British journal of psychology最新文献

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.

Walking direction conveyed by biological motion (BM) cues, which humans are highly sensitive to since birth, can elicit involuntary shifts of attention to enhance the detection of static targets. Here, we demonstrated that such intrinsic sensitivity to walking direction could also modulate the direction perception of simultaneously presented dynamic stimuli. We showed that the perceived direction of apparent motion was biased towards the walking direction even though observers had been informed in advance that the walking direction of BM did not predict the apparent motion direction. In particular, rightward BM cues had an advantage over leftward BM cues in altering the perception of motion direction. Intriguingly, this perceptual bias disappeared when BM cues were shown inverted, or when the critical biological characteristics were removed from the cues. Critically, both the perceptual direction bias and the rightward advantage persisted even when only local BM cues were presented without any global configuration. Furthermore, the rightward advantage was found to be specific to social cues (i.e., BM), as it vanished when non-social cues (i.e., arrows) were utilized. Taken together, these findings support the existence of a specific processing mechanism for life motion signals and shed new light on their influences in a dynamic environment.

The Morality-Agency-Communion (MAC) model of respect and liking suggests that traits linked with morality are important for respect and liking; traits related to competence or assertiveness are important for respect and traits related to warmth are important for liking. However, tests of this model have tended not to consider traits related to immorality, incompetence, lack of assertiveness or coldness. This study addressed this issue by utilizing a within-subjects design in which participants were required to rate their respect and liking for individuals with specific trait types across four categories (moral; competence; assertiveness; and warmth) at three levels (positive, negative and neutral). The central tenets of the MAC model were supported for ‘positive’ traits (morality, competence, assertiveness and warmth). However, for ‘negative’ traits (immorality, incompetence and lack of assertiveness), individuals were similarly not liked and not respected. Individuals who were cold were respected more than liked. The findings of this study extend the MAC model by indicating that the amount that individuals are respected versus liked depends not only on trait type but also whether a trait is positive or negative.

Previous research on the use of peripheral vision to identify two spatially separated stimuli simultaneously has led to the conclusion that the focus of attention has the form of a symmetric ellipse with a broader expansion along the horizontal compared to the vertical meridian. However, research on pseudoneglect has indicated that attention is not symmetrically distributed to the whole visual field. Here, we test if the attention window is indeed symmetrical with regard to its shape and resolution during peripheral vision. The results indicate that the position of those stimuli relative to the focus of attention influences the ability to identify a given set of stimuli. Specifically, stimuli presented to the left and top of the fixation point were more frequently identified correctly compared to those presented to the right bottom. That is, the attention window is rather not symmetric, which must be considered in future studies on the nature of the focus of attention.