Taking Care of Each Other: How Can We Increase Compliance with Personal Protective Measures During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Chile?

In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, personal protective measures (e.g., social distancing, handwashing, and mask wearing) have been adopted as a cornerstone to limit the spread of the disease. Yet, the effectiveness of these measures depends on people's levels of adherence. In this article, we apply social-psychological research to the study of compliance with personal protective measures during the COVID-19 pandemic in Chile. We consider three possible models underlying adherence: (1) sociodemographic and socioeconomic factors, (2) instrumental factors, and (3) normative factors. We draw on data from a longitudinal nonrepresentative panel study (Study 1, n = 32,304) and a cross-sectional representative survey (Study 2, n = 1,078) to explore the impact of these different factors on personal protective measures compliance. Findings show the strongest support for the role of instrumental and normative factors, in that people who comply with protective measures report to a greater extent that relatives and friends comply too and tend to perceive high risk of COVID-19. We finish by proposing policy recommendations to promote effective strategies to contain the spread of the virus.     

Temporal compression in episodic memory for real-life events

Remembering an event typically takes less time than experiencing it, suggesting that episodic memory represents past experience in a temporally compressed way. Little is known, however, about how the continuous flow of real-life events is summarised in memory. Here we investigated the nature and determinants of temporal compression by directly comparing memory contents with the objective timing of events as measured by a wearable camera. We found that episodic memories consist of a succession of moments of prior experience that represent events with varying compression rates, such that the density of retrieved information is modulated by goal processing and perceptual changes. Furthermore, the results showed that temporal compression rates remain relatively stable over one week and increase after a one-month delay, particularly for goal-related events. These data shed new light on temporal compression in episodic memory and suggest that compression rates are adaptively modulated to maintain current goal-relevant information.     

Developmental trajectories of multisite musculoskeletal pain and depressive symptoms: The effects of job demands and resources and individual factors

Objective: To investigate developmental paths in multisite musculoskeletal pain (MPS) and depressive symptoms (DPS) and the effects of job demands (JD), job resources (JR), optimism and health-related lifestyle on these paths. We expected to find four trajectories – Low Symptoms, High Pain, High Depression and High Symptoms – and hypothesised that high JDs, low JRs, low optimism and adverse lifestyle predict belonging to trajectories with high symptom levels.

Design: Data on Finnish firefighters (N = 360) were collected in 1996, 1999 and 2009. The effects of JDs (mental and physical workload), JRs (supervisory relations, interpersonal relations, task resources), optimism and lifestyle (alcohol consumption, smoking, physical exercise, sleeping) on MPS and DPS were assessed. Latent class growth modelling and multinomial logistic regression were applied.

Results: Three trajectories emerged: Low Symptoms; High Pain; and High Depression. In a multivariable model, high mental workload (OR 2.9, 95% CI 1.5–5.5), poor interpersonal relations (2.6, 1.4–5.0), sleeping problems (2.7, 1.4–5.2) and low optimism (2.0, 1.0–3.7) predicted belonging to High Depression. Alcohol consumption (2.4, 1.4–4.1) and sleeping problems (2.1, 1.3–3.6) were related to High Pain.

Conclusions: Different developmental paths in MPS and DPS are possible. Partly different factors predict the development of pain and depressive symptoms.     

The illness perception questionnaire: A new method for assessing the cognitive representation of illness

Abstract

The Illness Perception Questionnaire (IPQ) is a new method for assessing cognitive representations of illness. The IPQ is a theoretically derived measure comprising five scales that provides information about the five components that have been found to underlie the cognitive representation of illness. The five scales assess identity - the symptoms the patient associates with the illness, cause - personal ideas about aetiology, time-line - the perceived duration of the illness, consequences - expected effects and outcome and cure control - how one controls or recovers from the illness. The IPQ has a specific number of core items but allows the user to add items for particular patient groups or health threats. Data is presented supporting the reliability and validity of the IPQ scales in different chronic illness populations.     

Flourishing students: A longitudinal study on positive emotions,personal resources,and study engagement

The aim of this two-wave questionnaire study with a 4-week interval among 391 Dutch university students was to test a gain cycle of positive emotions, personal resources, and study engagement. As a theoretical basis, this study drew on the broaden-and-build (B&B) theory and the conservation of resources (COR) theory. More specifically, it was hypothesized that the experience of positive emotions predicts students’ future personal resources and study engagement. Moreover, it was expected that there is a longitudinal relationship between personal resources and study engagement. Furthermore, we hypothesized that positive emotions, personal resources, and study engagement are reciprocally related. Results, obtained by means of structural equation modeling, confirmed both causal (except for the positive relationship between positive emotions and study engagement) and reciprocal hypotheses, thereby successfully integrating the B&B theory with the COR theory.     

Life satisfaction goes with pleasure and personal growth goes with interest: Further arguments for separating hedonic and eudaimonic well-being

Some theories suggest that pleasure and interest are separable emotions, with distinct functions and phenomenology. This study proposes a functional model of well-being that draws on these insights. It argues that both pleasure and satisfaction are elements of hedonic well-being and that their main function is to reward goal achievement and to mentally signalize that the body is in homeostatic stability. In contrast, the main function of interest is to promote mental and physical growth, and to suppress hedonic tendencies of premature returns to a homeostatic balance during difficult strivings. The feeling of interest facilitates personal growth, and is thus an indicator of eudaimonic well-being. A follow-up study (N?=?145 Norwegian students) gave empirical support to these assumptions. Life satisfaction predicted feelings of pleasantness while personal growth predicted feelings of interest. With a projective technique, it was further demonstrated that satisfaction produces pleasant stories, but not interesting stories.     

Be careful what you wish for but also why you wish for it – Goal-striving reasons and subjective well-being

Individuals’ subjective well-being (SWB) when attaining their goals is moderated by the characteristics of their goals. Two significant moderators are whether goals are approach or avoidance oriented and their content. Within the goal-setting literature, these characteristics have been applied to goals as such, focussing on what it is people try to achieve. However, they can equally be applied to analyse why individuals pursue their goals. By applying the dimensions of approach and avoidance orientation as well as goal content to the analysis of goal-striving reasons, a framework has been developed encompassing the following four goal-striving reasons: goals pursuit because of pleasure, for altruistic reasons, out of necessity and for self-esteem reasons. The empirical findings (N?=?174) show that goal-striving reasons are significantly associated with affective SWB. Therefore goal-striving reasons provide an additional level of analysis, when analysing the relation between goals and affective SWB.     

Rationality and Synchronic Identity

Many requirements of rationality rely for their application on facts about identity at a time. Take the requirement not to have contradictory beliefs. It is irrational if a single agent believes P and believes ～P, but it is not irrational if one agent believes P and another believes ～P. There are puzzle cases, however, in which it is unclear whether we have a single agent, or instead two or more. I consider and reject possible criteria of identity at a time before proposing a pluralist alternative on which there are vastly more agents than we might have thought. This pluralist thesis is analogous to mereological universalism, on which there are all sorts of strange disconnected objects of which we don’t usually take note. I conclude by giving a pragmatic account of which of these rational agents it makes sense to attend to, by appealing the purposes that we have in employing rationally evaluative language.     

Authoritarian reactions to terrorist threat: Who is being threatened,the Me or the We?

Endorsement of authoritarian attitudes has been observed to increase under conditions of terrorist threat. However, it is not clear whether this effect is a genuine response to perceptions of personal or collective threat. We investigated this question in two experiments using German samples. In the first experiment (N = 144), both general and specific authoritarian tendencies increased after asking people to imagine that they were personally affected by terrorism. No such effect occurred when they were made to think about Germany as a whole being affected by terrorism. This finding was replicated and extended in a second experiment (N = 99), in which personal and collective threat were manipulated orthogonally. Authoritarian and ethnocentric (ingroup bias) reactions occurred only for people highly identified with their national ingroup under personal threat, indicating that authoritarian responses may operate as a group‐level coping strategy for a threat to the personal self. Again, we found no effects for collective threat. In both studies, authoritarianism mediated the effects of personal threat on more specific authoritarian and ethnocentric reactions. These results suggest that the effects of terrorist threat on authoritarianism can, at least in part, be attributed to a sense of personal insecurity, raised under conditions of terrorist threat. We discuss the present findings with regard to basic sociomotivational processes (e.g., group‐based control restoration, terror management) and how these may relate to recent models of authoritarianism.     

Philosophy Unbound: The Idea of Global Philosophy

The future of philosophy is moving towards “global philosophy.” The idea of global philosophy is the view that different philosophical approaches may engage more substantially with each other to solve philosophical problems. Most solutions attempt to use only those available resources located within one philosophical tradition. A more promising approach might be to expand the range of available resources to better assist our ability to offer more compelling solutions. This search for new horizons in order to improve our clarity about philosophical issues is at the heart of global philosophy. The idea of global philosophy encourages us to look beyond our traditions to improve our philosophical problem‐solving by our own lights. Global philosophy is a new approach whose time is coming. This essay offers the first account of this approach and an assessment of its future promise.