Razia S Sahi,Siyan G Nussbaum,João F Guassi Moreira,Elizabeth M Gaines,Emilia Ninova,Daniel Lee,Naomi I Eisenberger,Jennifer A Silvers
{"title":"Vocal pitch as an acoustic marker of social support efficacy in women friendships.","authors":"Razia S Sahi,Siyan G Nussbaum,João F Guassi Moreira,Elizabeth M Gaines,Emilia Ninova,Daniel Lee,Naomi I Eisenberger,Jennifer A Silvers","doi":"10.1037/xge0001841","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001841","url":null,"abstract":"Vocal communication (e.g., pitch) can shape inferences about speakers and the content of their messages. Yet, it is unknown how such communication impacts the effectiveness of social support. We examined the role of support givers' vocal pitch in three dyadic data sets (N₁ = 39; N₂ = 39; N₃ = 59; friend pairs) where participants recorded scripted reappraisals (i.e., reinterpretations) of aversive stimuli to support a friend with regulating emotion. Using Bayesian statistics, we found cumulative evidence that when support givers used higher pitch in delivering these reappraisals, targets of support experienced less negative affect. Targets of support also reported greater relationship satisfaction with support givers who used higher pitch during reappraisal. These data consisted primarily of women friend pairs, with preliminary results indicating that these associations may not hold in men friendships. These results highlight acoustic features of verbal communication as a promising mechanism for strengthening social ties and emotional well-being. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":"114 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2025-10-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145254840","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Unlocking creativity with artificial intelligence (AI): Field and experimental evidence on the Goldilocks (curvilinear) effect of human-AI collaboration.","authors":"Hsuan-Che Brad Huang","doi":"10.1037/xge0001838","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001838","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Humans create artificial intelligence (AI), but can AI help humans create? Numerous studies show how AI enhances productivity; however, little is known about creativity-another aspect of performance that requires higher level problem-solving. To understand how AI affects the creative process, I conducted two experiments by assigning 139 business professionals and 319 working adults to collaborate in varying degrees with ChatGPT on an entrepreneurial challenge. In contrast to the well-documented positive correlation between AI usage and productivity and early studies suggesting the same for creativity, the present research shows a Goldilocks (curvilinear) effect: Moderate (vs. low or high) human-AI collaboration increases creative performance. This effect, holding across general creativity rated by human judges (either the crowdsourced public or specific trained individuals), business values by entrepreneurs, and AI-evaluated creativity, is explained by the generation of new diverse ideas (i.e., knowledge diversity) rather than problem restructuring during the brainstorming stage. I further replicate the Goldilocks phenomenon with multisource-multiwave surveys among workers in the creative industries (<i>N</i> = 188). Overall, these findings provide timely insights to the broader public regarding the effective approach to working with AI tools, such as ChatGPT, in daily and professional life. This research emphasizes the importance of striking the right balance-not too little, not too much-when working with AI technologies. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.5,"publicationDate":"2025-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145232589","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Prospective and retrospective awareness of moment-to-moment fluctuations in visual working memory performance.","authors":"Olga Kozlova, Kirsten C S Adam, Keisuke Fukuda","doi":"10.1037/xge0001850","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001850","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Visual working memory (VWM) performance fluctuates from moment to moment with occasional failures in maintaining accurate information in mind. While previous research suggests that individuals tend to be overconfident in their VWM performance during these failures, no study to date has examined whether individuals can predict upcoming reductions in VWM performance. To test the accuracy of both prospective and retrospective awareness on VWM performance, we developed a VWM bet task in which participants made trial-by-trial bets on their upcoming VWM performance prior to viewing a memory array of colored squares, followed by color reports paired with confidence ratings at test. Across two experiments (<i>N</i> = 87; <i>N</i> = 85), we demonstrate that retrospective awareness is more sensitive to VWM performance fluctuations than prospective awareness in young adults, though both metacognitive abilities are imperfect. Poor metacognitive abilities reflected a general tendency-particularly among low VWM capacity individuals-to overestimate upcoming VWM performance. When individuals overestimated their upcoming VWM performance (i.e., prospective failures), VWM performance significantly reduced compared to the preceding trials of a prospective failure. Moreover, this reduction in performance significantly lingered into subsequent trials. However, individuals' prospective and retrospective awareness better aligned to VWM performance after a prospective failure. This postfailure calibration occurred even without feedback signaling a prospective failure (Experiment 2), suggesting a metacognitive efficiency in recognizing the initial overestimation. Taken together, our results suggest that individuals, particularly low-capacity individuals, have a limited awareness toward upcoming VWM performance but exhibit metacognitive adjustments immediately following a prospective failure. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.5,"publicationDate":"2025-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145232604","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Cognitive maps integrating locations but missing orientations in across-boundary environments.","authors":"Zhichun Qi, Weimin Mou","doi":"10.1037/xge0001793","DOIUrl":"10.1037/xge0001793","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>People often struggle to accurately point to locations across boundaries, such as pointing to campus buildings while seated inside a lecture room. This difficulty challenges the existence of a cognitive map with integrated representations of places across boundaries. In this project, we distinguished between a cognitive map comprising integrated representations of locations and one comprising integrated representations of orientations. We hypothesized that the across-boundary pointing difficulty might originate from a cognitive map lacking integrated orientations. Using an immersive virtual reality head-mounted display, participants were presented with panoramic photos taken indoors or outdoors of six campus buildings. After familiarizing themselves with their location as indicated by the panorama photo, participants were instructed to face a specific direction indicated by an arrow in the environment. They were then asked to point to five additional campus buildings. Participants' represented locations and headings for each testing view were calculated by maximizing the similarity between their pointing directions and their represented directions from a given location and heading. The results revealed that absolute pointing errors were significantly larger indoors than outdoors. This indoor-outdoor difference was primarily attributed to differences in estimating headings rather than differences in estimating positions. Furthermore, systematic positional shifts were observed in individual test views. These shifts were consistent between indoor and outdoor views of the same buildings but did not show consistency between indoor and outdoor views of different buildings. This suggests that individuals may develop a cognitive map of distorted but globally consistent representations of locations across boundaries. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":" ","pages":"2680-2708"},"PeriodicalIF":3.5,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144284906","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Hierarchical relationship between neural mechanisms of ensemble and individual perception revealed through perceptual learning.","authors":"Zhijia Zhang, Xueda Dong, Xinbo Zou, Ning Liu","doi":"10.1037/xge0001832","DOIUrl":"10.1037/xge0001832","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Ensemble perception is a critical cognitive function that enables individuals to rapidly comprehend overall situations and identify abnormal or potentially hazardous information. Understanding the neural mechanisms underlying ensemble perception is essential for elucidating how the visual system organizes complex information. Although extensive research has explored various aspects of ensemble perception, the relationship between ensemble and individual perception, as well as the existence of a universal mechanism across different subtypes of visual information, remains unclear. In this study, we conducted three tasks: the single line orientation task, the ensemble line orientation (ELO) task, and the ensemble circle size task. We leveraged the characteristics of perceptual learning, namely specificity and transferability, to investigate the aforementioned questions. Our findings revealed perceptual learning effects across all tasks. Notably, an asymmetrical transfer was observed between the ELO and single line orientation tasks: Training on the ELO task led to significant improvement in the single line orientation task, but not vice versa. Furthermore, the perceptual learning effects observed in the ELO and ensemble circle size tasks did not transfer to each other. These results suggest that a hierarchical mechanism may exist between ensemble and individual perception for the same visual features, while ensemble perception across different types of visual information processing may be governed by distinct mechanisms. Our research provides valuable insights into the neural mechanisms underlying ensemble perception, enhancing our understanding of visual perception processes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":" ","pages":"2914-2925"},"PeriodicalIF":3.5,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144855400","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Knowing you can pay to skip enjoyable activities undermines intrinsic motivation.","authors":"Haesung Jung, Marlone D Henderson","doi":"10.1037/xge0001816","DOIUrl":"10.1037/xge0001816","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>How providing financial incentives affects intrinsic motivation has been widely studied in various disciplines of social and behavioral sciences. In contrast, this article explores how asking people to pay to skip enjoyable activities affects their intrinsic motivation, as paying money to access more time has increasingly become common and affordable. Four experiments demonstrate that being offered an option to pay to skip an enjoyable activity (e.g., coloring) undermines people's intrinsic motivation, whereby providing such an option makes people enjoy the activity less and reduces their subsequent interest to engage in the activity. The experiments further show that offering pay-to-skip options undermines intrinsic motivation by negatively impacting people's perceptions about the activity's value: When an option to pay to skip is offered, people infer that such an option exists because the activity has low inherent value, which subsequently undermines their enjoyment in it. The final experiment demonstrates potential real-world consequences of offering pay-to-skip options, showing that having an option to pay to skip a prosocial activity undermines people's intrinsic prosocial motivation, prosocial engagement, and their subsequent interest in engaging in prosocial behavior. The article ends with a discussion of the theoretical and practical implications and limitations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":" ","pages":"2667-2679"},"PeriodicalIF":3.5,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144855401","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Becoming partisan: The development of children's social preferences based on political markers.","authors":"Annie Schwartzstein, Hyesung G Hwang","doi":"10.1037/xge0001831","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001831","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>What political party or what presidential candidate a person supports is often used by adults to divide their social world. However, little is known about whether young children also engage in such tendencies or whether political groups are even socially meaningful for young children. To trace the beginnings of these tendencies, the present study investigated whether 6- to 12-year-old U.S. children use political markers, such as political party affiliation and support for presidential candidates, to guide their social preferences. We also examined children's ability to report their political affiliation, whether their political affiliation matched their parents', how accurate they are at reporting their parents' political affiliations, and whether having parent-child conversations about politics predicted children's political affiliation and social preferences. We found that children as young as 6 years of age showed ingroup preferences for individuals who shared their own or their parents' political affiliations-especially based on support for presidential candidates. Notably, even if children could not report their own presidential candidate choice or were inaccurate at predicting their parents' presidential candidate choice, children still preferred people who supported the same presidential candidate as their parents. Further, children who had conversations with their parents about politics were more likely to prefer people who matched their parents' political affiliations. This study provides the first empirical evidence that 6- to 12-year-old children are using political markers to form ingroup preferences and show rudimentary forms of political partisanship. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.5,"publicationDate":"2025-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145191805","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Supplemental Material for Prospective and Retrospective Awareness of Moment-to-Moment Fluctuations in Visual Working Memory Performance","authors":"","doi":"10.1037/xge0001850.supp","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001850.supp","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":"34 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2025-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145254882","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
David C Rubin, Carolyn F Bell, Rick H Hoyle, Dorthe Berntsen
{"title":"Shame, tonic immobility, and reactions to stressful events as phylogenetically conserved submissive defense mechanisms.","authors":"David C Rubin, Carolyn F Bell, Rick H Hoyle, Dorthe Berntsen","doi":"10.1037/xge0001833","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001833","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Shame, tonic immobility, and passive reactions to stressful events are phylogenetically conserved, obligatory, submissive defense reactions. Behavior, biology, genetics, evolutionary theories, and theories of humans as ultra-social animals are integrated to expand the understanding of these defense reactions in ways that are missing from current theories. In Study 1, 445 undergraduates selected the event that caused them the most shame, the event that produced their greatest inability to move or speak, and the stressful event that bothered them the most. Event-specific measures included the severity, centrality to identity, and effects of the event. In Study 2, 300 of these participants answered individual-differences measures. In Study 3, 350 Prolific workers rated the same events and the events that produced the most verbal disagreement and the most pride, control events that involved fewer phylogenetically conserved, obligatory, submissive defense reactions. The added events generally produced the lower effects as predicted. Preregistered predictions of a high degree of similarity among shame, tonic immobility, and reactions to stressful events were supported, including similar correlations among event-specific measures in each type of event, between the same event-specific measures across event types, and between event-specific and individual-differences measures. For factors involving shame, tonic immobility, and reactions to stressful events, this framework increases scientific understanding and offers support to individuals who are left to interpret their responses as signs of personal weaknesses. Such factors include sexual assault, genocide, war, race, religion, ethnicity, gender, addiction, poverty, and professional duties. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.5,"publicationDate":"2025-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145191783","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Rachel A Leshin, Reut Shachnai, Yuchen Tian, Minghui Wang, Andrei Cimpian
{"title":"What predicts girls' and boys' political ambition? Evidence from the United States and China.","authors":"Rachel A Leshin, Reut Shachnai, Yuchen Tian, Minghui Wang, Andrei Cimpian","doi":"10.1037/xge0001834","DOIUrl":"10.1037/xge0001834","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Women are underrepresented in positions of political leadership across the world. One reason for this disparity is a gender gap in political ambition, which seems to emerge reliably as children transition from childhood to adolescence. Why does this gap in political ambition arise? The present study (N = 367 children ages 5-11 from the United States and China; 180 girls, 187 boys) provided a cross-cultural investigation of two potential antecedents of this ambition gap: (a) children's concepts of political leaders, which might discourage girls' ambitions if they emphasize traditionally masculine traits, and (b) the social support children anticipate receiving for their political ambitions, which might be lower for girls due to gender role expectations. In both the United States and China, children's concepts of political leaders-which were characterized by the same three underlying dimensions (prestige/charisma, dominance/assertiveness, vulnerability/fallibility)-did not consistently predict children's political ambition. However, the level of social support for their political leadership pursuits, which was higher for girls than boys in the United States and vice versa in China, did predict levels of political ambition in both countries, particularly for girls. That is, anticipated social support robustly predicted girls' motivation to pursue political leadership in both the United States and China, whereas this link was weaker and less consistent for boys. Together, these findings provide new insight into the sources of gender gaps in political ambition and, in doing so, bring us a step closer to understanding how to remedy the persistent gender imbalances in political leadership. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.5,"publicationDate":"2025-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12483184/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145191851","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}