An important area for tackling climate change and health improvement is reducing population meat consumption. Traffic light labelling has successfully been implemented to reduce the consumption of unhealthy foods and sugary drinks. The present research extends this work to meat selection.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRationale: Meta-reviews synthesising research on social class and mental health and wellbeing are currently limited and focused on specific facets of social class (e.g., social capital) or mental health and wellbeing (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUniversities are seeing growing numbers of students with poor mental health and wellbeing. Given that lower socioeconomic status (SES) students typically have poorer mental health and wellbeing than their peers, this may be, in part, caused by an increase in the number of students attending university from lower SES backgrounds. However, less is known about how socioeconomic inequalities in mental health and wellbeing persist within university communities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMeat consumption has been linked to adverse health consequences, worsening climate change, and the risk of pandemics. Meat is however a popular food product and dissuading people from consuming meat has proven difficult. Outside the realm of meat consumption, previous research has shown that pictorial warning labels are effective at curbing tobacco smoking and reducing the consumption of sugary drinks and alcohol.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Digital nudging has been mooted as a tool to alter user privacy behavior. However, empirical studies on digital nudging have yielded divergent results: while some studies found nudging to be highly effective, other studies found no such effects. Furthermore, previous studies employed a wide range of digital nudges, making it difficult to discern the effectiveness of digital nudging.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSelf-reported experiences are often poor indicators of outward expressions. Here we examine social power as a variable that may impact the relationship between self-reported affect and facial expressions. Earlier studies addressing this issue were limited by focusing on a single facial expression (smiling) and by using different, less sensitive methods that yielded mostly null results.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF'Power' and 'aggression' are two constructs that seem like a natural fit. After all, why should people in power not deploy aggression to get their way? Yet, when looking at empirical studies, the relationship between power and aggression is fickle at best. In an effort to integrate the literature, the present narrative review draws on a neuro-biological model of aggression as a framework, which distinguishes between three motivational mechanisms: offence, defence, and marking/display.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFContrary to conventional wisdom, there is little empirical evidence that elevated power, by default, fuels conflict and aggression. Instead, previous studies have shown that extraneous factors that decrease powerholders' perceived worth, making powerholders feel inferior or disrespected, seem to be necessary to 'unleash' power's dark side and trigger aggression and conflict. However, this past work has largely neglected that power boosts individuals' perceptions of worth, and as such these variables are not independent.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe contend that an ecological account of violence and aggression requires consideration of societal and cultural settings. Focusing on hierarchical relations, we argue countries with higher (vs. lower) power distance are, on average, located closer to the equator, have more challenging climates (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSustained, direct eye-gaze-staring-is a powerful cue that elicits strong responses in many primate and nonprimate species. The present research examined whether fleeting experiences of high and low power alter individuals' spontaneous responses to the staring gaze of an onlooker. We report two experimental studies showing that sustained, direct gaze elicits spontaneous avoidance tendencies in low power perceivers and spontaneous approach tendencies in high power perceivers.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHealthy individuals display a tendency to allocate attention unequally across space, and this bias has implications for how individuals interact with their environments. However, the origins of this phenomenon remain relatively poorly understood. The present research examined the joint and independent contributions of two fundamental motivational systems - behavioural approach and inhibition systems (BAS and BIS) - to lateral spatial bias in a locomotion task.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFListeners have to pay close attention to a speaker's tone of voice (prosody) during daily conversations. This is particularly important when trying to infer the emotional state of the speaker. Although a growing body of research has explored how emotions are processed from speech in general, little is known about how psychosocial factors such as social power can shape the perception of vocal emotional attributes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSize is an important visuo-spatial characteristic of the physical world. In language processing, previous research has demonstrated a processing advantage for words denoting semantically "big" (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe took an individual differences approach to explain revenge tendencies in powerholders. Across four experimental studies, chronically powerless individuals sought more revenge than chronically powerful individuals following a high power episode (Studies 1 and 2), when striking a powerful pose (Study 3), and when making a powerful hand gesture (Study 4). This relationship vanished when participants were not exposed to incidental power.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFConventional wisdom holds that power holders act more in line with their dispositions than do people who lack power. Drawing on principles of construct accessibility, we propose that this is the case only when no alternative constructs are activated. In three experiments, we assessed participants' chronic dispositions and subsequently manipulated participants' degree of power.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPowerless individuals face much challenge and uncertainty. As a consequence, they are highly vigilant and closely scrutinize their social environments. The aim of the present research was to determine whether these qualities enhance performance in more basic cognitive tasks involving simple visual feature discrimination.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis research examines adults', and for the first time, children's and adolescents' reaction to being ostracized and included, using an on-line game, 'Cyberball' with same and opposite sex players. Ostracism strongly threatened four primary needs (esteem, belonging, meaning, and control) and lowered mood among 8- to 9-year-olds, 13- to 14-year-olds, and adults. However, it did so in different ways.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSocial power affects the manner in which people view themselves and act toward others, a finding that has attracted broad interest from the social and political sciences. However, there has been little interest from those within cognitive neuroscience. Here, we demonstrate that the effects of power extend beyond social interaction and invoke elementary spatial biases in behavior consistent with preferential hemispheric activation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Pers Soc Psychol
June 2008
Past research on power focused exclusively on declarative knowledge and neglected the role of subjective experiences. Five studies tested the hypothesis that power increases reliance on the experienced ease or difficulty that accompanies thought generation. Across a variety of targets, such as attitudes, leisure-time satisfaction, and stereotyping, and with different operationalizations of power, including priming, trait dominance, and actual power in managerial contexts, power consistently increased reliance on the ease of retrieval.
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