British journal of psychology最新文献

We collected data from two sources – social media and online questionnaires – to investigate the emotional consequences of social sharing during the COVID-19 pandemic. Study 1 tracked and analysed sentiment of tweets posted over the course of a month in the crisis period and found that users who tweeted more frequently about COVID-19 expressed decreasing negative sentiment and increasing positive sentiment over time. Granger causality tests confirmed that this association was better interpreted in the forward direction (sharing levels predicting sentiment) than in the reverse direction (sentiment predicting sharing levels). Study 2 focused on immediate emotional consequences of sharing COVID-19-related events and found that participants reported improved overall affect about an event after sharing it, especially when that event was a personal experience rather than a news story. Reported positive feelings about both kinds of events were also significantly higher after sharing. Taken together, both studies suggested that social sharing is linked with emotional relief and may therefore help people to deal with their negative experiences during a persistent collective crisis.

Our current perception and decision-making are shaped by recent experiences, a phenomenon known as serial dependence. While serial dependence is well-documented in visual perception and has been recently explored in time perception, their functional similarities across non-temporal and temporal domains remain elusive, particularly in relation to task relevance and working memory load. To address this, we designed a unified experimental paradigm using coherent motion stimuli to test both direction and time reproduction. The direction and time tasks were randomly mixed across trials. Additionally, we introduced pre-cue versus post-cue settings in separate experiments to manipulate working memory load during the encoding phase. We found attractive biases in time reproduction but repulsive biases in direction estimation. Notably, the temporal attraction was more pronounced when the preceding task was also time-related. In contrast, the direction repulsion remained unaffected by the nature of the preceding task. Additionally, both attractive and repulsive biases were enhanced by the post-cue compared to the pre-cue. Our findings suggest that opposing sequential effects in non-temporal and temporal domains may originate from different processing stages linked to sensory adaptation and post-perceptual processes involving working memory.

This longitudinal study examined the reciprocal relationship between the Big Five personality traits and sense of purpose over a 13-year period using a nationally representative sample of American adults (N = 11,010). The random intercept cross-lagged panel model revealed unidirectional effects: increases in sense of purpose predicted subsequent increases in openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and extraversion, as well as decreases in neuroticism. Conversely, changes in personality traits did not predict future changes in sense of purpose. One potential mechanism underlying this effect might involve the link between sense of purpose and optimal self-regulatory processes and outcomes, such as successful planning, goal-directed behaviour, and self-control, which promote gradual positive changes in personality traits. Another plausible mechanism may be the association between purpose and improved subjective well-being and reduced psychological distress, which have been found to predict positive changes in personality traits. These findings challenge previous research that has interpreted cross-sectional associations as evidence that personality traits are predictive of purpose, rather than the other way around. The findings that intentionally cultivating a strong sense of purpose may facilitate positive personality change in adulthood.

Everyday social interactions or goal-directed actions towards objects activate action plans appropriate to their affordances. The spatial compatibility of a stimulus and a response might interfere with the activation of these action plans. In the present study, we examined how framing of interactions affects the interplay between affordance and spatial compatibility effects towards humans and objects in two separate experiments. In a motor priming task designed to simultaneously assess these two effects, participants were presented with interactive hand gestures and objects with a single handle. Participants responded either with their left or right hand according to the colour mask of the stimulus, regardless of the spatial position or the affordance-related orientation of the stimulus. In Experiment 1, when responses were given by keypresses, we found independent affordance and spatial compatibility effects towards objects. Surprisingly, interactive hand gestures induced a reversed affordance effect, that is, imitative action tendencies. Changing the responses from keypresses to the performance of grasping actions in Experiment 2 drastically altered these findings, resulting in the enhancement of affordance and the elimination of spatial compatibility effects for both human and object interactions. These findings highlight the importance of contextual influences on the emergence of automatic action tendencies.

Prior beliefs are central to Bayesian accounts of cognition, but many of these accounts do not directly measure priors. More specifically, initial states of belief heavily influence how new information is assumed to be utilized when updating a particular model. Despite this, prior and posterior beliefs are either inferred from sequential participant actions or elicited through impoverished means. We had participants to play a version of the game ‘Plinko’, to first elicit individual participant priors in a theoretically agnostic manner. Subsequent learning and updating of participant beliefs was then directly measured. We show that participants hold various priors that cluster around prototypical probability distributions that in turn influence learning. In follow-up studies, we show that participant priors are stable over time and that the ability to update beliefs is influenced by a simple environmental manipulation (i.e., a short break). These data reveal the importance of directly measuring participant beliefs rather than assuming or inferring them as has been widely done in the literature to date. The Plinko game provides a flexible and fecund means for examining statistical learning and mental model updating.

Recent years have witnessed some rapid and tremendous progress in natural language processing (NLP) techniques that are used to analyse text data. This study endeavours to offer an up-to-date review of NLP applications by examining their use in counselling and psychotherapy from 1990 to 2021. The purpose of this scoping review is to identify trends, advancements, challenges and limitations of these applications. Among the 41 papers included in this review, 4 primary study purposes were identified: (1) developing automated coding; (2) predicting outcomes; (3) monitoring counselling sessions; and (4) investigating language patterns. Our findings showed a growing trend in the number of papers utilizing advanced machine learning methods, particularly neural networks. Unfortunately, only a third of the articles addressed the issues of bias and generalizability. Our findings provided a timely systematic update, shedding light on concerns related to bias, generalizability and validity in the context of NLP applications in counselling and psychotherapy.

Collaboration has an essential role in memory, and how to appropriately use it to affect individual memory positively is a matter of concern. The meta-analysis generally assessed the effect of collaboration on subsequent individual retrieval, registered on the PROSPERO platform and adhering to the PRISMA guidelines, using the Web of Science, Science Direct, CNKI and WanFang databases with post-collaborative memory as the main subject, screened studies published up to December 31, 2023, a total of 64 studies with 101 effect sizes, including 13,398 participants from 11 countries. Heterogeneity test, sensitivity analysis, subgroup analysis and meta-regression analysis were performed on the included studies, while publication bias was assessed. The results found that collaboration improves subsequent individual retrieval memory more than individuals, and collaboration has a moderate facilitating effect on subsequent individual retrieval. Group size, material category, category size, collaboration phase, collaboration approach, task process and test method were among the moderating variables. The study emphasizes the role of collaboration in cognition and demonstrates the post-collaborative benefits. The conclusions are of value for developing methods to improve individual memory.

Creativity is defined by three key factors: novelty, feasibility and value. While many creativity tests focus primarily on novelty, they often neglect feasibility and value, thereby limiting their reflection of real-world creativity. In this study, we employ GPT-4, a large language model, to assess these three dimensions in a Japanese-language Alternative Uses Test (AUT). Using a crowdsourced evaluation method, we acquire ground truth data for 30 question items and test various GPT prompt designs. Our findings show that asking for multiple responses in a single prompt, using an 'explain first, rate later' design, is both cost-effective and accurate (r = .62, .59 and .33 for novelty, feasibility and value, respectively). Moreover, our method offers comparable accuracy to existing methods in assessing novelty, without the need for training data. We also evaluate additional models such as GPT-4 Turbo, GPT-4 Omni and Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Comparable performance across these models demonstrates the universal applicability of our prompt design. Our results contribute a straightforward platform for instant AUT evaluation and provide valuable ground truth data for future methodological research.

Psychological research has acknowledged that the commonly accepted definitions of ‘transgender’, ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ within psychological research have resulted in limitations in accounting for the lived realities of transgender individuals. Such limitations include, but are not limited to, the continued pathologization of transgender experiences through idealizing sex and gender congruence and incapacity to account for non-normative and non-binary transition pathways. This paper provides a review of these limitations to first demonstrate how the incongruence definition of ‘transgender’ is reliant on the idea of a ‘true’ gender, and next suggest that problematising the idea of a ‘true’ gender allows new conceptions of transgender experiences to be advanced. To undertake this problematization, the work of Judith Butler and Sara Ahmed is used to consider how gender could be conceptualized otherwise in psychology and then applied to transgender experiences. In all, this paper theorizes transgender experiences without a reliance on the assertion of a true gender, to suggest instead a focus on contextualized transgender experiences. Last, the limitations and implications of this definition of transgender are briefly discussed. Overall, transgender experiences are conceptualized as those experiences that run counter to the dominant (re)production of binary sexed gender.