Perceived self‐society moral discrepancies predict depression but not anxiety

Discrepancies between one's own beliefs, standards and practices and the standards expected by others are associated with increased vulnerability to depression and anxiety. Perhaps the most important personal standard is morality, one's standard of acceptable behaviour. We therefore reason that perceived discrepancies between one's own moral standards and those of society predict anxious and depressed moods. We tested this hypothesis, for the first time, in a sample of 99 female Turkish students. Moral discrepancies were assessed using an adapted moral foundations scale: participants were asked how much payment they would require to perform a series of potentially immoral acts, and how much payment they thought the average person in society would require. Participants also completed standard questionnaire measures of depression and trait anxiety. Results show that perceived self‐society moral discrepancies were significantly related to depression scores, but not to anxiety scores. Furthermore, only discrepancies related to the moral dimensions of respect for ingroups and avoiding harm were related to depression. We argue that perceiving a discrepancy between one's own standards of behaviour and those of society can increase vulnerability to depression, much as other kinds of self‐other discrepancies can; however, the specific moral standards which predict depression may vary with culture and the characteristics of the sample.     

Show me the product,show me the model: Effect of picture type on attitudes toward advertising

We suggest that a consideration of consumer self-evaluations is fundamental to understanding the conditions under which it is more advantageous to present person or product pictures in print advertisements. We build on the basic human motives of self-enhancement and self-verification to propose that the specific self-esteem level of consumers, in the domain relevant for the category, differentially affects their responses to picture type. Specifically, for consumers with low (high) domain-specific self-esteem, depicting a product (person) in the advertisement enhances attitudes toward the advertisement more than depicting a person (product). In two studies, we demonstrate the proposed matching relationships using two different domains of consumer self-evaluation: appearance self-esteem and academic self-esteem. We also show that increased and more fluent generation of self-related mental imagery drives the observed improvement in attitudes toward the advertisement. Our findings suggest direct implications for advertising design.     

How to Revise a Total Preorder

Most approaches to iterated belief revision are accompanied by some motivation for the use of the proposed revision operator (or family of operators), and typically encode enough information in the epistemic state of an agent for uniquely determining one-step revision. But in those approaches describing a family of operators there is usually little indication of how to proceed uniquely after the first revision step. In this paper we contribute towards addressing that deficiency by providing a formal framework which goes beyond the first revision step in two ways. First, the framework is obtained by enriching the epistemic state of an agent starting from the following intuitive idea: we associate to each world x two abstract objects x ⁺ and x ⁻, and we assume that, in addition to preferences over the set of worlds, we are given preferences over this set of objects as well. The latter can be considered as meta-information encoded in the epistemic state which enables us to go beyond the first revision step of the revision operator being applied, and to obtain a unique set of preferences over worlds. We then extend this framework to consider, not only the revision of preferences over worlds, but also the revision of this extended structure itself. We look at some desirable properties for revising the structure and prove the consistency of these properties by giving a concrete operator satisfying all of them. Perhaps more importantly, we show that this framework has strong connections with two other types of constructions in related areas. Firstly, it can be seen as a special case of preference aggregation which opens up the possibility of extending the framework presented here into a full-fledged framework for preference aggregation and social choice theory. Secondly, it is related to existing work on the use of interval orderings in a number of different contexts.     

Imagining thin: Why vanity sizing works

Vanity sizing, the practice of clothing manufacturers, whereby smaller size labels are used on clothes than what the clothes actually are, has become very common. Apparently, it helps sell clothes—women prefer small size clothing labels to large ones. We propose and demonstrate that smaller size labels evoke more positive self-related mental imagery. Thus, consumers imagine themselves more positively (thinner) with a vanity sized size-6 pant versus a size-8 pant. We also show that appearance self-esteem moderates the (mediating) effect of imagery on vanity sizing effectiveness—while vanity sizing evokes more positive mental imagery for both low and high appearance self-esteem individuals, the effect of the positive imagery on clothing preference is significant (only) for people with low appearance self-esteem, supported by the theory of compensatory self-enhancement.Our suggestion of simple marketing communications affecting valence of imagery and consequent product evaluation have implications for many other marketing domains.     

Fluency in L2: Read and Spontaneous Speech Pausing Patterns of Turkish,Swahili, Hausa and Arabic Speakers of English

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research - Language learners’ actual speech performances constitute an essential aspect of studies on second language learning and teaching. Although there is...     

A test of theory of planned behavior in type II diabetes adherence: The leading role of perceived behavioral control

Current Psychology - Diabetes mellitus is a health complication that millions of people suffer from all over the world. Type II (non-insulin dependent) diabetes requires many changes in the daily...     

Breaking Psychological Contracts with the Burden of Workload: A Weekly Study of Job Resources as Moderators

This intra‐individual study examined relationships over time of job demands and resources with employee perceptions of psychological contract breach and violation, or the emotional impact of breach. Based on Conservation of Resources (COR) Theory, we expected job demands to increase the susceptibility of experiencing contract breach and violation over time, and we expected this relationship to be moderated by available job resources. In particular, autonomy and social support were expected to buffer relationships of job demands with breach, while development was expected to intensify relationships between job demands and breach. For violation, we expected job resources to intensify the relationships between job demands and breach, in line with the betrayal hypothesis. Analyses on weekly diary data showed that weekly job demands were related to higher contract breach perceptions in the following week when autonomy and social support were low and when development was high. Moreover, weekly job demands were related to higher violation in the next week, especially when social support was high. The study shows that job demands may be related to higher odds of experiencing a breach and higher violation, and job resources may play opposite roles in moderating the relationships of job demands with breach and violation.