最新文献

Past research showed that personality traits develop less strongly after younger adulthood, though the underlying processes remain poorly understood, and personality intervention studies scarcely investigated age differences. Also, existing findings are mostly limited to explicit assessments of personality traits (i.e., questionnaires). In this preregistered, multi-method study, we examined associations between changes in personality states and explicit and implicit trait self-concepts of emotional stability and extraversion throughout an 8-week socio-emotional intervention, 3 and 12 months later. The sample consisted of younger and older adults (N = 165, age range = 19-78 years). Findings indicate changes in personality states, explicit self-concepts for both traits, and the implicit self-concept of extraversion. Only state changes in emotional stability predicted changes in the corresponding explicit but not implicit trait self-concept. Importantly, the effects were consistent across age groups, and exploratory analyses showed higher engagement among older adults throughout the intervention. The findings emphasize that older adults might benefit as much from socio-emotional interventions as younger adults, and potential age differences in skill acquisition might be set off through engagement.

Emotion expressions constitute a vital channel for communication, coordination and connection with others, but despite such valuable functions, people sometimes engage in expressive suppression or substitution (expressing emotions they do not genuinely feel). Yet, how exactly do people decide when and what to express? To answer this question, we developed a computational model that casts emotion expressions as value-based communicative decisions. Our model reveals that while people (N = 254) indeed tended to suppress expressions of anger towards others in anticipation of potential social costs as past work theorizes, they also engaged in other nuanced forms of expressive regulation, especially when their reputation was at stake. Most strikingly, people selectively exaggerated/suppressed expressions of happiness when others made more/less equitable choices, seemingly to communicate stronger normative preferences for fairness than they privately held. Together, these findings yield insights into how people regulate their emotion expressions, providing a mechanistic and unified account of the different expressive behaviors people flexibly engage in to navigate their complex social interactions with others.

Real-life social interactions often unfold continuously and involve dynamic cooperation and competition, yet most studies rely on discrete games that do not capture the adaptive and graded nature of continuous sensorimotor decisions. To address this gap, we developed the Cooperation-Competition Foraging game-an ecologically grounded paradigm in which pairs of participants (dyads) navigate a continuous shared space under face-to-face visibility, deciding in real-time to collect rewarded targets either individually or jointly. Dyads (n = 58, 116 participants) spontaneously converged on distinct stable strategies along the cooperation-competition spectrum, forming three groups: cooperative, intermediate, and competitive. Despite the behavioral complexity, our computational model, which incorporated travel path minimization, sensorimotor communication, and recent choice history, predicted dyadic decisions with 87% accuracy, and linked prediction certainty with ensuing dynamics of spatiotemporal coordination. Further modeling revealed how sensorimotor factors, such as movement speed and skill, shape distinct strategies and payoffs. Crucially, we quantify the cost of cooperation, demonstrating that in many dyads prosocial tendencies outweigh the individual benefits of exploiting skill advantages. Our versatile framework provides a predictive, mechanistic account of how social and embodied drivers promote the emergence of dynamic cooperation and competition, and offers rigorous metrics for investigating the neural basis of naturalistic social interactions, and for linking personality traits to distinct strategies.

This study adopted a within-person lens to unpack parental burnout and genuine emotional expression, focusing on their interplay and dynamic patterns - inertia, variability, and person-specific mean - during the Christmas season, an emotionally charged period that offers a valuable time window to study affective dynamics in parenting. Using the experience sampling method, we conducted a 35-day real-time study with 293 U.K. parents (14,451 observations), supplemented by baseline and follow-up assessments. Dynamic structural equation modeling was used to test reciprocal within-person relations between both constructs over time, to assess individual differences in dynamic patterns, and to explore whether these patterns mediated changes in burnout and expression from baseline to follow-up. Results revealed a negative, unidirectional within-person association from parental burnout to genuine expression. Individual differences were found in inertia, variability, and person-specific mean levels for both constructs. Notably, these person-specific mean levels mediated the links between baseline and follow-up levels of parental burnout and genuine expression. These findings offer insights into how short-term dynamics in parental burnout and genuine expression shape longer-term affective (mal)adjustment. They suggest that future intervention programs could benefit from being personalized and delivered in real time, targeting emotion regulation and burnout recovery in parents, particularly during emotionally intense periods such as the holiday season.

Mitigating climate change requires individuals to adopt more pro-environmental behaviours, many of which come at a personal cost. Costs such as the time and effort associated with certain behaviours are integral to everyday decision-making and can significantly shape people's motivation to act. In this preregistered study, we employed an experimental paradigm designed to quantify how people discount effort (measured via a grip-force device) and time (operationalised as waiting time) for self-benefitting and pro-environmental outcomes. Participants (n = 74) could earn monetary rewards for themselves (in half of the trials) and for reducing carbon emissions (in the other half). We observed a higher willingness to incur time and effort costs for self-benefitting than for pro-environmental outcomes, in particular when the rewards offered were higher. Moreover, computational modelling revealed rewards were discounted nonlinearly by both time and effort: effort discounting was best described by a parabolic function, and temporal discounting by a hyperbolic function. Finally, when linking experimental behaviour to self-report measures, we found that participants who were more motivated to invest time and effort for the environment also reported greater willingness to support costly climate change mitigation policies, whereas climate change beliefs were not significantly associated with the cost-incurring task behaviour. Our approach highlights differences in how individuals respond to costs associated with personal vs environmental benefits and presents a promising tool for further research on environmental decision-making.

Extant research suggests that disaster exposure may induce unhealthy behavior, such as smoking, drinking, and eating disorder symptoms in survivors; however, the underlying the mechanisms of such behavior remain unclear. Using two field experiments in two separate disaster-affected communities in Japan (N = 337) and the Philippines (N = 187), this study found that scarcity and reinforced present-bias were associated with disaster experiences and unhealthy behavior in both locations. These experiments were conducted twice (i.e., 2-3 years and 6 years post-disaster), allowing us to examine the enduring impact of these disasters. Disaster survivors became consistently present-biased, which in turn explains variance in individuals' health-related decisions, such as body mass index, smoking, and drinking.

Despite the urgent need to improve social connection, practical evidence-based recommendations on how to do so during daily interactions are lacking. One key behavior theorized to facilitate social connection is high-quality listening, yet behavioral evidence is limited. Across two pre-registered studies, we tested whether observed high-quality listening behaviors during conversations between strangers are associated with behavioral and subjective markers of social connection, and whether listening behaviors account for the effectiveness of simple interventions aimed at increasing social connection. Pairs of strangers conversed in either a 10-minute semi-structured conversation ("deep talk"; Study 1) or a brief, "small talk" opportunity (Study 2) following a randomized social connectedness intervention (total N = 646). In Study 1, we found that the frequency of verbal listening behaviors (i.e., verbal validation, follow-up questions) predicted faster conversational response times and other markers of social connection (i.e., 3^rd party observers and self- and partner-reports). Additionally, people randomized to a social connectedness intervention (vs. active control) asked their partner more follow-up questions (i.e., displayed high-quality listening behavior), which in turn, predicted increased social connection. We replicated and extended Study 1 to small talk conversations and found global listening behaviors also predicted behavioral and partner-reported social connection. Verbal listening indicators, however, were less consistently linked to markers of social connection and no evidence emerged that the intervention increased listening behaviors during small talk. Findings suggest observable high-quality listening behaviors may be a promising route to fostering social connection and may enhance the effectiveness of interventions aimed at improving social connection.

Young infants can change their behaviour and learn through interactions with novel environments. This ability has been demonstrated through group-averaged analyses. However, it remains unclear whether averaged behavioural changes accurately capture the diverse changes occurring at the individual level. To address this, we measured limb movement alterations in 185 infants aged 2 to 3 months before and after their arm was tethered to an overhead mobile and analysed individual differences in addition to conventional group analyses. While the group-averaged data showed a gradual increase in arm movements, individual learning curves rarely exhibited such simple gradual increases and instead displayed more complex patterns. To disentangle the complex movement patterns, we applied time-series clustering and dynamical systems modelling to our large-scale dataset. As a result, the infants were divided into distinct clusters with significant differences in spontaneous movements before learning, rather than after. A dynamical systems model further demonstrated that only differences in spontaneous movements could explain the diversity of overall behavioural changes. These findings indicate that the varying degrees of behavioural change reflect infants' unique learning processes rather than their learning capabilities. Furthermore, learning, as a process that reduces individual difference, suggest that infants harness their unique spontaneous movements to acquire instrumental behaviours.

Metabolic and depressive disorders are major chronic global health concerns, often co-occurring and mutually reinforcing each other. Thus, understanding risk and protective factors underlying their development is crucial for identifying effective preventive strategies. Participants included N = 10,446 participants (31,418 observations) from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study aged 10-15 years. Primary outcomes were internalizing problem scores, and random slopes quantifying the within-person coupling between waist-to-height ratio and internalizing problems. Predictors included early-life adversity measures and potentially protective environments measured at the family, community, peer, and school level. Early-life adversity and protective environment scores were examined as moderators of the coupling between body composition and internalizing problems. Early-life adversity was significantly associated with the magnitude of within-person coupling (random slope); individuals with higher early-life adversity exhibited a stronger coupling between waist-to-height ratio and internalizing problems (r²=4.6%, t = 26.6, p < 10^-¹⁰). The adversity-related amplification of waist-to-height ratio and internalizing coupling was mitigated by the protective environment score (t = -5.3, p < 10^-6), with family and community components showing the strongest effects. Early-life adversity intensifies the coupling between waist-to-height ratio and internalizing problems, but protective environments may mitigate these effects. These findings motivate research into interventions that reduce early adversity and strengthen protective environments to improve youth mental and physical health.