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People only exert cognitive effort if they think the benefits outweigh the costs. Here, the authors show that people assess these benefits by considering expected rewards and how much their effort matters for obtaining those rewards, and then integrating these to determine how much effort to exert.

Boredom is unpleasant, with people going to great lengths to avoid it. One way to escape boredom and increase stimulation is to consume digital media, for example watching short videos on YouTube or TikTok. One common way that people watch these videos is to switch between videos and fast-forward through them, a form of viewing we call digital switching. Here, we hypothesize that people consume media this way to avoid boredom, but this behavior paradoxically intensifies boredom. Across seven experiments (total N = 1,223; six preregistered), we found a bidirectional, causal relationship between boredom and digital switching. When participants were bored, they switched (Study 1), and they believed that switching would help them avoid boredom (Study 2). Switching between videos (Study 3) and within video (Study 4), however, led not to less boredom but more boredom; it also reduced satisfaction, reduced attention, and lowered meaning. Even when participants had the freedom to watch videos of personal choice and interest on YouTube, digital switching still intensified boredom (Study 5). However, when examining digital switching with online articles and with nonuniversity samples, the findings were less conclusive (Study 6), potentially due to factors such as opportunity cost (Study 7). Overall, our findings suggest that attempts to avoid boredom through digital switching may sometimes inadvertently exacerbate it. When watching videos, enjoyment likely comes from immersing oneself in the videos rather than swiping through them. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Trait self-control is highly valued, often equated with moral righteousness and associated with numerous positive life outcomes. This paper challenges the conventional conflation of trait self-control and state self-control. We suggest that while trait self-control is consistently linked to success, state self-control is not the causal mechanism driving these benefits. Trait self-control, sometimes also referred to as conscientiousness, grit, and the ability to delay gratification, predicts better health, wealth, and academic achievement. Conventional wisdom has it that people high in trait self-control reap all these benefits because they engage in more state self-control, defined as the momentary act of resolving conflict between goals and fleeting desires. Despite its intuitive appeal, there are problems with extolling state self-control because of our love for trait self-control. First, empirical evidence suggests that individuals high in trait self-control do not engage in more state self-control but engage it less. Second, changes to state self-control do not reliably and sustainably improve people's outcomes, as least in the long-term. And third, despite the possibility of dramatic improvements in trait self-control, these improvements are often short lived, with people returning to their baseline trait level over longer time horizons. The roots of this problem are numerous: Imprecise and inaccurate naming of our constructs that lead to construct drift and contamination; ignoring the numerous other facets of conscientiousness like orderliness or industriousness; and not appreciating that traits are sometimes not reducible to states. We suggest that the celebrated benefits of trait self-control arise from mechanisms beyond state self-control and highlight the need for a broader conceptualization of self-control in psychological research and practical interventions., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)

People who take on challenges and persevere longer are more likely to succeed in life. But individuals often avoid exerting effort, and there is limited experimental research investigating whether we can learn to value effort. We developed a paradigm to test the hypothesis that people can learn to value effort and will seek effortful challenges if directly incentivized to do so. We also dissociate the effects of rewarding people for choosing effortful challenges and performing well. The results provide limited evidence that rewarding effort increased people's willingness to choose harder tasks when rewards were no longer offered (near transfer). There was also mixed evidence that rewarding effort increased willingness to choose harder tasks in another unrelated and unrewarded task (far transfer). These heterogeneous results highlight the need for further research to understand when this paradigm may be the most effective for increasing and generalizing the value of effort., (© 2024. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited.)

The construct of personal control is crucial for understanding a variety of human behaviors. Perceived lack of control affects performance and psychological well-being in diverse contexts - educational, organizational, clinical, and social. Thus, it is important to know to what extent we can rely on the established experimental manipulations of (lack of) control. In this article, we examine the construct validity of recall-based manipulations of control (or lack thereof). Using existing datasets (Study 1a and 1b: N = 627 and N = 454, respectively) we performed content-based analyses of control experiences induced by two different procedures (free recall and positive events recall). The results indicate low comparability between high and low control conditions in terms of the emotionality of a recalled event, the domain and sphere of control, amongst other differences. In an experimental study that included three types of recall-based control manipulations (Study 2: N = 506), we found that the conditions differed not only in emotionality but also in a generalized sense of control. This suggests that different aspects of personal control can be activated, and other constructs evoked, depending on the experimental procedure. We discuss potential sources of variability between control manipulation procedures and propose improvements in practices when using experimental manipulations of sense of control and other psychological constructs., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

In public debate, Twitter (now X) is often said to cause detrimental effects on users and society. Here we address this research question by querying 252 participants from a representative sample of U.S. Twitter users 5 times per day over 7 days (6,218 observations). Results revealed that Twitter use is related to decreases in well-being, and increases in political polarization, outrage, and sense of belonging over the course of the following 30 minutes. Effect sizes were comparable to the effect of social interactions on well-being. These effects remained consistent even when accounting for demographic and personality traits. Different inferred uses of Twitter were linked to different outcomes: passive usage was associated with lower well-being, social usage with a higher sense of belonging, and information-seeking usage with increased outrage and most effects were driven by within-person changes., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

A lack of self-control has long been theorized to predict an individual's likelihood to engage in antisocial behaviors. However, existing definitions of self-control encompass multiple psychological constructs and lab-based measures of aggression have not allowed for the examination of aggression upon provocation where self-control is needed most. We introduce two versions of a novel paradigm, the Retaliate or Carry-on: Reactive AGgression Experiment (RC-RAGE) to fill this methodological gap. Using large online samples of US adults (N = 354 and N = 366), we evaluate to what extent dispositional impulsivity, self-control, aggression, and state anger contribute to aggression upon provocation when there is a financial cost involved. Results showed that costly retaliation on this task was related to trait aggression and being in an angry emotional state, but not related to social desirability. Importantly, we show that the tendency to act impulsively is a better predictor of costly retaliation than other forms of self-control, such as the ability to delay gratification, resist temptation, or plan ahead. As a browser-based task, the RC-RAGE provides a tool for the future investigation of reactive aggression in a variety of experimental settings., (© 2023. The Psychonomic Society, Inc.)

Decision conflicts may arise when the costs and benefits of choices are evaluated as a function of outcomes predicted along a temporal dimension. Electrophysiology studies suggest that during performance monitoring a typical oscillatory activity in the theta rhythm, named midfrontal theta, may index conflict processing and resolution. In the present within-subject, sham controlled, cross-over preregistered study, we delivered online midfrontal transcranial Alternating Current Stimulation (tACS) to modulate electrocortical activity during intertemporal decisions. Participants were invited to select choice preference between economic offers at three different intermixed levels of conflict (i.e., low, medium, high) while receiving either theta -, gamma-, or sham tACS in separate blocks and sessions. At the end of each stimulation block, a Letter-Flanker task was also administered to measure behavioural aftereffects. We hypothesized that theta-tACS would have acted on the performance monitoring system inducing behavioural changes (i.e., faster decisions and more impulsive choices) in high conflicting trials, rather than gamma- and sham-tACS. Results very partially confirmed our predictions. Unexpectedly, both theta- and gamma-driven neuromodulation speeded-up decisions compared to sham. However, exploratory analyses revealed that such an effect was stronger in the high-conflict decisions during theta-tACS. These findings were independent from the influence of the sensations induced by the electrical stimulation. Moreover, further analyses highlighted a significant association during theta-tACS between the selection of immediate offers in high-conflict trials and attentional impulsiveness, suggesting that individual factors may account for the tACS effects during intertemporal decisions. Finally, we did not capture long-lasting behavioural changes following tACS in the Flanker task. Our findings may inform scholars to improve experimental designs and boost the knowledge toward a more effective application of tACS., (Copyright © 2023 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

In this article we investigate the societal implications of empathic artificial intelligence (AI), asking how its seemingly empathic expressions make people feel. We highlight AI's unique ability to simulate empathy without the same biases that afflict humans. While acknowledging serious pitfalls, we propose that AI expressions of empathy could improve human welfare., Competing Interests: Declaration of interests No interests are declared., (Copyright © 2023 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

The empathy selection task is a novel behavioral paradigm designed to assess an individual's willingness to engage in empathy. Work with this task has demonstrated that people prefer to avoid empathy when some other activity is available, though individual differences that might predict performance on this task have been largely unexamined. Here, we assess the suitability of the empathy selection task for use in individual difference and experimental research by examining its reliability within and across testing sessions. We compare the reliability of summary scores on the empathy selection task (i.e., proportion of empathy choices) as an individual difference metric to that of two commonly used experimental tasks, the Stroop error rate and go/no-go commission rate. Next, we assess systematic changes at the item/trial level using generalized multilevel modeling which considers participants' individual performance variation. Across two samples (N = 89), we find that the empathy selection task is stable between testing sessions and has good/substantial test-retest reliability (ICCs = .65 and .67), suggesting that it is comparable or superior to other commonly used experimental tasks with respect to its ability to consistently rank individuals., (© 2022. The Psychonomic Society, Inc.)

Humans and other animals find mental (and physical) effort aversive and have the fundamental drive to avoid it. However, doing nothing is also aversive. Here, we ask whether people choose to avoid effort when the alternative is to do nothing at all. Across 12 studies, participants completed variants of the demand selection task, in which they repeatedly selected between a cognitively effortful task (e.g., simple addition, Stroop task, and symbol-counting task) and a task that required no effort (e.g., doing nothing, watching the computer complete the Stroop, and symbol-viewing). We then tabulated people's choices. Across our studies and an internal meta-analysis, we found little evidence that people choose to avoid effort (and hints that people sometimes prefer effort) when the alternative was doing nothing. Our findings suggest that doing nothing can be just as costly-if not more costly-than exerting effort. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

People often dislike effort and avoid it when they can, but effort can also imbue tasks with meaning. This is the case for real-life tasks, but also novel tasks devoid of true purpose. Why does effort feel meaningful, under what conditions, and for whom?, Competing Interests: Declaration of interests No interests are declared., (Copyright © 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

People tend to avoid exerting cognitive effort, and findings from recent behavioral studies suggest that effort allocation is in part determined by the opportunity cost of slothful responding-operationalized as the average reward rate per unit time. When the average rate of reward is high, individuals make more errors in cognitive control tasks, presumably owing to a withdrawal of costly cognitive processing. An open question remains whether the presumed modulations of cognitively effortful control processes are observable at the neural level. Here, we measured EEG while participants completed the Simon task, a well-known response conflict task, while the experienced average reward rate fluctuated across trials. We examined neural activity associated with the opportunity cost of time by applying generalized eigendecomposition, a hypothesis-driven source separation technique, to identify a midfrontal component associated with the average reward rate. Fluctuations in average reward rate modulated not only component amplitude but also, most importantly, component theta power (4-8 Hz). Higher average reward rate was associated with reduced theta power, suggesting that the opportunity of time modulates effort allocation. These neural results provide evidence for the idea that people strategically modulate the amount of cognitive effort they exert based on the opportunity cost of time., (© 2022 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.)

Effort is aversive and often avoided, even when earning benefits for oneself. Yet, people sometimes work hard for others. How do people decide who is worth their effort? Prior work shows people avoid physical effort for strangers relative to themselves, but invest more physical effort for charity. Here, we find that people avoid cognitive effort for others relative to themselves, even when the cause is a personally meaningful charity. In two studies, participants repeatedly decided whether to invest cognitive effort to gain financial rewards for themselves and others. In Study 1, participants (N = 51; 150 choices) were less willing to invest cognitive effort for a charity than themselves. In Study 2, participants (N = 47; 225 choices) were more willing to work cognitively for a charity than an intragroup stranger, but again preferred cognitive exertion that benefited themselves. Computational modeling suggests that, unlike prior physical effort findings, cognitive effort discounted the subjective value of rewards linearly. Exploratory machine learning analyses suggest that people who represented others more similarly to themselves were more willing to invest effort on their behalf, opening up new avenues for future research., (© 2022. The Author(s).)

Inhibition is considered a process essential to goal pursuit and as a result has become a central construct in many disciplines in psychology and adjacent fields. Despite a century's worth of debate, however, there is little consensus about what inhibition actually is. We suggest that it is time to abandon the concept of inhibition as it currently stands, given that its definition has been problematic. Instead, we propose an alternative framework in which inhibition is the target outcome, rather than a process to obtain a goal. We leverage existing process models to elucidate how people can achieve an inhibition goal by actively regulating impulses and desires. Although the field has been led astray by classifying inhibition as a process, our framework is intended to provide greater practical utility to the study of goal pursuit moving forward., Competing Interests: Declaration of Conflicting Interests: The author(s) declared that there were no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship or the publication of this article., (© The Author(s) 2022.)

Self-regulation has been studied across levels of analysis; however, little attention has been paid to the extent to which self-report, neural, and behavioral indices predict goal pursuit in real-life. We use a mixed-method approach (N = 201) to triangulate evidence among established measures of different aspects of self-regulation to predict both the process of goal pursuit using experience sampling, as well as longer-term goal progress at 1, 3, and 6-month follow-ups. While self-reported trait self-control predicts goal attainment months later, we observe a null relationship between longitudinal goal attainment and ERPs associated with performance-monitoring and reactivity to positive/rewarding stimuli. Despite evidence that these ERPs are reliable and trait-like, and despite theorizing that suggests otherwise, our findings suggest that these ERPs are not meaningfully associated with everyday goal attainment. These findings challenge the ecological validity of brain measures thought to assess aspects of self-regulation., (© 2022. The Author(s).)

While the importance of social affect and cognition is indisputable throughout the adult lifespan, findings of how empathy and prosociality develop and interact across adulthood are mixed and real-life data are scarce. Research using ecological momentary assessment recently demonstrated that adults commonly experience empathy in daily life. Furthermore, experiencing empathy was linked to higher prosocial behavior and subjective well-being. However, to date, it is not clear whether there are adult age differences in daily empathy and daily prosociality and whether age moderates the relationship between empathy and prosociality across adulthood. Here we analyzed experience-sampling data collected from participants across the adult lifespan to study age effects on empathy, prosocial behavior, and well-being under real-life circumstances. Linear and quadratic age effects were found for the experience of empathy, with increased empathy across the three younger age groups (18 to 45 years) and a slight decrease in the oldest group (55 years and older). Neither prosocial behavior nor well-being showed significant age-related differences. We discuss these findings with respect to (partially discrepant) results derived from lab-based and traditional survey studies. We conclude that studies linking in-lab experiments with real-life experience-sampling may be a promising venue for future lifespan studies., (© 2022. The Author(s).)

Compassion-the warm, caregiving emotion that emerges from witnessing the suffering of others-has long been considered an important moral emotion for motivating and sustaining prosocial behavior. Some suggest that compassion draws from empathic feelings to motivate prosocial behavior, whereas others try to disentangle these processes to examine their different functions for human prosociality. Many suggest that empathy, which involves sharing in others' experiences, can be biased and exhausting, whereas warm compassionate concern is more rewarding and sustainable. If compassion is indeed a warm and positive experience, then people should be motivated to seek it out when given the opportunity. Here, we ask whether people spontaneously choose to feel compassion, and whether such choices are associated with perceiving compassion as cognitively costly. Across all studies, we found that people opted to avoid compassion when given the opportunity, reported compassion to be more cognitively taxing than empathy and objective detachment, and opted to feel compassion less often to the degree they viewed compassion as cognitively costly. We also revealed two important boundary conditions: first, people were less likely to avoid compassion for close (vs. distant) others, and this choice difference was associated with viewing compassion for close others as less cognitively costly. Second, in the final study we found that with more contextually enriched and immersive pleas for help, participants preferred to escape feeling compassion, although their preference did not differ from also escaping remaining objectively detached. These results temper strong arguments that compassion is an easier route to prosocial motivation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

People generally prefer easier over more difficult mental tasks. Using two different adaptations of a demand selection task, we show that interest can influence this effect, such that participants choose options with a higher cognitive workload. Interest was also associated with lower feelings of fatigue. In two studies, participants ( N = 63 and N = 158) repeatedly made a choice between completing a difficult or easy math problem. Results show that liking math predicts choosing more difficult (vs. easy) math problems (even after controlling for perceived math skill). Two additional studies used the Academic Diligence Task (Galla et al., 2014), where high school students ( N = 447 and N = 884) could toggle between a math task and playing a video game/watching videos. In these studies, we again find that math interest relates to greater proportion of time spent on the math problems. Three of these four studies also examined perceived fatigue, finding that interest relates to lower fatigue. An internal meta-analysis of the four studies finds a small but robust effect of interest on both the willingness to exert greater effort and the experience of less fatigue (despite engaging in more effort)., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2021 Milyavskaya, Galla, Inzlicht and Duckworth.)

There is growing awareness across the neuroscience community that the replicability of findings about the relationship between brain activity and cognitive phenomena can be improved by conducting studies with high statistical power that adhere to well-defined and standardised analysis pipelines. Inspired by recent efforts from the psychological sciences, and with the desire to examine some of the foundational findings using electroencephalography (EEG), we have launched #EEGManyLabs, a large-scale international collaborative replication effort. Since its discovery in the early 20th century, EEG has had a profound influence on our understanding of human cognition, but there is limited evidence on the replicability of some of the most highly cited discoveries. After a systematic search and selection process, we have identified 27 of the most influential and continually cited studies in the field. We plan to directly test the replicability of key findings from 20 of these studies in teams of at least three independent laboratories. The design and protocol of each replication effort will be submitted as a Registered Report and peer-reviewed prior to data collection. Prediction markets, open to all EEG researchers, will be used as a forecasting tool to examine which findings the community expects to replicate. This project will update our confidence in some of the most influential EEG findings and generate a large open access database that can be used to inform future research practices. Finally, through this international effort, we hope to create a cultural shift towards inclusive, high-powered multi-laboratory collaborations., (Copyright © 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)

We conducted a preregistered multilaboratory project ( k = 36; N = 3,531) to assess the size and robustness of ego-depletion effects using a novel replication method, termed the paradigmatic replication approach . Each laboratory implemented one of two procedures that was intended to manipulate self-control and tested performance on a subsequent measure of self-control. Confirmatory tests found a nonsignificant result ( d = 0.06). Confirmatory Bayesian meta-analyses using an informed-prior hypothesis (δ = 0.30, SD = 0.15) found that the data were 4 times more likely under the null than the alternative hypothesis. Hence, preregistered analyses did not find evidence for a depletion effect. Exploratory analyses on the full sample (i.e., ignoring exclusion criteria) found a statistically significant effect ( d = 0.08); Bayesian analyses showed that the data were about equally likely under the null and informed-prior hypotheses. Exploratory moderator tests suggested that the depletion effect was larger for participants who reported more fatigue but was not moderated by trait self-control, willpower beliefs, or action orientation.

We used experience sampling to examine perceptions of empathy in the everyday lives of a group of 246 U.S. adults who were quota sampled to represent the population on key demographics. Participants reported an average of about nine opportunities to empathize per day; these experiences were positively associated with prosocial behavior, a relationship not found with trait measures. Although much of the literature focuses on the distress of strangers, in everyday life, people mostly empathize with very close others, and they empathize with positive emotions 3 times as frequently as with negative emotions. Although trait empathy was negatively associated only with well-being, empathy in daily life was generally associated with increased well-being. Theoretically distinct components of empathy-emotion sharing, perspective taking, and compassion-typically co-occur in everyday empathy experiences. Finally, empathy in everyday life was higher for women and the religious but not significantly lower for conservatives and the wealthy.

Objective: What strategies do people use to resist desires in their day-to-day life? How effective are these strategies? Do people use different strategies for different desires? This study addresses these questions using experience sampling to examine strategy use in daily life., Method: Participants (N = 197, M age  = 20.4, 63% female) reported on their use of six specific strategies (situation modification, distraction, reminding self of goals, promise to give in later, reminder of why it is bad, willpower) to resist desires (4,462 desires reported over a week)., Results: Participants reported using at least one strategy 89% of the time, and more than one strategy 25% of the time. Goal reminders and promises to give in later were more likely to be used for stronger desires. People also preferred different strategies for different types of desires (e.g., eating vs. leisure vs. work, etc.)., Conclusion: In contrast to recent theoretical predictions, we find that many strategies, including inhibition, are similarly effective and that using multiple strategies is especially effective., (© 2020 Wiley Periodicals LLC.)

Researchers run experiments to test theories, search for and document phenomena, develop theories, or advise policymakers. When testing theories, experiments must be internally valid but do not have to be externally valid. However, when experiments are used to search for and document phenomena, develop theories, or advise policymakers, external validity matters. Conflating these goals and failing to recognize their tensions with validity concerns can lead to problems with theorizing. Psychological scientists should be aware of the mutual-internal-validity problem, long recognized by experimental economists. When phenomena elicited by experiments are used to develop theories that, in turn, influence the design of theory-testing experiments, experiments and theories can become wedded to each other and lose touch with reality. They capture and explain phenomena within but not beyond the laboratory. We highlight how triangulation can address validity problems by helping experiments and theories make contact with ideas from other disciplines and the real world.

Any analysis of self-regulation that focuses solely on willpower in conflict-laden situations is insufficient. Research makes clear that the best way to reach one's goal is not to resist temptations but to avoid temptations before they arrive; it further suggests that willpower is fragile and not to be relied on; and that the best self-regulators engage in willpower remarkably seldom.

Recent years have witnessed calls for increased rigour and credibility in the cognitive and behavioural sciences, including psychophysiology. Many procedures exist to increase rigour, and among the most important is the need to increase statistical power. Achieving sufficient statistical power, however, is a considerable challenge for resource intensive methodologies, particularly for between-subjects designs. Meta-analysis is one potential solution; yet, the validity of such quantitative review is limited by potential bias in both the primary literature and in meta-analysis itself. Here, we provide a non-technical overview and evaluation of open science methods that could be adopted to increase the transparency of novel meta-analyses. We also contrast post hoc statistical procedures that can be used to correct for publication bias in the primary literature. We suggest that traditional meta-analyses, as applied in ERP research, are exploratory in nature, providing a range of plausible effect sizes without necessarily having the ability to confirm (or disconfirm) existing hypotheses. To complement traditional approaches, we detail how prospective meta-analyses, combined with multisite collaboration, could be used to conduct statistically powerful, confirmatory ERP research., (Copyright © 2021. Published by Elsevier B.V.)

The amount of mental effort we invest in a task is influenced by the reward we can expect if we perform that task well. However, some of the rewards that have the greatest potential for driving these efforts are partly determined by factors beyond one's control. In such cases, effort has more limited efficacy for obtaining rewards. According to the Expected Value of Control theory, people integrate information about the expected reward and efficacy of task performance to determine the expected value of control, and then adjust their control allocation (i.e., mental effort) accordingly. Here we test this theory's key behavioral and neural predictions. We show that participants invest more cognitive control when this control is more rewarding and more efficacious, and that these incentive components separately modulate EEG signatures of incentive evaluation and proactive control allocation. Our findings support the prediction that people combine expectations of reward and efficacy to determine how much effort to invest.

Self-regulation is a core aspect of human functioning that helps facilitate the successful pursuit of personal goals. There has been a proliferation of theories and models describing different aspects of self-regulation both within and outside of psychology. All of these models provide insights about self-regulation, but sometimes they talk past each other, make only shallow contributions, or make contributions that are underappreciated by scholars working in adjacent areas. The purpose of this article is to integrate across the many different models in order to refine the vast literature on self-regulation. To achieve this objective, we first review some of the more prominent models of self-regulation coming from social psychology, personality psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. We then integrate across these models based on four key elements-level of analysis, conflict, emotion, and cognitive functioning-specifically identifying points of convergence but also points of insufficient emphasis. We close with prescriptions for future research.

Over the past 10 years, Oosterhof and Todorov's valence-dominance model has emerged as the most prominent account of how people evaluate faces on social dimensions. In this model, two dimensions (valence and dominance) underpin social judgements of faces. Because this model has primarily been developed and tested in Western regions, it is unclear whether these findings apply to other regions. We addressed this question by replicating Oosterhof and Todorov's methodology across 11 world regions, 41 countries and 11,570 participants. When we used Oosterhof and Todorov's original analysis strategy, the valence-dominance model generalized across regions. When we used an alternative methodology to allow for correlated dimensions, we observed much less generalization. Collectively, these results suggest that, while the valence-dominance model generalizes very well across regions when dimensions are forced to be orthogonal, regional differences are revealed when we use different extraction methods and correlate and rotate the dimension reduction solution. PROTOCOL REGISTRATION: The stage 1 protocol for this Registered Report was accepted in principle on 5 November 2018. The protocol, as accepted by the journal, can be found at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.7611443.v1 .

Many clinical neuroscience investigations have suggested that trait anxiety is associated with increased neural reactivity to mistakes in the form of an event-related potential called the error-related negativity (ERN). Several recent meta-analyses indicated that the anxiety-ERN association was of a small-to-medium effect size, however, these prior investigations did not comprehensively adjust effect sizes for publication bias. Here, in an updated meta-analysis (k = 58, N = 3819), we found support for an uncorrected effect size of r = -0.19, and applied a range of methods to test for and correct publication bias (trim-and-fill, PET, PEESE, Peters' test, three-parameter selection model). The majority of bias-correction methods suggested that the correlation between anxiety and the ERN is non-zero, but smaller than the uncorrected effect size (average adjusted effect size: r = -0.12, range: r = -0.05 to -0.18). Moderation analyses also revealed more robust effects for clinical anxiety and anxious samples characterised by worry, however, it should be noted that these larger effects were also associated with elevated indicators of publication bias relative to the overall analysis. Mixed anxiety and sub-clinical anxiety were not associated with the amplitude of the ERN. Our results suggest that the anxiety-ERN relationship survives multiple corrections for publication bias, albeit not among all sub-types and populations of anxiety. Nevertheless, only 50% of the studies included in our analysis reported significant results, indicating that future research exploring the anxiety-ERN relationship would benefit from increased statistical power., (Copyright © 2020. Published by Elsevier B.V.)

Empathy in medical care has been one of the focal points in the debate over the bright and dark sides of empathy. Whereas physician empathy is sometimes considered necessary for better physician-patient interactions, and is often desired by patients, it also has been described as a potential risk for exhaustion among physicians who must cope with their professional demands of confronting acute and chronic suffering. The present study compared physicians against demographically matched non-physicians on a novel behavioural assessment of empathy, in which they choose between empathizing or remaining detached from suffering targets over a series of trials. Results revealed no statistical differences between physicians and non-physicians in their empathy avoidance, though physicians were descriptively more likely to choose empathy. Additionally, both groups were likely to perceive empathy as cognitively challenging, and perceived cognitive costs of empathy associated with empathy avoidance. Across groups, there were also no statistically significant differences in self-reported trait empathy measures and empathy-related motivations and beliefs. Overall, these results suggest that physicians and non-physicians were more similar than different in terms of their empathic choices and in their assessments of the costs and benefits of empathy for others., (© 2019 The British Psychological Society.)

People feel tired or depleted after exerting mental effort. But even preregistered studies often fail to find effects of exerting effort on behavioral performance in the laboratory or elucidate the underlying psychology. We tested a new paradigm in four preregistered within-subjects studies ( N = 686). An initial high-demand task reliably elicited very strong effort phenomenology compared with a low-demand task. Afterward, participants completed a Stroop task. We used drift-diffusion modeling to obtain the boundary (response caution) and drift-rate (information-processing speed) parameters. Bayesian analyses indicated that the high-demand manipulation reduced boundary but not drift rate. Increased effort sensations further predicted reduced boundary. However, our demand manipulation did not affect subsequent inhibition, as assessed with traditional Stroop behavioral measures and additional diffusion-model analyses for conflict tasks. Thus, effort exertion reduced response caution rather than inhibitory control, suggesting that after exerting effort, people disengage and become uninterested in exerting further effort.

Accumulating evidence indicates weak correlations between self-report and behavioral measures of the same construct. We suggest that these weak correlations result from the poor reliability of many behavioral measures and the distinct response processes involved in the two measurement types. We also describe how researchers can benefit from appropriate use of these measures., (Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Why are some actions evaluated as effortful? In the present set of experiments we address this question by examining individuals' perception of effort when faced with a trade-off between two putative cognitive costs: how much time a task takes vs. how error-prone it is. Specifically, we were interested in whether individuals anticipate engaging in a small amount of hard work (i.e., low time requirement, but high error-likelihood) vs. a large amount of easy work (i.e., high time requirement, but low error-likelihood) as being more effortful. In between-subject designs, Experiments 1 through 3 demonstrated that individuals anticipate options that are high in perceived error-likelihood (yet less time consuming) as more effortful than options that are perceived to be more time consuming (yet low in error-likelihood). Further, when asked to evaluate which of the two tasks was (a) more effortful, (b) more error-prone, and (c) more time consuming, effort-based and error-based choices closely tracked one another, but this was not the case for time-based choices. Utilizing a within-subject design, Experiment 4 demonstrated overall similar pattern of judgments as Experiments 1 through 3. However, both judgments of error-likelihood and time demand similarly predicted effort judgments. Results are discussed within the context of extant accounts of cognitive control, with considerations of how error-likelihood and time demands may independently and conjunctively factor into judgments of cognitive effort.

Empathy is considered a virtue, yet it fails in many situations, leading to a basic question: When given a choice, do people avoid empathy? And if so, why? Whereas past work has focused on material and emotional costs of empathy, here, we examined whether people experience empathy as cognitively taxing and costly, leading them to avoid it. We developed the empathy selection task, which uses free choices to assess the desire to empathize. Participants make a series of binary choices, selecting situations that lead them to engage in empathy or an alternative course of action. In each of 11 studies ( N = 1,204) and a meta-analysis, we found a robust preference to avoid empathy, which was associated with perceptions of empathy as more effortful and aversive and less efficacious. Experimentally increasing empathy efficacy eliminated empathy avoidance, suggesting that cognitive costs directly cause empathy choice. When given the choice to share others' feelings, people act as if it is not worth the effort. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

An influential line of research suggests that initial bouts of self-control increase the susceptibility to self-control failure (ego depletion effect). Despite seemingly abundant evidence, some researchers have suggested that evidence for ego depletion was the sole result of publication bias and p-hacking, with the true effect being indistinguishable from zero. Here, we examine (a) whether the evidence brought forward against ego depletion will convince a proponent that ego depletion does not exist and (b) whether arguments that could be brought forward in defense of ego depletion will convince a skeptic that ego depletion does exist. We conclude that despite several hundred published studies, the available evidence is inconclusive. Both additional empirical and theoretical works are needed to make a compelling case for either side of the debate. We discuss necessary steps for future work toward this aim.

Successful execution of goal-directed behaviors often requires the deployment of cognitive control, which is thought to require cognitive effort. Recent theories have proposed that anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) regulates control levels by weighing the reward-related benefits of control against its effort-related costs. However, given that the sensations of cognitive effort and reward valuation are available only to introspection, this hypothesis is difficult to investigate empirically. We have proposed that two electrophysiological indices of ACC function, frontal midline theta and the reward positivity (RewP), provide objective measures of these functions. To explore this issue, we recorded the electroencephalogram (EEG) from participants engaged in an extended, cognitively-demanding task. Participants performed a time estimation task for 2 h in which they received reward and error feedback according to their task performance. We observed that the amplitude of the RewP, a feedback-locked component of the event related brain potential associated with reward processing, decreased with time-on-task. Conversely, frontal midline theta power, which consists of 4-8 Hz EEG oscillations associated with cognitive effort, increased with time-on-task. We also explored how these phenomena changed over time by conducting within-participant multi-level modeling analyses. Our results suggest that extended execution of a cognitively-demanding task is characterized by an early phase in which high control levels foster rapid improvements in task performance, and a later phase in which high control levels were necessary to maintain stable task performance, perhaps counteracting waning reward valuation., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

What do people feel like doing after they have exerted cognitive effort or are bored? Here, we empirically test whether people are drawn to rewards (at the neural level) following cognitive effort and boredom. This elucidates the experiences and consequences of engaging in cognitive effort, and compares it to the consequences of experiencing boredom, an affective state with predicted similar motivational consequences. Event-related potentials were recorded after participants (N = 243) were randomized into one of three conditions - boredom (passively observing strings of numbers), cognitive effort (adding 3 to each digit of a four-digit number), or control. In the subsequent task, we focused on the feedback negativity (FN) to assess the brain's immediate response to the presence or absence of reward. Phenomenologically, participants in the boredom condition reported more fatigue than those in the cognitive effort condition, despite reporting exerting less effort. Results suggest participants in the boredom condition exhibited larger FN amplitude than participants in the control condition, while the cognitive effort condition was neither different from boredom nor control. The neural and methodological implications for ego depletion research, including issues of replicability, are discussed., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

A growing body of work in social and affective neuroscience suggests that emotion plays an instrumental role in error monitoring processes, rather than only a moderating one. High-powered replications of studies that support this idea, however, are lacking. Here, we attempted a preregistered replication of our own study that had provided evidence for the functional role of emotions in error monitoring: that a neural signal of error monitoring-the error-related negativity-is reduced when participants undergo a misattribution of arousal procedure (Inzlicht & Al-Khindi, 2012). Like a previous replication attempt (Rodilla et al, 2016), our misattribution procedure failed to reduce the amplitude of the ERN. However, it also failed its manipulation check to reduce state anxiety, limiting the conclusions we can draw. Nonetheless, these findings are consistent with the view that our original study may have been a false positive. We discuss these findings in the context of the replication crisis in psychology and of work on the emotional properties of the ERN., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Traditionally, ritual has been studied from broad sociocultural perspectives, with little consideration of the psychological processes at play. Recently, however, psychologists have begun turning their attention to the study of ritual, uncovering the causal mechanisms driving this universal aspect of human behavior. With growing interest in the psychology of ritual, this article provides an organizing framework to understand recent empirical work from social psychology, cognitive science, anthropology, behavioral economics, and neuroscience. Our framework focuses on three primary regulatory functions of rituals: regulation of (a) emotions, (b) performance goal states, and (c) social connection. We examine the possible mechanisms underlying each function by considering the bottom-up processes that emerge from the physical features of rituals and top-down processes that emerge from the psychological meaning of rituals. Our framework, by appreciating the value of psychological theory, generates novel predictions and enriches our understanding of ritual and human behavior more broadly.

Touch is central to mammalian communication, socialization, and wellbeing. Despite this prominence, interpersonal touch is relatively understudied. In this preregistered investigation, we assessed the influence of interpersonal touch on the subjective, neural, and behavioral correlates of cognitive control. Forty-five romantic couples were recruited (N = 90; dating >6 months), and one partner performed an inhibitory control task while electroencephalography was recorded to assess neural performance monitoring. Interpersonal touch was provided by the second partner and was manipulated between experimental blocks. A within-subject repeated-measures design was used to maximize statistical power, with our sample size providing 80% power for even small effect sizes (ds > .25). Results indicated that participants were not only happier when receiving touch, but also showed increased neural processing of mistakes. Further exploratory cognitive modeling using indirect effects tests and drift diffusion models of decision making revealed that touch was indirectly associated with both improved inhibitory control and increased rates of evidence accumulation (drift rate) through its influence on neural monitoring. Thus, beyond regulating emotion and stress, interpersonal touch appears to enhance the neurocognitive processes underling flexible goal-directed behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record, ((c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).)

Many everyday choices are based on personal, subjective preferences. When choosing between two options, we often feel conflicted, especially when trading off costs and benefits occurring at different times (e.g., saving for later versus spending now). Although previous work has investigated the neurophysiological basis of conflict during inhibitory control tasks, less is known about subjective conflict resulting from competing subjective preferences. In this pre-registered study, we investigated subjective conflict during intertemporal choice, whereby participants chose between smaller immediate versus larger delayed rewards (e.g., $15 today vs. $22 in 30 days). We used economic modeling to parametrically vary eleven different levels of conflict, and recorded EEG data and pupil dilation. Midfrontal theta power, derived from EEG, correlated with pupil responses, and our results suggest that these signals track different gradations of subjective conflict. Unexpectedly, both signals were also maximally enhanced when decisions were surprisingly easy. Therefore, these signals may track events requiring increased attention and adaptive shifts in behavioral responses, with subjective conflict being only one type of such event. Our results suggest that the neural systems underlying midfrontal theta and pupil responses interact when weighing costs and benefits during intertemporal choice. Thus, understanding these interactions might elucidate how individuals resolve self-control conflicts., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

According to prominent models in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and economics, effort (be it physical or mental) is costly: when given a choice, humans and non-human animals alike tend to avoid effort. Here, we suggest that the opposite is also true and review extensive evidence that effort can also add value. Not only can the same outcomes be more rewarding if we apply more (not less) effort, sometimes we select options precisely because they require effort. Given the increasing recognition of effort's role in motivation, cognitive control, and value-based decision-making, considering this neglected side of effort will not only improve formal computational models, but also provide clues about how to promote sustained mental effort across time., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Dijksterhuis and van Knippenberg (1998) reported that participants primed with a category associated with intelligence ("professor") subsequently performed 13% better on a trivia test than participants primed with a category associated with a lack of intelligence ("soccer hooligans"). In two unpublished replications of this study designed to verify the appropriate testing procedures, Dijksterhuis, van Knippenberg, and Holland observed a smaller difference between conditions (2%-3%) as well as a gender difference: Men showed the effect (9.3% and 7.6%), but women did not (0.3% and -0.3%). The procedure used in those replications served as the basis for this multilab Registered Replication Report. A total of 40 laboratories collected data for this project, and 23 of these laboratories met all inclusion criteria. Here we report the meta-analytic results for those 23 direct replications (total N = 4,493), which tested whether performance on a 30-item general-knowledge trivia task differed between these two priming conditions (results of supplementary analyses of the data from all 40 labs, N = 6,454, are also reported). We observed no overall difference in trivia performance between participants primed with the "professor" category and those primed with the "hooligan" category (0.14%) and no moderation by gender.

Objective: Our experiences, attributes, and behaviors are diverse, inconsistent, and often negative. Consequently, our capacity to assimilate divergent experiences-particularly negative aspects-is important to the development of a unified self. Whereas this process of integration has received attention at the level of personal identity, it has not been assessed at the level of group identity., Objective: We examined the mechanisms involved in integrating positive and negative ingroup identities, as well as related outcomes., Method: In three experiments, participants (N = 332) high and low in autonomy identified either positive or negative aspects of their ingroup and then indicated the extent to which they integrated the attribute., Results: Those high in personal autonomy integrated both positive and negative identities, whereas those low in autonomy acknowledged only positive identities. Study 2 showed that, regardless of identity valence, those high in autonomy felt satisfied and close with their group. Conversely, those low in autonomy felt less close and more dissatisfied with their group after reflecting on negative identities. Finally, reflecting on a negative identity reduced prejudice, but only for those high in autonomy., Conclusions: Owning up to negative group traits is facilitated by autonomy and demonstrates benefits for ingroup and intergroup processes., (© 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)