Current research in behavioral sciences最新文献

What are the bright- and dark-side personality trait, ideological belief, and mind-set correlates of self-assessed optimism? This paper reports on four studies, with a total N > 2000. In each, participants rated to what extent they were an optimist on an 8-point scale (high to low). We obtained demographic (age, sex) and ideological (political and religious beliefs) data in each study, as well as self-ratings on four variables (e.g., attractiveness, intelligence) which we aggregated and labelled self-esteem, which had alphas ranging from .70 to .80. We assessed personality, intelligence and other belief systems in different studies. Study 1 showed older, more religious, but less intelligent males with higher self-esteem and Belief in a Just World (BJW) were more optimistic. Study 2 showed older, more religious people, with higher self-esteem were more optimistic. Study 3 showed Open, Extraverted, Agreeable, Emotionally Stable, religious people with higher self-esteem and low on Negative Affectivity and Detachment, but high on Disinhibition, were most optimistic. Study 4 showed older, more religious people with higher self-esteem and lower Dweck fixed personality mindset beliefs were more optimistic. The concept and correlates of dispositional optimism and its measurement are discussed. Limitations and implications are noted.

Importance

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has caused concern of an impending “second wave” of loneliness and mental health problems following social disruption that included mandates to physically and socially distance from others. Research is needed to identify factors that can mitigate loneliness, which results from perceptions that one's social connections are less than desirable.

Objective

We examined whether individual differences in empathy and compassion would predict loneliness in a large sample of adults surveyed early in the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic controlling for social desirability and loneliness risk factors.

Design

Using a cross-sequential design, a baseline survey was fielded at seven time points (every two weeks) to seven different cohorts from March 22 to June 15, 2020. For each cohort, a follow-up survey was fielded one month after each baseline survey.

Participants

Participants who comprised the seven cohorts were recruited from two U.S. convenience samples, Amazon Mechanical Turk and Qualtrics Online Panels. The response rate across the follow-up surveys was 59% (total N = 3262).

Main outcomes and measures

We hypothesized that dispositional empathy and compassion at baseline would be associated with lower levels of loneliness at one-month follow-up.

Results

Higher empathy at baseline (Beta = -0.03; 95% CI -0.05 to -0.02; P < .001) was associated with lower loneliness at follow-up, even after controlling for social desirability and other loneliness risk factors. Higher compassion at baseline (Beta = -0.03; 95% CI -0.05 to -0.01; P < .001) was also associated with lower loneliness at follow-up.

Conclusion and relevance

We found that early in the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, higher levels of empathy and compassion predicted lower levels of loneliness one month later. Future research, including experimental designs, should examine whether increasing empathy, or the tendency to share others’ positive and negative feelings, can confer a protective effect against perceived social isolation during collective trauma characterized by physical and social distancing.

With the surge of social media use in contemporary society, scholars have focused on how feelings of apprehension that one is missing out on important social activities (i.e., fear of missing out [FoMO]) might influence mental health. However, worry surrounding social inclusion is not a contemporary problem, and successfully participating in social events is an important aspect of human evolutionary history. To our knowledge, researchers have yet to frame the phenomenon of FoMO in an evolutionary perspective. In a sample of N = 327 heterosexual American adults (M_age = 36.94, SD = 10.24), we found that FoMO correlated positively with status-striving and intrasexual competitiveness, as well as unrestricted sociosexual behavior and desires. Among females, but not males, FoMO was negatively linked to received social support. Results highlight how adults higher in FoMO express a greater inclination to compete for evolutionarily salient social and reproductive resources and devote more effort toward short-term mating. FoMO may also alert females to the absence of desired social support. Findings provide insight into the utility of an evolutionary approach to studying individual differences in the experience of FoMO, which can aid in gathering a more comprehensive understanding of the construct.

Early life stress adversely influences neurodevelopment and has profound long-term effects on brain function and behavior. Here we measure endogenous stress hormone and determine locomotor, anxiogenic, and operant binge drinking behavior of rats exposed to a 2-hit model of maternal deprivation (MD) stress in infancy followed by acute (ARS) or chronic restraint stress (CRS) paradigms during adolescence/adulthood to determine resiliency or susceptibility to the second stress exposure. Adolescents (n=40) exhibited higher baseline corticosterone (CORT) levels than adults (n=40) and with CRS exposure, showed significantly elevated circulating CORT irrespective of MD exposure status. In adults, MD females had lower baseline CORT levels than controls, whereas MD and control male CORT were indistinguishable. For behavior, N=40 was used in total. In the open field, locomotion was significantly decreased upon ARS, with MD having a significant sustained impact on ambulatory measures with CRS. When tested for anxiety-like behavior on an elevated zero maze, ARS interacted with MD to induce protracted and more profound anxiogenic behavior. Upon CRS, MD anxiogenic behavior was reversed to baseline levels whereas controls, especially males, exceeded baseline levels to spend significantly more time in the open arms of the EZM. Finally, in testing for binge drinking behavior, MD rats lever-pressed significantly more for 10% ethanol on an operant apparatus and exhibited a 3-fold greater drinking baseline than controls. Binge drinking behavior was further elevated with ARS, but quickly returned to the MD baseline even prior to reaching CRS. By contrast, controls had much lower baseline but significantly elevated binge drinking behavior by 3–5-fold in response to ARS which remained elevated through CRS, stabilizing at MD baseline levels. Sex differences were most evident in controls where males exhibited accelerated binge drinking behavior at consistently higher rates than females until Day 21 of CRS where their binge drinking behaviors were similar. There was also a main effect of alcohol binge behavior for MD males, and not females. This study illustrates that, depending on the biobehavioral output, males and females differ in reactivity to stressors where MD stress may confer sex-dependent resilience to subsequent stressors, and males are differently impacted than females.

Feelings of belonging are integral in people's choice of what career to pursue. Women and men are disproportionately represented across careers, starting with academic training. The present research focuses on two fields that are similar in their history and subject matter but feature inverse gender gaps—psychology (more women than men) and philosophy (more men than women)—to investigate how theorized explanations for academic gender gaps contribute to feelings of belonging. Specifically, we simultaneously model the relative contribution of theoretically relevant individual differences (empathizing, systematizing, and intellectual combativeness) as well as life goals (prioritization of family, money, and status) to feelings of belonging and majoring in psychology or philosophy. We find that men report higher intellectual combativeness than women, and intellectual combativeness predicts feelings of belonging and majoring in philosophy over psychology. Although systematizing and empathizing are predictive of belonging and, in turn, majoring in psychology and philosophy, respectively, when other factors are taken into account, women and men do not differ in empathizing and systematizing. Women, more than men, report prioritizing having a family, wealth, and status in choosing a career, and these directly or indirectly feed into feelings of belonging and majoring in psychology, in contrast to prior theory. Together, these findings suggest that students’ perceptions of their own combativeness and the extent to which they desire money and status play essential roles in women's feeling they belong in psychology and men's feeling they belong in philosophy.

This paper investigates how manipulating the face contour would systematically influence the face inversion effect (i.e., better recognition performance for upright vs inverted upside-down faces) and overall face recognition. Experiment 1 (n=144) addressed the question of whether manipulating the face contour would affect the inversion effect for scrambled faces which have disrupted configural information. Our results revealed that blurring the face contour significantly reduced the inversion effect by means of impaired performance for upright scrambled faces. Experiment 2a (n=144) and Experiment 2b (n=144) examined how either blurring the contour or replacing it with a new contour would influence the inversion effect for normal faces. These results confirmed a reduction of the inversion effect mainly due to impaired performance for upright faces. A reduction in overall recognition performance was also recorded for normal faces with a manipulated contour. Experiment 3 (n=144) manipulated the contour of New Thatcherized faces which suffer from partial configural information disruption. The results revealed no influence on the inversion effect but a significant reduction in overall recognition performance. Taken together, our results suggest that face contour information can have an impact in influencing both the inversion effect and overall recognition performance.

We examined how three different components of self-reported healthy living—physical activity, sleepiness, and dietary habits—relate to self-reported inattention and deep, effortless concentration (i.e., “flow”) in everyday life via two online surveys (N = 171 and N = 172). Our results indicated that sedentariness was associated with less frequent self-reported experiences of flow while sleepiness was associated with inattention in general (i.e., greater self-reported attention-related cognitive errors, attention lapses, and mind-wandering) as well as less frequent self-reported experiences of flow. Additionally, unhealthy dietary habits were associated with more lapses of attention and attention-related cognitive errors and less frequent self-reported experiences of flow. Most importantly, the measures of healthy living collectively accounted for a significant and substantial portion of the variance in each attention measure after controlling for age (up to 29% in Sample One and 34% in Sample Two). These results indicate a strong relation between healthy living and attentional engagement and raise the tantalizing possibility that an increase in healthy living may substantially improve attentional engagement in everyday life.

Self- and value-based reward processing were investigated from an individual difference perspective. Participants learnt to associate geometric shapes with three identities (self, friend, stranger) on one occasion and three values (e.g., high, medium, low monetary value) on another occasion. Participants then carried out a perceptual matching task of judging whether shape-label pairings matched (e.g., triangle-self or circle-£16). This personal matching task was followed by a self-report measure concerning personal distance from others. Both self-identification and high value-associations led to better task performance (faster responses with higher perceptual sensitivity) in the matching tasks. Correlations between self- and high value-based reward biases varied as a function of participant ratings of personal distance between themselves and others. For individuals who rated with a large personal distance, there were no correlations between the self- and reward-biases. In contrast, self- and reward-biases did correlate for individuals who rated a close personal distance between themselves and others. These conclusions were supported by cluster analyses, which showed either distinct or common similarity structures for matching, based on personal and value relevance, corresponding to individuals’ self-rating of a large or close distance to others. The data suggest an intertwining model of self-value at the individual level. This model has significant implications for understanding emotion regulation in relation to self and reward interactions and may be relevant for advancing our understanding self in relation to normal and psychopathological processes.

Anxiety and depression negatively impact many. Studies suggest depression is associated with future time horizons, or how “far” into the future people tend to think, and anxiety is associated with temporal discounting, or how much people devalue future rewards. Separate studies from linguistics and economics have shown that how people refer to future time predicts temporal discounting. Yet no one—that we know of—has investigated whether future time reference habits are a marker of anxiety and/or depression. We introduce the FTR classifier, a novel classification system researchers can use to analyse linguistic temporal reference. In Study 1, we used the FTR classifier to analyse data from the social-media website Reddit. Users who had previously posted popular contributions to forums about anxiety and depression referenced the future and past more often than controls, had more proximal future and past time horizons, and significantly differed in their linguistic future time reference patterns: They used fewer future tense constructions (e.g. will), fewer high-certainty constructions (certainly), more low-certainty constructions (could), more bouletic modal constructions (hope), and more deontic modal constructions (must). This motivated Study 2, a survey-based mediation analysis. Self-reported anxious participants represented future events as more temporally distal and therefore temporally discounted to a greater degree. The same was not true of depression. We conclude that methods which combine big-data with experimental paradigms can help identify novel markers of mental illness, which can aid in the development of new therapies and diagnostic criteria.