Facial disfigurement in patients with head and neck cancer: the role of social self-efficacy.

This study investigated the moderating role of social self-efficacy (i.e., the belief that one is capable of exercising control over the reactions and openness of other people) with respect to the link between facial disfigurement and psychological and n = 76) as well as their physicians. In line with the hypotheses, the results revealed that the degree of facial disfigurement, as judged by patients as well as their physicians, was positively related to psychological distress and distress in reaction to unpleasant behavior of others, but only when patients did not feel self-efficacious in social encounters. Furthermore, social self-efficacy mitigated the positive link between facial disfigurement as judged by patients and social isolation.     

Concurrent guidance of attention by multiple working memory items: Behavioral and computational evidence

During visual search, task-relevant representations in visual working memory (VWM), known as attentional templates, are assumed to guide attention. A current debate concerns whether only one (Single-Item-Template hypothesis; SIT) or multiple (Multiple-Item-Template hypothesis; MIT) items can serve as attentional templates simultaneously. The current study was designed to test these two hypotheses. Participants memorized two colors, prior to a visual-search task in which the target and the distractor could match or not match the colors held in VWM. Robust attentional guidance was observed when one of the memory colors was presented as the target (reduced response times (RTs) on target-match trials) or the distractor (increased RTs on distractor-match trials). We constructed two drift-diffusion models that implemented the MIT and SIT hypotheses, which are similar in their predictions about overall RTs, but differ in their predictions about RTs on individual trials. Critically, simulated RT distributions and error rates revealed a better match of the MIT hypothesis to the observed data than the SIT hypothesis. Taken together, our findings provide behavioral and computational evidence for the concurrent guidance of attention by multiple items in VWM.

     

Increasing Psychological Capital: A Pre-Registered Meta-Analysis of Controlled Interventions

The aim of this meta-analysis was to evaluate the overall effectiveness of interventions designed to enhance psychological capital (PsyCap), well-being, and performance. We used inclusion criteria such as: to have an experimental design, the sample to be formed by employees or students, to contain a measure of PsyCap, and a control group. Forty-one trials (N_total = 3,911) met these criteria. The overall effect of the interventions on all PsyCap variables was significant but small (d = 0.34, k = 41, Z = 6.74, p < .001). Separate analyses on each of the PsyCap variables also revealed significant effects: small effects on developing PsyCap (d = 0.26, k = 9, Z = 4.37, p < .001), hope (d = 0.22, k = 5, Z = 2.26, p < .05), self-efficacy (d = 0.37, k = 18, Z = 4.11, p < .001), and optimism (d = 0.36, k = 12, Z = 2.52, p < .05), and a small to medium effect for resilience (d = 0.49, k = 12, Z = 3.61, p < .001). The effectiveness of the PsyCap interventions on well-being and performance is also significant.     

Moral Self-Licensing: When Being Good Frees Us to Be Bad

Past good deeds can liberate individuals to engage in behaviors that are immoral, unethical, or otherwise problematic, behaviors that they would otherwise avoid for fear of feeling or appearing immoral. We review research on this moral self-licensing effect in the domains of political correctness, prosocial behavior, and consumer choice. We also discuss remaining theoretical tensions in the literature: Do good deeds reframe bad deeds (moral credentials) or merely balance them out (moral credits)? When does past behavior liberate and when does it constrain? Is self-licensing primarily for others’ benefit (self-presentational) or is it also a way for people to reassure themselves that they are moral people? Finally, we propose avenues for future research that could begin to address these unanswered questions.     

“That's the one I wanted”: when do competitors copy their opponents' choices?

This paper explores the interactive effect of competitiveness and choice structure on symbolic (noninstrumental) choices in competitive situations. When individuals in competitive situations learn the stated preference of their opponent, their own choice depends on their competitiveness and on whether they are in an inclusive‐choice situation (in which both competitors can end up with the same option) or an exclusive‐choice situation (in which they cannot). We obtained this predicted interaction in an imagined video game challenge (Studies 1 and 3), cooking contest (Study 2), and March Madness bracket competition (Study 4). Highly competitive people copied their opponent's choices in exclusive‐choice situations, and seemed to do this because they wanted to frustrate their opponent (Studies 3 and 4).     

How the Opinions of Racial Minorities Influence Judgments of Discrimination

We investigated the influence of target versus non-target group members on judgments of racial discrimination. In Study 1, Black individuals were regarded as better sources of information about racial discrimination than White individuals. In Study 2, Black peers were more influential than White peers on judgments of discrimination. In Study 3, the influence of Black peers was moderated by internal concern with prejudice, and mediated by the perceived credibility of the peer. We discuss these findings in terms of targeted social referencing, whereby members of relevant target groups exert more influence than members of non-target groups over assessments of discrimination.     

Self-Induced Motion Sickness and Body Movement During Passive Restraint

From both direct-realist and motor-theoretic perspectives, the objects of speech perception are construed as articulatory events. We offer the alternative view that it is the auditory properties of phonetic events to which listeners are primarily sensitive. Evidence for this alternative view comes from a variety of sources, including studies of phonetic and phonological universals, comparisons of the perception of speech and nonspeech signals, cross-language perceptual experi- ments, and studies of phonetic categorization by nonhuman animals.     

Postural coordination in looking and tracking tasks

Participants stood in a moving room and looked at a target that was attached to the front wall of the room. They were instructed either to look at the target or to track it, that is, to move so as to maintain a constant distance between the target and their head. Previous research (e.g. Bardy, Oullier, Bootsma, & Stoffregen, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 2002) has documented stable modes of coordination of the hip and ankle joints that emerge during the tracking task. In the present study our main goal was to determine the effects of task variation (tracking versus looking) on these postural coordination modes. Within trials, we varied the frequency of room motion between 0.10 and 0.75 Hz. The results revealed that in both the tracking and looking tasks, posture was characterized by the emergence of in-phase and anti-phase modes, although the modes were more prominent in the tracking task. For both tasks the coordination mode adopted depended on the frequency of motion of the moving room. Coupling between motion of the room and motion of the head was stronger in the tracking task than in the looking task. Overall, the dynamics of hip-ankle coordination were qualitatively similar during the looking and tracking tasks. This similarity has consequences for the development of a general theory of the visual regulation of stance.     

Misery has more company than people think: underestimating the prevalence of others' negative emotions

Four studies document underestimations of the prevalence of others' negative emotions and suggest causes and correlates of these erroneous perceptions. In Study 1a, participants reported that their negative emotions were more private or hidden than were their positive emotions; in Study 1b, participants underestimated the peer prevalence of common negative, but not positive, experiences described in Study 1a. In Study 2, people underestimated negative emotions and overestimated positive emotions even for well-known peers, and this effect was partially mediated by the degree to which those peers reported suppression of negative (vs. positive) emotions. Study 3 showed that lower estimations of the prevalence of negative emotional experiences predicted greater loneliness and rumination and lower life satisfaction and that higher estimations for positive emotional experiences predicted lower life satisfaction. Taken together, these studies suggest that people may think they are more alone in their emotional difficulties than they really are.     

Impact of an individualist vs. collectivist context on the social valorization of internal explanations

The theory of the norm of internality emphasizes the role of Western individualism in the normativity of internal explanations. The present study examines the link between the social value accorded to targets expressing internal vs. external explanations and individualist vs. collectivist contexts. Sixty-three male and female French management sciences students evaluated two targets (internal vs. external) in a simulated recruitment situation. The job vacancy was partially manipulated to create individualist vs. collectivist contexts. Participants were asked to state whether or not they would recruit the targets and to describe the targets on traits relating to social utility (market value) and social desirability (likeability). As expected, the results showed that the effect of the targets' internality on recruitment judgments and perceived social utility was stronger in the individualist context than in the collectivist context. However, the analysis also revealed that the participant's gender moderated the impact of the context on the evaluation of the targets. The results showed that the context strongly affected the men's judgments, whereas it had no effect on the women's judgments.