A longitudinal analysis of conspiracy beliefs and Covid-19 health responses.

Background: Little is known about how conspiracy beliefs and health responses are interrelated over time during the course of the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) pandemic. This longitudinal study tested two contrasting, but not mutually exclusive, hypotheses through cross-lagged modeling. First, based on the consequential nature of conspiracy beliefs, we hypothesize that conspiracy beliefs predict an increase in detrimental health responses over time.

Gathering, processing, and interpreting information about COVID-19.

Does cognitive motivation influence how people gather and interpret information about COVID-19 and their adherence to measures? To address these questions, we conducted a longitudinal survey among European and American respondents. Wave 1 (N = 501) was conducted on March 27, 2020 and Wave 2 (N = 326) on July 1, 2020. We assessed COVID-19 knowledge, endorsement of COVID-19 conspiracy theories, media use, Need for Cognition (NC), Need for Cognitive Closure (NCC), and self-reported adherence to governmental measures taken.

The influence of state change on object representations in language comprehension.

To understand language people form mental representations of described situations. Linguistic cues are known to influence these representations. In the present study, participants were asked to verify whether the object presented in a picture was mentioned in the preceding words.

The processing of the Dutch masculine generic zijn 'his' across stereotype contexts: An eye-tracking study.

Language users often infer a person's gender when it is not explicitly mentioned. This information is included in the mental model of the described situation, giving rise to expectations regarding the continuation of the discourse. Such gender inferences can be based on two types of information: gender stereotypes (e.

Registered Replication Report: Hart & Albarracín (2011).

Language can be viewed as a complex set of cues that shape people's mental representations of situations. For example, people think of behavior described using imperfective aspect (i.e.

Understanding How Grammatical Aspect Influences Legal Judgment.

Recent evidence suggests that grammatical aspect can bias how individuals perceive criminal intentionality during discourse comprehension. Given that criminal intentionality is a common criterion for legal definitions (e.g.

Embodied cognition, abstract concepts, and the benefits of new technology for implicit body manipulation.

Current approaches on cognition hold that concrete concepts are grounded in concrete experiences. There is no consensus, however, as to whether this is equally true for abstract concepts. In this review we discuss how the body might be involved in understanding abstract concepts through metaphor activation.

The influence of direct and indirect speech on mental representations.

Language can be viewed as a set of cues that modulate the comprehender's thought processes. It is a very subtle instrument. For example, the literature suggests that people perceive direct speech (e.

One way and the other: the bidirectional relationship between ambivalence and body movement.

Prior research exploring the relationship between evaluations and body movements has focused on one-sided evaluations. However, people regularly encounter objects or situations about which they simultaneously hold both positive and negative views, which results in the experience of ambivalence. Such experiences are often described in physical terms: For example, people say they are "wavering" between two sides of an issue or are "torn.

How body balance influences political party evaluations: a wii balance board study.

Embodied cognition research has shown how actions or body positions may affect cognitive processes, such as autobiographical memory retrieval or judgments. The present study examined the role of body balance (to the left or the right) in participants on their attributions to political parties. Participants thought they stood upright on a Wii(™) Balance Board, while they were actually slightly tilted to the left or the right.

Out of mind, out of sight: language affects perceptual vividness in memory.

We examined whether language affects the strength of a visual representation in memory. Participants studied a picture, read a story about the depicted object, and then selected out of two pictures the one whose transparency level most resembled that of the previously presented picture. The stories contained two linguistic manipulations that have been demonstrated to affect concept availability in memory, i.

Out of sight, out of mind: the presence of forensic evidence counts more than its absence.

Recent evidence suggests that decision makers in criminal procedures are susceptible to biases. We previously found support for the presence of a feature positive effect (FPE, i.e.

Posture as index for approach-avoidance behavior.

Approach and avoidance are two behavioral responses that make people tend to approach positive and avoid negative situations. This study examines whether postural behavior is influenced by the affective state of pictures. While standing on the Wii™ Balance Board, participants viewed pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant pictures (passively viewing phase).

Leaning to the left makes the Eiffel Tower seem smaller: posture-modulated estimation.

In two experiments, we investigated whether body posture influences people's estimation of quantities. According to the mental-number-line theory, people mentally represent numbers along a line with smaller numbers on the left and larger numbers on the right. We hypothesized that surreptitiously making people lean to the right or to the left would affect their quantitative estimates.