Consonant beginnings and vowel endings lead to higher liking judgments.

Across languages, syllables more likely begin with consonants (vs. vowels) and end with vowels (vs. consonants), so that words that follow (vs.

Go with your gut! The beneficial mood effects of intuitive decisions.

People make countless decisions every day. We explored the self-regulatory function of decisions and assumed that the very act of making a decision in everyday life enhances people's mood. We expected that this decision-related mood change would be more pronounced for intuitive decisions than for analytical ones.

Can sequencing of articulation ease explain the in-out effect? A preregistered test.

Words whose consonantal articulation places move from the front of the mouth to the back (e.g. BADAKA; inward) receive more positive evaluations than words whose consonantal articulation places move from the back of the mouth to the front (e.

The Accumulated Clues Task (ACT): Development of a German Semantic Problem-Solving Paradigm.

The Accumulated Clues Task (ACT; Bowers et al., 1990) is a semantic problem-solving paradigm that has primarily been used in research on intuitive processes and as an experimental model of insight. In this incremental task, participants are instructed to find a solution word that is implied by a list of clue words with increasing semantic proximity to the solution word.

Intuition and meaning in life in persons with varying level of depressive symptoms and impairments in personality functioning.

Objectives: The current research explored the interplay between intuition, meaning in life, and psychopathology. Specifically, we investigated whether experiential and reflective components of meaning in life are associated with depressive symptoms and personality pathology, whether intuition is related to the experience of meaning, and whether psychopathology has disruptive effects on intuition as well as on the link between intuition and the experience of meaning.

Methods: We tested our preregistered hypotheses in two independent studies.

The impact of horizontal and vertical Luminance SNARC compatibility on affective judgments.

Research on the Spatial Quantity Association of Response Codes (SQUARC) has documented associations between spatial position and mental representations of quantity. Large quantities are associated with right and top, small quantities are associated with left and bottom. Resulting compatibility effects have largely been documented for response speed and judgment accuracy.

On the emergence of the in-out effect across trials: two items do the trick.

Individuals prefer letter strings whose consonantal articulation spots move from the front of the mouth to the back (e.g., BAKA, inward) over those with a reversed consonant order (e.

Bright on the right feels right: SQUARC compatibility is hedonically marked.

According to the Spatial Quantity Association of Response Codes (SQUARC), people hold a mental association between horizontal position and quantity (lower quantities left, higher quantities right). While a large body of research has explored this effect for response speed and judgment accuracy, the affective downstream consequences of the SQUARC remain unexplored. Aiming to address this gap, the present two experiments (pre-registered, total  = 521) investigated whether stimulus arrangements that are compatible with the SQUARC for luminance are affectively preferred to stimulus arrangements that are incompatible.

How individuals react emotionally to others' (mis)fortunes: A social comparison framework.

When confronted with others' fortunes and misfortunes, emotional reactions can take various forms-ranging from assimilative (happy-for-ness, sympathy) to contrastive emotions (envy, schadenfreude) and from prosocial (reward) to antisocial behavior (punish). We systematically tested how social comparisons shape reactions to others' (mis)fortunes with a newly developed paradigm with which we investigated envy, happy-for-ness, schadenfreude, and sympathy in a joint rigorous experimental setup, along with individuals' ensuing behavioral reactions. In nine experiments ( = 1,827), (a) participants' rankings on a comparison dimension relative to other people and (b) others' (mis)fortunes (changes in relative rankings) jointly determined how much individuals experienced the emotions.

The articulatory in-out effect: replicable, but inexplicable.

People prefer inward over outward articulation dynamics, a phenomenon referred to as the articulatory in-out effect. It is empirically robust and generalizes across languages, settings, and stimuli. However, the theoretical explanation of the effect is still a matter of lively debate and in need of novel research directions.

Maybe favors: How to get more good deeds done.

While previous research has revealed several reasons why humans generally do good deeds, we explore a simple nudge that might get more of them done: the "maybe favor." We first show conceptually that, compared to a conventional favor, humans are more willing to grant a favor to a stranger on which they might eventually not have to make good. Furthermore, we conducted a series of fully incentivized experiments (total N = 3,475) where participants could make actual donations to charity.

The Price of Predictability: Estimating Inconsistency Premiums in Social Interactions.

For financial decision-making, people trade off the expected value (return) and the variance (risk) of an option, preferring higher returns to lower ones and lower risks to higher ones. To make decision-makers indifferent between a risky and risk-free option, the expected value of the risky option must exceed the value of the risk-free option by a certain amount-the . Previous psychological research suggests that similar to risk aversion, people dislike inconsistency in an interaction partner's behavior.

Intuitive Judgments in Depression and the Role of Processing Fluency and Positive Valence: A Preregistered Replication Study.

Background: Recent preliminary evidence indicates that depression is associated with impaired intuitive information processing. The current study aimed at replicating these findings and to move one step further by exploring whether factors known as triggering intuition (positivity, processing fluency) also affect intuition in patients with depression.

Method: We pre-registered and tested five hypotheses using data from 35 patients with depression and 35 healthy controls who performed three versions of the Judgment of Semantic Coherence Task (JSCT, Bowers et al.

SNARC compatibility triggers positive affect.

Previous research on the spatial-numerical association of response codes (SNARC) has demonstrated that SNARC-compatible digit arrangements are processed faster and more accurately than SNARC-incompatible arrangements. Concurrently, processing speed and accuracy have been conceptualised as indicating processing fluency - the ease of information processing - which has been shown to entail affective downstream consequences. Bridging these two research lines for the first time, we investigated whether digit arrangements that are compatible to this association are affectively preferred to association-incompatible digit arrangements.

Imitation of action-effects increases social affiliation.

Imitating someone's actions influences social-affective evaluations and motor performance for the action model and the imitator alike. Both phenomena are explained by the similarity between the sensory and motor representations of the action. Importantly, however, theoretical accounts of action control hold that actions are represented in terms of their sensory effects, which encompass features of the movement but also features of an action's consequence in the outside world.

Front in the mouth, front in the word: The driving mechanisms of the in-out effect.

Words for which the consonantal articulation spots wander from the front to the back of the mouth (inward) elicit more positive attitudes than words with the reversed order (outward). The present article questions the common theoretical explanation of this effect, namely an association between articulation movements and oral movements during ingestion and expectoration (inward resembles eating which is positive; outward resembles spitting which is negative). In 4 experiments (total = 468), we consistently replicated the basic in-out effect; but no evidence was found supporting an eating-related underlying mechanism.

Economic Decisions for Others Are More Favorable for Close Than Distant Clients.

This research investigates the role of social distance between decision makers and their clients. In 11 experiments (total = 1,653), participants decided about unfair and hyper-fair offers in an advisor game for themselves or for a client who varied in social distance (e.g.

Shades of surprise: Assessing surprise as a function of degree of deviance and expectation constraints.

Merging recent surprise theories renders the prediction that surprise is a function of how strong an event deviates from what was expected and of how easily this event can be integrated into the constraints of an activated expectation. The present research investigates the impact of both these factors on the behavioral, affective, experiential, and cognitive surprise responses. In two experiments (total N = 1257), participants were instructed that ten stimuli of a certain type would appear on the screen.

Disillusionment.

Recent research has shown that perceptual processes carry intrinsic affect. But prior studies have only manipulated the occurrence of perceptual processes by presenting two different stimulus categories. The present studies go beyond this by manipulating perceptual expectations for identical stimuli.

Training articulation sequences: A first systematic modulation of the articulatory in-out effect.

People prefer words with consonant articulation locations moving inward, from the front to the back of the mouth (e.g., ), over words with consonant articulation locations moving outward, from the back to the front of the mouth (e.

Egocentrism in sub-clinical depression.

Depression is marked by rigid thinking and the inability to generate different and more positive views on the self. The current study conceptualises this a perspective-taking deficit, which is defined as a deficit in the ability to overcome one's egocentrism. Previous research has demonstrated that individuals with depression are impaired in Theory of Mind reasoning and empathy - two social cognitions that involve cognitive and affective perspective-taking.

Oral kinematics: examining the role of edibility and valence in the in-out effect.

Previous research has revealed a stable preference for words with inward consonantal-articulation patterns (from the front to the back of the mouth; e.g. BENOKA), over outward-words (from the back to the front; e.

Exploring the temporal boundary conditions of the articulatory in-out preference effect.

Earlier research has documented a preference for words with consonantal articulation patterns that move from the front to the back of the mouth (e.g., MENIKA) over words with reversely wandering consonantal articulation spots (e.

The influence of articulation dynamics on recognition memory.

Previous research has demonstrated an effect of consonantal direction on preference, showing that words following inward articulation dynamics (e.g., EMOK or OPIK) are generally liked more than words following outward dynamics (e.