How collective and personal mortality salience impacts antagonism against worldview-threatening others.

We conducted a study in Japan using terror management theory (N = 115) to examine these predictions: first, personal morality salience (MS) would increase antagonism against worldview-threatening others; second, priming to reinforce collective identity would be more effective to strengthen participants' sense of security and thus lower antagonism toward an in-group critic under personal MS than collective MS. The results revealed a significant interaction between MS types and identity priming. Participants were most tolerant toward worldview-threatening others upon awareness of a crisis threatening the group providing them collective identity. These findings provide insight into understanding individual behaviors during social unrest.

Effective forewarning requires central route processing: Theoretical improvements on the counterargumentation hypothesis and practical implications for scam prevention.

Financial scams have caused tremendous financial damage globally. In Japan, the police forewarn people by equipping them with scam-prevention techniques or providing awareness regarding examples of previous scams; however, this does not appear to effectively prevent the damage, as many scam victims do not remember these warnings when faced with actual scam encounters. Considering that scammers often use appeal to emotion techniques, peripheral processing during scam attempts might disturb people's abilities to recall the warnings on scammers' modus operandi, thus leading to failed counter-arguing efforts. We verified this hypothesis in an experimental setting by asking 162 participants to remember given forewarnings and resist deceptive advertisements. The results showed that participants gave the advertisers' manipulative intent a higher rating only when they processed the advertisement through a central route, in addition to being forewarned. This means that forewarning had no effect when participants processed the advertisement through a peripheral route. Moreover, forewarning recollection levels mediated the effect of processing route on this rating, which suggests that remembering forewarnings is necessary to generate counterarguments. This result expands the theory on forewarning effects and explains why people are susceptible to scam victimization. Furthermore, it provides implications for scam prevention.

Effects of Labeling and Group Category of Evaluators on Evaluations of Aggression.

This study investigated whether the effect of labeling on people's evaluation of aggression varies according to the group category of the evaluators (i.e., whether they are ingroup members or third parties). Two labeling strategies--the negative labeling of victims (NL strategy) and the positive labeling of aggressors (PL strategy)--were adopted. We conducted an experiment using the hot sauce paradigm, as a way to assess aggressive intent that includes behavioral measures of evaluations. The results suggested that the NL strategy causes ingroup members to evaluate aggression in a more positive light, while the PL strategy has the same effect but on third parties instead. Thus, labeling strategies may increase the severity of aggressors' reaction and could also be a factor that can escalate a war or conflict.

[Influence of evaluations and coping behavior in relationships with supervisors on the psychological stress responses of subordinates: A comparison between full-time workers and students working part-time jobs].

This research examined workers' and supervisors' evaluations of their relationships and coping behaviors as related to the workers' psychological stress responses. The participants were full-time workers and students working part-time jobs. This study focused on both informal and formal relationships. The results showed that full-time workers who evaluated their informal relationships with their supervisors as being more negative and perceived their supervisors' evaluations as being more positive had greater psychological stress responses. The psychological stress responses of students working part-time jobs were not significantly associated with their evaluations or their supervisors' evaluations. The results for full-time workers indicate that supervisors' positive evaluations of their informal relationships increased the subordinates' psychological stress responses. The proportion of variance attributed to the coping behavior of full-time workers was lower than for students working part-time jobs.