British journal of psychology最新文献

As people age, they tend to spend more time indoors, and the colours in their surroundings may significantly impact their mood and overall well-being. However, there is a lack of empirical evidence to provide informed guidance on colour choices, irrespective of age group. To work towards informed choices, we investigated whether the associations between colours and emotions observed in younger individuals also apply to older adults. We recruited 7393 participants, aged between 16 and 88 years and coming from 31 countries. Each participant associated 12 colour terms with 20 emotion concepts and rated the intensity of each associated emotion. Different age groups exhibited highly similar patterns of colour–emotion associations (average similarity coefficient of .97), with subtle yet meaningful age-related differences. Adolescents associated the greatest number but the least positively biased emotions with colours. Older participants associated a smaller number but more intense and more positive emotions with all colour terms, displaying a positivity effect. Age also predicted arousal and power biases, varying by colour. Findings suggest parallels in colour–emotion associations between younger and older adults, with subtle but significant age-related variations. Future studies should next assess whether colour–emotion associations reflect what people actually feel when exposed to colour.

The purpose of this research is to examine gender differences in promotion/prevention self-regulatory focus, a dispositional motivational orientation with major implications for human functioning. First, a review of literature using social cognitive theory as a framework suggests that, driven by socialization processes, (1) women may on average be more prevention focused than men – meaning more vigilant to maintain a secure status quo, whereas (2) men may on average be more promotion focused than women – meaning more eager to advance to a better situation than their status quo. Second, we provide data to examine these possible gender differences in self-regulatory focus with secondary analyses of (a) our own existing data on dispositional regulatory focus and of (b) a large scale, representative panel study (LISS Survey). The data suggest a highly consistent difference with women being more prevention focused than men, while the difference in promotion focus is much smaller and is only found in European samples. Auxiliary data suggest promotion-focused women hold less traditional gender role beliefs as well as showing that regulatory focus partially explains examples of behavioural differences between men and women. The analysis of gender difference in regulatory focus sheds new light on gender differences and biases already known, and on regulatory focus, and as such opens up many new and important areas of future inquiry.

Research on gender-fair language aims to identify language inclusive to a multitude of individuals, for example, increasing the visibility of women by using paired pronouns (he/she) instead of generic masculine forms (he). However, binary presentations like he/she might come with unwanted side effects and evoke what we label as normative gender bias. A normative gender bias is defined as when words lead to stronger associations with individuals with normative gender expressions than with individuals with non-normative gender expressions, thus contributing to making non-normative individuals invisible. In three experiments, we compared the extent to which the paired pronoun he/she (Swedish and English), the neo-pronouns hen (Swedish), ze (English), and the generic pronoun singular they (English) evoked a normative gender bias. Swedish- (N = 219 and 268) and English- (N = 837, from the UK) speaking participants read about individuals referred to with the paired pronoun he/she or with hen, ze, or they. In Experiment 1 (Swedish), there was no main effect of condition on a normative bias, but in Experiment 2 (Swedish), the paired pronouns he/she evoked normative gender bias while hen did not. In Experiment 3 (English), both ze and singular they evoked normative gender bias, although normative associations were lower in these conditions compared to he/she. Furthermore, the normative bias was lower among participants who had knowledge about the use of ze as a nonbinary pronoun. Finally, neither ze nor they evoked a normative gender bias when their use was explicitly stated to be nonbinary. A potential explanation for why singular they did not generally result in less normative associations, despite almost all participants knowing about it, may include its more common use as a generic pronoun. Taken together, our results suggest that neo-pronouns, but not paired pronouns, have the potential to evoke less normative associations, but that they must be both (1) actively created new words and (2) well-known to language users as nonbinary pronouns.

Do cynical individuals have a stronger desire for power and are they more likely to acquire power at work? The negative consequences of cynicism—for cynics themselves and the people around them—render the examination of these questions particularly important. We first examined the role of cynicism in power motives. Results showed that more cynical individuals have a greater desire for power to avoid exploitation by others (and less so to exploit others; Study 1) and score higher on dominance (but not prestige or leadership) motives (Study 2). The subsequent two studies examined the role of cynicism in power attainment at work. A study of virtual teams (Study 3) showed that more cynical individuals were less likely to emerge as group leaders, and a prospective study of ~9000 employees followed for up to 10 years (Study 4) showed that cynicism predicted a lower likelihood of attaining a leadership position in organizations. Taken together, more (vs. less) cynical individuals have a stronger power—in particular, dominance—motive but they are not more successful at power acquisition. These findings inform the literature on cynicism and power and highlight the importance of cynical worldviews for leadership attainment.

Musicians outperform non-musicians in vocal emotion perception, likely because of increased sensitivity to acoustic cues, such as fundamental frequency (F0) and timbre. Yet, how musicians make use of these acoustic cues to perceive emotions, and how they might differ from non-musicians, is unclear. To address these points, we created vocal stimuli that conveyed happiness, fear, pleasure or sadness, either in all acoustic cues, or selectively in either F0 or timbre only. We then compared vocal emotion perception performance between professional/semi-professional musicians (N = 39) and non-musicians (N = 38), all socialized in Western music culture. Compared to non-musicians, musicians classified vocal emotions more accurately. This advantage was seen in the full and F0-modulated conditions, but was absent in the timbre-modulated condition indicating that musicians excel at perceiving the melody (F0), but not the timbre of vocal emotions. Further, F0 seemed more important than timbre for the recognition of all emotional categories. Additional exploratory analyses revealed a link between time-varying F0 perception in music and voices that was independent of musical training. Together, these findings suggest that musicians are particularly tuned to the melody of vocal emotions, presumably due to a natural predisposition to exploit melodic patterns.

Conspiracy theories allege secret plots between two or more powerful actors to achieve an outcome, sometimes explaining important events or proposing alternative understandings of reality in opposition to mainstream accounts, and commonly highlight the threat presented by the plot and its conspirators. Research in psychology proposes that belief in conspiracy theories is motivated by a desire to understand threats and is predicted by increased anxiety. Morbid curiosity describes the tendency to seek out information about threatening or dangerous situations and is associated with an interest in threat-related entertainment and increased anxiety. Across three studies, we investigated the relationship between morbid curiosity and conspiracy theories in US-based samples. We found that higher trait morbid curiosity was associated with higher general conspiracist beliefs (Study 1) and the perceived threat of conspiratorial explanations of events (Study 2). Using a behavioural choice paradigm, we found that participants who chose to investigate morbidly curious stimuli were more likely to choose to learn about conspiratorial explanations for events (Study 3). Greater curiosity about the minds of dangerous people was consistently the strongest predictor of conspiratorial ideation and interest. These results suggest that morbid curiosity is an important but hitherto unstudied predictor of conspiratorial interest and belief.

Our everyday perceptual experiences are grounded in the integration of information within and across our senses. Due to this direct behavioural relevance, cross-modal integration retains a certain degree of contextual flexibility, even to social relevance. However, how social relevance modulates cross-modal integration remains unclear. To investigate possible mechanisms, Experiment 1 tested the principles of audio-visual integration for numerosity estimation by deriving a Bayesian optimal observer model with perceptual prior from empirical data to explain perceptual biases. Such perceptual priors may shift towards locations of high salience in the stimulus space. Our results showed that the tendency to over- or underestimate numerosity, expressed in the frequency and strength of fission and fusion illusions, depended on the actual event numerosity. Experiment 2 replicated the effects of social relevance on multisensory integration from Scheller & Sui, 2022 JEP:HPP, using a lower number of events, thereby favouring the opposite illusion through enhanced influences of the prior. In line with the idea that the self acts like a prior, the more frequently observed illusion (more malleable to prior influences) was modulated by self-relevance. Our findings suggest that the self can influence perception by acting like a prior in cue integration, biasing perceptual estimates towards areas of high self-relevance.

Theories of human emotion, including some emotion embodiment theories, suggest that our moods and affective states are reflected in the movements of our bodies. We used the reverse process for mood regulation; modulate body movements to regulate mood. Dancing is a type of full-body movement characterized by affective expressivity and, hence, offers the possibility to express different affective states through the same movement sequences. We tested whether the repeated imitation of a dancer performing two simple full-body dance movement sequences with different affective expressivity (happy or sad) could change mood states. Computer-based systems, using avatars as dance models to imitate, offer a series of advantages such as independence from physical contact and location. Therefore, we compared mood induction effects in two conditions: participants were asked to imitate dance movements from one of the two avatars showing: (a) videos of a human dancer model or (b) videos of a robot dancer model. The mood induction was successful for both happy and sad imitations, regardless of condition (human vs. robot avatar dance model). Moreover, the magnitude of happy mood induction and how much participants liked the task predicted work-related motivation after the mood induction. We conclude that mood regulation through dance movements is possible and beneficial in the work context.

Bullying victimization can undermine adolescents' well-being. However, few studies have comprehensively investigated the contributions of various victimization forms to well-being and compared which forms were more harmful than others. Evidence on whether resilience and social support moderate such associations is also limited. Using a sample of 12,058 Chinese adolescents in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2018, this cross-sectional study aimed to (1) investigate the associations of physical, verbal and relational victimization with well-being; (2) compare the strengths of these associations; and (3) examine the moderating roles of resilience and teacher and parent support in these associations. Results showed that three victimization forms were associated with poorer well-being. Relational and physical victimization were more harmful to most studied well-being outcomes than verbal victimization. Furthermore, resilience weakened the negative effects of physical victimization on negative affect and life satisfaction but aggravated the negative effects of verbal victimization on both outcomes and the negative effect of relational victimization on school belonging. Teacher support intensified the negative effects of physical victimization on school belonging. Parent support was not effective in regulating the victimization–well-being association. The findings underscored the detrimental effects of bullying victimization on adolescents' well-being and the potentially harmful sides of resilience and social support. Implications for bullying prevention were discussed.

Perspective-taking (PT) accessibility has been recognized as an important factor in affecting moral reasoning, also playing a non-trivial role in moral investigation towards autonomous vehicles (AVs). A new proposal to deepen this effect leverages the principles of the veil of ignorance (VOI), as a moral reasoning device aimed to control self-interested decisions by limiting the access to specific perspectives and to potentially biased information. Throughout two studies, we deepen the role of VOI reasoning in the moral perception of AVs, disclosing personal and contingent information progressively throughout the experiment. With the use of the moral trilemma paradigm, two different VOI conditions were operationalized, inspired by the Original Position theory by John Rawls and the Equiprobability Model by John Harsanyi. Evidence suggests a significant role of VOI reasoning in affecting moral reasoning, which seems not independent from the order in which information is revealed. Coherently, a detrimental effect of self-involvement on utilitarian behaviours was detected. These results highlight the importance of considering PT accessibility and self-involvement when investigating moral attitudes towards AVs, since it can help the intelligibility of general concerns and hesitations towards this new technology.