Journal of General Psychology

Corruption represents a complex problem firmly embedded within our societal structures, governments, and organizations. The current study aimed to build a clearer consensus on the extent to which perceptions of organizational corruption are associated with organizational hierarchy. Two high-powered close replications of studies 1c and 6 by Fath and Kay provide further evidence for the claim that taller organizational structures are associated with greater perceived potential for corruption, and that these perceptions may compromise subsequent trust-related outcomes...

The literature indicated that deceivers in face-to-face communication experience psychological strains derived from guilt or distress associated with violating conversational rules. We proposed that this also applies to telephone-mediated deception. Drawing insights from the theoretical and empirical literature, we surmised that strategic trickery utilized by outsourced call center agents would elicit adverse psychological reactions that have unfavorable impacts on their well-being, cognition, and work motivation...

At present there is little knowledge on whether and how multiple pieces of unconscious information can simultaneously affect a single conscious response. In the present study, we manipulated the congruency relation between a masked prime arrow and the target arrow, as well as that between masked flankers and the target arrow. The results demonstrated that the masked prime and flankers produced independent unconscious priming effects on the response to the target. In the process of studying the above phenomenon, two secondary findings were made...

Prior research has indicated that positive affect, energy, and vitality are positively related to subjective well-being. Unfortunately, most scholars have overlooked the possibility that individuals may proactively manage their energetic, affective, and cognitive resources to boost their subjective well-being. Grounded in social cognitive theory, the current research focuses on explaining why students' proactive vitality management (PVM) leads to positive outcomes (i.e., meaning in life, subjective well-being) and considers how school support climate moderates these effects...

Research has indicated the critical role of responsiveness in facilitating close relationships, but what communication leads to enhanced responsiveness has not been fully explored. We hypothesized that gratitude and apologies facilitate responsiveness within friendship relationships in Japan. In Experiment 1 ( n  = 669), receiving gratitude, apologies, or both gratitude and apologies increased recipients' perceptions of the expresser's responsiveness more than receiving a message without either gratitude or apologies...

Mental contrasting is a motivational behavior change strategy necessary for strong goal commitment. Meanwhile, general causality orientations are motivational patterns that represent individuals' motivation for behavior change and the reason for their goal commitment. The current study explored whether causality orientations predict spontaneous mental contrasting in Chinese university students. Study 1 investigated whether academic autonomy, control, and amotivated orientations correlate with spontaneous mental contrasting about an important academic goal...

A common method for assessing blatant dehumanization asks participants to rate "how evolved" they think members of various social groups are using the Ascent of Human scale (AOH) that transitions in stages from a crawling ape to a fully upright modern human. However, little is known about how task instructions affect participant ratings. In this pre-registered study, participants saw alternative forms of instruction including the traditional instructions emphasizing "evolution", a prompt without any reference to evolution, and a prompt that clearly explained that the scale assesses dehumanization...

Syntactic analysis and semantic plausibility provide important cues to build the meaningful representation of sentences. The purpose of this research is to explore the age-related differences in the use of syntactic analysis and semantic plausibility during sentence comprehension under different working memory load conditions. A sentence judgment task was implemented among a group of older and younger adults. Semantic plausibility (plausible, implausible) and syntactic consistency (consistent, inconsistent) were manipulated in the experimental stimuli, and working memory load (high, low) was varied by manipulating the presentation of the stimuli...

In the study, 512 high school students from China were followed three times over a two-year period using a follow-up study design. Based on the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions, a cross-lagged model was developed to investigate the bidirectional relationship between gratitude and depression/anxiety. The results showed that gratitude was significantly negatively correlated with depression and anxiety. However, gratitude did not significantly negatively predict depression and anxiety in the cross-lag analysis, while depression and anxiety did significantly negatively predict gratitude...

Through cluster analysis, this study seeks to identify various clusters that differ in the level of self-focused and other-focused caring (e.g., autonomy and pro-sociality) and to contrast the happiness and life satisfaction among them. This approach is based on the notion that unifying autonomy and pro-sociality is more advantageous than separating them for well-being, which follows the theories and empirical studies. The World Value Survey dataset ( N  = 76897; M age = 43.02, SD  = 16...

The relation between response time and performance in cognitive tasks is increasingly evident. In the present study, we analyzed the effect of participants' spontaneous speed when responding to a mental rotation task. We carried out a data reanalysis from a previous study where a training of 3 practice sessions of 100 trials each was applied. The procedure was applied to a sample of 21 high school students (11 boys, 10 girls). The relation between response time and performance (hits) across the training trials was analyzed...

High suicide rates are a major issue in Spain, to the extent that they are the main non-natural cause of death in this country. The present study analyses the relationship between Internet searches and actual suicide rates in Spain. For this purpose, we employ data from actual suicide rates and Google® searches for Spain, differencing by the means used to commit suicide. Our results show that suicide (" suicidio ") search term seems to be positively associated with higher total suicide rates, in addition to suicides using poison, suffocation and jumping...

It is essential to focus on the variables that can empower mothers of single-parent students. The present study aimed to investigate the effects of self-healing training on perfectionism and frustration tolerance in mothers of single-parent students. The statistical population included all divorced mothers of elementary school students within the 2020-21 academic year. Sampling was performed in two stages, the first of which was multistage cluster sampling, whereas the second stage was purposive sampling based on inclusion and exclusion criteria...

Recent studies have revived the issue of whether the five-factor personality model or Big Five is the most valid to summarize the most relevant personality traits or whether, on the contrary, the basic structure of personality traits would better fit a six-factor model such as the HEXACO model: Honesty-Humility (H), Emotionality (E), Extraversion (X), Agreeableness (A), Conscientiousness (C), and Openness to Experience (O). In a Spanish community sample of 682 adults, the factorial structure of the 30 facets of the NEO-Revised Personality Inventory (NEO PI-R) and its 16 facets common to the HEXACO model was analyzed...

Increased social power-defined as one's influence on another's behavior-guides activation of one's behavioral activation system which, in turn, elicits greater positive emotion. Positive emotion has also been linked to greater health. The current research assessed whether power and positive emotion are related to health. In Study 1, participants ( N  = 403; M age = 48.33 years) wrote a narrative about a time in which they felt powerful or powerless. Greater self-reported feelings of power, concurrent with more frequent use of positive emotional words within the narrative, was associated with fewer references to health within the narrative...

Many concepts describe how individuals sustain effort despite challenging circumstances. For example, scholars and practitioners may incorporate discussions of grit, hardiness, self-control, and resilience into their ideas of performance under adversity. Although there are nuanced points underlying each construct capable of generating empirically sound propositions, the shared attributes make them difficult to differentiate. As a result, substantial confusion arises when debating how these related factors concomitantly contribute to success, especially when practitioners attempt to communicate these ideas in applied settings...

Existing research has demonstrated a significant directed forgetting (DF) effect in memory. However, it remains unclear whether this phenomenon would occur in the context of interpersonal collaboration. Additionally, the contribution of emotional valence to the DF effect in item memory and source memory (which are subtypes of episodic memory) also needs to be explored. To address these issues, we conducted two experiments that combined the collaborative memory paradigm with the item-method procedure of DF. In both experiments, positive, neutral, or negative words were presented as stimuli, each followed by an R/F cue during encoding...

Highly trained team sports players possess highly developed visual attentional skills, compared with non-athletes. These athletes also have much better motor control than non-athletes. This study compared the performance of intensively trained handball players with non-athletes in a modified version of the multiple object tracking (MOT) task, in which participants were instructed to point at the moving targets with their fingers. We hypothesized that athletes will perform better in the MOT task than non-athletes, and that the increased visual attentional load in the MOT task will affect pointing movements to a smaller degree in athletes than in non-athletes...

OBJECTIVE: During March 2020, the UK entered a national lockdown, causing a sudden change in undergraduate students' routines. This study uses this event to investigate the impact routine change had on students' mental wellbeing; in particular looking at depression, anxiety, sleep disturbance, and eating behaviors. METHOD: Participants reported their daily routine timings (waking, breakfast, lunch, evening meal and bedtime) and activities (e.g. exercise amount, time with friends, time studying, etc) on a typical Monday, Wednesday and Saturday during term time and lockdown...

The present study aimed to develop a precise and reliable measure of unsuccessful disengagement among older adults, defined as involuntary withdrawal from societal roles and norms due to familial or societal pressure, resulting in the transfer of responsibilities to the younger generation. High scores on the Unsuccessful Disengagement Aging Scale (UDAS) were indicative of a greater degree of unsuccessful disengagement. The study was conducted in two parts: Study I involved a purposive sample of 200 participants, whereas Study II involved a purposive sample of 500 occupationally retired older adults aged between 65 and 85 years...