British journal of psychology最新文献

When competing for resources, people appear particularly sensitive to social cues of threat, tending to submissively cede resources to more (vs. less) threatening-looking others. This tendency appears especially pronounced among those that are physically weaker and thus more vulnerable to harm. One phase of adult life during which humans are particularly vulnerable is the perinatal period, the months leading up to and immediately after parturition (giving birth). Previous evidence and models of parental care and motivation suggest that individuals would be especially sensitive to threats during this phase. Accordingly, here we tested for the first time the preregistered prediction that perinatal (vs. non-perinatal) women would submissively cede more to threatening-looking others when competing over resources. Contrary to these predictions, results showed that women in this phase (n = 86, tested at ~29 weeks gestation and 1-month postpartum) were less sensitive to social threat than were non-perinatal women (n = 53), dominantly protecting rather than submissively ceding resources against threatening-looking male strangers. These findings suggest that pregnancy may affect social and economic decision-making by reducing (rather than increasing) submissiveness to threat, consistent with a 'maternal aggression' response documented in many non-human mammals.

When people see another person's face, they can quickly infer traits and make social evaluations from them, a process known as social perception of faces. Previous studies have investigated the effects of emotion on social evaluations but have mainly focused on single expressions. The present study examined how intra-individual emotional variability across multiple faces affects judgements of warmth and competence. In Experiment 1, mixed-valence sets containing both happy and angry faces were used, and emotional variability was manipulated by varying the emotional distance of faces. Results showed that the positive warmth and competence words were perceived as more appropriate to describe faces with low variability compared with high variability (Exp1a). This low-variability advantage persisted after controlling for extreme expressions and generalized to additional warm and competent traits (Exp1b). Experiments 2a and 2b tested the variability effects across happy-only, angry-only, and mixed-valence sets. Positive sets received the highest ratings, mixed-valence sets intermediate, and negative sets the lowest on both dimensions. Importantly, a significant main effect of variability emerged only for competence ratings, with low-variability faces rated higher than high-variability faces. In summary, our study indicates that low emotional variability has an advantage in social evaluations over high emotional variability.

Climate misinformation reduces public acceptance of climate change and undermines support for mitigation policies. This study explored the impact of different types of climate misinformation, examining through content-based and logic-based frameworks. The content-based framework was based on a taxonomy of contrarian claims consisting of five categories-it's not real, it's not us, it's not bad, climate solutions won't work and scientists are not reliable. The logic-based framework examined six rhetorical techniques used in science denial arguments-misrepresentation, false equivalence, oversimplification, red herring, cherry picking and slothful induction. We experimentally tested 30 misinformation examples, crossing five content categories with six fallacies. Participants rated the perceived veracity of misinformation as well as the likelihood of interacting with it. We found no main effect of fallacy on perceived veracity or likelihood to interact but did find a main effect of content category, with the fourth category (climate solutions won't work) perceived as most veracious. We also found that content categories interacted with political ideology, replicating past research into the polarizing effect of climate misinformation. Specifically, the most polarizing categories of misinformation were those targeting climate solutions or attacking climate scientists. Our results highlight the need to prioritize combatting misinformation that targets solutions and scientists.

Economic inequality was found to be positively related to unethical behaviours, but the underlying psychological mechanisms have not been well studied. Through five studies, this research explored the psychological mechanisms and boundary conditions between economic inequality and unethical behaviour. Study 1 (N = 165,622) provided primary evidence for the relationship between inequality and unethical behaviour based on large-scale publicly available databases. Using well-established questionnaires, Study 2 (N = 394) indicated that economic inequality positively predicted immoral and competitive normative climates, which positively predicted unethical behaviour. Study 3 (N = 160) and Study 4 (N = 188) provided causal evidence for the effect of economic inequality and repeatedly verified the mediating roles of immoral and competitive normative climates. Study 5 (N = 300) indicated that income level moderated the effect of economic inequality on unethical behaviour by moderating the mediating effect of immoral and competitive normative climates. In societies with high inequality, participants in low-income groups perceived stronger immoral and competitive normative climates, thereby engaging in more unethical behaviours. This research offers explanations for the prevalence of unethical behaviours in unequal societies, contributing to extend the emerging literature in social-ecological psychology that explores how macro-social-ecological factors impact micro-behaviours.

Trust involves making oneself vulnerable by relying on the expectation that others will reciprocate and act in a trustworthy manner, leading to mutual benefit. In behavioural economics and psychology, the Trust Game (TG) is a widely used paradigm to measure trust. The repeated TG is a modified version of the TG in which participants encounter the same partner(s) multiple times, allowing for reputation and trust learning. The aim of the present meta-analysis was to identify features of the repeated TG, participant characteristics, and manipulations of partner trustworthiness that affect trust learning. This is the first meta-analytic study to specifically assess trust learning in the repeated TG and included 404 effect sizes from over 8000 participants from 68 studies. Our findings indicate that the partners' behavioural trustworthiness, in the form of their reciprocation rate, is by far the most influential factor in participant trust learning (β = 3.0). Furthermore, the results reveal that manipulating prior information about partners can have an effect on the amount of learning, but only for manipulations of trustworthiness/morality. Notably, in ingroup-outgroup studies, participants learn from their partners' trustworthiness and it is not affected by their partners' group membership.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed scientific inquiry across disciplines, including the psychological sciences. In psychology, AI serves not only as an analytic tool but also as a computational model of the very processes the field seeks to explain. In this commentary, I highlight several ways in which AI can advance fundamental questions in psychological science beyond traditional approaches, thanks to its unprecedented ability to generate high-level perceptual and cognitive human-like representations. These developments provide psychologists with powerful new tools that, if embraced, can significantly advance our understanding of the human mind and behaviour.

In this commentary, I express my concern that the special issue focuses too much on the added value of AI for psychology, while psychological research also has much to offer, such as the operationalization of variables based on theory, validation tools and the statistical evaluation of information generated by AI systems.

The Tower of London (TOL) is a planning task frequently used in clinical settings and research. Planning and execution times are the most common outcome variables despite yielding lower effect sizes in clinical group comparisons and lower test-retest reliability than planning accuracy. Here, it is proposed that planning time be analysed not in isolation, but in relation to the combined duration of planning and execution, yielding a novel pre-planning index (PPI). In N = 179 healthy participants, test-retest reliability analyses yielded higher absolute agreement and less intra-individual variability over two sessions for PPI than for planning and execution times. The clinical validity of PPI was probed by comparing patients known to exhibit planning deficits and healthy controls. Stroke and Parkinson's patients showed significantly lower PPI than controls, driven by reduced planning and longer execution times. There was no difference in PPI between patients with mild cognitive impairment and controls. Consistently across healthy participants and patients, the positive correlation of PPI with planning accuracy exceeded that of planning times with accuracy. Thus, this pre-planning index can enhance both the reliability and clinical validity of TOL latency variables and represents a useful complement to accuracy for measuring planning performance in health and disease.

Since antiquity humans have been fascinated by mirrors; yet, when asked to predict what is made visible in the reflection, or to interpret a scene with a mirror, observers make systematic errors. Many observers claim that a character in a scene is looking at themselves when their reflection is visible, despite not sharing the same viewpoint. The first part of the study consisted of a survey of artworks containing mirrors, and the creation of a catalogue. The second part, using 21 artworks and an online methodology (N = 97), confirmed that the Venus effect impacts most participants. The third part (N = 101) tested whether the effect relates to cognitive/emotional perspective-taking - taking the perspective of someone else - or visual perspective-taking - understanding what can be seen from a certain viewpoint. We related the magnitude of the Venus effect to scores on the AQ test (as a measure of cognitive/emotional perspective-taking) and the ROMP test (as a measure of visual perspective-taking). AQ scores did not predict the Venus effect, and ROMP scores did. We conclude that the Venus effect is likely to occur because people fail to understand what can be seen from a given viewpoint.

This study investigated the relationship between parental control types and mental health categories among Chinese adolescents. About 2240 adolescents (1267 males; M_age = 14.09) were recruited and completed the Parental Control Scale, Patient Health Questionnaire-9, Life Satisfaction Scale at two time points. Results revealed that adolescents' parental control could be classified into seven types, while mental health could be classified into three types. The key finding demonstrates significant dynamic interactions between these variables: at T1, the "high behavioral control-low psychological control" parental control type (e.g., behavioural guidance type) significantly promoted adolescents' transition towards more optimal mental health categories; conversely, adolescents classified in the "complete mental health" category at T1 were more likely to have parents exhibiting the "high behavioural control-low psychological control" positive parenting pattern at T2. This "virtuous cycle" pattern was confirmed, although the "vicious cycle" commonly observed in variable-centred research between psychological control and poor mental health did not fully emerge in this study. These findings elucidate the complex bidirectional relationships between perceived parental control and mental health development among Chinese adolescents.