British journal of psychology最新文献

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.

Rapid advances in AI technology are fuelling the proliferation of AI applications across industries, including educational services. With the allure of intelligent tutoring, individuals now face the choice of their educational approach-either parental engagement or utilizing AI educational services. This research employs an experimental design approach to examine individuals' decision-making processes involving AI educational services. Across five studies, we observe that, relative to AI educational services, parental engagement induces less guilt, receives a higher valuation and increases individuals' willingness to recommend it to others. We attribute these preferences to a perceived parental responsibility. Intrinsic attribution and conformity promote individuals' WOM. This research is the first to uncover the impact of educational approaches on individuals' guilt and downstream behaviours in the AI-in-Education field, shedding light on attribution as its underlying mechanism and offering actionable strategies to enhance individuals' WOM. The findings offer novel insights to AI-human interaction psychological research and hold practical implications for AI-in-Education industry practitioners.

Cue integration theory suggests that the sense of agency arises from the interaction of multiple cues, weighted by their reliability and availability. However, whether this integration is dynamic or static remains unclear. This study explored the potential dynamics of cue integration by examining the interplay between internal and external cues in social comparison contexts. Participants in the two experiments controlled a circle to a target location, with the circle's motion either fluent or disfluent. After completing the task, the participants received feedback on their performance relative to others, delivered in either a social (hand gestures in Experiment 1) or non-social format (arrow symbols in Experiment 2), presented either before or after they provided agency ratings. Results revealed that both socially and non-socially formatted feedback influenced agency ratings for future actions (forward modulation) as well as for past actions (backward modulation). Notably, a dynamic pattern of integration was evident only between socially formatted feedback and motion fluency: under disfluent motion, forward and backward effects of socially formatted feedback intensified over time. Conversely, with fluent motion, the impact of socially formatted feedback diminished over time. These findings underscore the complexity of cue integration, indicating a need to incorporate temporal dynamics into cue integration theory.

In the current research, we use network analysis to examine the structure, ideological foundations and correlates of climate change conspiracy theories, distinguishing between denialist and warmist beliefs. Denialist beliefs, typically endorsed on the political right, claim that climate change is exaggerated, whereas warmist beliefs, more prevalent on the left, allege the suppression of climate science and the downplaying of climate change. Across four studies, these beliefs showed a weak and unstable positive correlation but were reliably connected via indirect associations with general conspiracy beliefs and negatively through opposing relationships with denial of anthropogenic climate change (ACC) and conservatism. General conspiracy beliefs and denial of ACC were not directly connected but were instead related indirectly through climate-specific conspiracy beliefs: positively via denialist and negatively via warmist. We found no evidence across studies for an association between climate change conspiracy beliefs and indices of non-rational thinking. Finally, denialist beliefs were negatively associated with pro-environmental intentions, environmental concern, policy support and collective guilt, whereas warmist beliefs were positively related to these outcomes, except for environmental concern, where no significant relationship emerged. These findings highlight the importance of distinguishing ideological variants of climate change conspiracy beliefs to contextualize their psychological significance and potential impacts.

Humans are highly adept at utilizing various social signals, such as eye gaze and biological motion (BM), to detect important events (e.g. threat, reward) in the environment, a phenomenon termed social attention. Here we investigated whether the affective information carried by the contextual event would modulate this social attention behaviour. By introducing natural emotional pictures (negative, neutral and positive) as peripheral probing targets within the modified central cueing paradigm, we found that central BM induced a stronger attentional orienting effect towards negative targets than neutral and positive ones. Moreover, this modulation was observed in attentional effects induced by another well-known social cue (i.e. eye gaze), whereas no such effect was obtained with the non-social arrow cues. Importantly, this negativity bias persisted at the subliminal level, as shown by the significant attentional effects towards negative targets induced by unconscious social cues (i.e. BM, eye gaze). In contrast, no attentional effects were obtained with non-conscious arrow cues. Overall, these findings reveal a general enhancement of negative targets on conscious and unconscious social attention induced by different types of social signals (i.e. BM, eye gaze) and highlight the distinction of social attention compared to non-social attention in detecting potentially detrimental events.

Visual complexity is a key factor in perceptual and evaluative judgments. People's representation of visual complexity is constructed from quantitative and structural image features, but it is also influenced by familiarity and expertise. We examined how people represent visual complexity and its impact on perception and evaluation, focusing on information about paintings and their affective valence on judgments of visual complexity, liking and understanding. Seventy-six participants rated 60 representational artworks of negative, neutral, and positive valence on complexity, beauty and understanding. Half of the participants received written information about each artwork. Results showed that negative artworks were judged as more complex than neutral artworks and positive ones, but this effect was attenuated by the provided information. Liking judgments increased with judged complexity, were higher for positive artworks than neutral ones, for neutral than negative ones, and were higher when information was provided. Understanding judgments were higher for positive artworks than neutral ones, and higher for neutral artworks than negatively valenced ones. Information increased understanding only for negative artworks, and judged complexity did not affect these judgments. In sum, the representation of the visual complexity of an image is influenced by its valence and the available information, modulating judgments of complexity and liking, but not of understanding.

The success of the true crime media genre reflects humanity's avid curiosity about violence, deviance, and murder, yet psychological research on this phenomenon is lacking. In this article, we highlight why true crime consumption may be relevant to various research fields that go beyond simple media preferences. Additionally, we present a large-scale behavioural investigation for comprehensive empirical insights into motives, and behavioural and well-being correlates of true crime consumption. In n = 307-571 participants, we (a) confirm a robust gender difference in true crime consumption in favour of women, and (b) find more general (morbid curiosity) and distinct motives (defensive vigilance, excitement) for true crime consumption. Additionally, (c) through principal component analysis, we extract five components from numerous variables (negative affectivity, antagonism, fear of crime, self-focused adaptive regulation, and affective creativity) to test for contributions to true crime consumption. Ultimately, (d) in multiple regression models, gender, income, fear of crime, and antagonism emerged as unique predictors of overall true crime consumption, though results varied for different formats (e.g., podcasts) and motives. Notably, defensive vigilance motivation (higher in women) was linked to more adaptive self-regulation. Our investigation adds to the emerging body of research on negative crime-related information seeking.

Evidence shows that social exclusion motivates to paying attention to the situation to reconnect with others or to protect oneself from further exclusion. However, it is unclear how social attention is affected by who offers an opportunity to reconnect. Two studies filled this gap by assessing whether being excluded affects our propensity to share attention with another individual (seen or novel) with a happy or a neutral expression. Findings show a significant three-way interaction with differences in gaze cueing between groups only for seen faces with a neutral expression. Gaze-cueing effects for seen (excluders) faces with a neutral expression occurred in 73% of socially excluded individuals – this was 33% for seen (includers) faces for socially included. There were no differences in gaze cueing for novel faces with happy or neutral expressions. In Study 2, social information about faces was learned without direct exclusion. Here, the proportion of participants showing the effect observed in Study 1 and the associations between gaze cueing and emotional expressions differed. In line with the social monitoring system theory, individuals in the immediate aftermath of exclusion remain socially engaged, displaying a dual attentional strategy: vigilance towards the excluder and openness to affiliative signals from novel others.

Collective narcissism and non-narcissistic ingroup positivity (notably collective self-esteem) are associated differently with conspiracy beliefs. We conducted three cross-sectional surveys in China and the United States that distinguished between ingroup and outgroup conspiracy beliefs, to explore the intricate relationships and underlying mechanisms of these variables. Studies 1 (N = 800) and 2 (N = 385) showed that, in China, collective narcissism was positively associated with outgroup conspiracy belief (partially mediated by increased perceived threat from the outgroup) and with ingroup conspiracy belief (partially mediated by increased instrumental treatment of ingroup members); collective self-esteem was positively associated with outgroup conspiracy belief (fully mediated by increased victim consciousness), but negatively with ingroup conspiracy belief (fully mediated by increased system-justifying belief). Study 3 (N = 397) only replicated the significant positive relationship between collective narcissism and outgroup conspiracy belief in a US sample, and the partial mediating effect of increased perceived threat from the outgroup in it, while the other three paths were not statistically significant. These findings suggest that the association between different forms of ingroup positivity (narcissistic versus non-narcissistic) and conspiracy beliefs is influenced both by the identity of the conspirators (ingroup versus outgroup) and cultural context.