Increasing pro-environmental behavior in the home and work contexts through cognitive dissonance and autonomy.

The aim of this study was to develop a novel cognitive dissonance intervention founded on the action-based model for enhancing pro-environmental behavior. Based on intraindividual feedback on the expression of personal pro-environmental attitudes and behavior the study confirms the effect of cognitive dissonance intervention to foster pro-environmental behavior. The effect of this intervention could be demonstrated for the home as well as for the work context, although the effects for the work domain were lower. This can be explained by specific situational conditions of the work domain. Autonomy for pro-environmental behavior is significantly lower in the work context than in the home context and significantly moderates the effect of the cognitive dissonance intervention. The present work provides information on how pro-environmental behavior can be influenced in different contexts as well as the significance of situational framework conditions for the effect of behavior-changing interventions.

The Sound of Voice: Voice-Based Categorization of Speakers' Sexual Orientation within and across Languages.

Empirical research had initially shown that English listeners are able to identify the speakers' sexual orientation based on voice cues alone. However, the accuracy of this voice-based categorization, as well as its generalizability to other languages (language-dependency) and to non-native speakers (language-specificity), has been questioned recently. Consequently, we address these open issues in 5 experiments: First, we tested whether Italian and German listeners are able to correctly identify sexual orientation of same-language male speakers. Then, participants of both nationalities listened to voice samples and rated the sexual orientation of both Italian and German male speakers. We found that listeners were unable to identify the speakers' sexual orientation correctly. However, speakers were consistently categorized as either heterosexual or gay on the basis of how they sounded. Moreover, a similar pattern of results emerged when listeners judged the sexual orientation of speakers of their own and of the foreign language. Overall, this research suggests that voice-based categorization of sexual orientation reflects the listeners' expectations of how gay voices sound rather than being an accurate detector of the speakers' actual sexual identity. Results are discussed with regard to accuracy, acoustic features of voices, language dependency and language specificity.