Search

The Action-sentence Compatibility Effect (ACE) is a well-known demonstration of the role of motor activity in the comprehension of language. Participants are asked to make sensibility judgments on sentences by producing movements toward the body or away from the body. The ACE is the finding that movements are faster when the direction of the movement (e.g., toward) matches the direction of the action in the to-be-judged sentence (e.g., Art gave you the pen describes action toward you). We report on a pre-registered, multi-lab replication of one version of the ACE. The results show that none of the 18 labs involved in the study observed a reliable ACE, and that the meta-analytic estimate of the size of the ACE was essentially zero.

Retirement is an eagerly awaited life transition for many older workers, but some may anticipate their exit from the workforce will result in loss of meaningful work-based activities and social interactions. For older workers more committed to their organization, retirement might represent a threat to maintaining a consistent, positive identity. Across three pre-registered studies of US adults aged 49 to 75, we investigated the relationship between organizational commitment and anticipated identity changes in retirement. Studies 1 and 2 (N = 1059) found that older workers largely anticipated positive changes to their identity in retirement. In Study 2, we divided older workers into two conditions and used a framing manipulation to present retirement as either a 'role exit' or a 'role entry'. In the 'role exit' condition, older workers less committed to their organization anticipated more positive changes when they held more group memberships compared to those with fewer group memberships. Those in the 'role entry' condition anticipated significantly more positive changes to their identity in retirement than those in the 'role exit' condition, but did not anticipate more positive changes based on organizational commitment or group memberships. More group memberships, but not lower organizational commitment, was associated with more positive anticipation of identity changes in retirement. Study 3 (N = 215) surveyed older adults after they had retired, finding that identity changes experienced post-retirement were less positive than those anticipated by older workers. We discuss the theoretical and applied implications of these findings for older workers' retirement decisions and wellbeing., Author(s): Daniel Jolles [sup.1] , Veronica M. Lamarche [sup.1] , Jonathan J. Rolison [sup.1] , Marie Juanchich [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.8356.8, 0000 0001 0942 6946, Department of Psychology, University [...]

Past research has shown that people are more likely to make the decision to hire candidates whose gender would increase group diversity when making multiple hiring choices in a bundle (i.e., when selecting multiple team members simultaneously) compared to making choices in isolation (i.e., when selecting a single team member). However, it is unclear if this bundling effect extends to age diversity and the selection of older candidates, as older workers are often the target of socially acceptable negative stereotypes and bias in recruitment, leaving them unemployed for longer than their younger counterparts. Across five preregistered experiments (total N = 4,096), we tested if the positive effect of bundling on diversity of selections extends to older candidates in hiring decisions. We found evidence of bias against older job candidates in hiring decisions but found inconsistent effects of choice bundling on the selection of older candidates across experiments. An effect of bundling was found in two of five experiments, with no meta-analytic effect found across the five studies. Making older candidates more competitive and introducing a diversity statement aimed at increasing their selection both significantly increased older candidate selections, but failed to activate the bundling effect. We discuss the theoretical implications for choice bundling interventions and for age as a diversity characteristic to support the design of interventions that meet the challenges of an aging workforce. Public Significance Statement: This research demonstrates that a theoretically driven behavioral intervention proposed to increase diversity largely failed to increase age diversity via the selection of older candidates. In the context of hiring, explicit diversity statements that make clear the company aim to increase age diversity via the representation of older workers are effective in increasing selections, but these statements do not activate the diversity benefits of bundling decisions, and may even overpower them. More generally, behavioral interventions aimed at increasing choice diversity may depend on the target characteristic being neither too undesirable nor desirable to the selector. Overall, this highlights the contextual nature of behavioral choice interventions, and suggests that interventions designed to increase diversity cannot be expected to work uniformly across different diversity characteristics or in combination with other interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Health Psychology is the property of American Psychological Association and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Trypophobia is the condition in which individuals report a range of negative emotions when viewing clusters of small holes. Since the phenomenon was first described in the peer-reviewed literature a decade ago, 49 papers have appeared together with hundreds of news articles. There has also been much discussion on various Internet forums, including medical and health-related websites. In the present article, we examine the degree to which the phenomenon is caused by a form of social learning, specifically, its ubiquitous social media presence. We also examined its prevalence among the broad population. In Experiment 1 (n = 2,558), we assessed whether younger people and females (i.e., greater social media users) are more sensitive to trypophobic stimuli, as predicted by the social media hypothesis. In Experiment 2 (n = 283), we examined whether sensitivity to trypophobic stimuli and rates of trypophobia is greater in people who are aware of the condition's existence, as opposed to those who have never heard of the phenomenon. In line with the social media theory, results showed that younger people and females are indeed more susceptible to trypophobia. However, 24% of trypophobic individuals have never heard of the condition. Overall, these data suggest that both social learning and non-social learning contribute to trypophobia. We also find that the prevalence of trypophobia is approximately 10%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Family physicians can communicate to patients the risk of adverse drug reactions using words or numbers, and this format has important implications for patients' ability to make informed decisions. The present study (a) assessed which formats family physicians preferred to communicate the risk of a given side effect, (b) tested whether the severity of this adverse drug reaction affected this preference, and (c) investigated the type of quantifiers physicians preferred to use in general (e.g., ratios, percentages). In a format selection task, a sample of 131 family physicians reported that they mostly use words to communicate to patients the risk of mild and severe adverse drug reactions, but the verbal preference was weaker for severe adverse drug reactions. The quantifier selection task showed that the most common quantifiers were verbal frequencies and verbal probabilities. Family physicians and patients should be aware of the implications of this preference.

‘Activity-equivalent’ food labels are believed to encourageconsumers to partake in exercise. This may occur by semanticpriming, where featuring images of physical activity increasesthe mental accessibility of the concept of exercise, making itmore ‘fluent’ and therefore more influential on people’sbehaviour. We tested how the format of labels (image vs.text) and representation of energy (‘activity’ vs. ‘calorie)affected mental accessibility of exercise in a word-fragmentcompletion task and participants’ behavioural intentions forexercise (N = 142). Participants exposed to calorie labelsproduced more exercise-related words and viewed animagined exercise scenario as shorter and more enjoyable.Images led to higher intentions to exercise than text whenthey described activities but they led to lower intentions toexercise than text when they described calories. Findingssuggest that activity labels do not trigger more activity relatedthoughts, but could increase exercise intentions only ifpresented in pictorial format.

The psychological consequences of prosocial behavior depend on people's perceptions of their own volition. Building on this, we hypothesized that people who donate increase their volition and the benefits of donations by judging donation requests as polite (non‐coercive), whereas non‐donors reduce their volition and the drawback of refusing to donate by judging the request as less polite (too coercive). Three weeks after providing baseline politeness judgments about a fundraising request, participants re‐evaluated the same request as potential donors (experimental group) or observers (control group) and reported how they felt (Ntime1 = 605, Ntime2 = 294). Relative to past perceptions, donors judged the request as more polite than control participants. Non‐donors redefined the request as less polite than donors, but not less than control participants. Both donors and non‐donors benefited from redefining the request as more polite. We discuss how altering one's perception of a request is a multi‐purpose self‐serving cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Past work showed a tendency to associate verbal probabilities (e.g., possible, unlikely) with extreme quantitative outcomes, and to over-estimate the outcomes' probability of occurrence. In the first four experiments (Experiment 1, Experiments 2a–c), we tested whether this "extremity effect" reflects a general preference for extreme (vs central or less extreme) values of a distribution. Participants made predictions based on a frequency distribution in two scenarios. We did not find a preference for extreme outcomes. Instead, most of the participants made a prediction about the middle, most frequent outcome of the distribution (i.e., the modal outcome), but still over-estimated the outcomes' probabilities. In Experiment 3, we tested whether the over-estimation could be better explained by an "at least"/"at most" reading of the predictions. We found that only a minority of participants interpreted predictions as the lower/upper bounds of an open interval and that these interpretations were not associated with heightened probability estimates. In the final three experiments (Experiments 4a–c), we tested whether participants perceived extreme outcome predictions as more correct, useful and interesting than modal outcome predictions. We found that extreme and modal predictions were considered equally correct, but modal predictions were judged most useful, whereas extreme predictions were judged to be more interesting. Overall, our results indicate that the preference for extreme outcomes is limited to specific verbal probability expressions, whereas the over-estimation of the probability of quantitative outcomes may be more general than anticipated and applies to non-extreme values as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on verbal probabilities has shown that "unlikely" or "improbable" events are believed to correspond to numerical probability values between 10% and 30%. However, building on a pragmatic approach of verbal probabilities and a new methodology, the present paper shows that unlikely outcomes are most often associated with outcomes that have a 0% frequency of occurrence. Five studies provide evidence that when people complete or evaluate statements describing "improbable" outcomes, based on outcome distributions or expected ranges, they favor extraordinary outcomes that have not occurred in the original sample. For quantitative outcomes that can be ordered on a unipolar dimension, an improbable outcome is typically perceived as having a "higher" outcome value than those observed. Thus when battery life for a sample of laptop batteries is shown to range from 2.5 to 4.5 h, 5 or 6 h are considered better examples of "improbable" duration times than those that actually occur in 10% of the cases. Similarly, an "improbable" exam grade is one that has not yet been observed, rather than one that has been obtained by a small percentage of students. And when climate experts claim that a 100 cm increase in sea level by the year 2100 is "improbable", participants believe that the same experts' maximum estimates will be much lower. We conclude that judgments of what is improbable suggest outcomes beyond the expected range, rather than simply low frequency outcomes. These results are compatible with a causal (propensity) interpretation rather than a statistical (frequency) interpretation of probabilities. (Contains 2 tables and 3 figures.)