Your Psychology Psychology articles and news

Four experiments were conducted to examine the effect of responding to self-report items framed with either a cognitive verb (think) or an affective verb (feel). Participants’ open-ended self-descriptions were significantly more negative when the…

We tested whether the perceived physical attractiveness of a group is greater than the average attractiveness of its members. In nine studies, we find evidence for the so-called group attractiveness effect (GA-effect), using female, male, and mixed-gen…

Individuals exercise self-control daily to achieve desired goals; at the same time, people engage in social interaction daily and influence (feel powerful) or are influenced (feel powerless) by others. Does controlling the self have an unforeseen conse…

Moral licensing refers to the effect that when people initially behave in a moral way, they are later more likely to display behaviors that are immoral, unethical, or otherwise problematic. We provide a state-of-the-art overview of moral licensing by c…

The importance of hope in promoting conciliatory attitudes has been asserted in the field of conflict resolution. However, little is known about conditions inducing hope, especially in intractable conflicts, where reference to the outgroup may backfire…

Two studies investigated how people define and perceive diversity in the historically majority-group dominated contexts of business and academia. We hypothesized that individuals construe diversity as both the numeric representation of racial minoritie…

In a three-wave, year-long, large-sample dataset (N = 755), 10 candidate “personality strengths” (Grit, Gratitude, Curiosity, Savoring, Control Beliefs, Meaning in Life–Presence, Strengths Use, and Engagement, Pleasure, and Meaning-Based Orientat…

We hypothesized that threats to people’s social (i.e., group) identity can trigger deviant attitudes and behaviors. A correlational study and five experiments showed that experiencing or recalling situations associated with the devaluation of a s…

In health-promotional campaigns, positive and negative role models can be deployed to illustrate the benefits or costs of certain behaviors. The main purpose of this article is to investigate why, how, and when exposure to role models strengthens the p…

Does Buddhism really promote tolerance? Based on cross-cultural and cross-religious evidence, we hypothesized that Buddhist concepts, possibly differing from Christian concepts, activate not only prosociality but also tolerance. Subliminally priming Bu…