Psychology Research Digest
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology - Vol 131, Iss 2
The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology publishes original papers in all areas of personality and social psychology. It emphasizes empirical reports but may include specialized theoretical, methodological, and review papers.
Can I make the time or is it running out? That depends in part on what difficulty implies about me.
When thinking about a task or goal feels difficult, people can interpret this as signaling self-relevant value (difficulty-as-importance) and a reminder to stop wasting time on self-irrelevant things (difficulty-as-impossibility). Identity-based motivation theory predicts that both interpretations are available in memory, vary in momentary accessibility, and shape action in part through activating action-relevant judgments. We note that in situations calling for task engagement, action-relevant judgment entails making sense of time, an abstract concept that people reason about metaphorically. We test this novel prediction that difficulty mindsets shape action in part by shaping how people reason metaphorically about time by examining associations (N = 941) and documenting effects of mindset accessibility (using an autobiographical recall task, N = 1,676) on how much people endorse the time-as-limited and time-as-expandable aspects of the time-as-resource metaphor. Indeed, across experiments, people more strongly endorsed time-as-limited, less strongly endorsed time-as-expandable and saw these aspects of the time-as-resource metaphor as more negatively correlated if randomized to the difficulty-as-impossibility (vs. difficulty-as-importance) recall condition. Supporting our novel prediction, the consequence of accessible difficulty mindsets on task engagement (Experiments 2–3) and performance (Experiments 4–5), confidence in goal progress and experienced time to make progress (the length of the line they drew to represent the semester or year, Experiments 6–7) occurred partly through the effect of accessible mindsets on momentary judgments of time-as-limited and time-as-expandable, as revealed in statistical mediation analyses. In situations requiring task engagement and assessing goal certainty, accessible difficulty mindsets matter in part by momentarily shifting judgments about having time. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Mental contrasting prevents a negative future by changing the explicit and implicit meaning of reality.
People often anticipate feared, negative future events but still fail to take preventive action—simply imagining feared outcomes does not reliably prompt behavior change. Research has shown that mental contrasting—imagining a negative future and then reflecting on a positive reality in the present—can translate this fear into action. However, the psychological mechanisms underlying this effect remain unexplored. Across five experiments (two cross-sectional and three longitudinal with 1-month follow-ups), we examined how mental contrasting of a negative future promotes preventive behavior by altering interpretations of current reality. Supporting our hypothesis, participants who engaged in mental contrasting evaluated their reality as more precious than those engaged in reverse contrasting (Studies 1 and 3) and those in the valence control condition (Study 2). These shifts in evaluations of reality predicted greater preventive behavior over the following month (Studies 1 and 3). In addition, mental contrasting changed implicit evaluations of reality in the same direction, as measured by the extrinsic affective Simon task (Studies 4 and 5). These implicit changes further predicted preventive action 1 month later (Study 5). Our research identifies a key mechanism by which mental contrasting converts fear into action: It changes how people explicitly and implicitly evaluate the meaning of their current reality. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Morality cut both ways: The role of cognition and emotion in attitude moralization and demoralization.
Moralized attitudes motivate social change, political participation, and charitable giving, but at the same time, hinder compromise, conformity, and acceptance of procedural solutions to conflict. Although considerable research has explored the consequences of moralized attitudes, the processes that lead to attitude moralization and demoralization are less clear. Across six studies (N = 4,464), we contrasted the moralization of attitudes about male circumcision (typically viewed as a matter of preference or convention in the United States) with the demoralization of attitudes about female circumcision (a practice most Americans see as immoral). For male circumcision, stronger negative emotional reactions consistently mediated the association between exposure to evocative information and stronger moral conviction, even when accounting for participants’ underlying levels of support or opposition. For female circumcision, demoralization was observed but less consistently across studies, and mediational evidence emerged only under stronger informational “pushes”: No individual piece of information was potent enough to predict demoralization on its own when participants chose which information to read, but weaker negative emotional reactions fully mediated the effect of information exposure on reduced moral conviction when participants were randomly assigned to read all (vs. no) information. These findings suggest that although negative emotion plays a central role in both moralization and demoralization, demoralization is harder to achieve and may require more extensive information exposure. In other words, attitudes may acquire their moral significance more readily than they lose it. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>In their God we trust: Religious cognition increases cooperation across religious divides.
Belief in moralizing Gods is widely thought to foster cooperation between coreligionists, but there is disagreement regarding whether this effect is limited to the religious ingroup or if it extends to members of religious outgroups. Here we report the results of a cross-cultural research program that demonstrates that people who think about God (a) are more trusted by both coreligionists and members of other religious groups and (b) typically behave in a more trustworthy manner toward both ingroups and outgroups. We ran three preregistered studies (N = 1,784) with Christians and Muslims in the United States, Jews and Muslims in Israel, and Christians and Hindus in Fiji. Our contexts varied in multiple ways, including the level of intergroup conflict. Using two-player trust games involving real money, we varied whether participants interacted with ingroup or outgroup members and whether reciprocators considered God when deciding how much to return to trustors. We find in each context that making moralizing God beliefs of one player salient enhances both intragroup and intergroup cooperation. Our findings add to a nascent literature documenting the potential for religious cognition to extend moral norms across intergroup divides. We discuss implications for theories of the emergence of moralizing Gods and implications for public debates about religious pluralism in diverse societies. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 17 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>What stands out to you about me? Implications of self-observation during online intergroup interaction for metaperceived race salience.
Whether a group membership is salient in one’s mind is a key determinant of its impact. Accordingly, group membership salience figures prominently in theories of intergroup cognition, affect, and behavior. Based on individuals’ ready attention to how they are perceived and might be rejected by others, we reasoned that metaperceived group membership salience—perceptions of a group membership being salient to others—might constitute a critical form of group membership salience that can be distinguished from personal salience and have unique consequences. Further, the threshold for metaperceived salience of visible distinctive group memberships might be sufficiently low during intergroup interaction that it is increased not only by reference to the group but also by seeing oneself. Specifically, we examined visual access to the self, as provided by online communication platforms, as a novel potential trigger for salience, focusing on metaperceived salience of race-relevant characteristics in particular. A combined sample of 392 White/POC dyads (784 individuals) had an exchange in which individuals’ self-view was manipulated while their interaction partner’s ability to see them was held constant. Self-observation led persons of color to feel that their race and nationality were more salient to their interaction partner than in their own mind, and this discrepancy constituted a path to less powerful interaction behavior by these individuals. No such pattern was evident for other self-aspects or White individuals. Additional research is needed to clarify the robustness and generalizability of these findings, which suggest that a way self-observation during online interaction might uniquely disadvantage persons of color. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Age as a moderator of gender differences in Five-Factor Model personality traits: A cross-national and cross-sectional study.
This study examines how age moderates gender differences in Five-Factor Model personality traits across cultures. Prior research suggests that women generally score higher than men on these traits, with a larger gender gap observed in personality traits in more economically developed, egalitarian, and individualistic countries. Gender differences also vary across age, yet the timing of these changes and the extent to which they are culturally universal remain unclear. Using multilevel modeling in a large cross-sectional online sample (N = 3,038,567; ages 10–65 years, 68 countries), we found that age significantly moderated gender differences in Five-Factor Model personality traits, with substantial cross-national variation. The gender gap in Neuroticism, Extraversion, and Openness was wider among older adults in countries with higher levels of individualistic and self-expressive values, higher Human Development Education Index scores, and later mean ages at first marriage and childbearing for women. These findings suggest that broader educational, cultural, and family-related contexts may shape the expression of personality traits across the lifespan. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Navigating cultural identity: A 20-year longitudinal study of first-generation adult immigrants in Germany.
Although cultural identity—a bidimensional construct comprised of identification with one’s culture of origin (ethnic identity) and country of residence (national identity)—is an important aspect of identity, little is known about its development during adulthood, the longitudinal relationship between the two dimensions, and the factors that influence their development. As maintaining a sense of sameness and self-continuity is particularly difficult for individuals exposed to great contextual and cultural change, we examined the cultural identity trajectories of first-generation adult immigrants (N = 6,846) in Germany during their first 20 years after immigration and tested the impact of sociocultural background, forcedness of migration, and structural integration factors on these individuals’ cultural identity development. We used multivariate latent growth curve models based on longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel to model cultural identity trajectories. The results show that the cultural identity of these immigrants changed over time—especially in the first decade after immigration—with ethnic identity decreasing in strength and national identity increasing. Initial levels of ethnic and national identity were negatively correlated, as were the trajectories of these two dimensions over time. In the context of acculturation research, this indicates that assimilation is the predominant acculturation strategy among immigrants in Germany. In addition, the unique longitudinal findings from this large-scale German data set suggest high interindividual variability in cultural identity trajectories following migration. Identity levels and trajectories were predicted by sociocultural background and were related in part to the forcedness of migration and the degree of structural integration in the country of residence. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Within-nation variation in war exposure and psychological and physical adjustment.
Extensive evidence suggests that war-related trauma negatively affects health, yet its long-term and transgenerational effects on psychological and physical adjustment remain poorly understood. This study examines whether individuals who experienced greater war exposure in early childhood—specifically variation in bombardment intensity across German municipalities during the Second World War—show lower, similar, or better psychological (life satisfaction, affective well-being, and mental health) and physical adjustment (self-rated and physical health) in late adulthood compared to less exposed peers. The study also analyzes intergenerational effects by investigating whether the children of parents who were more versus less exposed to bombardments differed in psychological and physical adjustment in midlife. War exposure was measured using exogenous variation in regional housing destruction across 1,739 German municipalities (0%–97% destroyed) during the Second World War. Combining these historical data with individual data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we analyzed three samples: two childhood-exposed samples (N = 1,975, Mage = 73.44; N = 959, Mage = 72.09) and one consisting of their children (N = 1,747, Mage = 51.67). Supporting perspectives on individual resilience, the findings revealed no significant associations between early-life war exposure and late-life adjustment. Likewise, parents’ war experiences were not associated with their children’s midlife adjustment. Process analyses, including socioeconomic status, control beliefs, and general stress responses only partially accounted for the observed associations. These results challenge the notion of inevitable long-term or intergenerational harm from early-life trauma and highlight the need for future replication studies examining individual differences in responses to war exposure. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Evolving together: Dynamic transactions of antagonistic and self-centered traits with couple relationships.
The reciprocal influence between personality and relationship experiences has been of considerable interest, but there is little research on the extent to which changes in relationship quality are shaped by changes in antagonistic or self-centered personality traits or, conversely, how changes in relationship quality impact these traits. In the present study, we examined how Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and narcissism are linked to key aspects of romantic relationships, including relationship satisfaction, commitment, reciprocity orientation, and verbal aggression. We used data from the German Family Panel (pairfam). The analyzed sample included N = 1,925 couples, with a mean age of 36.48 years (SD = 7.62) for anchor persons and 36.91 years (SD = 8.71) for their partners at the first measurement occasion. Across three waves of data collection, each 2 years apart, we applied extended bivariate latent change models. The results revealed both cross-sectional associations and correlated changes between the antagonistic/self-centered traits and relationship satisfaction, commitment, reciprocity orientation, and verbal aggression, with both actor and partner effects. Generally, higher levels in these traits were linked to lower relationship satisfaction and commitment, alongside higher reciprocity orientation and verbal aggression. Moreover, findings indicated a reciprocal influence between personality (change) and relationship (change), again involving both actor and partner effects, with narcissism showing the most consistent associations with relationship dynamics. The results are discussed in the context of existing literature on personality development in partner relationships. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>