Current research in behavioral sciences最新文献

Background

Although studies have reported a significant inverse association between meaning in life and psychological distress, little is known about this association, specifically among men, or its potential underlying mechanisms. Accordingly, this study investigated prospective pathways connecting meaning in life to men's psychological distress through the serial mediation effects of resilience and loneliness.

Methods

In total, 364 male respondents provided demographic data and completed an online survey to assess meaning in life, resilience, loneliness, and psychological distress. Simple and serial mediation models were tested to examine whether resilience and loneliness mediated the association between meaning in life and men's psychological distress, both separately and jointly.

Results

Direct and indirect effects of meaning in life on men's psychological distress were found. As predicted, both resilience and loneliness independently mediated the association between meaning in life and men's psychological distress. In addition, serial mediation analysis indicated that resilience and loneliness mediated the association between meaning in life and men's psychological distress via a sequential process.

Conclusions

The findings advance knowledge concerning the influence of meaning in life on men's psychological distress and two critical underlying mechanisms in this relationship. Clinical interventions for men that enhance meaning in life may help bolster resilience and reduce loneliness, diminishing psychological distress.

The relationships between loneliness and facets of narcissism were investigated based on responses from 696 (46% women) university students. Bivariate correlations revealed small negative correlations between loneliness and the narcissism scales of arrogance and acclaim seeking. A medium positive correlation was between loneliness and reactive anger and medium negative correlations were with exhibitionism and authoritativeness. Large positive correlations were between loneliness and shame, need for admiration, and distrust and a large negative correlation was with indifference. To further examine how loneliness and narcissism are possibly related, the narcissism facets were examined using latent profile analysis, resulting in three profiles. The profile with high scores for the narcissism facets of shame, need for admiration, authoritativeness, grandiose fantasy, acclaim-seeking, and distrust had significantly higher loneliness scores compared to the two other narcissism profiles. These results add to our understanding of both loneliness and narcissism. Limitations and future directions are discussed.

There is substantial evidence supporting the processing of affective stimuli outside of conscious awareness in both healthy individuals and brain-damaged patients. However, the methodologies used to assess awareness are still a matter of debate, with also implications for dichotomous or gradual theories. In two experiments, we investigated how social threat is processed in healthy participants by combining the continuous flash suppression paradigm and the perceptual awareness scale, a fine-grained measure of perceptual awareness. Our findings revealed a gradual relationship between emotional recognition and perceptual awareness, with higher recognition sensitivity for fearful than angry bodies across all visual awareness levels, except during perceptual unawareness where performance was at chance level. Interestingly, angry body expressions were suppressed for a shorter duration than neutral and fearful ones. Furthermore, pupil dilation responses were influenced by affective expression, suppression duration and perceptual awareness level. In conclusion, our results highlight a gradual relationship between behavioral and pupillary responses and perceptual awareness, which is further influenced by the specific stimulus category being processed. In addition, our results illustrate that certain experimental choices, such as stimulus type or the method used to assess awareness, are important factors to be considered in consciousness studies.

Loneliness is common in young people, yet there are few evidence-based interventions to manage youth loneliness. Understanding the ways in which young people cope with social isolation may inform the development of targeted loneliness programmes for young people. During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic when social restrictions were at a peak, 2500 young people aged 12–25 years were asked to report freely on coping strategies that they would recommend to peers to manage isolation and loneliness. The coding of qualitative responses suggested that young people recommended a range of different coping strategies, which we grouped into categories: contact seeking, approach, distraction, self-care, self-talk, self-compassion, and gratitude. Regression analyses showed that age, sex and socioeconomic background were associated with recommendation of some of the coping strategies. Paradoxically, recommendation of self-compassion was associated with higher levels of loneliness, while recommendation of approach and self-talk was associated with higher levels of wellbeing. This study highlights the importance of exploring how young people manage loneliness, a complex process that involves various strategies and is associated with an individual's demographic characteristics.

In this study, we examine the relationship between anxiety and athletic performance, measuring pre-game anxiety in a corpus of 12,228 tweets of 81 National Basketball Association (NBA) players using an anxiety inference algorithm, and match this data with certified NBA individual player game performance data. We found a positive relationship between pre-game anxiety and athletic performance, which was moderated by both player experience and minutes played on the court. This paper serves to demonstrate the use case for using machine learning to label publicly available micro-blogs of players which can be used to form important discrete emotions, such as pre-game anxiety, which in turn can predict athletic performance in elite sports. Based on the results, we discuss these findings and outline recommendations for athletes, teams, team leaders, coaches, and managers.

People sometimes behave dishonestly to collect undeserved monetary rewards. Prior research has shown that people put more effort into avoiding monetary losses than into making gains, and accordingly they cheat more to avoid losses than to acquire the equivalent amount (loss aversion). However, there has been a lack of research about how reward size and money exposure affect levels of cheating. Using a real effort task, we implemented a between-subjects experimental design to test the effects of framing (loss vs gain), reward size (small vs large) and money exposure (money vs no money) on individual real performance and cheating levels. The results revealed no significant differences in real performance. However, for cheating levels, all two-way interaction effects turned out to be significant (i.e., frame by size – frame by exposure – size by exposure). To disentangle the effects of the loss frame on cheating levels, a double moderated model was tested with reward size and money exposure as moderators. The model was significant with conditional effects revealing that the loss frame generally causes increased cheating level unless (i) participants were informed about a possible large reward they had not been exposed to, and (ii) participants were informed about, and exposed to, a small reward. Our results offer a partial replication of the finding that the level of cheating is higher within the loss frame than in the gain framing, which suggests that the relationship between framing and cheating behaviour can be moderated by other variables such as reward size and exposure to a reward. They also pose new questions for future research about complex joint effects on cheating behaviour, such as the combined influence of framing and default choices.

This research shows that Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count 2015 can identify important aspects of self-control and suggests that lay people inaccurately may believe that prevention focus is more useful for self-control than promotion focus is. We analyzed descriptions of self-control (N = 362) and compared them with descriptions of pursuing hopes or duties (N = 1048). Descriptions of self-control frequently mentioned common temptations and aspects of (meta)cognitive processes. They also showed evidence of extremely high authenticity, which may be crucial for successful self-control. Additionally, analyses of word categories and self-reported need satisfaction in the experiences participants described showed more and larger differences between self-control and pursuing hopes (promotion) than between self-control and pursuing duties (prevention). We discuss directions for future research about the role of authenticity in effective self-control and whether, when, and how being in a prevention focus (vs. promotion focus) is more effective for engaging in self-control.

Current research suggests that individual differences in the experience of loneliness should be reflected in personalized approaches to treatment. Psychological interventions are effective in reducing loneliness and complete reporting of these approaches in treatment studies is recommended to facilitate their implementation in clinical practice. Here, an adapted TIDieR (template for intervention description and replication) checklist was used to assess the quality of reporting of effective psychological interventions for loneliness, identified in systematic reviews, including adaptations to individual needs and circumstances. Thirteen articles were evaluated, 69% were randomised controlled trials. None thoroughly reported all details of the intervention. The results indicate that reporting of psychological interventions for loneliness is inadequate. Poor reporting of how interventions were tailored or modified for particular client's needs was noted (complete in only 23.1% and 7.7% of studies, respectively), making it difficult for clinicians to know how best to adapt treatment to individual differences in loneliness. Other essential treatment information is also often missing, such as the materials and procedures used, limiting translation of evidence into clinical practice and reproducibility in future research. Greater attention is needed to improve intervention reporting, and increased use of the TIDieR checklist may assist.

This review explores qualitative studies that examined the relationship between loneliness and suicide among young men (18–25 years) as it is discussed on social media. In the 8 papers we identified, analyses validated the relationship between loneliness and suicide in social media discourses. The findings also show that attitudes towards masculinity and mental health prevent some men from discussing mental health issues, which increases loneliness; other men had opportunities to share their experiences openly, breaking preconceived gender rules. Thus, the conceptualizations of gender appeared to affect individuals' expression of their mental health online, with traditional masculine ideals seemingly restricting individuals from reaching out for support, increasing loneliness. Papers often discussed how gender norms negatively impacted the degree to which men felt their mental health issues and loneliness were ‘tellable’. However, there was emerging evidence that some online platforms permitted tellability of men's mental health and loneliness issues. This review highlights the close relationship between loneliness and mental health, and how both are affected by all masculinities.