Elasticity of emotions to multiple interpersonal transgressions.

After an interpersonal mishap-like blowing off plans with a friend, forgetting a spouse's birthday, or falling behind on a group project-wrongdoers typically feel guilty for their misbehavior, and victims feel angry. These emotions are believed to possess reparative functions; their expression prevents future mistakes from reiterating. However, little research has examined people's emotional reactions to mistakes that happen more than once. In seven preregistered studies, we assessed wrongdoers' and victims' emotions that arise after one transgression and again after another. Following two (or more) consecutive transgressions, wrongdoers felt guiltier, and victims felt angrier. However, from one transgression to the next, increases to anger were significantly greater than increases to guilt. Likewise, after transgression repair, anger decreased more than guilt did. In short, we found that anger is more elastic than guilt, which suggests a new perspective on emotions: The sensitivity to which emotions update in response to new circumstances. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Seeing far: Abstract construal and visual distance judgments.

construal underlies mental travel. As a result, the human mind associates abstraction and psychological distance, whereby prompting abstract construal begets the inference of psychological distance - in time, social distance, hypotheticality, and physical space. That final distance is the only dimension that can be appraised visually, so would abstract construal impact judgments related to perceived visual distance? Two experiments provide evidence that abstract construal causes targets in the visual field to be judged as physically farther away. Further, the exacerbated sense of distance gives rise to related inferences about those visual targets (size and weight). These results deepen and broaden Construal Level Theory with practical implications for how people reason about the physical properties of objects - including but not limited to their physical distance.

Improving the Generalizability of Behavioral Science by Using Reality Checks: A Tool for Assessing Heterogeneity in Participants' Consumership of Study Stimuli.

In attempting to draw bigger conclusions, researchers in psychology open their labs to more diverse groups of people. Yet even the most far-reaching theories must be tested with specific stimuli, materials, and methodology. To the extent that a study's stimuli are familiar beyond the lab to groups of people writ large, an experiment is said to have mundane realism-a type of external validity. We propose that an experiment's stimuli will vary in their relevance to each individual participant (such as how much they consume the stimuli outside the lab) and can be assessed using a tool: reality checks. We found that accounting for a study's mundane realism, at the individual level, significantly altered a study's results-which we found to be the case in testing well-established findings in psychology and behavioral economics. Our work suggests that measuring mundane realism (in addition to creating it) is a useful way of testing effects in psychology among the participants for whom the studies' scenarios and decisions will matter most outside of the lab.

Pleas for patience from the cumulative future self.

Current selves wield all the power in intertemporal tradeoffs. Although one set of future selves will make similar tradeoffs in the future, another self - who we term the cumulative future self - falls on the receiving end of those dictated decisions. How current selves commune with the cumulative future self determines whether the former heed pleas, from the latter, for patience.

Stocks, flows, and risk response to pandemic data.

During the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, data regarding new infections were commonly presented and used to guide policy decisions (e.g., whether to close schools) and personal choices (e.g., whether to dine at a restaurant). In this manuscript, we highlight a critical aspect of pandemic data that can pose a challenge for people trying to reason about it. Data on infections-like much time series data-can be presented as either stocks (the total number of cases) or flows (the number of new cases over some interval). We show that seeing the same data presented in one format versus the other can shift judgments of risk and behavioral intentions. Specifically, when participants were shown data that depicted the number of new cases each day (flow) decreasing, they judged the current risk of COVID-19 to be lower than participants who were shown the same data as the total (cumulative) number of cases (stock), which-by its nature-continued to increase. Risk appraisal, in turn, predicted a wide array of behavioral intentions (e.g., likelihood of dining indoors at a restaurant). Thus, the choice of how to present pandemic data can lead people to different conclusions about risk and can have practical consequences for risky behavior. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Choice protection for feeling-focused decisions.

Whether guided by feelings or deliberation, most decisions entail selecting an option and then living with it. Beyond simply investigating which option people select and how they evaluate it right away, the present research examines the extended issue of how people think and act in the service of that choice as a function of how they decided in the first place. We propose that reliance on feelings over deliberation in making an initial decision will strengthen postchoice protection of chosen options against threats. Seven studies provide evidence that feeling-focused deciders prove more mentally, emotionally, and behaviorally staunch in their defense of chosen options in response to a range of different campaigns against them. Together, a focus on feelings emerges as a decision strategy with broad relevance for the extended issue of how decision makers navigate the postchoice course. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

When does the present end and the future begin?

Through the process of prospection, people can mentally travel in time to summon in their mind's eye events that have yet to occur. Such depictions of the future often differ than those of the present, as do choices made for these 2 time periods. Conceptually and semantically, this research tradition presupposes a division between the 2: At some point in the progression of time, the present must yield to the future. Still, the field to date has offered little insight by way of defining the division that separates the present from the future. The basic scientific appeal and practical implications of prospection beg 2 related questions: When do people believe that the present ends and the future begins, and do such perceptions affect decision-making? To the first question, perceptions of when the present ends vary across people (Study 1) and are reliable over time (Study 2). To the second, when people believe that the present ends sooner, they are more likely to make future-oriented choices in correlational and experimental contexts, even when controlling for potentially related constructs (Studies 3-5). Finally, we identify a psychological mechanism underlying this relationship: A shorter present is associated with a sharper division from the future (Study 6a), and this sharp division accounts for future-oriented behavior toward both hypothetical (Study 6b) and incentive-compatible (Study 6c) outcomes. This research sheds light on a foundational but unexplored prerequisite for thinking and acting across time. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

The Voice of Cognition: Active and Passive Voice Influence Distance and Construal.

English passages can be in either the active or passive voice. Relative to the active voice, the passive voice provides a sense of objectivity regarding the events being described. This leads to our hypothesis that passages in the passive voice can increase readers' psychological distance from the content of the passage, triggering an abstract construal. In five studies with American, Australian, British, and Canadian participants, we find evidence for our propositions, with both paragraphs and sentences in the passive voice increasing readers' felt temporal, hypothetical, and spatial distance from activities described in the text, which increases their abstraction in a manner that generalizes to unrelated tasks. As such, prose colors how people process information, with the active and passive voice influencing the reader in ways beyond what is stated in the written word.

Coffee cues elevate arousal and reduce level of construal.

Coffee and tea are two beverages commonly-consumed around the world. Therefore, there is much research regarding their physiological effects. However, less is known about their psychological meanings. Derived from a predicted lay association between coffee and arousal, we posit that exposure to coffee-related cues should increase arousal, even in the absence of actual ingestion, relative to exposure to tea-related cues. We further suggest that higher arousal levels should facilitate a concrete level of mental construal as conceptualized by Construal Level Theory. In four experiments, we find that coffee cues prompted participants to see temporal distances as shorter and to think in more concrete, precise terms. Both subjective and physiological arousal explain the effects. We situate our work in the literature that connects food and beverage to cognition or decision-making. We also discuss the applied relevance of our results as coffee and tea are among the most prevalent beverages globally.

Feeling certain: Gut choice, the true self, and attitude certainty.

Decisions need not always be deliberative. Instead, people confronting choices can recruit their gut feelings, processing information about choice options in accordance with how they feel about options rather than what they think about them. Reliance on feelings can change what people choose, but might this decision strategy also impact how people evaluate their chosen options? The present investigation tackles this question by integrating insights from the separate literatures on the true self and attitude certainty. Four studies support a process model by which focusing on feelings (vs. deliberation) in choice causes people to see their true selves reflected in those choices (Studies 1 and 2), leading to enhanced attitude certainty (Study 3) and advocacy on behalf of that attitude (Study 4) while offering robustness checks and accounting for alternative explanations throughout. Discussion of these findings highlights the opportunity for new insights at the intersection of feeling-focused decision making, attitudes, and the true self. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Temporal orientation.

Time in the mind orients people in one of two directions. An inward orientation points to the present, contracting the scope of thought to immediate concerns. An outward orientation, in contrast, points away from the present to the past or the future, expanding the scope of thought to a wider consideration set. These oriented arrows need not solely be used for mental time travel, as a similar inward/outward orientation can apply to social distance, spatial distance, and probability. We review recent findings illuminated by this broad form distancing, as illustrated in how people learn from and compare themselves to others, before concluding with a discussion of how change necessarily transpires over time, providing opportunities for future research at the intersection of future thought and present behavior.

Vanishing time in the pursuit of happiness.

Happiness can be conceptualized as a positive affective state or as a goal whose pursuit ironically pulls the pursuer away from achieving it (Mauss, Tamir, Anderson, & Savino in Emotion, 11(4), 807-815, 2011). But how do people think about time during this latter, never-ending pursuit of happiness? The present investigation asks how seeking happiness influences perceptions of time availability. Four studies demonstrated that trait-level happiness seeking (Study 1) as well as direct manipulation of happiness seeking (Studies 2, 3, and 4) consistently reveal the same pattern: reduced feelings of time availability while pursuing happiness. This negative effect on time availability is mitigated when happiness seems like it has been achieved (Study 2) or seems quick to achieve (Study 3). In addition, pursuing happiness can ultimately decrease happiness, in part, by reducing perceptions of time availability (Study 4), extending theories on happiness, goal pursuit, and perceptions of time.

Mere Gifting: Liking a Gift More Because It Is Shared.

We investigated a type of mere similarity that describes owning the same item as someone else. Moreover, we examined this mere similarity in a gift-giving context, whereby givers gift something that they also buy for themselves (a behavior we call "companionizing"). Using a Heiderian account of balancing unit-sentiment relations, we tested whether gift recipients like gifts more when gifts are companionized. Akin to mere ownership, which describes people liking their possessions more merely because they own them, we tested a complementary prediction: whether people like their possessions more merely because others own them too. Thus, in a departure from previous work, we examined a type of similarity based on two people sharing the same material item. We find that this type of sharing causes gift recipients to like their gifts more, and feel closer to gift givers.

Anticipated ambiguity prolongs the present: Evidence of a return trip effect.

Every event that can occupy a span of time can also warp how long that duration feels. No shortage of factors configures such duration estimates, yet they remain largely confined to events experienced in the present moment. Might future events similarly impact duration? The present investigation leverages a phenomenological return trip effect, which documents subjectively longer outbound journeys relative to identical inbound journeys, to inform this question. Through this lens, the focal event (that which will transpire at the destination) can be decoupled from the focal duration (the span of time between the present moment and arrival at that destination). Four studies document a consistent effect in which ambiguity awaiting at a future event (occurring at the destination) expands the subjective magnitude of present durations (the travel time to the destination). Duration judgments thus appear sensitive to an increasingly broad scope of factors, informing models of temporal cognition. (PsycINFO Database Record

Revising probability estimates: Why increasing likelihood means increasing impact.

Forecasted probabilities rarely stay the same for long. Instead, they are subject to constant revision-moving upward or downward, uncertain events become more or less likely. Yet little is known about how people interpret probability estimates beyond static snapshots, like a 30% chance of rain. Here, we consider the cognitive, affective, and behavioral consequences of revisions to probability forecasts. Stemming from a lay belief that revisions signal the emergence of a trend, we find in 10 studies (comprising uncertain events such as weather, climate change, sex, sports, and wine) that upward changes to event-probability (e.g., increasing from 20% to 30%) cause events to feel less remote than downward changes (e.g., decreasing from 40% to 30%), and subsequently change people's behavior regarding those events despite the revised event-probabilities being the same. Our research sheds light on how revising the probabilities for future events changes how people manage those uncertain events. (PsycINFO Database Record

The sound of distance.

Human languages may be more than completely arbitrary symbolic systems. A growing literature supports sound symbolism, or the existence of consistent, intuitive relationships between speech sounds and specific concepts. Prior work establishes that these sound-to-meaning mappings can shape language-related judgments and decisions, but do their effects generalize beyond merely the linguistic and truly color how we navigate our environment? We examine this possibility, relating a predominant sound symbolic distinction (vowel frontness) to a novel associate (spatial proximity) in five studies. We show that changing one vowel in a label can influence estimations of distance, impacting judgment, perception, and action. The results (1) provide the first experimental support for a relationship between vowels and spatial distance and (2) demonstrate that sound-to-meaning mappings have outcomes that extend beyond just language and can - through a single sound - influence how we perceive and behave toward objects in the world.

Spatial orientation shrinks and expands psychological distance.

Being objectively close to or far from a place changes how people perceive the location of that place in a subjective, psychological sense. In the six studies reported here, we investigated whether people's spatial orientation (defined as moving toward or away from a place) will produce similar effects-by specifically influencing psychological closeness in each of its forms (i.e., spatial, temporal, probabilistic, and social distance). Orientation influenced subjective spatial distance at various levels of objective distance (Study 1), regardless of the direction people were facing (Study 2). In addition, when spatially oriented toward, rather than away from, a particular place, participants felt that events there had occurred more recently (Studies 3a and 3b) and that events there would be more likely to occur (Study 4). Finally, participants felt more similarity to people who were spatially oriented toward them than to people who were spatially oriented away from them (Study 5). Our investigation broadens the study of psychological distance from static spatial locations to dynamically moving points in space.

Vowel sounds in words affect mental construal and shift preferences for targets.

A long tradition in sound symbolism describes a host of sound-meaning linkages, or associations between individual speech sounds and concepts or object properties. Might sound symbolism extend beyond sound-meaning relationships to linkages between sounds and modes of thinking? Integrating sound symbolism with construal level theory, we investigate whether vowel sounds influence the mental level at which people represent and evaluate targets. We propose that back vowels evoke abstract, high-level construal, while front vowels induce concrete, low-level construal. Two initial studies link front vowels to the use of greater visual and conceptual precision, consistent with a construal account. Three subsequent studies explore construal-dependent tradeoffs as a function of vowel sound contained in the target's name. Evaluation of objects named with back vowels was driven by their high- over low-level features; front vowels reduced or reversed this differentiation. Thus, subtle linguistic cues appear capable of influencing the very nature of mental representation.

Distance from a distance: psychological distance reduces sensitivity to any further psychological distance.

What is the difference between far and further? Investigations into such psychological distancing--removal from an egocentric reference point--have suggested similarities between geographical space, time, probability, and social distance. We draw on these similarities to propose that experiencing any kind of distance will reduce sensitivity to any other distance. Nine studies varied the initial distance of an event and assessed sensitivity to a second distance. Consistently, people were less responsive to a given span of distance when it was distal versus proximal. This effect held using each of the four distances as the initial instantiation of distance; it also held using each dimension to assess sensitivity to distance (i.e., as the second distance dimension). These findings suggest that the dimensions of psychological distance share a common, interchangeable meaning and that the cross-dimension difference between far and further is less than that between near and far.

Disembodiment: abstract construal attenuates the influence of contextual bodily state in judgment.

Can the mind be divorced from the body? As evidenced by a host of findings in the traditions of grounded cognition and embodiment, sensorimotor experience can exert a powerful influence on what and how people think. The current investigation explores the conditions that temper or enable this influence, proposing that level of mental construal may moderate the role of temporary physical state in judgment. Insofar as the sensorimotor information responsible for grounding cognition constitutes an incidental and thus low-level feature of a situation, it should exert less influence from an abstract or high-level (vs. concrete) frame of mind. Two studies provide support for this prediction: Contextual bodily information affected visual length estimates (Study 1) and importance ratings (Study 2) for people led to think concretely but not for those thinking abstractly. These results suggest that high-level thought allows for consistency by buffering against the effects of transitory situational factors.