Action Interpretation Determines the Effects of Go/No-Go and Approach/Avoidance Actions on Stimulus Evaluation.

Executing go/no-go or approach/avoidance responses toward a stimulus can change its evaluation. To explain these effects, some theoretical accounts propose that executing these responses inherently triggers affective reactions (i.e.

The socioecological benefits and consequences of oil palm cultivation in its native range: The Sustainable Oil Palm in West Africa (SOPWA) Project.

Agriculture is expanding rapidly across the tropics. While cultivation can boost socioeconomic conditions and food security, it also threatens native ecosystems. Oil palm (Elaeis guineensis), which is grown pantropically, is the most productive vegetable oil crop worldwide.

What is intuiting and deliberating? A functional-cognitive perspective.

We applaud De Neys for drawing attention to the interaction between intuiting and deliberating without committing to single- or dual process models. It remains unclear, however, how he conceptualizes the distinction between intuiting and deliberating. We propose several levels at which the distinction can be made and discuss the merits of defining intuiting and deliberating as different types of behavior.

ABC-training as a new intervention for hazardous alcohol drinking: Two proof-of-principle randomized pilot studies.

Background And Aims: ABC-training is a new intervention to encourage health behavior change that targets the automatic activation of adaptive beliefs (i.e. automatic inferences).

Let's play pretend: Towards effective modelling in experimental psycho(patho)logy.

Background And Objectives: Models are omnipresent in science. We introduce a novel framework to achieve more effective modelling practices in general psychology and experimental psychopathology.

Method: We analyze three types of models that are common in psychology: laboratory models, computational models, and cognitive models.

Approach-Bias Retraining and Other Training Interventions as Add-On in the Treatment of AUD Patients.

In the past two decades, a variety of cognitive training interventions have been developed to help people overcome their addictive behaviors. Conceptually, it is important to distinguish between programs in which reactions to addiction-relevant cues are trained (varieties of cognitive bias modification, CBM) and programs in which general abilities are trained such as working memory or mindfulness. CBM was first developed to study the hypothesized causal role in mental disorders: by directly manipulating the bias, it was investigated to what extent this influenced disorder-relevant behavior.

Testing the practical utility of implicit measures of beliefs for predicting drunk driving.

Despite the potential benefits of implicit measures over self-report measures, they are rarely used in real-world contexts to predict behavior. Two potential reasons are that (a) traditional implicit measures typically show low predictive validity and (b) the practical utility of implicit measures has hardly been investigated. The current studies test the practical utility of a new generation of implicit measures for predicting drunk driving.

Learned helplessness and its relevance for psychological suffering: a new perspective illustrated with attachment problems, burn-out, and fatigue complaints.

We develop a new perspective on various forms of psychological suffering - including attachment issues, burn-out, and fatigue complaints - by drawing on the construct of learned helplessness. We conceptualise learned helplessness in operant terms as the behavioural effects of a lack of reinforcement and in goal-directed terms as the dysregulation of goal-directed behaviour. Our central claim is that if one fails to reach a goal (e.

A goal-directed account of action slips: The reliance on old contingencies.

People often keep engaging in behaviors that used to be successful in the past but which are knowingly no longer effective in the current situation, so-called "action slips." Such action slips are often explained with stimulus-driven processes in which behavior is caused by a stimulus-response association and without information about the outcome of the behavior. This process is contrasted with a goal-directed process in which behavior is selected because it is expected to lead to a desired outcome.

Do evaluation and self-identification relate to self-reported and actual social media use?

Background And Aims: Social media use can sometimes become excessive and damaging. To deal with this issue, scholars and practitioners have called for the development of measures that predict social media use. The current studies test the utility of evaluation and self-identification measures for predicting social media use.

Nudging societally relevant behavior by promoting cognitive inferences.

Effective behavioral interventions are essential to address urgent societal challenges. Over the past decade, nudging interventions (i.e.

Predicting drunk driving using a variant of the implicit association test.

Introduction: Drunk driving is one of the primary causes of road traffic injuries and fatalities. A possible approach to reduce drunk driving rates is to identify which individuals are at risk of such behavior and establish targeted prevention. Simply asking individuals about drunk driving in real-world contexts would be problematic because of potential deception.

Mental distress through the prism of predictive processing theory.

We review the predictive processing theory's take on goals and affect, to shed new light on mental distress and how it develops into psychopathology such as in affective and motivational disorders. This analysis recovers many of the classical factors known to be important in those disorders, like uncertainty and control, but integrates them in a mechanistic model of adaptive and maladaptive cognition and behavior. We derive implications for treatment that have so far remained underexposed in existing predictive processing accounts of mental disorder, specifically with regard to the model-dependent construction of value, the importance of model validation (evidence), and the introduction and learning of new, adaptive beliefs that relieve suffering.

Attitudes as propositional representations.

Attitudes are mental representations that help to explain why stimuli evoke positive or negative responses. Until recently, attitudes were often thought of as associations in memory. This idea inspired extensive research on evaluative conditioning (EC) and implicit evaluation.

Powerful Effects of Diagnostic Information on Automatic and Self-Reported Evaluation: The Moderating Role of Memory Recall.

We sometimes learn about certain behaviors of others that we consider diagnostic of their character (e.g., that they did immoral things).

Assessing the influence of warnings with testimonies from former smokers on smoking and quitting behaviour.

Objectives: Cigarette pack warnings are widely used internationally for reducing smoking behaviour. Current warnings typically consist of a textual or graphic warning that smoking can lead to negative (health) outcomes. Though these warnings have proven benefits, they also have important limitations.

Illusory-Correlation Effects on Implicit and Explicit Evaluation.

Research suggests that people sometimes perceive a relationship between stimuli when no such relationship exists (i.e., illusory correlation).

Can (Instructions About) Stimulus Pairings Influence Automatic and Self-Reported Evaluations in the Presence of More Diagnostic Evaluative Information?

Evaluative conditioning (EC) and persuasion are important pathways for shaping evaluations. However, little is known about how these pathways interact. Two preregistered experiments (total = 1,510) examined effects of EC procedures (i.

To punish or to assist? Divergent reactions to ingroup and outgroup members disobeying social distancing.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, societies face the formidable challenge of developing sustainable forms of sociability-cumsocial-distancing - enduring social life while containing the virus and preventing new outbreaks. Accordant public policies often balance between retributive (punishment-based) and assistance (solidarity-based) measures to foster responsible behaviour. Yet, the uncontrolled spreading of the disease has divided public opinion about which measures are best suited, and it has made salient group disparities in behaviour, potentially straining intergroup relations, elevating heated emotions, and undercutting coordinated international responses.

On the effectiveness of approach-avoidance instructions and training for changing evaluations of social groups.

Prior evidence suggests that White participants who repeatedly approach images of Black people and avoid images of White people can exhibit a reduction in implicit racial bias (Kawakami, Phills, Steele, & Dovidio, 2007). In contrast, a recent study by Van Dessel, De Houwer, Gast, and Smith (2015) showed that mere instructions to perform approach-avoidance training in an upcoming phase produces a similar change in implicit evaluations of unfamiliar but not familiar social groups. We report 4 experiments that examined the replicability and generalizability of these findings for well-known social groups.

The Instructed Task-Switch Evaluation Effect: Is the Instruction to Switch Tasks Sufficient to Dislike Task Switch Cues?

It is often argued that people dislike situations in which there is conflict requiring cognitive control, possibly because it is effortful to resolve this conflict. In a recent study, Vermeylen, Braem, and Notebaert (2019) provided evidence for this idea in the context of task switching. They observed that participants evaluated cues signaling a task switch more negatively than cues signaling a task repetition in a task switching paradigm.

Dissociations between Learning Phenomena do Not Necessitate Multiple Learning Processes: Mere Instructions about Upcoming Stimulus Presentations Differentially Influence Liking and Expectancy.

Prior research showed that the degree of statistical contingency between the presence of stimuli moderates changes in expectancies about the presence of those stimuli (i.e., expectancy learning) but not changes in the liking of those stimuli (i.

Does approaching puppies and avoiding a dead cat improve the effectiveness of approach-avoidance training for changing the evaluation of feared stimuli?

Background And Objectives: Approach-avoidance training (AAT) is a procedure for changing people's likes and dislikes that involves executing repeated approach (e.g., pulling a joystick towards yourself) and avoidance actions (e.