British Journal of Psychology

Do cynical individuals have a stronger desire for power and are they more likely to acquire power at work? The negative consequences of cynicism-for cynics themselves and the people around them-render the examination of these questions particularly important. We first examined the role of cynicism in power motives. Results showed that more cynical individuals have a greater desire for power to avoid exploitation by others (and less so to exploit others; Study 1) and score higher on dominance (but not prestige or leadership) motives (Study 2)...

Musicians outperform non-musicians in vocal emotion perception, likely because of increased sensitivity to acoustic cues, such as fundamental frequency (F0) and timbre. Yet, how musicians make use of these acoustic cues to perceive emotions, and how they might differ from non-musicians, is unclear. To address these points, we created vocal stimuli that conveyed happiness, fear, pleasure or sadness, either in all acoustic cues, or selectively in either F0 or timbre only. We then compared vocal emotion perception performance between professional/semi-professional musicians (N = 39) and non-musicians (N = 38), all socialized in Western music culture...

Our everyday perceptual experiences are grounded in the integration of information within and across our senses. Due to this direct behavioural relevance, cross-modal integration retains a certain degree of contextual flexibility, even to social relevance. However, how social relevance modulates cross-modal integration remains unclear. To investigate possible mechanisms, Experiment 1 tested the principles of audio-visual integration for numerosity estimation by deriving a Bayesian optimal observer model with perceptual prior from empirical data to explain perceptual biases...

Theories of human emotion, including some emotion embodiment theories, suggest that our moods and affective states are reflected in the movements of our bodies. We used the reverse process for mood regulation; modulate body movements to regulate mood. Dancing is a type of full-body movement characterized by affective expressivity and, hence, offers the possibility to express different affective states through the same movement sequences. We tested whether the repeated imitation of a dancer performing two simple full-body dance movement sequences with different affective expressivity (happy or sad) could change mood states...

Perspective-taking (PT) accessibility has been recognized as an important factor in affecting moral reasoning, also playing a non-trivial role in moral investigation towards autonomous vehicles (AVs). A new proposal to deepen this effect leverages the principles of the veil of ignorance (VOI), as a moral reasoning device aimed to control self-interested decisions by limiting the access to specific perspectives and to potentially biased information. Throughout two studies, we deepen the role of VOI reasoning in the moral perception of AVs, disclosing personal and contingent information progressively throughout the experiment...

Bullying victimization can undermine adolescents' well-being. However, few studies have comprehensively investigated the contributions of various victimization forms to well-being and compared which forms were more harmful than others. Evidence on whether resilience and social support moderate such associations is also limited. Using a sample of 12,058 Chinese adolescents in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2018, this cross-sectional study aimed to (1) investigate the associations of physical, verbal and relational victimization with well-being; (2) compare the strengths of these associations; and (3) examine the moderating roles of resilience and teacher and parent support in these associations...

Walking direction conveyed by biological motion (BM) cues, which humans are highly sensitive to since birth, can elicit involuntary shifts of attention to enhance the detection of static targets. Here, we demonstrated that such intrinsic sensitivity to walking direction could also modulate the direction perception of simultaneously presented dynamic stimuli. We showed that the perceived direction of apparent motion was biased towards the walking direction even though observers had been informed in advance that the walking direction of BM did not predict the apparent motion direction...

The Morality-Agency-Communion (MAC) model of respect and liking suggests that traits linked with morality are important for respect and liking; traits related to competence or assertiveness are important for respect and traits related to warmth are important for liking. However, tests of this model have tended not to consider traits related to immorality, incompetence, lack of assertiveness or coldness. This study addressed this issue by utilizing a within-subjects design in which participants were required to rate their respect and liking for individuals with specific trait types across four categories (moral; competence; assertiveness; and warmth) at three levels (positive, negative and neutral)...

Previous research on the use of peripheral vision to identify two spatially separated stimuli simultaneously has led to the conclusion that the focus of attention has the form of a symmetric ellipse with a broader expansion along the horizontal compared to the vertical meridian. However, research on pseudoneglect has indicated that attention is not symmetrically distributed to the whole visual field. Here, we test if the attention window is indeed symmetrical with regard to its shape and resolution during peripheral vision...

People often form first impressions of others based on face and/or voice cues. This study aimed to compare the first impressions formed under these two cues. First, we compared free descriptions based on face and voice cues and found differences in the content and frequency of the personality words. We then compiled three wordlists used for face-based and voice-based first impression evaluations separately or simultaneously. Second, using these wordlists, we compared face-based and voice-based first impression ratings and found that both had significant intra-rater and inter-rater reliability...

Displaced aggression refers to pernicious acts against innocent people. To date, little is known about mechanisms underlying dynamic changes in displaced aggression. The present study constructed a cross-lagged model to examine the dynamic effects of relative deprivation on displaced aggression and the mediation mechanisms underlying these effects. A total of 1130 undergraduate students participated in this three-wave longitudinal study. The results showed that relative deprivation predicted changes in displaced aggression through concurrent changes in levels of hostile attribution bias and moral disengagement...

Although several studies have addressed the relations between perceived parental warmth and social behaviours, few have distinguished their between- and within-person effects or explored their within-person mediating mechanisms. This study examined the transactional relations among perceived parental warmth (i.e. maternal warmth and paternal warmth), children's self-esteem and children's positive/negative social behaviours (i.e. prosocial behaviour and delinquent behaviour) along with the mediating role of self-esteem after disentangling between- and within-person effects...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

We investigated the relationship between ambient temperature and prosocial behaviour in real-life settings. It was guided by two mechanisms of opposite predictions, namely (1) higher temperatures decrease prosociality by harming well-being, and (2) higher temperatures increase prosociality by promoting the embodied cognition of social warmth. In Study 1, U.S. state-level time-series data (2002-2015) supported the first mechanism, with higher temperatures predicting lower volunteer rates through lower well-being...

Systematic differences in the attitudes of men and women towards risk is well established. In this paper, we investigate the joint role of two prominent psychological characteristics in explaining this difference. Our starting point is that risk assessments can be thought of, in general terms, to combine beliefs about the probability of negative outcomes occurring with a subjective valuation of how painful that negative outcome would be. Exploiting large-scale panel data from the United Kingdom, we find that gender differences in financial optimism and financial loss aversion - the stronger psychological response to monetary losses than monetary gains - explain a substantial proportion of the parallel gender difference in willingness to take risks...

Forgetting or suppressing a memory with unwanted content is just as important as remembering a desirable one. In addition to emphasizing the role of inhibitory control in memory suppression processes, neuropsychological studies have indicated that an intentional inhibition targeting a brain area may exert its inhibitory effects in seemingly unrelated areas through a common inhibitory network. In this study, we aimed to investigate whether the suppression of unwanted memories can be strengthened by recruiting an inhibitory task that can be simultaneously performed with a memory suppression task...

Natural disasters, including earthquakes, can have a traumatic impact on children's psychological wellbeing and development. The efficacy of interventions aimed at enhancing children's socio-emotional learning has been documented in the literature. At the same time, these techniques are the key for training children for possible future disasters by enhancing their knowledge about behavioural preparedness and emotional competence. However, research on evidence-based training programs on earthquakes combining digital and traditional activities is scarce...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Food-related attentional bias refers that individuals typically prioritize rewarding food-related cues (e.g. food words and food images) compared with non-food stimuli; however, the findings are inconsistent for restrained eaters. Traditional paradigms used to test food-related attentional bias, such as visual probe tasks and visual search tasks, may not directly and accurately enough to reflect individuals' food-word processing at different cognitive stages. In this study, we introduced the boundary paradigm to investigate food-word attentional bias for both restrained and unrestrained eaters...