COVID-19 has induced stress motivated by individuals’ fears of infection and death, while mitigation efforts have also exacerbated stress by reducing individuals’ income, creating feelings of social isolation, and imposing barriers to obtaining basic resources. In this study, we use a representative sample of 693 adults in Michigan to investigate the association between COVID-19 stress and life satisfaction. We find that COVID-19 stress is significantly negatively related to life satisfaction, and that this association is strongest among those living alone and those living in households with many other adults. Exploratory analyses suggest that shopping challenges are most strongly associated directly with stress and indirectly with life satisfaction, while income and boredom challenges are less important. We conclude by discussing the implications of declines in life satisfaction due to an ongoing and potentially worsening stressful event, and consider some strategies for mitigating this non-trivial form of COVID-19 harm.

Previous research examining transference – which posits people draw on past experiences with close others to inform novel interactions – has found that people attribute qualities to and express preferences for novel targets based on their similarity to significant others. However, classic tasks for testing transference required multiple sessions over many weeks, limiting the test of this process to relatively small, college student samples. The purpose of the current study ( N = 532, M age = 34.81, SD = 9.83, 61.47% Men, 63.35% White) was to create an online version of a transference task administered in one session and replicate the effect of transference with a larger sample of participants across the lifespan, and test whether targets resembling parents and ex-partners were preferable to control targets. The effects of transference and preference were replicated in the online version of the transference task. We also found preliminary evidence that the effects of transference and preference were slightly stronger in older individuals and secure individuals, albeit the effects were small. Results are discussed in the context of how individuals use previous and existing relationships to guide their behavior in new relationships.

Although romantic relationships have been found to boost well-being, some studies demonstrated that staying single has similar beneficial effects. One cause of such contradiction is probably due to the lack of a quantitative measurement of attitudes toward singlehood. To address this methodological gap, four studies involving 1,276 undergraduate students in Malaysia and India were conducted to develop and examine the psychometric qualities of the Attitudes toward Singlehood Scale (AtSS). Study 1 selected 15 items from the pool and identified a 3-factor solution using exploratory factor analysis. However, a 9-item second-order factor model was found superior in Study 2 using confirmatory factor analysis. The 9-item AtSS demonstrated good internal consistency and test-retest reliability measured two weeks apart as well as construct and criterion validity. Study 3 further supported the superiority of the 9-item second-order factor model with replicated results of Study 2 on a new sample. Measurement invariance test supported scalar invariance across gender while ANCOVA showed female participants displaying higher scores than male counterparts. Study 4 then examined the properties of the 9-item AtSS on a sample of young adults in India. The results are consistent with Study 2 and 3, lending further support to the usability of the AtSS in different cultural contexts. Overall, the consistent findings promote the AtSS as a promising tool for assessing young adults’ attitudes toward singlehood. Implication and suggestions for future studies are also discussed.

Women are more likely than men to be sexualized, objectified and dehumanized. Female sex workers experience stigma and violence associated with these judgements at far higher rates than other women. Here, we use a pre-registered experimental design to consider which aspects of sex work – the level of sexual activity, earned income, or perceived autonomy of the work – drive dehumanization. A first group of participants ( N = 217) rated 80 vignettes of women varying by full-time employment, hobbies and interests on humanness. These ratings were subtracted from the ratings of a second group of participants ( N = 774) who rated these same vignettes which additionally described a part-time job, hobby or activity that varied in sexual activity, income earned and autonomy over one’s actions. We find that women and especially men dehumanize women they believe are engaging in penetrative sex. We also find that women’s autonomy of, but not their income from, their sexual activity increases dehumanization. Our findings suggest that opposition to women’s ability to pursue casual sex and generalizations about the exploitative conditions of sex work may drive the harshest negative prejudice towards female sex workers and, by similar mechanisms, women’s sexuality in general.

Self-interest is a central driver of attitudes and behaviors, but people also act against their immediate self-interest through prosocial behaviors, voting incongruously with their finances, or punishing others at personal cost. How much people believe that self-interest causes attitudes and behaviors is important, because this belief may shape regulation, shared narratives, and institutional structures. An influential paper claimed that people overestimate the power of self-interest on others’ attitudes and behavioral intentions (Miller & Ratner, 1998). We present two registered, close, and successful replications (U.S. MTurk, N = 800; U.K. Prolific, N = 799) that compared actual to estimated intentions, with open data and code. Consistent with the original article, participants overestimated the impact of payment on blood donation in Study 1, ds = 0.59 [0.51, 0.66], 0.57 [0.49, 0.64], and overestimated the importance of smoking status for smoking policy preferences in Study 4, ds = 0.75 [0.59, 0.90], 0.84 [0.73, 0.96]. These replications included two extensions: 1) communal orientation as a moderator of overestimation and 2) a more detailed measure of self-interest in Study 4 (ordinal smoking status). Communal orientation did not predict overestimation, and the ordinal smoking measure yielded similar results to the main study. Verifying the overestimation error informs behavioral theories across several fields and has practical implications for institutions that require trust and cooperation. All materials, data, and code are available at osf.io/57mdc/

Research on trust development has generally focused on how similarities between people influence trust allocation. However, similarity in interests and beliefs, which underpins trust development and may be critical to relationship success, is seldom apparent upon initial interaction and thus may not be a primary predictor of initial trust decisions. Here we ask how mimicry, a visible social cue, affects trust decisions alongside similarity. We used a “chat-room” style task to independently manipulate the degree to which participants were similar to a set of avatars and the degree to which those avatars displayed mimicry. We then assessed trust decisions in both financial and social domains. Our results show that together with similarity, mimicry is an important independent predictor of trust decisions. This work has implications for understanding how and when trust is allocated, as well how to facilitate successful interactions.

Cultural heritage professionals are becoming increasingly concerned about the lack of care being taken by municipalities for their cultural heritage objects which include works of art in public places. They have therefore begun to ask the public to help take care of “their” cultural heritage through so-called public participation projects. Cultural heritage professionals tacitly assume that if they “teach” the public to treasure such objects of “their” heritage, the public will become more proactive in helping to conserve them. However, research being conducted by the authors is showing that a majority of the general public often has a completely different awareness and/or feeling about cultural heritage objects in their neighborhoods than the cultural heritage professionals think they have, or think they should have. Three recent case studies carried out by the authors show that these differences are most noticeable during so-called “value moments” at the beginning and at the perceived end of an object’s life. These are the two moments when decisions are made, usually by cultural heritage professionals, to place an object in a neighborhood or have it significantly changed or removed, often to the surprise and disagreement of the residents. Between these two moments lay many moments when an object is taken for granted, grudgingly accepted, or not even noticed. Given the fact that cultural heritage professionals often make the ultimate decisions and do not always consider or outright ignore public opinion, it should not be surprising that there is an increasingly negative public perception of what they do. The results of the case studies illustrate the need for professionals to consider and accept as valid, public feelings about cultural heritage objects in their neighborhoods.

Attribution of responsibility for the causes of suffering is one of the main factors that influence responses to individuals in distress. While the role of attributional processes on prosocial motivation has been widely investigated in social psychology, only few attempts have been made to characterize their behavioural and neurophysiological underpinnings. This is partly due to the lack of stimuli that can facilitate within-subject experimental designs. To overcome this problem, we created a set of stimuli consisting of videos depicting people in different situations of distress. Each video is paired with short stories that aim to manipulate the perceived degree of responsibility of the main character. To validate the stimuli, we investigated the effect of different context-video pairs on self-report measures of participants’ subjective experience. We found that different contexts preceding the same video can influence blame and responsibility judgments, affective responses and willingness to help. In a complementary analysis, we replicated previous findings on the influence of empathy and responsibility on willingness to help, showing how the latter is mediated by moral judgments. Finally, we observed a general increase in responses times when videos were paired with responsible contexts. We provide interpretations of this finding that can relate attribution accounts to prominent theories in moral psychology. Overall, this study highlights the possibility of expanding existing theories on prosocial motivation by implementing a set of stimuli that includes multiple scenarios and allows for the collection of third person measures in within-subject designs.

Even though planning is generally helpful in goal pursuit, people do not always choose to plan. The inclination to plan might depend on whether we focus on what we seek to approach or what we seek to avoid. In two pre-registered experiments, we tested the relative effect of approach versus avoidance motivation on willingness to plan (total N =1349). With outcome framing as the experimental manipulation, participants were randomly assigned to either an approach or an avoidance condition, and then indicated their willingness to plan their study activities before an upcoming exam. Contrary to predictions, the results showed no significant difference in willingness to plan depending on condition in either experiment. There was mixed support for the importance of anticipated affect and perceived distance as process mechanisms: While Experiment 1 showed that participants who experienced the day of the exam as closer in time were more willing to plan their study preparations (regardless of condition), we found no mediational effects through perceived distance or anticipated affect. In Experiment 2, anticipated affect intensity mediated the association between motivation and willingness to plan, where participants induced to approach motivation predicted greater intensity of anticipated affect upon achieving their goals, and thus were more willing to plan, than participants induced to avoidance motivation. However, such mediational effects without a main effect remain ambiguous and should be interpreted with caution. Seen as a whole, the results suggest that the effect of different motivation types on the willingness to plan may be different than previously thought: They may not influence this aspect of goal striving.

Preserving historic buildings can have many purposes, including honoring proud moments in our history as well as acknowledging and redressing shameful ones. The preservation of Antebellum buildings, buildings with an architectural style from the pre-Civil War era that often features symmetrical brick or white-washed façades and columns in a Greek revival style, has been as especially fraught issue. In the present work, we contribute to this conversation by examining the psychological costs of preserving Antebellum buildings such as restored or preserved Plantations. In two studies (Ns=166 and 165, respectively), Black participants rated Antebellum but not New American architecture more negatively than White participants. They reported liking Antebellum architecture less and feeling less welcome in it. Further, Black (but not White) participants spontaneously mentioned racism/slavery when viewing Antebellum architecture. Interestingly, this pattern was also found for modern-built Antebellum architecture. This suggests it is not Antebellum buildings per se but Antebellum architecture and the ideologies it evokes that may be problematic. Next, we examined potential moderators of this effect. In Study 3, Black participants (N=81) read about an Antebellum museum with one of two missions, one devoted to reconstructing the museum for historical accuracy, common to historical museums, and the other to addressing and informing visitors about the era’s slavery. Participants also saw pictures of either a predominantly White or Black Board of Visitors. We found that only in the addressing slavery condition with a predominantly Black board did these Black participants report liking and feeling welcome in the museum. Importantly, they felt that museum would have more influence from and be more empowering for the Black community. The present findings have implications for interventions aimed at increasing Black Americans’ engagement with and sense of ownership in public spaces associated with Antebellum architecture. They suggest that reclaiming—and not only redeeming—spaces with such histories is important.

In this paper we seek to investigate the concept of built heritage as Imagines Agentes whereby built heritage functions as a generating force in the process of appropriation towards belonging. Heritage places as meaningful locations can form a bridge linking the past to the future in a sensitive way. Accessing a local community’s connections to their surrounding environment and recognising and acknowledging the role that built heritage plays here is critical because people’s relationships with places of which built heritage is an integrated part are key to the contemporary policy issues surrounding (social) sustainability. Decision making in projects of restoration and redevelopment of heritage places, particularly in the collective sphere, must consider local populations with their narratives and experiences if the project is to be sustainable and socially better accepted. In the paper, built heritage as Imagines Agentes has been explored through the three-step methodology of Interactive Walking . This novel practice-based method combines methodological approaches in cultural anthropology, such as historical and phenomenological approaches, with the skills of an architect, which comprise observational drawing and modelmaking together with historical heritage studies. We explore the concept of built heritage as Imagines Agentes from two viewpoints, whereby the method and subject start to merge within the object of inquiry: as part of a graphical mnemonic technique for heritage practitioners or planners exploring a heritage site and as part of the environmental appropriation process of local community members.

Easily comprehensible summaries of scholarly articles that are provided alongside ‘ordinary’ scientific abstracts, so-called plain language summaries, can be a powerful tool for communicating research findings to a wider audience. Using an experimental within-person-design in a preregistered study ( N = 166), we showed that the comprehensibility for laypeople was higher for plain language summaries compared to scientific abstracts in a psychological journal and also found that laypeople actually understood the corresponding information more correctly for plain language summaries. Moreover, in line with the easiness effect of science popularization, individuals perceived plain language summaries as more credible and were more confident about their ability to make a decision based on plain language summaries. If and under which circumstances this higher perceived credibility is justified, is discussed together with other practical implications and theoretical implications of our findings. In sum, our research further strengthens arguments for providing plain language summaries of psychological research findings by demonstrating that they actually work in practice.

In a now-classic study by Srull and Wyer (1979), people who were exposed to phrases with hostile content subsequently judged a man as being more hostile. And this “hostile priming effect” has had a significant influence on the field of social cognition over the subsequent decades. However, a recent multi-lab collaborative study (McCarthy et al., 2018) that closely followed the methods described by Srull and Wyer (1979) found a hostile priming effect that was nearly zero, which casts doubt on whether these methods reliably produce an effect. To address some limitations with McCarthy et al. (2018), the current multi-site collaborative study included data collected from 29 labs. Each lab conducted a close replication (total N = 2,123) and a conceptual replication (total N = 2,579) of Srull and Wyer’s methods. The hostile priming effect for both the close replication ( d = 0.09, 95% CI [-0.04, 0.22], z = 1.34, p = .16) and the conceptual replication ( d = 0.05, 95% CI [-0.04, 0.15], z = 1.15, p = .58) were not significantly different from zero and, if the true effects are non-zero, were smaller than what most labs could feasibly and routinely detect. Despite our best efforts to produce favorable conditions for the effect to emerge, we did not detect a hostile priming effect. We suggest that researchers should not invest more resources into trying to detect a hostile priming effect using methods like those described in Srull and Wyer (1979).

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is the most widely used measure to assess automatic evaluations. One classic phenomenon that has been well established both using the IAT and self-report measures of liking is evaluative conditioning (EC), which refers to a change in the evaluation of a stimulus due to its pairing with another stimulus. Research has documented that EC can also occur when participants are merely informed about upcoming stimulus pairings. In a recent study, participants reported a more negative evaluation of non-words that were instructed to be followed by an unpleasant sound compared to non-words that would not to be followed by this sound (De Houwer, Mattavelli, & Van Dessel, 2019). Interestingly, however, an unexpected pattern was observed on an IAT, that is, a preference for the stimulus said to be followed by the sound. We report three pre-registered experiments ( N = 650) in which we manipulated different aspects of the procedure such as the stimuli, instructions, and the measure, but that still revealed the same dissociation. Based on three pilot experiments ( N = 92), we then conducted a registered report study (Experiment 4) testing whether the unexpected effect depends on how the USs are labelled in the instructions. Although describing the aversive sound as negative eliminated the unexpected IAT effect, the type of instruction only had a weak impact on IAT effects. These results are in line with prior evidence showing that IAT scores are malleable.

The coronavirus pandemic represents a serious challenge for modern societies. Individuals’ perception of risk influences their choice of action, and their collective actions determine the societal impact of the pandemic. The current data paper presents descriptive statistics of a survey from a representative sample of Norwegian citizens ( N = 4,083), collected in the early phases of the pandemic (March 20-29, 2020). Most of the population considered the risk for being infected to be small and the risk for becoming seriously ill to be smaller still. On the other hand, most were worried that family members could be infected, and that their daily life could change drastically. The majority of participants were optimistic that they could handle the challenges that the virus would bring, and that they would receive good medical treatment if they were to become sick. Almost all stated that they intended to comply with the authorities’ advice for limiting the contagion. Most stated that following the advice would be effective in preventing themselves and others from becoming sick. Most stated being careful in how they gather information about the pandemic. The survey showed that the Norwegian population at the time had realistic perceptions of risks, optimistic attitudes and intentions for prosocial behaviour that would limit the pandemic spread.

Belief system structure can be investigated by estimating belief systems as networks of interacting political attitudes, but we do not know if these estimates are replicable. In a sample of 31 countries from the World Values Survey (N = 52,826), I find that countries’ belief system networks are relatively replicable in terms of connectivity, proportion of positive edges, some centrality measures (e.g., expected influence), and the estimates of individual edges. Betweenness, closeness, and strength centrality estimates are more unstable. Belief system networks estimated with smaller samples or in countries with more unstable political systems tend to be less replicable than networks estimated with larger samples in stable political systems. Although these analyses are restricted to the items available in the World Values Survey, they show that belief system networks can be replicable, but that this replicability is related to features of the study design and the political system.

Self-regulation refers to effortful control over one’s thoughts, emotions, choices, impulses, and behaviors, and has implications for older adults’ health. Executive function, physiological, and subjective indices have all been proposed to reflect self-regulation. Pairwise associations among these indices have been previously examined; however, a self-regulation constellation encompassing all of these indices has never been tested in older adults. The present study described the relationships among indices of self-regulation and tested their between- and within-person associations with upstream personality factors (conscientiousness) and downstream psychological and physical health in 149 older adults aged 60–93 years, assessed semi-annually for five years (up to 10 waves). Indices of self-regulation were only modestly correlated with each other but were each associated with health. Better executive function was associated with better psychological and physical health between and within people, whereas higher heart rate variability was associated with psychological health within people. Better subjective self-regulation had the most between- and within-person associations with better psychological and physical health. Conscientiousness was associated with subjective self-regulation and better psychological and physical health. These findings support the non-unitary nature of self-regulation in older adults and the health relevance of each of its indices between and within older adults. The aging process may change how the indices relate to each other, and older adults may draw more on certain self-regulatory components over others, given limited resources. Subjective self-regulation may be an important final common pathway to psychological and physical health in older adults.

People display systematic priorities to self-related stimuli. As the self is not a unified entity, however, it remains unclear which aspects of the self are crucial to producing this stimulus prioritization. To explore this issue, we manipulated the valence of the self-concept (good me vs. bad me) — a core identity-based facet of the self — using a standard shape-label association task in which participants initially learned the associations (e.g., circle/good-self, triangle/good-other, diamond/bad-self, square/bad-other), after which they completed shape-label matching and shape-categorization tasks, such that attention was directed to different aspects of the stimuli (i.e., self-relevance and valence). The results revealed that responses were more efficient to the good-self shape (vs. other shapes), regardless of the task that was undertaken. A hierarchical drift diffusion model (HDDM) analysis indicated that this good-self prioritization effect was underpinned by differences in the rate of information uptake. These findings demonstrate that activation of the good-self representation exclusively facilitates perceptual decision-making, thereby furthering understanding of the self-prioritization effect.

When individuals are exposed to their own image in a mirror, known to increase self-awareness, they may show increased accessibility of suicide-related words (a phenomenon labeled “the mirror effect”; Selimbegović & Chatard, 2013 ). We attempted to replicate this effect in a pre-registered study (N = 150). As in the original study, self-awareness was manipulated using a mirror and recognition latencies for accurately detecting suicide-related words, negative words, and neutral words in a lexical decision task were assessed. We found no evidence of the mirror effect in pre-registered analyses. A multiverse analysis revealed a significant mirror effect only when excluding extreme observations. An equivalence TOST test did not yield evidence for or against the mirror effect. Overall, the results suggest that the original effect was a false positive or that the conditions for obtaining it (in terms of statistical power and/or outlier detection method) are not yet fully understood. Implications for the mirror effect and recommendations for pre-registered replications are discussed.

There is ample evidence that watching sports induces strong emotions that translate into manifold consequential behaviours. However, it is rather ill-understood how exactly spectators’ emotions unfold during soccer matches and what determines their intensity. To address these questions, we used the 2018 FIFA World Cup as a natural quasi-experiment to conduct a pre-registered study on spectators’ emotional experiences. Employing an app-based experience-sampling design, we tracked 251 German spectators during the tournament and assessed high-resolution changes in core affect (valence, activation) throughout soccer matches. Across the three German matches, multi-level models revealed that all spectators exhibited strong changes on both affective dimensions in response to Germany’s performance. Although fans experienced slightly more intense affect than non-fans, particularly during losses, this moderating effect was very small in comparison to the magnitude of the affective fluctuations that occurred independent of fan identity. Taken together, the findings suggest group emotions (collectively felt emotion irrespective of individual affiliation) rather than group-affiliation based emotions (individually felt emotion because of an affiliated group), as the dominant process underlying spectator affect during the 2018 FIFA World Cup.