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People's memory for emotion is often biased by their beliefs of what they should have felt. This bias may be stronger when people estimate the emotions of others. We hypothesised that people might remember a lockdown as worse than it really was for them, and, especially if their own was not too bad, they might believe that others had a worse experience. We investigated people's memories of their own emotions experienced during a national COVID-19 lockdown and the emotions they estimated others were feeling. Two hundred and thirty-four participants from Aotearoa New Zealand each completed two matched questionnaires, one during a lockdown and one after the lockdown had ended. The questionnaires asked them to rate eight different emotions, some positive and some negative, and their life satisfaction. They also rated the government's current performance on managing COVID-19 at both time points. Participants had a relatively good memory for their emotions but, as predicted, they tended to recall the lockdown experience as more negative than they had originally experienced it. They also estimated the experiences of others to be more negative than their own. These results agree with our predictions and suggest that we should be cautious about accepting people's memories of how they actually felt during disasters as accurate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do New Zealanders invest overwhelmingly in housing and not in shares? This paper adopted a psychological approach to examine the question. Study 1 investigated whether the relatively high level of New Zealand ownership of housing might stem from risk aversion. A sample of New Zealanders was more likely to prefer housing investment than a Hong Kong sample, but there were no differences in Investment Risk Attitude although this variable was positively correlated with share investment in both samples. Study 2 looked at how New Zealanders perceived past rates of return on different investments and found a tendency to overestimate the returns from housing. They showed a similar pattern for their expectations of future returns. However, the estimates of returns were very variable and the estimates of returns from housing were not strongly related to investment choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examined whether personal values and empathy and systemising traits relate to support levels for the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) in New Zealand. Two hundred and seventy respondents from New Zealand completed a 61-item questionnaire which measured self-rated knowledge and support for the TPPA, Schwartz Values, and Empathy and Systemising Quotients. Little to no self-rated knowledge of the TPPA strongly predicted neutrality in support levels for the TPPA. People who rated power and achievement highly tended to support the TPPA; those rating benevolence and universalism highly tended to oppose it. Higher levels of systemising were related to higher levels of self-rated TPPA knowledge, but empathy was only weakly associated with opposition to the TPPA. Overall, our results show that people's values are important in indicating support or opposition to trade deals, and perhaps need to be taken into account by those proposing or opposing the deals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]