Acta Psychologica最新文献

The spread of health wish rumors (misinformation promising unverified solutions to health threats) poses significant risks to public health decision-making. By integrating rumor typology and the Extended Parallel Process Model (EPPM), this study investigates how fear appeals amplify the Continued Influence Effect (CIE) of health wish rumors and their behavioral consequences. Through two experiments (N = 180), we demonstrate that health wish rumors under fear appeals sustain reliance on corrected falsehoods and increase purchase intentions by leveraging perceived efficacy. Experiment 1 (N = 54 undergraduates) employed a within-subjects design to compare inference scores and purchase intentions among three conditions: fear appeal misinformation correction, general appeal misinformation correction, and no-misinformation control. Linear mixed models revealed fear appeal misinformation corrections yielded significantly higher inference scores (b = 0.96, p < 0.001) and purchase intentions (b = 0.73, p < 0.001) than no-misinformation controls. Experiment 2 (N = 126 diverse adults) replicated these effects and identified perceived efficacy as the critical mediator (CIE: partial mediation, ab = 0.24, 95% CI [0.05, 0.46]; purchase intentions: full mediation, ab = 0.26, 95% CI [0.06, 0.51]), whereas perceived threat showed no mediating role. These findings challenge static rumor typology assumptions by showing that fear contexts override the reputed correctability of health wish rumors. This work reveals how health wish rumors can exploit the persuasiveness of fear appeal by inflating perceived efficacy. It also provides actionable insights for combating real-world health rumors, demonstrating that debunking efforts should prioritize reducing efficacy beliefs about health wish rumors.

Students' negative emotions are likely to arise when they are engaged in writing graduation theses due to intense academic pressure. There have been many studies concerning negative emotions of MA or Ph.D. students in thesis writing but little attention has been paid to undergraduate students in English as a Second Language (ESL) or English as a Foreign Language (EFL) contexts. In this study, a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods was adopted to examine the negative emotions of 113 senior English majors in their undergraduate thesis writing. Results indicate that: (1) Students' negative emotions primarily fall into 4 categories: Self-deficiency Anxiety, Task-induced Stress, Cognitive Fragmentation and Communication Apprehension. (2) Academic publication experience, participation in Innovative Practical Training Program, and English proficiency exert, to some extent, an influence on these negative emotions. (3) The dynamic evolution of negative emotions is characterized by stage-specific differences in occurrence frequency, coexistence or alternation with positive emotions, and diachronic impacts on students. The findings provide valuable insights for alleviating negative emotions of English majors during thesis writing and improving thesis quality.

Internet adaptability on artificial intelligence (AI) healthcare platforms is a key factor influencing users' continued usage and the effectiveness of platform outcomes. It has emerged as a major challenge in the era of digital healthcare transformation. However, it remains unclear to what extent users' Internet adaptability and platform usage behaviors interact, predict each other, and sustain a dynamic pattern of co-evolution. Therefore, this study employed cross-lagged panel network (CLPN) analysis with a multi-wave longitudinal design to uncover the network structure and dynamic interaction mechanisms underlying the co-occurrence of users' network adaptability and usage behaviors on AI-driven healthcare platforms. The results show that (1) In the cross-sectional network, there was a relatively dispersed structure during the early stage. As user experience accumulated, the network became increasingly centralized around a few core pathways, with self-efficacy and disease prevention emerging as key nodes. (2) According to the CLPN analysis, network adaptability factors (such as information protection, learning ability, and self-control) significantly promoted later usage behavior on AI-driven healthcare platforms (particularly self-diagnosis and disease prevention), forming a causal chain from adaptation to usage. (3) There are gender differences in the predictive effects of various dimensions of Internet adaptability on platform usage behaviors. Female users tend to adopt a socially oriented and holistic approach to health information processing, whereas male users are more inclined towards a tool-oriented and functional usage pattern. Interpreting user behavior evolution in intelligent healthcare environments, this research provides theoretical insights for the personalized design and precision service of AI-driven healthcare platforms.

The current study aims to propose, develop, and validate a conceptual framework featuring viewer engagement and psychological consequences in the context of live streaming commerce. Focusing on how streamers' trustworthiness and attractiveness shape streamers' state mindfulness experiences for live streaming commerce among Uzbekistan-based consumers, our framework draws upon Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R); Uses and Gratifications Theory (UGT) and Social Cognitive Theory (SCT). Survey data generated 319 valid responses from livestream viewers in Uzbekistan, which were used to empirically evaluate the proposed model through Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). Findings reveal that participants engage in a three-stage process, which includes the stimulus, organism, and response stage, in shaping their psychological engagement during livestreaming. The evidence demonstrates that streamer trustworthiness and attractiveness serve as important precursors to information seeking, recognition, and escapism gratifications, which, in turn, enhance mindful engagement online. By offering insights into viewers' mental and emotional reactions to streamer cues in a developing market environment, the study is expected to guide the creation of livestreaming platforms that foster sustained attention and online well-being in Uzbekistan and other developing economies with similar socio-cultural settings.

Background: Adverse childhood experiences, such as neglect and abuse in childhood, can significantly harm the mental and physical health of individuals and form the basis for the belief that the world is an unreliable, meaningless, and unjust place.

Objective: This study investigates the mediating role of hope and loneliness in individuals who had experienced adverse childhood experiences in pursuing a meaningful life.

Methods: The study cohort consisted of 419 adults who participated voluntarily. The Socio-demographic Information Form, Adverse Childhood Experiences Scale, Dispositional Hope Scale, Revised UCLA Loneliness Scale, and Meaning in Life Scale were used for data collection.

Results: Adverse childhood experiences were negatively associated with hope (r = -0.157, p < 0.001) and meaning in life (total effect B = -0.284, p < 0.001), while positively associated with loneliness (r = 0.360, p < 0.001). Serial mediation analysis confirmed that hope and loneliness significantly mediated the relationship between childhood adversity and meaning in life.

Conclusions: The findings revealed that hope and loneliness were serial mediators in the relationship between childhood traumas and individuals' perceived meaning in life.

High frequency words are more strongly activated than low frequency words, which causes the former to be processed faster than the latter. In the MOGUL framework, the higher the activation of a word is during processing, the higher the activation of the structure containing it is and the greater the learning of the structure resulting from processing is. This study explores whether differences in lexical frequency facilitate adults' acquisition of L2 structures and whether and how this facilitation is modulated by cross-linguistic syntactic similarity. In a structure-search task, two groups of 44 Spanish natives without knowledge of Galician were exposed to a Spanish-Galician similar structure and a Spanish-Galician dissimilar one using Galician verbs cognate with Spanish high or low frequency verbs. Then, a Grammaticality Judgement Task showed that the two structures were learnt. Importantly, the stronger activation of high frequency verbs compared to low frequency verbs facilitated the acquisition of the cross-linguistically dissimilar structure, but not of the cross-linguistically similar structure, which could be processed using an L1 structure. These findings broaden our understanding of the facilitation exerted by lexical processing in initial L2 syntax acquisition and could have pedagogical implications.

Multisensory integration (MSI) enhances perceptual processing by combining signals across modalities, often resulting in faster and more accurate responses than unisensory inputs. While attention is known to modulate MSI, it remains unclear whether MSI can in turn enhance exogenous attentional capture. Previous studies using cueing paradigms have found little evidence that bimodal cues are more effective than unimodal cues in orienting attention, except under conditions of increased perceptual load. However, given the rapid processing advantages observed in redundant target effects (RTE), it is possible that MSI facilitates attentional orienting at shorter cue-target onset asynchronies (CTOAs) than typically tested. Here, we investigated whether bimodal cues enhance spatial orienting compared with unimodal and crossmodal cues using a modified Posner paradigm. Participants were randomly assigned to one of five CTOA conditions (50-500 ms) and completed both a speeded and unspeeded orientation discrimination tasks. Visual targets were preceded by spatially congruent unimodal (visual), crossmodal (auditory), or bimodal (audiovisual) cues that were either spatially valid or invalid with targets. When examining validity effects, defined as the difference in behavioural performance between valid and invalid trials, the speeded task showed significantly greater validity effects for bimodally cued targets than other modalities at 50 ms CTOA. A similar pattern was observed in the unspeeded task, where only bimodal cues produced a significant accuracy validity effect at 50 ms CTOA. These findings demonstrate a time-limited multisensory enhancement of exogenous attentional orienting being most apparent at the shortest CTOA. We propose that bimodal cues facilitate early attentional engagement via enhanced sensory processing, but this advantage diminishes as the CTOA increases.

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, Artificial Intelligence generated content (AIGC) has been increasingly applied in the design industry and has become an important tool for enhancing user efficiency. However, the impact of AIGC interaction design features on user creativity remains insufficiently examined. Based on the Stimulus Organism Response model and the Dual Pathway to Creativity Model (DPCM), this study constructs a theoretical framework that identifies intelligence, anthropomorphism, stylistic diversity, and interactivity as independent variables, and cognitive flexibility and cognitive persistence as mediating variables. Data were collected from 504 Chinese users who work in the design field with experience using AIGC tools and analyzed through Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling. Results show that the four design features significantly influence user creativity and that cognitive flexibility and cognitive persistence mediate these relationships. Notably, interactivity demonstrated the strongest direct effect, suggesting that highly interactive AIGC tools are particularly effective in stimulating creative production. The study provides theoretical and practical insights for optimizing AIGC tools, improving user creative experiences, and promoting creativity developments in both AIGC applications and the design industry.

Children struggle with independently innovating solutions to physical problems until around 8-years-old. This pre-registered study tested whether encouraging 5-7-year-olds (N = 83) to (1) explore task materials or (2) generate explanations would support innovative problem-solving in two tasks that involved accessing an out-of-reach item (the hook task and water-displacement task). Children were assigned to one of three conditions (Explore, Explain, Baseline). In the pre-test phase children were prompted to: (1) explore task materials (the functional and non-functional items presented alongside each task), (2) explain how the materials could be used to problem solve, or (3) complete a filler task, respectively. During the test phase of the Explain condition the experimenter used verbal prompts (e.g., "Why did that happen when you did that?") to elicit explanations from children. These were matched with neutral "report" prompts ("What happened when you did that?") in the Explore and Baseline groups. Overall success rates were 48.2% (hook task) and 59% (water-displacement task), but there were no significant differences between conditions in success, whether children used the functional item first, or time to success. These findings indicate that neither the Explore nor the Explain manipulations used in the current study facilitated children's problem-solving performance. Exploratory analyses suggested that, regardless of condition, object manipulations, independent discoveries, and iterative tool refinement were associated with success on the hook task. Analyses of children's verbal utterances revealed an association between cognitive speech and success on the hook task. Taken together, these findings suggest that self-directed exploration and task engagement, rather than externally prompted efforts, supported problem-solving success.

Visual perceptual learning refers to intensive training on a perceptual task that leads to substantial improvement in perceptual ability. However, its neural substrates, particularly how attention modulates learning-related neural oscillations, remain unclear. Here, we utilized a facial emotion discrimination task combined with an electroencephalogram (EEG) technique to investigate the neural oscillatory substrates underlying perceptual learning on social information and the modulation mechanisms by attention. Twenty-four participants were trained for eight days on the perceptual discrimination task. Before and after the training, we measured discrimination thresholds and electrophysiological responses to emotional faces under two attentional conditions: attending to emotion (trained attribute) or gender (untrained attribute). Psychophysical results revealed a strong emotion specificity of learning, which echoed previous findings. More importantly, we found that learning mainly enhanced brain oscillatory activities in the theta band. First, learning primarily enhanced theta amplitude in the left hemisphere, regardless of attentional conditions. Second, theta phase synchronization was enhanced in the left hemisphere only when participants attended to facial emotions; this enhancement disappeared when attention was directed to gender. These results suggest a left-lateralized learning effect on theta band oscillations. Attention modulated the learning effect on phase synchronization rather than on oscillation amplitude.