Priming, Replication, and the Hardest Science

Can sensory and semantic priming enhance the effects of guided self-compassion meditation? A proof-of-concept study

Introduction

Self-compassion is a fundamental aspect of psychological health and well-being that can be cultivated through self-compassion meditations, but it remains unclear how to facilitate this most effectively. This study is the first to explore whether sensory and semantic priming introduced prior to a guided self-compassion meditation could enhance the effects of meditation in comparison with a control condition.

Methods

The study was conducted with 3 × 3 repeated measures between-group design, including three groups (sensory priming, semantic priming and control group), and three assessment time points of state self-compassion, self-criticism, and positive and negative affect (at baseline, after priming, and after guided meditation). Additionally, a meditation appeal questionnaire was used. The total sample size included 71 students who underwent a 3-min priming intervention followed by a 15-min self-compassion guided meditation session.

Results

First, prior to guided meditation, sensory priming significantly decreased state self-criticism more than the control condition or semantic priming, although some reliability issues of the applied self-criticism scale must be taken into consideration. Second, neither sensory nor semantic priming changed state self-compassion, positive affect or negative affect. Third, neither semantic nor sensory priming significantly enhanced the effects of guided self-compassion meditation either in positive and negative affect, self-compassion states, self-criticism states, or in the appeal of the meditation experience.

Discussion

Although this study is underpowered (estimated post hoc power ranges from 0.20 to 0.42), the findings provide preliminary insights into the potential priming has as a tool to enhance meditation effects and provide guidelines for future studies.

Does Psychological Flourishing Have the Potential to Mitigate Self-Injurious Thoughts and Behaviors? A Preliminary Analysis of the Protective Influence of Flourishing

AIM

The purpose of this article was to examine whether psychological flourishing, a multi-dimensional construct of well-being, has the potential to play a preventative role in suicidal and nonsuicidal thoughts and actions.

METHODS

This two-part study utilized cross-sectional survey data from college students across the United States, assessing levels of psychological distress, loneliness, and psychological flourishing. Frequencies of suicidal ideation, intent, previous suicidal attempts, and nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) were also assessed. Data collected in 2019 were used for Study 1 (n = 38,679) and data collected in 2020 were used for Study 2 (n = 50,307).

RESULTS

Psychological flourishing is significantly inversely related to suicide and NSSI risk when controlling for loneliness and psychological distress. There were two-way interactions between flourishing and distress, whereby under conditions of high distress, the inverse effect of flourishing on suicidal ideation, intent, and attempts and NSSI was more pronounced. These results were consistent across both studies. Subgroup analyses revealed similar results regardless of participants' race, sexual orientation, and gender identity.

CONCLUSION

Inverse associations between flourishing and self-injurious thoughts and behaviors suggest that flourishing may buffer risk of suicide and NSSI, and these findings may have important implications for developing evidence-based therapeutic interventions. Additional research, including longitudinal and clinical work, is warranted.

Visual attention is not attuned to non-human animal targets' pathogenicity: an evolutionary mismatch perspective

A considerable amount of research has revealed that there exists an evolutionary mismatch between ancestral environments and conditions following the rise of agriculture regarding the contact between humans and animal reservoirs of infectious diseases. Based on this evolutionary mismatch framework, we examined whether visual attention exhibits adaptive attunement toward animal targets' pathogenicity. Consistent with our predictions, faces bearing heuristic infection cues held attention to a greater extent than did animal vectors of zoonotic infectious diseases. Moreover, the results indicated that attention showed a specialized vigilance toward processing facial cues connoting the presence of infectious diseases, whereas it was allocated comparably between animal disease vectors and disease-irrelevant animals. On the other hand, the pathogen salience manipulation employed to amplify the participants' contextual-level anti-pathogen motives did not moderate the selective allocation of attentional resources. The fact that visual attention seems poorly equipped to detect and encode animals' zoonotic transmission risk supports the idea that our evolved disease avoidance mechanisms might have limited effectiveness in combating global outbreaks originating from zoonotic emerging infectious diseases.

What do we manipulate when reminding people of (not) having control? In search of construct validity

The construct of personal control is crucial for understanding a variety of human behaviors. Perceived lack of control affects performance and psychological well-being in diverse contexts - educational, organizational, clinical, and social. Thus, it is important to know to what extent we can rely on the established experimental manipulations of (lack of) control. In this article, we examine the construct validity of recall-based manipulations of control (or lack thereof). Using existing datasets (Study 1a and 1b: N = 627 and N = 454, respectively) we performed content-based analyses of control experiences induced by two different procedures (free recall and positive events recall). The results indicate low comparability between high and low control conditions in terms of the emotionality of a recalled event, the domain and sphere of control, amongst other differences. In an experimental study that included three types of recall-based control manipulations (Study 2: N = 506), we found that the conditions differed not only in emotionality but also in a generalized sense of control. This suggests that different aspects of personal control can be activated, and other constructs evoked, depending on the experimental procedure. We discuss potential sources of variability between control manipulation procedures and propose improvements in practices when using experimental manipulations of sense of control and other psychological constructs.

Health-Related, Social and Cognitive Factors Explaining Gambling Addiction

BACKGROUND

Gambling addiction was the first addictive behavior not related to substance use that was recognized by the DSM-5. It shares diagnostics and comorbidity with other addictions. Extensive studies have investigated the clinical variables involved, but there have been fewer studies of related cognitive and social variables. In this research, an integrative model was developed to advance the understanding of gambling addiction, and an explanatory model was created based on the concept of cognitive distortions.

METHODS

The sample comprised 258 university students (59.5% women) with a mean age of 20.95 years (SD = 2.19). A series of questionnaires were administered to measure gambling addiction, depression, coping with stress, prosocial behavior, susceptibility to priming and cognitive distortions about gambling. In addition, correlations, multiple linear regressions and a simple mediation model of these variables were analyzed.

RESULTS

The results indicated that gambling addiction was correlated with a variety of clinical, social and cognitive factors. These factors contributed to a model that predicted 16.8% of the variance in gambling addiction and another model using cognitive distortions as a predictor and the maximum bet as a mediator that predicted 34.5% of the variance.

CONCLUSIONS

The study represents an advance by developing a theoretical model from an integrative perspective and providing a new explanatory model. The findings of this research are of great importance in the development of prevention and intervention programs for gambling addiction.

Influence of Economic Scarcity on Race Perception

Racial socioeconomic gaps are widened in periods of economic recession. Besides social and institutional factors, black people also struggle with many psychological factors. The literature reports racial-biased complex behaviors and high-level processes that are influenced by economic scarcity. A previous study found a bias at the perceptual level: an experimental manipulation of scarcity (a subliminal priming paradigm) lowered the black-white race categorization threshold. Here we present a conceptual replication in a higher ecological setup. In our main analysis we compared the categorization threshold of participants that received the Brazilian government's emergency economic aid in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic (n = 136) and participants that did not receive the economic aid (n = 135) in an online psychophysical task that presented faces in a black-white race continuum. Additionally, we analyzed the economic impact of COVID-19 on household income, and in cases of family unemployment. Our results do not support the claim that perception of race is influenced by economic scarcity. Interestingly, we found that when people differ greatly in terms of racial prejudice, they encode visual information related to race differently. People with higher scores on a prejudice scale needed more phenotypic traits of the black race to categorize a face as black. We discuss the results in terms of differences in method and sample.

Does the sense of power influence reputational concern? Tests with episodic and semantic power priming