Anger and disgust shape judgments of social sanctions across cultures, especially in high individual autonomy societies.

When someone violates a social norm, others may think that some sanction would be appropriate. We examine how the experience of emotions like anger and disgust relate to the judged appropriateness of sanctions, in a pre-registered analysis of data from a large-scale study in 56 societies. Across the world, we find that individuals who experience anger and disgust over a norm violation are more likely to endorse confrontation, ostracism and, to a smaller extent, gossip. Moreover, we find that the experience of anger is consistently the strongest predictor of judgments of confrontation, compared to other emotions. Although the link between state-based emotions and judgments may seem universal, its strength varies across countries. Aligned with theoretical predictions, this link is stronger in societies, and among individuals, that place higher value on individual autonomy. Thus, autonomy values may increase the role that emotions play in guiding judgments of social sanctions.

Changes in social norms during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic across 43 countries.

The emergence of COVID-19 dramatically changed social behavior across societies and contexts. Here we study whether social norms also changed. Specifically, we study this question for cultural tightness (the degree to which societies generally have strong norms), specific social norms (e.g. stealing, hand washing), and norms about enforcement, using survey data from 30,431 respondents in 43 countries recorded before and in the early stages following the emergence of COVID-19. Using variation in disease intensity, we shed light on the mechanisms predicting changes in social norm measures. We find evidence that, after the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, hand washing norms increased while tightness and punishing frequency slightly decreased but observe no evidence for a robust change in most other norms. Thus, at least in the short term, our findings suggest that cultures are largely stable to pandemic threats except in those norms, hand washing in this case, that are perceived to be directly relevant to dealing with the collective threat.

Overdue Assignment: A Case Study on Academic Writing Development for Postgraduate Health Professional Trainees in Kenya.

OBJECTIVES: Though essential for research capacity building, development of authorial identity for thesis projects and publications has been overlooked in African postgraduate residency programs. This study aims to explore authorial identity among postgraduate health professional trainees at two universities in Kenya. It also evaluated the effect of Age of Acquisition of English on confidence in writing. METHODS: This exploratory case study utilized quantitative and qualitative data. Pre- and post-workshop surveys were generated from learning objectives and evaluated confidence in writing and plagiarism awareness, both important attributes of authorial identity. As confidence in writing might be influenced by the English Age of Acquisition, the questionnaire also included items from the Language Experience and Proficiency Questionnaire. Pre- and post-workshop responses were analyzed using planned comparisons. Focus group discussions further explored authorial identity among participants and were analyzed thematically. RESULTS: A total of 57 postgraduate trainees from nine medical specialties participated in the study. Both confidence in writing and plagiarism awareness improved significantly after the workshop: confidence in writing pre-test (M = 3.20, SD = 0.59) and post-test (M = 3.97, SD = 0.61), t(56) = 6.93, P < .001, d = 0.9; plagiarism awareness pre-test (M = 3.01, SD 0.72) and post-test (M = 3.92, SD 0.65), t(56) = 6,8, P < .001, d = 0.9. The average English Age of Acquisition was 4.98 years and showed no correlation with confidence in writing. Participants recognized that authentic authorship requires hard work and suggested plagiarism is driven by inadequate writing instruction. They proposed that changing perceptions of research and writing could overcome a graduation requirement mindset among trainees. CONCLUSIONS: Interactive workshops using procedural and enculturation approaches may be useful to develop authorial identity among postgraduate health professionals in Kenya. Further research is needed on evaluating workshop effectiveness using direct indicators of learning and other curricular reforms to promote authorship.

Exploration of human cognitive universals and human cognitive diversity.

In this editorial, the editors briefly introduce the aims of the Special Issue. If the goal of the scientific field of Cognitive Psychology is to improve our understanding of human cognition, then research needs to be conducted on a much broader slice of humanity than it has mostly been doing. The first aim of this Special Issue was to examine cognitive processes in populations that are different from the typical Western young adult samples often used in previously published studies. Studies in this issue therefore included both non-WEIRD participants as well as WEIRD participants who process information using different sensory experiences (e.g., individuals who are deaf). The second aim was to amplify - where possible - the research of scholars from less well-represented regions. The authors of the studies were affiliated with a diverse range of academic institutes and frequently included partnerships between Western and non-Western investigators.

Fact or artifact? Demand characteristics and participants' beliefs can moderate, but do not fully account for, the effects of facial feedback on emotional experience.

The facial feedback hypothesis suggests that an individual's facial expressions can influence their emotional experience (e.g., that smiling can make one feel happier). However, a reoccurring concern is that supposed facial feedback effects are merely methodological artifacts. Six experiments conducted across 29 countries (N = 995) examined the extent to which the effects of posed facial expressions on emotion reports were moderated by (a) the hypothesis communicated to participants (i.e., demand characteristics) and (b) participants' beliefs about facial feedback effects. Results indicated that these methodological artifacts moderated, but did not fully account for, the effects of posed facial expressions on emotion reports. Even when participants were explicitly told or personally believed that facial poses do not influence emotions, they still exhibited facial feedback effects. These results indicate that facial feedback effects are not solely driven by demand or placebo effects. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The Benefits, Barriers, and Risks of Big-Team Science.

Progress in psychology has been frustrated by challenges concerning replicability, generalizability, strategy selection, inferential reproducibility, and computational reproducibility. Although often discussed separately, these five challenges may share a common cause: insufficient investment of intellectual and nonintellectual resources into the typical psychology study. We suggest that the emerging emphasis on big-team science can help address these challenges by allowing researchers to pool their resources together to increase the amount available for a single study. However, the current incentives, infrastructure, and institutions in academic science have all developed under the assumption that science is conducted by solo principal investigators and their dependent trainees, an assumption that creates barriers to sustainable big-team science. We also anticipate that big-team science carries unique risks, such as the potential for big-team-science organizations to be co-opted by unaccountable leaders, become overly conservative, and make mistakes at a grand scale. Big-team-science organizations must also acquire personnel who are properly compensated and have clear roles. Not doing so raises risks related to mismanagement and a lack of financial sustainability. If researchers can manage its unique barriers and risks, big-team science has the potential to spur great progress in psychology and beyond.

A multi-lab test of the facial feedback hypothesis by the Many Smiles Collaboration.

Following theories of emotional embodiment, the facial feedback hypothesis suggests that individuals' subjective experiences of emotion are influenced by their facial expressions. However, evidence for this hypothesis has been mixed. We thus formed a global adversarial collaboration and carried out a preregistered, multicentre study designed to specify and test the conditions that should most reliably produce facial feedback effects. Data from n = 3,878 participants spanning 19 countries indicated that a facial mimicry and voluntary facial action task could both amplify and initiate feelings of happiness. However, evidence of facial feedback effects was less conclusive when facial feedback was manipulated unobtrusively via a pen-in-mouth task.

Perceptions of the appropriate response to norm violation in 57 societies.

Norm enforcement may be important for resolving conflicts and promoting cooperation. However, little is known about how preferred responses to norm violations vary across cultures and across domains. In a preregistered study of 57 countries (using convenience samples of 22,863 students and non-students), we measured perceptions of the appropriateness of various responses to a violation of a cooperative norm and to atypical social behaviors. Our findings highlight both cultural universals and cultural variation. We find a universal negative relation between appropriateness ratings of norm violations and appropriateness ratings of responses in the form of confrontation, social ostracism and gossip. Moreover, we find the country variation in the appropriateness of sanctions to be consistent across different norm violations but not across different sanctions. Specifically, in those countries where use of physical confrontation and social ostracism is rated as less appropriate, gossip is rated as more appropriate.

Multiple Translations in Bilingual Memory: Processing Differences Across Concrete, Abstract, and Emotion Words.

Historically, the manner in which translation ambiguity and emotional content are represented in bilingual memory have often been ignored in many theoretical and empirical investigations, resulting in these linguistic factors related to bilingualism being absent from even the most promising models of bilingual memory representation. However, in recent years it was reported that the number of translations a word has across languages influences the speed with which bilinguals translate concrete and abstract words from one language into another (Tokowicz and Kroll in Lang Cogn Process 22:727-779, 2007). The current work examines how the number of translations that characterize a word influences bilingual lexical organization and the processing of concrete, abstract, and emotional stimuli. In Experiment 1, Spanish-English bilinguals translated concrete and abstract words with one and more than one translation. As reported by Tokowicz and Kroll, concreteness effects emerged only when words had more than one translation across languages. In Experiment 2, bilinguals translated emotion words with more than one translation. Concreteness effects emerged in both language directions for words with more than one translation, and in the L1-L2 language direction for words with a single translation across languages. These findings are discussed in terms of how multiple translations, specifically for emotion words, might be incorporated into current models of bilingual memory representation.

Morphological facilitation for regular and irregular verb formations in native and non-native speakers: Little evidence for two distinct mechanisms.

The authors compared performance on two variants of the primed lexical decision task to investigate morphological processing in native and non-native speakers of English. They examined patterns of facilitation on present tense targets. Primes were regular (billed-bill) past tense formations and two types of irregular past tense forms that varied on preservation of target length (fell-fall; taught-teach). When a forward mask preceded the prime (Exp. 1), language and prime type interacted. Native speakers showed reliable regular and irregular length preserved facilitation relative to orthographic controls. Non-native speakers' latencies after morphological and orthographic primes did not differ reliably except for regulars. Under cross-modal conditions (Exp. 2), language and prime type interacted. Native but not non-native speakers showed inhibition following orthographically similar primes. Collectively, reliable facilitation for regulars and patterns across verb type and task provided little support for a processing dichotomy (decomposition, non-combinatorial association) based on inflectional regularity in either native or non-native speakers of English.

List context fosters semantic processing: parallels between semantic and morphological facilitation when primes are forward masked.

The authors examined patterns of facilitation under forward-masked priming conditions across 3 list contexts (Experiments 1-3) that varied with respect to properties of filler trials -- (a) mixed (morphological, orthographic, semantic), (b) identity, and (c) semantic -- but held the relatedness proportion constant (75%). Facilitation for targets that were related morphologically to their prime occurred regardless of filler context, but facilitation for semantically related pairs occurred only in the context of identity and semantic fillers. Facilitation was absent for orthographically similar prime-target pairs in all 3 filler contexts when matching numbers of orthographically similar word-word and word-nonword prime-target pairs rendered orthographic similarity uninformative with respect to lexicality of the target. Enhanced semantic and morphological facilitation in the context of identity and semantic relative to mixed fillers support a semantically attuned, as contrasted with a purely form-based, account of early morphological processing.

Differences in semantic and translation priming across languages: the role of language direction and language dominance.

In the present study, we examined bilingual memory organization, using the priming paradigm. Many of the previous studies in which this experimental technique has been used in the bilingual domain appear to have had several differences in methodology that have caused there to be a lot of variation in the data reported. The aim of the present work was to create an experimental situation that was well constrained so that automatic processes could be observed. In Experiment 1, Spanish-English bilinguals participated in an unmasked semantic- and translation-priming study in which a lexical decision task was used. The results revealed significant translation-priming effects in both language directions and, unexpectedly, significant semantic priming in the L2-L1 direction only. In Experiment 2, we examined semantic- and translation-priming effects with a forward mask design. The results indicated that significant priming was obtained only for translation word pairs in both language directions. These results are discussed with regard to current models of bilingual memory representation.

Methodological considerations in performing semantic- and translation-priming experiments across languages.

Research in the field of bilingualism has had as its principal aim to describe the structure and function of memory for bilingual speakers. A primary technique that has been used to examine bilingual memory is an examination of cross-language word priming (semantic and translation), using the lexical decision and pronunciation tasks. Although studies have, on occasion, revealed greater degrees of word priming from a dominant to a subordinate language, in comparison with the reverse, a careful review of the methodology that has been used reveals a number of issues that render conclusions such as this quite problematic. Parameters of concern include language proficiency, cognate status, masking, control conditions, word frequency and length, stimulus onset asynchrony, relatedness proportion, and nonword ratio. These factors are discussed, as well as recommendations for conducting future empirical research in this area of investigation.

Monolingual and Bilingual Recognition of Regular and Irregular English Verbs: Sensitivity to Form Similarity Varies with First Language Experience.

We used a cross-modal priming procedure to explore the processing of irregular and regular English verb forms in both monolinguals and bilinguals (Serbian-English, Chinese-English). Materials included irregular nested stem (drawn-DRAW), irregular change stem (ran-RUN), and regular past tense-present tense verb pairs that were either low (guided-GUIDE) or high (pushed-PUSH) in resonance, a measure of semantic richness. Overall, semantic richness of irregular verbs (nested and irregular change) and of regular verbs (high and low resonance) was matched. Native speakers of English revealed comparable facilitation across regularity and greater facilitation for nested than change stem irregulars. Like native speakers, Serbian, but not Chinese bilinguals matched for proficiency, showed facilitation due to form overlap between irregular past and present tense forms with a nested stem. Unlike native speakers, neither group showed reliable facilitation to stem change irregulars. Results demonstrate the influence of first language on inflectional processing in a second language.