Pals,Problems, and Personality: The Moderating Role of Personality in the Longitudinal Association Between Adolescents’ and Best Friends’ Delinquency

We examined the potential moderating role of Block's personality types (i.e., overcontrollers, undercontrollers, and resilients) on the longitudinal associations between adolescents’ and their best friends’ delinquency. Across three annual waves, 497 Dutch adolescents (283 boys, M_Age = 13 years at Wave 1) and their best friends reported on their delinquent behaviors. Adolescents’ three personality types were obtained by latent class growth analysis on their annual reports on Big Five personality. A three‐group cross‐lagged panel analysis was performed on three waves of data. Delinquency of overcontrollers was predicted by their best friends’ delinquency, whereas delinquency of undercontrollers and resilients was not. Delinquency of undercontrollers and resilients predicted their best friends’ delinquency, but overcontrollers’ delinquency did not. These findings suggest that personality may play an important role in adolescents’ susceptibility to the influence of friends’ delinquency, as well as in youths’ ability to influence friends through their own delinquency.     

Aging and the speed of time

Correlational and experimental methods provide evidence relevant to seven theories of humans’ general impressions of the speed of time, including theories of the purported subjective acceleration of time with aging. A total of 1865 adults from two countries, ranging in age from 16 to 80, reported how fast time appears to pass over different spans of time. Other measures tapped the experience of life changes and time pressure, and experimental manipulations were used to test two models based on forward telescoping and difficulty of recall. Respondents of all ages reported that time seems to pass quickly. In contrast to widely held beliefs, age differences in reports of the subjective speed of time were very small, except for the question about how fast the last 10 years had passed. Findings support a theory based on the experience of time pressure.     

Do people remember the temporal proximity of unrelated events?

In the present study, we tested the ability to remember the temporal proximity of two unrelated events that had happened within 7 days of one another. In three experiments, 1,909 participants judged whether pairs of news events, ranging in age from 1 month to about 6 years, had occurred within a week of each other and, if not, how far apart they had occurred. Some event pairs were related, and others were unrelated. For unrelated event pairs, same-week and separation judgments were very poor. Accuracy was much greater for both kinds of judgments when the events were related. Participants often guessed the separation of unrelated event pairs, whereas they frequently deduced the separation or remembered the proximity of related event pairs. For both types of pairs, the participants reported using the strength of the memories or the general period in which the events had occurred.     

Phänomenologie als Geschichtsphilosophie in praktischer Absicht: Den philosophischen Intentionen Ludwig Landgrebes zur Erinnerung

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

The Self‐enhancement Function of Autobiographical Memory

The self‐enhancement function of autobiographical memory was examined by assessing the psychological distance of adults' most important memories. Participants (N = 445, ages 18–80) reported the seven most important events from their lives on an online survey and rated the memories in terms of valence, emotionality, importance, vividness, reliving, rehearsal, novelty, and psychological distance. Participants also completed the Rosenberg Self‐esteem Scale. Regression analyses showed that participants felt psychologically closer to positive memories than to negative memories, independent of the actual age of the memories. The self‐enhancement function was unrelated to participants' age but was related to their self‐esteem: Higher self‐esteem was associated with feeling closer to positive memories. Finally, a moderated multiple‐mediation model showed that memories' importance and rehearsal mediated the relation between one's self‐esteem and the psychological distance of their positive versus negative memories. Findings are discussed in relation to the functional approach to autobiographical memory. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Brand placement disclosure effects on persuasion: The moderating role of consumer self‐control

The inclusion of branded products in media entertainment has become a popular marketing strategy, because viewers are less likely to recognize the persuasive intent of sponsored content as compared with traditional advertising. To guarantee fair communication and protect consumers against unobtrusive persuasion attempts, European media policy has obligated broadcasters to disclose the presence of brand placement in their television shows. Recent studies demonstrate that disclosures raise viewers' persuasion knowledge; however, the circumstances under which brand placement disclosures may affect brand evaluations and resistance to the persuasive impact of brand placement are still unclear. In two experiments, we uncovered self‐control depletion as an important moderator of disclosure effects on brand evaluations and resistance to brand placement influence. Whereas disclosures increase resistance and decrease persuasion for viewers not depleted of their self‐control, disclosures do not affect resistance and even result in more favorable brand evaluations when viewers' self‐control is depleted by a previous self‐control task. Because a state of self‐control depletion can be perceived as the “couch‐potato” mindset in which people expose themselves to entertaining television content, our findings imply that instead of protecting consumers from hidden persuasion, disclosures may unintentionally increase the persuasive effects of brand placement. We discuss several possible mechanisms that could explain our findings. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Joint Impact of Achievement Goals and Performance Feedback on Information Giving

This research examined how performance feedback moderates the effects of individuals' achievement goals on information exchange when carrying out a novel and complex task. Experiment 1 demonstrated that mastery goal individuals who received positive performance feedback gave less modified information about their task performance to their exchange partner relative to both mastery goal individuals who received negative feedback and performance goal individuals (who received either negative or positive feedback). In Experiment 2, we found that relative to performance goals, mastery goals led to a stronger reciprocity orientation and a weaker exploitation orientation. Also, mastery goal individuals provided information of higher quality than performance goal individuals, thereby explaining the observed findings in Experiment 1.     

Increased attention for computer-tailored health communications: an event-related potential study.

The authors tested whether individually tailored health communications receive more attention from the reader than nontailored health communications in a randomized, controlled trial among student volunteers (N = 24). They used objective measures of attention allocation during the message exposure. In a between-subjects design, participants had to read tailored or nontailored nutrition education messages and at the same time had to pay attention to specific odd auditory stimuli in a sequence of frequent auditory stimuli (odd ball paradigm). The amount of attention allocation was measured by recording event-related potentials (ERPs; i.e., N100 and P300 ERPs) and reaction times. For the tailored as opposed to the nontailored group, results revealed larger amplitudes for the N100 effect, smaller amplitudes for the P300 effect, and slower reaction times. Resource allocation theory and these results suggest that those in the tailored group allocated more attention resources to the nutrition message than those in the nontailored group.