Why and when suffering increases the perceived likelihood of fortuitous rewards.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Ong HH
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8048465 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Consciously and unconsciously perceived rewards are thought to modulate essential cognitive processes in different ways. However, little is known about whether and how they modulate higher-order social cognitive processes. The present ERP study aimed to investigate the effect of consciously and unconsciously perceived rewards on the temporal course of self-face processing. After a monetary reward (high or low) was presented either supraliminally or subliminally, participants gain this reward by rapidly and correctly judging whether the mouth shape of a probe face and a target face (self, friend, and stranger) were same. Results showed a significant three-way interaction between reward value, reward presentation type, and face type observed at the P3 component. For the supraliminal presentations, self-faces elicited larger P3 after high compared to low reward cues; however, friend-faces elicited smaller P3 and stranger-faces elicited equivalent P3 under this condition. For the subliminal presentations, self-faces still elicited larger P3 for high reward cues, whereas there were no significant P3 differences for friend-faces or stranger-faces. Together, these results suggest that consciously processed rewards have distinct advantages over unconsciously processed rewards in facilitating self-face processing by flexibly and effectively integrating reward value with self-relevance.
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Project description:To determine the appropriate punishment for a harmful action, people must often make inferences about the transgressor's intent. In courtrooms and popular media, such inferences increasingly rely on video evidence, which is often played in "slow motion." Four experiments (n = 1,610) involving real surveillance footage from a murder or broadcast replays of violent contact in professional football demonstrate that viewing an action in slow motion, compared with regular speed, can cause viewers to perceive an action as more intentional. This slow motion intentionality bias occurred, in part, because slow motion video caused participants to feel like the actor had more time to act, even when they knew how much clock time had actually elapsed. Four additional experiments (n = 2,737) reveal that allowing viewers to see both regular speed and slow motion replay mitigates the bias, but does not eliminate it. We conclude that an empirical understanding of the effect of slow motion on mental state attribution should inform the life-or-death decisions that are currently based on tacit assumptions about the objectivity of human perception.
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Project description:Background and objectiveChild abuse pediatricians (CAPs) are often asked to determine the likelihood that a particular child has been sexually abused. These determinations affect medical and legal interventions, and are important for multisite research. No widely accepted scale is available to communicate perceived sexual abuse likelihood. In this study, we measure intra- and inter-rater reliability of a 5-point scale to communicate child sexual abuse likelihood.MethodsWe developed a 5-point scale of perceived likelihood of child sexual abuse with example cases and medical-legal language for each risk category. We then surveyed CAPs who regularly perform sexual abuse evaluations using the abstracted facts of 15 actual cases with concern for sexual abuse. A subset of participants rated the same vignettes again, 1 month later.ResultsOf 512 invited participants, 240 (46.7%) responded, with 145 (28.3%) indicating that they regularly perform sexual abuse evaluations, 116 initially completing all 15 vignettes, and 36 completing repeat ratings at least 1 month later. The scale showed consistent stepwise increase in mean perceived likelihood of abuse and intention to report for each increase in scale rating. Inter-rater agreement was substantial (Fleiss' weighted kappa 0.64) and test-retest reliability among 36 participants was almost perfect (Cohen's kappa = 0.81).ConclusionsWe introduce a scale of perceived sexual abuse likelihood that appears to reflect CAPs' perceptions and intention to report. This scale may be a reasonable metric for use in multicenter studies. CAPs demonstrated substantial inter- and intrarater reliability when evaluating sexual abuse likelihood in case vignettes. While this scale may improve communication of sexual abuse likelihood among experts, its examples should not be used as a legal standard or a clinical criterion for sexual abuse diagnosis.
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Project description:A large body of evidence shows that interaction with greenery can be beneficial for human stress reduction, emotional states, and improved cognitive function. It can, therefore, be expected that university students might benefit from greenery in the university environment. Before investing in real-life interventions in a university environment, it is necessary to first explore students' perceptions of greenery in the university environment. This study examined (1) preference for university indoor and outdoor spaces with and without greenery (2) perceived restoration likelihood of university outdoor spaces with and without greenery and (3) if preference and perceived restoration likelihood ratings were modified by demographic characteristics or connectedness to nature in Dutch university students (N = 722). Digital photographic stimuli represented four university spaces (lecture hall, classroom, study area, university outdoor space). For each of the three indoor spaces there were four or five stimuli conditions: (1) the standard design (2) the standard design with a colorful poster (3) the standard design with a nature poster (4) the standard design with a green wall (5) the standard design with a green wall plus interior plants. The university outdoor space included: (1) the standard design (2) the standard design with seating (3) the standard design with colorful artifacts (4) the standard design with green elements (5) the standard design with extensive greenery. Multi-level analyses showed that students gave higher preference ratings to the indoor spaces with a nature poster, a green wall, or a green wall plus interior plants than to the standard designs and the designs with the colorful posters. Students also rated preference and perceived restoration likelihood of the outdoor spaces that included greenery higher than those without. Preference and perceived restoration likelihood were not modified by demographic characteristics, but students with strong connectedness to nature rated preference and perceived restoration likelihood overall higher than students with weak connectedness to nature. The findings suggest that students would appreciate the integration of greenery in the university environment.
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Project description:Biparental care is a critical and, occasionally, unequally shared obligation that ensures that young survive to maturity. Such care may be complicated in systems in which one parent, typically the male, is unsure of his genetic relatedness to the young. Males may reduce paternal provisioning when full paternity is not assured, as occurs in mating systems in which females engage in extrapair copulations. Moreover, other factors independent of extrapair matings, such as male personality traits, likely also affect the level of paternal care. In this study, we determined the effect of a paternity threat event (i.e., a conspecific or a heterospecific territory intrusion) and male personality (i.e., the level of aggressiveness) on provisioning effort by male house wrens (Troglodytes aedon). Males were more likely to attack a conspecific intruder than a heterospecific intruder. Males that were exposed to a conspecific intruder were less likely to provision young at all. Of those males that did feed the young in their nest, male aggressiveness did not relate to feeding effort. These findings suggest that the likelihood of paternal care is reduced by perceived threats to paternity but that the costs of not feeding potentially multisired young are high and feeding efforts are unrelated to male personality.
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Project description:ObjectivesFor older adults coping with a spouse's chronic condition, greater marital satisfaction may not be entirely protective for psychological health. We examined marital satisfaction and gender as moderators of the association between perceived spousal suffering and daily emotional contagion. Based on empathy-altruism and interdependent self-construal theories, we hypothesized that high marital satisfaction and being female would heighten daily emotional contagion, or within-person associations between perceived spouse suffering and distress to spouse suffering.MethodForty-five older adults who had a spouse with a musculoskeletal condition completed daily interviews. Participants reported their marital satisfaction once in the laboratory and then daily perceptions of their spouse's physical suffering and their own distress to spouse suffering via phone at home for 7 days.ResultsConsistent with hypotheses, there were significant within-person effects such that highly satisfied wives experienced heightened emotional contagion on days when they perceived higher than average spouse suffering. Unexpectedly, men who were high in marital satisfaction experienced heightened daily distress irrespective of their perceptions of level of spousal suffering.DiscussionMarital satisfaction can increase daily emotional contagion to spousal suffering among older couples dealing with chronic conditions. Wives' distress may be more dependent on perceiving high levels of partner suffering compared with husbands' distress.
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Project description:BackgroundHabits have been proposed to develop as a function of the extent to which a behavior is rewarded, performed frequently, and executed in a stable context. The present study examines how each of these factors are associated with behavioral automaticity across a broad variety of behaviors drawn from previous habits research. This study further assesses how perceived complexity of the behavior influences the associations of rewards, frequency, and contextual stability with automaticity.MethodsParticipants (N = 459) completed an online survey assessing their experiences and engagement with 25 different behaviors, including exercise, handwashing, smoking, and medication adherence, among others. Exploratory factor analysis validated a short, relatively novel scale of perceived behavioral complexity, and multilevel analyses grouped by participant were used to examine the factors that contribute to automaticity.ResultsAcross behaviors, frequency, contextual stability, and perceived rewards were positively associated with automaticity. Perceived complexity was negatively associated with automaticity and moderated the influence of contextual stability and rewards, but not frequency, on automaticity. Both contextual stability and rewards were stronger predictors of automaticity when behavioral complexity was high rather than low, as predicted; in addition, when contextual stability was high, more complex behaviors showed greater automaticity than simpler behaviors.ConclusionThe results of this study confirm that behavioral frequency, rewards, and contextual stability are each independently associated with automaticity across a spectrum of behaviors. This study further demonstrates that perceived complexity of a behavior moderates the extent to which contextual stability and rewards are associated with automaticity. The results affirm a need to further understand the components of habits and how they differ across varying behaviors.
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Project description:The 2016 U.S. presidential election brought considerable attention to the phenomenon of "fake news": entirely fabricated and often partisan content that is presented as factual. Here we demonstrate one mechanism that contributes to the believability of fake news: fluency via prior exposure. Using actual fake-news headlines presented as they were seen on Facebook, we show that even a single exposure increases subsequent perceptions of accuracy, both within the same session and after a week. Moreover, this "illusory truth effect" for fake-news headlines occurs despite a low level of overall believability and even when the stories are labeled as contested by fact checkers or are inconsistent with the reader's political ideology. These results suggest that social media platforms help to incubate belief in blatantly false news stories and that tagging such stories as disputed is not an effective solution to this problem. It is interesting, however, that we also found that prior exposure does not impact entirely implausible statements (e.g., "The earth is a perfect square"). These observations indicate that although extreme implausibility is a boundary condition of the illusory truth effect, only a small degree of potential plausibility is sufficient for repetition to increase perceived accuracy. As a consequence, the scope and impact of repetition on beliefs is greater than has been previously assumed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).
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