British journal of psychology最新文献

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.

Does moving to a new environment change people's cultural thought style? We tracked the cultural thought style of 1462 university students at 18 sites over time after they moved across China for college. We tested their holistic thought, which is more common in interdependent cultures. One logical prediction is that students would think less holistically after moving to big cities and more economically developed areas, in line with modernization theory. However, moving to bigger cities or more-developed areas did not predict decreases in holistic thought. Instead, regions' history of rice versus wheat farming predicted change in thought style. Within just five months, students who moved to wheat-farming prefectures thought less holistically than people who moved to rice-farming prefectures. This fits with the idea that rice farming required more coordination and interdependence than wheat farming. In a follow-up wave three years later, differences widened between students in rice and wheat areas. This three-wave longitudinal study documents the transmission of cultural differences in cognition, even without personal experience farming. The results suggest that China's farming history is still shaping cultural differences in the modern day.

In the media, accurate climate information and climate disinformation often coexist and present competing narratives about climate change. Whereas previous research documented detrimental effects of disinformation on climate beliefs, little is known about how people seek climate-related content and how this varies between cross-cultural contexts. In a preregistered experiment, we studied how individuals sequentially sample and process Pro- and Anti-climate statements across 15 rounds. Participants from the United States, China, and Germany (N_total = 2226) freely sampled real-world climate-related statements, retrieved from Twitter and validated in previous studies. Overall, reading both Pro- and Anti-climate statements influenced climate concern in all countries. Participants preferred statements that were better aligned with their initial climate beliefs, and this confirmatory tendency intensified the more information had been sampled. Moreover, participants' confirmatory evaluation (i.e., accepting aligned and rejecting opposing messages) increased over time. While climate concern was mostly stable, in the United States, climate concern levels and box choices mutually reinforced each other, leading to greater polarization within the sample over the course of the experiment. The paradigm offers new perspectives on how people process and navigate conflicting narratives about climate change.

People form consequential trait judgements from seeing others' faces. The influential dynamic interactive theory suggests that trait judgements reflect the combined use of visual cues from faces (e.g. smiling looks trustworthy) with individuals' own conceptual trait associations (e.g. believing trustworthy people are also kind), thus far supported for impressions of highly constricted neutral faces in the US cultural context. Here, we provide a stringent new test of the dynamic interactive theory by examining whether conceptual trait associations predict impressions of highly variable everyday faces, within and across cultures and individuals. Study 1 shows that conceptual trait associations predict impressions of highly variable everyday faces in British perceivers. Study 2 demonstrates that British and Chinese perceivers' conceptual trait associations (expressed in English and Mandarin, respectively) predict impressions of highly variable White and Asian faces similarly. Study 3 finds that individuals' conceptual trait associations predict their impressions of highly variable face images. Together, we show for the first time that conceptual trait associations predict impressions even when faces provide rich visual cues and extend this understanding beyond Western perceivers, faces and languages. Our findings thus offer independent support for dynamic interactive theory in naturalistic impressions across cultures.

One of the behaviours associated with Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) is talking in a manner considered to be socially inappropriate. It follows, therefore, that self-directed speech, including inner dialogue, will be particularly prevalent among adults who exhibit traits typical of ADHD. In three experiments, we tested this prediction. Participants completed the ASRS-v1.1 together with either the Self-Talk Scale (Experiment 1; N = 198) or the Varieties of Inner Speech Questionnaire (Experiment 2; N = 198). Results from both experiments revealed that participants with behaviours typical of an ADHD diagnosis reported significantly more self-directed speech than those whose behaviours were not typical of ADHD. A third experiment (N = 198) replicated these findings and also found that the effect does not distinguish between overt and covert speech. Overall, these data suggest that self-talking is more prevalent in individuals with relatively high levels of ADHD traits. We speculate that talking to oneself may represent a useful displacement activity or acts as a camouflage technique for those with the condition.

The temporal relationship between incoming signals is crucial in determining whether multisensory information is integrated into unitary percepts. Temporal binding windows (TBWs) define the time range within which multisensory inputs are highly likely to be perceptually integrated, even if asynchronous. TBWs widen with stimulus complexity and neurodevelopmental conditions (e.g., autism and schizophrenia), yet the key factors underlying their malleability remain unclear. The (quasi)rhythmic properties of sensory inputs, frequently embedded in natural stimuli (e.g., speech), are among the possible exogenous modulators. Indeed, stimulus spectral features can influence the alignment of neural excitability across sensory regions, synchronizing brain rhythms with external rhythmic patterns through phase-reset mechanisms and neural entrainment. In a series of psychophysical studies, we presented simultaneity judgement tasks with pulsing audio-visual (AV) streams amplitude-modulated according to different regular frequencies or following purely rhythmic vs. quasi-rhythmic (speech-like) envelopes. Results show that TBWs decrease as the stimulus frequency increases and that speech-like streams are integrated across larger TBWs. These findings highlight the importance of stimulus spectral structure in shaping multisensory perception. Furthermore, they show that quasi-rhythmic spectrotemporal features of speech-like streams induce more tolerant cross-modal temporal processing even when the leading stimulation frequency is controlled for, putatively reflecting an adaptation to the variable rhythmic structure of natural speech. Our results align with neurophysiological accounts of neural entrainment and motivate future research in clinical populations with multisensory processing deficits.

Social norms are powerful predictors of pro-environmental behaviour. At the same time, conspiracy beliefs are prevalent that can reduce individuals' efforts to act pro-environmentally and might impede the influence of social norms. Across three cross-sectional studies in three countries (Germany, UK, US; total N = 1037), we investigated the interplay between different types of social norm perceptions and conspiracy beliefs in predicting everyday pro-environmental behaviour. Against two out of three hypotheses, we found no evidence that conspiracy beliefs moderated the relationship between perceived social norms and self-reported pro-environmental behaviour. Rather, perceiving higher pro-environmental social (especially subjective and injunctive) norms was associated with more frequent pro-environmental behaviour - also among those with stronger conspiracy beliefs. Conspiracy beliefs (especially those related to climate change) were, in turn, related to less pro-environmental behaviour. These findings shed light on the social factors that might influence individuals believing in conspiracy theories and give reason for optimism regarding the possibility to overcome their climate inaction via normative influence.