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Societies are confronted with significant and complex global challenges such as pandemics, climate change and the biodiversity crisis, which call for citizens’ better understanding of scientific information and its use in everyday decision-making. To narrow the gap between scientific knowledge and the public’s perceptions and everyday actions we need to know more about the factors that impact interest and positive attitudes toward science as well as understanding and acceptance of scientific information. Science capital, a concept that extends the bourdieusian notions of social and cultural capital to science, has been proposed to be an important factor in how people can understand and interact with science in their daily lives. In the present study, we examined science capital by conducting a population survey among Finnish adults. Participants (N=1,572) answered to 37 items concerning different aspects of science capital in addition to background questions of age, gender, education, and parental education. Exploratory factor analysis suggested that the science capital items formed four factors: visiting science-related places, science attitudes, science-related self-efficacy, and experienced early support to study science. Confirmatory factor analyses supported the four-factor solution. The results of structural equation models showed that older respondents had lower levels of science-related self-efficacy, they had experienced less early support, and showed more negative attitudes toward science than younger respondents. Higher education as well as higher parental education were associated with higher science capital across the four factors. Interestingly, age and education were stronger predictors of science-related self-efficacy and experienced early encouragement for men than for women, and mother’s education had a weaker association to science-related self-efficacy for men than for women. The present results shed new light to the concept of science capital and provide pointers for developing science-teaching interventions and policies that increase the acceptance and use of scientific information in society.

Eye-tracking studies have shown that readers reread ironic phrases when resolving their meaning. Moreover, it has been shown that the time-course of processing ironic meaning is affected by readers working memory capacity (WMC). Irony is context-dependent phenomena but using traditional eye-movement measures it is difficult analyze processing beyond sentence-level. A promising method to study individual differences in irony processing at the paragraph-level is scanpath analysis. In the present experiment, we analyzed whether individual differences in WMC are reflected in scanpaths during reading ironic stories by combining data from two previous eye-tracking studies (N=120). The results revealed three different reading strategies: linear reading, and strategic and non-selective rereading. The readers predominantly used linear strategy for ironic and literal stories. However, the reading strategy for ironic stories were affected by comprehension and WMC. Results showed that scanpaths captured differences missed by standard measures, showing it to be a valuable tool to study individual differences in irony processing.

We introduce a database (IDEST) of 250 short stories rated for valence, arousal, and comprehensibility in two languages. The texts, with a narrative structure telling a story in the first person and controlled for length, were originally written in six different languages (Finnish, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, and Turkish), and rated for arousal, valence, and comprehensibility in the original language. The stories were translated into English, and the same ratings for the English translations were collected via an internet survey tool (N = 573). In addition to the rating data, we also report readability indexes for the original and English texts. The texts have been categorized into different story types based on their emotional arc. The texts score high on comprehensibility and represent a wide range of emotional valence and arousal levels. The comparative analysis of the ratings of the original texts and English translations showed that valence ratings were very similar across languages, whereas correlations between the two pairs of language versions for arousal and comprehensibility were modest. Comprehensibility ratings correlated with only some of the readability indexes. The database is published in osf.io/9tga3, and it is freely available for academic research.

Individually tailored vaccine hesitancy interventions are considered auspicious for decreasing vaccine hesitancy. In two studies, we measured self-reported format preference for statistical vs. anecdotal information in vaccine hesitant individuals, and experimentally manipulated the format in which COVID-19 and influenza vaccine hesitancy interventions were presented (statistical vs. anecdotal). Regardless of whether people received interventions that were in line with their format preference, the interventions did not influence their vaccine attitudes or vaccination intentions. Instead, a stronger preference for anecdotal information was associated with perceiving the material in both the statistical and the anecdotal interventions as more frustrating, less relevant, and less helpful. However, even if the participants reacted negatively to both intervention formats, the reactions to the statistical interventions were consistently less negative. These results suggest that tailoring COVID-19 and influenza vaccine hesitancy interventions to suit people’s format preference, might not be a viable tool for decreasing vaccine hesitancy. The results further imply that using statistics-only interventions with people who hold anti-vaccination attitudes may be a less risky choice than using only anecdotal testimonies.