Estimated probabilities of positive, vs. negative, events show separable correlations with COVID-19 preventive behaviours.

Research has associated optimism with better health-protective behaviours, but few studies have measured optimism or pessimism directly, by asking participants to estimate probabilities of events. We used these probability estimates to examine how optimism and/or pessimism relate to protecting oneself from COVID-19. When COVID-19 first reached Turkey, we asked a snowball sample of 494 Istanbul adults how much they engaged in various COVID-protective behaviours. They also estimated the probabilities of their catching COVID-19, and of other positive and negative events happening to them. Estimated probability of general positive events (optimism) correlated positively with officially-recommended helpful behaviours (e.g. wearing masks), but not with less-helpful behaviours (e.g. sharing 'alternative' COVID-related information online). Estimated probabilities of general negative events (pessimism), or of catching COVID, did not correlate significantly with helpful COVID-related behaviours; but they did correlate with psychopathological symptoms, as did less-helpful COVID-related behaviours. This shows important nuances can be revealed by measuring optimism and pessimism, as separate variables, using probability estimates.

Explaining illness with evil: pathogen prevalence fosters moral vitalism.

Pathogens represent a significant threat to human health leading to the emergence of strategies designed to help manage their negative impact. We examined how spiritual beliefs developed to explain and predict the devastating effects of pathogens and spread of infectious disease. Analysis of existing data in studies 1 and 2 suggests that moral vitalism (beliefs about spiritual forces of evil) is higher in geographical regions characterized by historical higher levels of pathogens. Furthermore, drawing on a sample of 3140 participants from 28 countries in study 3, we found that historical higher levels of pathogens were associated with stronger endorsement of moral vitalistic beliefs. Furthermore, endorsement of moral vitalistic beliefs statistically mediated the previously reported relationship between pathogen prevalence and conservative ideologies, suggesting these beliefs reinforce behavioural strategies which function to prevent infection. We conclude that moral vitalism may be adaptive: by emphasizing concerns over contagion, it provided an explanatory model that enabled human groups to reduce rates of contagious disease.

State anxiety impairs attentional control when other sources of control are minimal.

Research suggests anxiety impairs attentional control; however, this effect has been unreliable. We argue that anxiety's impairment of attentional control is subtle, and can be obscured by other non-emotional sources of control. We demonstrate this by examining conflict adaptation, an enhancement in attentional control following a trial with high conflict between distracter and target stimuli. Participants completed a Stroop task featuring incongruent (e.g. RED in green font; high-conflict) and control (e.g. +++ in green font; low-conflict) trials. More state-anxious participants showed greater Stroop interference following control trials, but interference was uniformly low following incongruent trials. This suggests state anxiety can impair attention, but other sources of top-down control - such as conflict adaptation - can easily overcome this impairment. This is consistent with recent theories of anxious cognition and shows that anxiety researchers must attend to the dynamics and sources of attentional control.

Looking good or doing good? Motivations for organisational citizenship behaviour in Turkish versus South Korean collectivists.

The purpose of this article is to explore potential motivations to perform organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB) in collectivistic Turkish and South Korean societies. Although collectivism has been proposed as a predictor of OCB, previous research has not fully explored the possibility that collectivistic individuals' OCB may result from their self-oriented motives (i.e. social desirability concerns) or their future-oriented motives (i.e. long-term orientation concerns). We predicted that OCB stems from social desirability concerns among Turkish collectivists, meaning it is used for maintaining a positive image within the organisation. However, for South Korean collectivists, we predicted that OCB stems from their long-term orientation concerns, meaning it is used to make the organisation better. The results were in line with our predictions, and the findings are discussed in terms of their implications for firms in collectivistic societies.

Social mindfulness predicts concern for nature and immigrants across 36 nations.

People cooperate every day in ways that range from largescale contributions that mitigate climate change to simple actions such as leaving another individual with choice - known as social mindfulness. It is not yet clear whether and how these complex and more simple forms of cooperation relate. Prior work has found that countries with individuals who made more socially mindful choices were linked to a higher country environmental performance - a proxy for complex cooperation. Here we replicated this initial finding in 41 samples around the world, demonstrating the robustness of the association between social mindfulness and environmental performance, and substantially built on it to show this relationship extended to a wide range of complex cooperative indices, tied closely to many current societal issues. We found that greater social mindfulness expressed by an individual was related to living in countries with more social capital, more community participation and reduced prejudice towards immigrants. Our findings speak to the symbiotic relationship between simple and more complex forms of cooperation in societies.

Perceiving societal pressure to be happy is linked to poor well-being, especially in happy nations.

Happiness is a valuable experience, and societies want their citizens to be happy. Although this societal commitment seems laudable, overly emphasizing positivity (versus negativity) may create an unattainable emotion norm that ironically compromises individual well-being. In this multi-national study (40 countries; 7443 participants), we investigate how societal pressure to be happy and not sad predicts emotional, cognitive and clinical indicators of well-being around the world, and examine how these relations differ as a function of countries' national happiness levels (collected from the World Happiness Report). Although detrimental well-being associations manifest for an average country, the strength of these relations varies across countries. People's felt societal pressure to be happy and not sad is particularly linked to poor well-being in countries with a higher World Happiness Index. Although the cross-sectional nature of our work prohibits causal conclusions, our findings highlight the correlational link between social emotion valuation and individual well-being, and suggest that high national happiness levels may have downsides for some.

Measurement invariance of the moral vitalism scale across 28 cultural groups.

Moral vitalism refers to a tendency to view good and evil as actual forces that can influence people and events. The Moral Vitalism Scale had been designed to assess moral vitalism in a brief survey form. Previous studies established the reliability and validity of the scale in US-American and Australian samples. In this study, the cross-cultural comparability of the scale was tested across 28 different cultural groups worldwide through measurement invariance tests. A series of exact invariance tests marginally supported partial metric invariance, however, an approximate invariance approach provided evidence of partial scalar invariance for a 5-item measure. The established level of measurement invariance allows for comparisons of latent means across cultures. We conclude that the brief measure of moral vitalism is invariant across 28 cultures and can be used to estimate levels of moral vitalism with the same precision across very different cultural settings.