Parental evaluation of teachers’ competences and characteristics during COVID-19 pandemic homeschooling

Social Psychology of Education - With the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, school-related closures and the hasty transition into homeschooling, parents were required to take a more active and...     

To justify or excuse?: A meta-analytic review of the effects of explanations

The authors used R. Folger and R. Cropanzano's (1998, 2001) fairness theory to derive predictions about the effects of explanation provision and explanation adequacy on justice judgments and cooperation, retaliation, and withdrawal responses. The authors also used the theory to identify potential moderators of those effects, including the type of explanation (justification vs. excuse), outcome favorability, and study context. The authors' predictions were tested by using meta-analyses of 54 independent samples. The results showed strong effects of explanations on both the justice and response variables. Moreover, explanations were more beneficial when they took the form of excuses rather than justifications, when they were given after unfavorable outcomes, and when they were given in contexts with instrumental, relational, and moral implications.     

The influence of mood on the search for supporting versus conflicting information: dissonance reduction as a means of mood regulation?

Focusing on similarities between the mood regulation approach and dissonance theory, this article addresses the interplay between dissonance and mood by examining how individuals search for information after making a decision while under the influence of positive versus negative mood. Study 1 suggested that negative mood increased the preference for consonant over dissonant information after decisions, whereas positive mood led to a more balanced information search. In Study 2, participants in negative mood rated consonant information as more pleasant and dissonant information as more annoying than participants in positive mood. In addition, the results suggested that mood regulation processes took place. In Study 3, the findings from Study 1 were replicated with a paradigm in which higher stakes were involved.     

Response mode does not modulate the space–time congruency effect: Evidence for a space–time mapping at a conceptual level

Previous studies reported a space–time congruency effect on response time, supporting the notion that people's thinking about time is grounded in their spatial sensorimotor experience. According to a strong view of metaphoric mapping, the congruency effect should be larger for responses that differ in their spatial features than for responses that lack such differences. In contrast, a weaker version of this account posits that the grounding of time is based on higher-level spatial concepts. In this case, response mode should not modulate the size of the space–time congruency effect. In order to assess these predictions, participants in this study responded to temporal stimuli either manually or vocally. Response mode did not modulate the space–time congruency effect which supports the weaker view of metaphoric mapping suggesting that this effect emerges at a higher cognitive level.