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. The ease of making a decision and the feeling of rightness were expected to mediate the effect of intuitive (vs. analytical) decisions on participants' mood. In a preregistered experimental experience sampling study, participants from the general population were asked to report when they were about to make an everyday decision over the course of 14 days (N = 256 participants, 6,779 decisions). For each decision, participants were randomly instructed to decide either based on their intuition or based on careful analysis. We assessed several variables before and immediately after the decision. Participants also reported retrospectively on their choices in voluntary follow-up assessments. Making a decision per se immediately enhanced participants' mood. This mood enhancement was stronger for intuitive compared to analytic decisions and persisted until follow-up. Ease of decision, but not feeling of rightness, mediated this effect. Intuitive decisions compared to analytic decisions were more likely to be implemented and led to greater satisfaction and pleasantness of the chosen option. Having more options for a particular decision led to generally higher mood improvement and satisfaction. This is the first empirical demonstration showing that using one's gut has beneficial effects in everyday life. Study limitations and implications for theory and practice are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

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.g. KADABA; outward). This in-out effect has a variety of affective, cognitive, and even behavioural consequences, but its underlying mechanisms remain elusive. Most recently, a linguistic explanation has been proposed applying the linguistic easy-first account and the so-called labial-coronal effect from developmental speech research and phonology to the in-out effect: Labials (front) are easier to process than coronals (middle); and people prefer easy followed by harder motor components. Disentangling consonantal articulation direction and articulation place, the present three preregistered experiments (total N = 1012) found in-out effects for coronal-dorsal (back), and labial-dorsal articulation places. Critically, no in-out effect emerged for labial-coronal articulation places. Thus, the in-out effect is unlikely an instantiation of easy first.

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. We present a German version of the ACT, consisting of 20 word lists with 15 clues each, and report norming studies testing its psychometric properties and their relations to psycholinguistic features of the stimulus material (total N = 300). The results are reported and discussed for future research employing this stimulus pool, which can be easily adapted to varying experimental set-ups and research questions.

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. In Study 1, N = 448 participants completed self-report instruments assessing the experiential and the reflective dimensions of meaning in life, depressive symptoms, and impairments in personality functioning. Intuition was operationalized as the ability to intuitively detect semantic coherence in an experimental task. Additionally, self-reported confidence in intuition was assessed. In Study 2, we aimed to replicate our findings and hypotheses that emerged from Study 1 with a new sample of N = 1189 participants. RESULTS: In both studies, participants with more depressive symptoms or higher levels of personality pathology experienced life as less meaningful but reflected significantly more about meaning in life. The intuitive ability to discriminate between coherence and incoherence in the experimental task was neither related to the experience of meaning in life nor to psychopathology, but more confidence in intuition was associated with experiencing life as more meaningful and with less psychopathological symptoms. It was tentatively supported that the association between meaning in life and intuition was moderated by psychopathology. CONCLUSION: The findings are discussed in terms of their clinical implications and regarding the cognitive-affective processes potentially underlying people's experience of life being meaningful.

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.g., KABA, outward), the so-called in-out effect. The present research explores whether individuals hold an internal standard or scheme of consonant order that triggers this effect. If this were the case, the in-out effect should already occur in one-trial between-subjects designs. If not, the in-out effect should emerge over the course of trials in within-subjects designs. In Experiments 1a-e (1b-e preregistered; total N = 2973; German, English, and Portuguese samples) employing a one-trial between-subjects design, no in-out effect was found. In Experiment 2 (N = 253), employing within-subjects designs with either 1, 5, 10, 30, or 50 trials per consonant order category (inward vs. outward), the in-out effect was absent in the first trial, but already surfaced for the first 2 trials, reached significance within the first 10 trials and a solid plateau within the first 20 trials. Of the four theoretical explanations, the present evidence favors the fluency/frequency and letter-position accounts and is at odds with the eating-related embodiment and easy-first accounts.

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. Recently, employing luminance as quantity, Löffler et al. (2022) generalised such SQUARC compatibility effects to affective judgments, showing that horizontally SQUARC-compatible stimulus arrangements (i.e. bright on the right, dark on the left side) are liked more than SQUARC-incompatible arrangements. The present Experiment 1 (N = 296) replicated this horizontal compatibility effect, dz = .18, and generalised it to vertical luminance SQUARC compatibility (i.e. bright on the top, dark on the bottom), dz = .22. Experiments 2a-b (total N = 259; Experiment 2b preregistered) employed stimulus arrangements tilted by 45° to manipulate horizontal and vertical (in)compatibility simultaneously within the same stimulus, finding robust horizontal compatibility effects, but mixed evidence regarding vertical compatibility.

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 N = 521) investigated whether stimulus arrangements that are compatible with the SQUARC for luminance are affectively preferred to stimulus arrangements that are incompatible. SQUARC-compatible square arrangements (dark-left, bright-right) were preferred over SQUARC-incompatible square arrangements (dark-right, bright-left). The preference for SQUARC compatibility was not moderated by the horizontal orientation of the response scale. Our results confirm the direction of the spatial-luminance association and provide initial support that the cognitive processing of SQUARC compatibility is hedonically marked and appears sufficient to impact affective evaluations.

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 (Ntotal = 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. Upward comparisons increased envy and schadenfreude, and downward comparisons increased sympathy and happy-for-ness, relative to lateral comparisons. When the relevance of comparison standards (Experiment 4a) or the comparison domain (Experiment 4b) was low, or when participants did not have their own reference point for comparison (Experiment 4c), the effect of comparison direction on emotions was attenuated. Emotions also predicted the ensuing behavior: Envy and schadenfreude predicted less, whereas happy-for-ness and sympathy predicted more prosocial behavior (Experiments 5 and 6). Overall, the strongest social comparison effects occurred for envy and sympathy, followed by schadenfreude and happy-for-ness. The data suggest that envy and sympathy arise when comparative concerns are threatened, and happy-for-ness and schadenfreude arise when they are satisfied (because inequality increases vs. decreases, respectively) and predict behavior aimed at dealing with these concerns. We discuss implications for the function of fortunes-of-others emotions, social comparison theory, inequity aversion, and prospect theory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

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 risk premium. Previous psychological research suggests that similar to risk aversion, people dislike inconsistency in an interaction partner's behavior. In eight experiments (total N = 2,412) we pitted this inconsistency aversion against the expected returns from interacting with an inconsistent partner. We identified the additional expected return of interacting with an inconsistent partner that must be granted to make decision-makers prefer a more profitable, but inconsistent partner to a consistent, but less profitable one. We locate this inconsistency premium at around 31% of the expected value of the risk-free option.

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. Introducing a "maybe" into our donation proposals by randomly revoking some donations not only led to significant increases in donation rates but also increased the total amount of donations. That is, due to biased perceptions of costs and benefits combined with nonlinear probability weighting, the donations we revoked due to the "maybe" were overcompensated by an increased overall willingness-to-donate. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

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. This suggests that social-affective consequences of imitation should not be limited to situations in which the imitator copies the model's body movements. Rather, the present study tested whether copying the perceived action-effects of another person without imitating the eventual body movements increases the social-affective evaluation of this person. In three experiments, participants produced visual action-effects while observing videos of models who performed either the same or a different movement and produced either the same or a different action-effect. If instructions framed the action in terms of the movement, participants preferred models with similar movements (Experiment 1). However, if instructions framed the action in terms of the to-be produced action-effect in the environment, participants preferred models with similar action-effects (Experiments 2 and 3). These results extend effect-based accounts of action control like the ideomotor framework and suggest a close link between action control and affective processing in social interactions.

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. In a line of four experiments (total N = 786), German participants were asked to indicate how much they like the overall appearance of two digits that appear at the right and at the left side of the screen. Results from three of the four experiments suggest that digit arrangements that are compatible with this spatial-numerical association indeed trigger positive feelings. These preference patterns were not moderated by the horizontal distance between the two digits, pointing towards a stable phenomenon that is insensitive to contextual spatial cues.

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 N = 468), we consistently replicated the basic in-out effect; but no evidence was found supporting an eating-related underlying mechanism. The in-out effect was not modulated by disgust inductions (Experiments 1, 2, 4, and 10) or food deprivation (Experiment 3). In 6 further experiments (total N = 1,067), we explored a novel alternative explanation, namely that the in-out effect is simply a position-specific preference for front consonants over back consonants. In these experiments, we found in-out-like preference effects for fragments that lacked an actual front-to-back movement but featured only starting (e.g., B _ _ _ _) or ending (e.g., _ _ _ K) consonants (Experiments 6-8). Consonants that are articulated in the front of the mouth were generally preferred over those articulated in the back of the mouth, and this basic preference was stronger at the beginning of a word-like stimulus (Experiments 6-10), thus explaining the preference pattern of the in-out effect. The present evidence speaks against an eating-related (embodied) explanation and suggests a simple word-morphologic explanation of the in-out effect. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

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., 1990). This task operationalizes intuition as the inexplicable and sudden detection of semantic coherence. Results: Results revealed that depressed patients and healthy controls did not differ in their general intuitive performance (Hypothesis 1). We further found that fluency did not significantly affect depressed patients' coherence judgments (H2a) and that the assumed effect of fluency on coherence judgments was not moderated by depression (H2b). Finally, we found that triads positive in valence were more likely to be judged as coherent as compared to negative word triads in the depressed sample (H3a), but this influence of positive (vs. negative) valence on coherence judgments did not significantly differ between the two groups (H3b). Conclusion: Overall the current study did not replicate findings from previous research regarding intuitive semantic coherence detection deficits in depression. However, our findings suggest that enhancing positivity in depressed patients may facilitate their ability to see meaning in their environment and to take intuitive decision.

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 N = 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., for a close friend vs. a stranger). Participants were strongly influenced by client identity. They systematically accepted more hyper-fair offers for themselves and close clients than for distant clients, while client identity played no role in unfair offers. We show that the driving mechanism of this client privileging effect is joy (happy-for-ness) participants experience particularly for close clients, while envy did not explain this effect. Across all types of clients and experiments, hyper-fair offers were accepted at only 86% which can only be explained by participants being not exclusively motivated by absolute monetary payoffs but also, to some extent, factoring in nonmonetary concerns.

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.g., KENIMA). The present experiments explored the temporal dynamics of the reading process in this in-out preference effect. In three experiments (total N = 344), we gradually reduced the presentation durations of inward and outward wandering words from 1000 ms down to 25 ms to approximate the minimum length of visual stimulus presentation required to trigger the effect. The in-out effect was reliably observed for exposure timings down to 50 ms, but vanished for 25 ms timings, which is line with previous evidence on phonological encoding. Thus, impressively, 50 ms of word presentation is sufficient to evoke the in-out effect. These findings suggest phonological activation to be a prerequisite and thus a driving mechanism of the in-out effect.

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. Crucially, we manipulated the degree of deviance of the last stimulus by showing a stimulus that deviated to either no, a medium, or a high degree from the previous nine stimuli. Orthogonally to this deviation, we induced an expectation with either high, moderate, or low constraints prior to the experimental task. We measured behavioral response delay and explicit ratings of liking, surprise, and expectancy. Our findings point out an overall only low association between the behavioral, affective, experiential, and cognitive surprise responses and reveal rather dichotomous response patterns that differentiate between deviance and non-deviance of an event. Challenging previous accounts, the present evidence further implies that surprise is not about the ease of integrating an event with the constraints of an explicit a-priori expectation but rather reflects the automatic outcome of implicit discrepancy detection, resulting from a continuous cognitive fine-tuning of expectations.

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.g. KENOBA). Following the oral approach-avoidance account suggesting that the in-out effect is due to the resemblance between consonantal-articulations patterns and ingestion/expectoration, recent findings have shown that when judging inward-outward names for objects with particular oral functions, valence did not modulate the effect while the oral function did. To replicate and examine further the role of edibility and valence in shaping the in-out effect, we asked participants (N = 545) to rate inward and outward names for edible and non-edible products while controlling for valence. Results revealed that the motor-to-affect link was only observed for edible products, regardless of valence.