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Aims and summary of project The degree to which beliefs about free will impact actual behaviour is a hotly contested area of research. Proponents of the biomedical model of psychological problems argue that framing mental disorder in terms of ‘chemical imbalances’ or as a ‘brain disease’ can help resolve individuals suffering from addiction from blame and reduce stigma (e.g., Volkow, 2015). Others, however, argue that promoting biogenetic conceptualisations does not help to reduce stigmatisation (e.g., Pescosolido et al., 2010). There is also evidence to suggest that framing addiction in a neurobiological framework, as opposed to in a psychosocial one, weakens perceptions of agency in relation to substance use (Wiens & Walker, 2014) and is associated with external attributions regarding personal control over the behaviour in question (Davies, 1997; Hardman et al., 2015). Recent research indicates that individuals who believe that willpower is limited and easily depleted exhibit improved self-control after sugar consumption, whilst no such benefits to performance were apparent in those who viewed willpower as a non-limited (plentiful) resource (Job, Walton, Bernecker, & Dweck, 2013). Whilst concerns have subsequently been raised about the nature of ego depletion in such studies (c.f., Lange, Seer, Rapior, Rose, & Eggert, 2014), this research raises interesting questions in relation to the role/importance of (people’s belief in) willpower in the field of addiction (e.g., Vohs & Baumeister, 2005). While not previously applied directly to substance use behaviour, this body of work suggests that the beliefs people hold about free will may impact behaviour (Protzko et al, 2016; Vohs & Schooler, 2008). It is also well known that alcohol consumption is associated with decreased inhibition (e.g., Babor et al, 1983). The current research tests the assertion that intoxication and beliefs about willpower may interact to impact alcohol behaviour.

Emotional contagion has been defined as “a tendency to automatically mimic and synchronise expressions, vocalisations, postures and movements with those of another person’s and, consequently, to converge emotionally” (Hatfield, Cacioppo & Rapson, 1994). This is an important mechanism within social interaction, through which feelings of affiliation and social connectedness are generated (Chartrand & Lakin, 2013). Research has shown that when individuals are instructed to mimic the behaviours of their interaction partners, they report a more positive social experience (Stel & Vonk, 2010). Due to the focus of most emotional contagion work on faces or small groups, this series of studies will examine how large groups can affect an individual’s emotion. This will be achieved through the use of short videos of computer generated agents (Carretero, Qureshi & Peters, 2014). These videos have been modelled in order to portray individual versus group emotions. The foreground is occupied by three agents interacting with one another, and the background is occupied by a crowd of agents. The emotional state of both the foreground and background characters can be varied between positive (happy), neutral or negative (sad), allowing (for example) both foreground and background agents to be positive, or for the foreground characters to be positive whilst the background crowd are negative (when asked to rate the emotion of the foreground characters, participants rated the latter manipulation as less positive than the former, indicating an influence of background or crowd emotion; Carretero et al., 2014). Therefore these videos allow us to study to examine how foreground (individual) and background (crowd) emotions could affect emotional contagion differentially or through an interactive process. The agents in the videos do not have facial expressions or other details (such as finger motion), so emotion is only represented by (full) body movement. Research has shown that individuals are able to perceive emotion through full-body movement (Castellano, Villalba & Camurri, 2007). This will allow the assessment of whether body movement can cause emotional contagion, or whether facial expressions are key to any emotional contagion.

There is evidence to suggest that relative to unattractive faces, the presence of attractive faces within a spatial cuing task is associated with longer task performance. This paradigm has not hitherto been implemented to examine the effect of intoxication on perceptions of attractiveness. Therefore, we will measure whether attractive faces within a spatial cuing task are associated with longer task performance than unattractive faces. There is mixed evidence for the "beer goggles effect" (that perceptions of attractiveness increase with intoxication), such that self-report measures have revealed an apparent beer goggles effect, while observational correlation research within a pub setting has failed to find such an effect. The current study will therefore measure the effect of (un) attractive faces in a gaze cuing task in people of varying intoxication levels, testing in a pub context. A recent study by the same authors found a beer goggles effect using an implicit measure (the spatial cuing paradigm) towards facial stimuli. This study will explore whether this effect also translates into pictorial stimuli which depict bodies of varying attractiveness/physical form

The decoy effect (also known as the asymmetric dominance effect) refers to the phenomenon whereby the introduction of a third choice to a decision dyad changes the distribution of preferences between offers (Huber, Payne & Puto, 1982). Specifically, the introduction of a third offer to a choice dyad ("the decoy") changes the selection of two original offers ("target vs. competitor") with equivalent appeal, even though the third offer is of inferior value (i.e. it is asymmetrically dominated by the other two offers). In field of alcohol consumption research, there is growing evidence that the introduction of a decoy to a choice dyad can influence decision making. Specifically, research by Monk et al.(2016) showed that the introduction of a decoy offer changed initial selections of both target and competitor offers for both alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages. Moreover, this effect appeared to be moderated by environmental context, with the decoy influencing selections of the target and competitor offers when the task was completed in a bar relative to a library. Research by Pennington et al. (in prep) also shows that branding can influence the decoy effect in alcohol-related purchasing decisions. Here, the introduction of a decoy modified initial purchasing decisions for alcoholic compared to non-alcoholic beverages, but this effect was greater for branded alcoholic compared to non-branded alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages. Surprisingly, however, rather than replicating the classic decoy effect (shifting from the target to the competitor upon the introduction of the decoy), this study found that participants were more likely to chose the decoy when it was introduced to the choice dyad. This research may have implications for nudging interventions that aim to curb alcohol consumption by controlling the price of alcohol, but further research is required to investigate these effects. The current study therefore aims to extend this research by investigating whether different (non)alcohol advertisements influence the decoy effect in alcohol purchasing decisions. Specifically, we assess whether "intoxigenic" alcohol advertisements, which aim to normalise drinking behaviours through targeting key aspects of identity and social norms (McCreanor et al., 2005; Jackson & Bartholow, 2020), influence purchasing decisions more than traditional adverts of both alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages. In an online experiment, participants will complete a hypothetical purchasing task ("Decoy effect paradigm") that presents a range of product offers for alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages within intoxigenic and traditional adverts. They will indicate their choice of a target or competitor offer in dual-choice dyads (Time 1), and then in trinary choice dyads when the decoy is introduced (Time 2). This allows us to investigate whether the introduction of a decoy changes selection preferences as well as assessing the impact of beverage type and advert type. References: Jackson, K. M., & Bartholow, B. (2020). Psychological processes underlying effects of alcohol marketing on youth drinking. Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, 81–96. https://doi.org/10.15288/jsads.2020.s19.81 Huber, J., Payne, J. W., & Puto, C. (1982). Adding asymmetrically dominated alternatives: Violations of regularity and the similarity hypothesis. Journal of Consumer Research, 9(1), 90–98. https://doi.org/10.1086/208899 McCreanor, T., Barnes, H. M., Kaiwai, H., Borell, S., & Gregory, A. (2008). Creating intoxigenic environments: Marketing alcohol to young people in Aotearoa New Zealand. Social Science & Medicine, 67, 938–946. doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2008.05.027 Monk, R. L., Qureshi, A. W., Leatherbarrow, T., & Hughes, A. (2016). The decoy effect within alcohol purchasing decisions. Substance Use & Misuse, 51, 1353-1362. https://doi.org/10.3109/10826084.2016.1168449 Pennington, C. R., Qureshi, A. W., Kulkarni, R., Li, W., Li, J., & Monk, R. L. (in prep). Nudged into a (branded) drink: How alcohol branding impacts the decoy effect in consumer purchasing decisions.

This OSF Page contains supporting information for the article: " Do Gender Differences in Academic Attainment Correspond to Differences in Scholastic Attitudes? An Exploratory Study in a U.K Secondary School" currently 'under review' for publication.

The purpose of this research was therefore to examine the impact of including (non) alcohol-related beverages into a revised version of a VPT (Study 1) and to explore the impact of intoxication on these VPT abilities (Study 2). Using a revised version of the director task (Keysar et al., 2003) which incorporated alcoholic and nonalcoholic beverages (alongside the traditional stimuli used in this task), participants were required to follow the instructions of an avatar (the director) who has a spatially opposite perspective to their own, and move objects that are mutually visible in the visual array (target objects) while avoiding objects that are only visible to the participant (competitor objects; Apperly et al., 2010) because they are located in one of the covered slots. An example of this task is shown in Figure 1, uploaded as part of this pre registration. In order to choose the target object, participants need to consider the director’s perspective, ignoring their own. Planned and exploratory analyses (and associated predictions) were pre-registered.

Exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM) analyses of survey instruments suggest that the omission of small cross-loadings from confirmatory factor models and scale score computation upwardly biases first-order factor and scale score correlations, respectively. This bias can lead researchers to use fewer scores than is necessary to summarize item covariance, as well as theorizing about the identities of global constructs that may not necessarily exist as conceptualized in particular measures (e.g., the general factor of personality). Importantly, omitted cross-loading bias may also impact parameters quantifying the associations among scores serving as empirical proxies for different constructs. This may occur when the assumption of local independence does not hold, and items reflect factors that emerge from multiple instruments. Given that this possibility has received little attention in the substance use literature, here we use ESEM to determine whether omitted cross-loading bias affects estimates of the effects of drinking motives on alcohol use. We also examine whether measures of these constructs exhibit measurement invariance by drinking occasion, race/ethnicity, gender, age, and time. Measurement invariance testing allows us to determine if drinking motives and alcohol use are on the same metric across levels of drinking occasion, race/ethnicity, gender, age, and time; such that comparisons of scores are not confounded by measurement bias.

Visual perspective taking is an important social ability that facilitates the generation of common reference frames and shared perceptions of the world (Frith & Frith, 2007). Level 1 perspective taking concerns judging if something is visible to somebody else, while Level 2 perspective taking requires someone to represent how the world appears to somebody else (Kessler & Thompson, 2010). Level-2 visuospatial perspective taking (L2-VSPT) has been conceived as having two predominant underlying cognitive processes. One of these processes relates to the creation of a perspective representation. The other relates to overcoming the conflict between the self and other perspectives when the self and agent have different viewing angles of the same object (Kessler & Thompson, 2010). Level-1 visual perspective tasks, although concerning whether something can be seen rather than how something appears (Samson et al., 2010), are proposed as having similar underlying processes. A process pertaining to the intrinsic motivation to focus on the self or other – linked to subsequent effort involved in perspective representation. As well as a process for overcoming the conflict inherent in the tasks during incongruent self-other perspective conditions (when what the participant and the agent see is different). These processes can be represented mathematically as focus and conflict index values, which have been shown to explain individual differences in Level-1 perspective tasks (Bukowski, 2018). Despite there being several L2-VSPT tasks, none are able to provide similar indices because of the lack of self-other congruent trials; inherent in level-2 task design is that if participants are at different angles then their perspective will be different, but if they share angular position then there is no potential conflict as the view will be congruent. This limitation prohibits similar investigations as to whether the same two indices can explain variability in L2-VSPT performance. To overcome this limitation, researchers require a task where the participant and agent are positioned at different angular disparities but share a similar visual experience. The current study proposes a novel Level-2 task to investigate the two dimensions in relation to performance variability in level-2 visuospatial perspective taking, these two indices on a level-1 perspective taking task, as well as relating these dimensions to several other measures associated with visual perspective taking such as inhibitory control (Qureshi et al., 2010; Qureshi & Monk, 2018), working memory (Qureshi & Monk, 2018), empathy (Mattan et al., 2016), depression (Ferguson & Cane, 2017), anxiety (Todd et al., 2015), and social skills (Shelton, et al., 2015). Measuring these additional dimensions, which have been related to different VPT task performance, will contribute to a comprehensive examination of individual variability in level-2 perspective taking.