Absorption, openness to experience, and hypnotizability

Absorption, a correlate of hypnotizability, is conceptually related to openness to experience. Study 1 found no evidence that gender moderated the correlation between absorption and hypnotizability, or of nonlinear trends. Study 2 showed that openness was factorially complex, and that absorption was related to imaginative involvement, but not to social-political liberalism. Study 3 found small quadratic trends in the relations between these variables and hypnotizability; hypnotizability was related to imaginative involvement, but not liberalism. Study 4 confirmed differential correlations between absorption subscales and hypnotizability but failed to confirm the nonlinear trends. Implications for future studies of the correlates of hypnotizability, and for the nature of the "fifth factor" in personality structure, are discussed.     

How Emotional Are Populists Really? Factors Explaining Emotional Appeals in the Communication of Political Parties

Are populists really more emotional than mainstream parties? The alleged link between populism and emotional communication has barely been subject to systematic empirical scrutiny. I use literature on populist communication and appraisal theory to generate expectations about which political parties use which emotional appeals. I test these claims by applying a novel emotional dictionary to a large set of text data including more than 700,000 press releases and tweets from three European countries. As expected, I find that populist parties use significantly more negative emotional appeals (anger, fear, disgust, sadness) and less positive emotional appeals (joy, enthusiasm, pride, hope) than mainstream parties. Furthermore, I find that political actors adapt the usage of emotional appeals to different purposes depending on the communication medium and the politicians' status level. This study entails important implications for the research on emotional appeals in politics and populist communication.     

A Comparison of ML,WLSMV, and Bayesian Methods for Multilevel Structural Equation Models in Small Samples: A Simulation Study

Multilevel structural equation models are increasingly applied in psychological research. With increasing model complexity, estimation becomes computationally demanding, and small sample sizes pose further challenges on estimation methods relying on asymptotic theory. Recent developments of Bayesian estimation techniques may help to overcome the shortcomings of classical estimation techniques. The use of potentially inaccurate prior information may, however, have detrimental effects, especially in small samples. The present Monte Carlo simulation study compares the statistical performance of classical estimation techniques with Bayesian estimation using different prior specifications for a two-level SEM with either continuous or ordinal indicators. Using two software programs (Mplus and Stan), differential effects of between- and within-level sample sizes on estimation accuracy were investigated. Moreover, it was tested to which extent inaccurate priors may have detrimental effects on parameter estimates in categorical indicator models. For continuous indicators, Bayesian estimation did not show performance advantages over ML. For categorical indicators, Bayesian estimation outperformed WLSMV solely in case of strongly informative accurate priors. Weakly informative inaccurate priors did not deteriorate performance of the Bayesian approach, while strong informative inaccurate priors led to severely biased estimates even with large sample sizes. With diffuse priors, Stan yielded better results than Mplus in terms of parameter estimates.     

Intertrial priming due to distractor repetition is eliminated in homogeneous contexts

Targets are found more easily in a visual search task when their feature is repeatedly presented, an effect known as intertrial priming. Recent findings suggest that priming of distractors can also improve search performance by facilitated suppression of repeated distractor features. The efficacy of intertrial priming for targets can be potentiated by the expectancy of a specific target feature; systematic repetition shows larger intertrial priming than random repetition. For distractors, the underlying mechanism is less clear. We used the systematic lateralization approach to disentangle target- and distractor-related processing with subcomponents of the N2pc. We found no modulation of the N_T component, which reflects prioritization of target processing. The N_D component, which reflects attentional capture by irrelevant stimuli, however, showed intertrial priming: N_D monotonically decreased with repetition of a distractor color, but only if a specific distractor feature was expected, and if the context induced a search that was vulnerable to attentional capture. These observations suggest that distractor priming only improves visual search if volitional control is relatively high. The results also suggest that intertrial priming for distractors is due to decreased attentional capture by repeatedly presented distractors, whereas target processing remains unaffected.     

Ego depletion and positive illusions: does the construction of positivity require regulatory resources?

Individuals frequently exhibit positive illusions about their own abilities, their possibilities to control their environment, and future expectations. The authors propose that positive illusions require resources of self-control, which is considered to be a limited resource similar to energy or strength. Five studies revealed that people with depleted self-regulatory resources indeed exhibited a less-optimistic sense of their own abilities (Study 1), a lower sense of subjective control (Study 2), and less-optimistic expectations about their future (Study 3). Two further studies shed light on the underlying psychological process: Ego-depleted (compared to nondepleted) individuals generated/retrieved less positive self-relevant attributes (Studies 4 and 5) and reported a lower sense of general self-efficacy (Study 5), which both partially mediated the impact of ego depletion on positive self-views (Study 5).     

Terror salience and punishment: Does terror salience induce threat to social order?

In recent times, international terrorism has become one of the most serious concerns of the modern Western world. As a consequence, the risk and fear of terrorism is more salient in people’s minds (i.e. terror salience), which is supposed to affect behavioral responses in our society. The present research suggests that increased punishment of violations of criminal laws is one societal reaction to increased terror salience. It was consistently shown that increased terror salience, induced by either varying the temporal distance from the London terrorist attacks of July 7, 2005 (Study 1), by vignettes in the form of newspaper articles manipulating the expected terror risk (Study 2), or by pictures of recent terrorist attacks (Studies 3 and 4), significantly increased the punishment assigned to a violation of criminal laws that was completely unrelated to terror (i.e. car theft and rape). Finally, Study 4 revealed that (a) the effect of terror salience on punishment is indeed due to increased perception of threat to social order and (b) that this effect cannot be explained by the general negative nature of the stimulus material employed in this study.     

Becoming More Conscientious or More Open to Experience? Effects of a Two-Week Smartphone-Based Intervention for Personality Change

Research indicates that it might be possible to change personality traits through intervention, but this clinical research has primarily focused on changing neuroticism. To date, there are no established, proven techniques for changing other domains of personality, such as conscientiousness and openness. This research examined the effects of a two-week smartphone-based intervention to either change one facet of conscientiousness (i.e. self-discipline) or one facet of openness to experience (i.e. openness to action). Two intervention studies (total N = 255) with two active intervention groups for mutual comparisons were conducted. Results of self-reports and observer reports showed that people who wanted to become more self-disciplined were less self-disciplined at pretest. Similarly, people who wanted to become more open to action were less open to action at pretest. The results showed that people who chose the self-discipline intervention showed greater increases in self-discipline, and people who chose the openness to action intervention showed greater increases in openness to action compared with the other group. Changes were maintained until follow-up two and six weeks after the end of the intervention. Future work is needed to examine whether these personality changes are enduring or reflect temporary accentuation as a result of participation in the intervention. © 2020 European Association of Personality Psychology