Publications

How can we maximize what is learned from a replication study? In the creative destruction approach to replication, the original hypothesis is compared not only to the null hypothesis, but also to predictions derived from multiple alternative theoretical accounts of the phenomenon. To this end, new populations and measures are included in the design in addition to the original ones, to help determine which theory best accounts for the results across multiple key outcomes and contexts. The present pre-registered empirical project compared the Implicit Puritanism account of intuitive work and sex morality to theories positing regional, religious, and social class differences; explicit rather than implicit cultural differences in values; self-expression vs. survival values as a key cultural fault line; the general moralization of work; and false positive effects. Contradicting Implicit Puritanism’s core theoretical claim of a distinct American work morality, a number of targeted findings replicated across multiple comparison cultures, whereas several failed to replicate in all samples and were identified as likely false positives. No support emerged for theories predicting regional variability and specific individual-differences moderators (religious affiliation, religiosity, and education level). Overall, the results provide evidence that work is intuitively moralized across cultures.

Ensemble representations are often described as efficient tools when summarizing features of multiple similar objects as a group. However, it can sometimes be more useful not to compute a single summary description for all of the objects if they are substantially different, for example when they belong to entirely different categories. It was proposed that the visual system can efficiently use the distributional information of ensembles to decide whether simultaneously displayed items belong to single or several different categories. Here we directly tested how the feature distribution of items in a visual array affects an ability to discriminate individual items (Experiment 1) and sets (Experiments 2–3) when participants were instructed explicitly to categorize individual objects based on the median of size distribution. We varied the width (narrow or fat) as well as the shape (smooth or two-peaked) of distributions in order to manipulate the ease of ensemble extraction from the items. We found that observers unintentionally relied on the grand mean as a natural categorical boundary and that their categorization accuracy increased as a function of the size differences among individual items and a function of their separation from the grand mean. For ensembles drawn from two-peaked size distributions, participants showed better categorization performance. They were more accurate at judging within-category ensemble properties in other dimensions (centroid and orientation) and less biased by superset statistics. This finding corroborates the idea that the two-peaked feature distributions support the “segmentability” of spatially intermixed sets of objects. Our results emphasize important roles of ensemble statistics (mean, range, distribution shape) in explicit visual categorization.

Purpose

The first year of college is a stressful life period connected with the experience of loneliness, isolation and depression since the majority of freshmen can no longer maintain an equally close relationship with school friends and family. Social networks have become a significant part of students' daily lives and might be an effective tool for maintaining relationship and reducing loneliness. There are contradictory results concerning the relationship between social networks sites (SNS) use and feelings of loneliness.

Design/methodology/approach

A four-week experiment was conducted to study the effect of SNS on feelings of social and emotional loneliness across freshmen. The treatment group (n = 40) took a break from SNS, while the control group (n = 37) used SNS as usual.

Findings

Comparison of the treatment and control groups showed that quitting SNS does not change either feeling of social/emotional loneliness. This paper also found that feelings of social and emotional loneliness did not depend on freshmen's positive/negative attitudes toward being alone.

Originality/value

This study is one of the few that uses experimental design to study the effects of using social networks on the psychological state of students in the context of higher education. The results showed that refusing SNS use can have a positive potential for psychological well-being of freshmen since solitude can be used by them as time for self-discovery and self-development. According to the results, social networks neither increase nor decrease the feeling of loneliness, and offline learning and communication environment plays a more significant role in the adaptation of freshmen. These results allow to take a new look at the studies related to the relationship between SNS use and loneliness and the role of social networks in the adaptation of freshmen.

The European migrant crisis imposed a challenge to the scientific community to study migration processes, the adaptation of migrants and society to each other, as well as to develop the methodology of these processes. This process became a challenge for the social sphere of European states, which are interested in the speedy employment of migrants. The labor influx can have both positive and negative consequences for the economy of the host state. The study aims at distinguishing the socio-psychological factors of successful migrants’ adaptation. The methods of research include theoretical analysis, the method of expert evaluation, and factor analysis. The results confirmed the existing hypothesis that socio-psychological training should take several aspects into account during the work with a traumatic experience through the symbolic space, including a platform for the dialogue between the local population and migrants, linking the client with the meaning forming characteristics of individuals. The authors pay special attention to the prerequisites for adaptation and propose a psychological board game to form a symbolic transition space for cross-cultural dialogue and increase knowledge about the adaptation processes for migrants and the local population.

Two studies examined factors that would influence people’s preferences for interaction with a perpetrator of sexism. In Study 1 (n = 348), participants preferred to interact (being friends or developing a relationship) with an intelligent person regardless of whether or not that person was sexist. Study 2 (n = 614) replicated this finding and confirmed that where a perpetrator had a high level of intelligence, people were more willing to interact with them, regardless of the perpetrator’s sex and the perceived commission or non-commission of sexist behavior. Moreover, Study 2 provides evidence that participants’ hostile sexism beliefs are a significant covariate of a willingness to interact with unintelligent women. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for the understanding of person perception.

The present article aims to assess psychometric characteristics of the Russian version of the Big Five Inventory-2 (BFI-2). This questionnaire measures five basic personality traits, as well as three facets for each trait. The data were collected online, with a total sample of 1,787 people (31.9% of men) aged from 14 to 54 years (M = 26.31; SD = 7.76). The study covered more than ten regions of the Russian Federation. The factorial structure of the BFI-2 was examined using the principal component analysis, confirmatory factor analysis and random intercept exploratory factor analysis. The five-factor structure of the BFI-2 was confirmed both at the trait and facet levels. The analysis of measurement invariance revealed that the Russian BFI-2 demonstrates strict equivalence across sex, which makes it possible to compare raw scores of the questionnaire when assessing sex differences. The results on sex differences obtained in this study were consistent with the extant findings published in the literature. Across various BFI-2’s subscales, internal consistency measured by the Cronbach’s alpha and McDonald’s omega was satisfactory, good, or excellent. A scale discrimination test (Ferguson’s delta in the adaptation by M. Hankins) was high which shows the questionnaire's capability to distinguish individuals with various manifestations of a domain or facet. Therefore, the Russian version of the BFI-2 is a reliable and valid tool for measuring the basic traits and facets of personality. 

Objective. To analyze and summarize the results obtained in various social sciences regarding the emergence and spread of prejudice.

Background. Prejudice is a complex issue, which is represented in different spheres of social science. In psychology, researchers analyzed individual or group-based factors, while in economics and sociology they investigate objective indicators of the socioeconomic development at the country-level. Today the data in the mentioned fields are not integrated.

Conclusions. Previous studies showed that GDP might indicate a significant factor in reducing bias, but only in countries with low social inequality or stable economic growth. Moreover, people with lower socioeconomic status are more vulnerable to the consequences of economic and socio-political changes. Psychological factors, in particular, the perceived inequality or intergroup threat defined additional perspective in the explanation of the relationship between objective socioeconomic indicators and the level of prejudice. In addition, the ideological attitudes (e.g., system justification) also influence how perceived inequality or threat, and bias. These findings are used to define future directions for research related to the integration of objective socio-economic indicators and psychological variables to analyze the nature of prejudices. 

Objective – Increasing life expectancy leads to an increase in the mean age of the workforce. The aging workforce implies new challenges for management and human resources. Existing findings on relations between age and burnout are controversial and scarce. Also, the problem of burnout problem amongst library workers in Russia received little attention from researchers.  

Methods – The studied sample consisted of 620 public librarians from 166 public libraries of different regions (the Moscow region, Yaroslavl, Chelyabinsk, Novosibirsk, Astrakhan, and Republic of Buryatia) of the Russian Federation, who completed a self-reported online survey. For measuring burnout, a new Burnout Assessment Tool was implemented. To examine the associations of interest, the authors used structural equation modeling with a group correction approach. In addition, library location, general self-efficacy, and length of employment at the current workplace were utilized as predictors. All statistical analysis was performed in R.    

Results – Findings confirmed the hypotheses partially and revealed negative links between exhaustion, mental distance, cognitive control, and age, while reduced emotional control did not relate to age. Urban librarians tended to demonstrate higher levels of mental distance and had more significant problems with emotional regulation than their rural counterparts. Also, the non-Moscow region librarians did not demonstrate correlations between age and reduced cognitive control. Moreover, they showed a positive link between age and reduced emotional control.   

Conclusion – The current paper confirmed some previous results on the negative relations between burnout symptoms and chronological age. The results suggest the existence of higher risks of burnout for younger library workers. Potential mechanisms underlying the resilience of older workers are discussed.

Beginning with the historic racial desegregation in the United States, and spreading to other parts of the world, policy makers, guided by the findings of social scientists (e.g., Allport, 1954), have advocated for increased intergroup contact (e.g., in schools and neighborhoods) as the key to prejudice reduction and increased social cohesion. Recent work on the ‘irony of harmony’ effect ( Saguy, Tausch, Dovidio, & Pratto, 2009), however, suggests that intergroup contact can undermine disadvantaged group’s support for social change toward greater equality (e.g., Çakal, Hewstone, Schwär, & Heath, 2011; Dixon, Durrheim, & Tredoux, 2007). Using a large and heterogeneous dataset (N = 12,997 individuals from 69 countries), we demonstrate that intergroup contact and support for social change toward greater equality are positively associated among members of advantaged groups (ethnic majorities and cis-heterosexuals), but negatively associated among disadvantaged groups (ethnic minorities and sexual and gender minorities), supporting the ‘irony of harmony’ effect. Specification curve analysis revealed important variation in the size—and at times, direction—of correlations, depending on how contact and support for social change were measured. This allowed us to identify one type of support for change, willingness to work in solidarity for social change, that is positively associated with intergroup contact among both advantaged- and disadvantaged-group members.

‘And Quiet Flows the Don’ is an epic novel, considered one of the most significant works of Russian and world literature. The debate on the authorship of ‘And Quiet Flows the Don’ had been surrounding the novel since its first release in 1928 by Mikhail Sholokhov, who was repeatedly accused of plagiarism. The supporters of the plagiarism theory often indicate that the real author of the novel is the Cossack writer, Fyodor Kryukov, who died before ‘And Quiet Flows the Don’ was published. In the present study we applied the information-based similarity analysis (Yang et al., 2003a, Linguistic analysis of human heartbeats using frequency and rank order statistics. Physical Review Letters, 90: 108103; Yang et al., 2003b, Information categorization approach to literary authorship disputes. Physica A, 329, 473) and Burrows's Delta (Burrows, 2002, ‘Delta’: a measure of stylistic difference and a guide to likely authorship. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 17(3):267–87) to a corpus of Russian literature of XIX and XX centuries. We next used these two methods to compare ‘And Quiet Flows the Don’ to Sholokhov’s and Kryukov’s writings. It was found that Fyodor Kryukov writings are distinct from ‘And Quiet Flows the Don’, whilst Sholokhov’s writings being close to the Don novel. The results also highlight how both information similarity analysis and Delta analysis can be used Russian language.

. This paper presents a novel rodent avoidance test. We have devel-oped a specialized device and procedures that expand the possibilities for exploration of the processes of learning and memory in a psychophysiological experiment. The device consists of a current stimulating electrode-platform and custom software that allows to control and record real-time experimental pro-tocols as well as reconstructs animal movement paths. The device can be used to carry out typical footshock-avoidance tests, such as passive, active, modified active and pedal-press avoidance tasks. It can also be utilized in the studies of prosocial behavior, including cooperation, competition, emotional contagion and empathy. This novel footshock-avoidance test procedure allows flexible current-stimulating settings. In our work, we have used slow-rising current. A test animal can choose between the current rise and time-out intervals as a signal for action in footshock avoidable tasks. This represents a choice between escape and avoid-ance. This method can be used to explore individual differences in decision-making and choice of avoidance strategies. It has been shown previously that a behavioral act, for example, pedal-pressing is ensured by motivation-dependent brain activity (avoidance or approach). We have created an experimental design based on tasks of instrumental learning: pedal-pressing in an operant box results in a reward, which is either a piece of food in a feeder (food-acquisition behavior) or an escape-platform (footshock-avoidance behavior). Data recording and analysis were performed using custom software, the open source Accord.NET Framework was used for real-time object detection and tracking.

Background. The Job Apathy Scale (JAS), developed by G.B. Schmidt (2017), has been widely used in industrial and organizational psychology. This scale examines two dimensions of job apathy, namely apathetic thought (weak interest in the job processes and unwillingness to develop strategies for the promotion of job efficacy) and apathetic action (investing little emotional energy in job tasks, coworkers, or the organization). Objectives. 1) To examine the psychometric properties of the JAS with Russian employees; 2) to assess the influence of sociodemographic characteristics on job apathy. Design. The sample was recruited using the convenience sampling method. Two hundred and seventy-five Russian employees were included in this cross-sectional study. In addition to the JAS, all participants completed measures assessing professional burnout, work engagement, and job satisfaction. Cronbach’s alpha values were used to assess the internal consistency of the JAS. Exploratory and confrmatory factor analyses were employed to examine the factor structure of the JAS. The nonparametric Spearman rank order correlation coefficient was used to examine the convergent and divergent validity of the JAS. The Student’s t-test and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) were used to assess the sociodemographic differences in job apathy. Results. Exploratory and confrmatory factor analyses supported a two-dimensional structure of the JAS. The Cronbach’s alpha values were .86 and .73 for the apathetic thought scale and the apathetic action scale, respectively. Job apathy was positively correlated with professional burnout and was negatively correlated with work engagement and job satisfaction. There is evidence of convergent and divergent validity of the JAS. The analysis using a one-way ANOVA revealed a significant effect of age and marital status on job apathy: younger and married employees are more prone to apathetic action than their older and single colleagues. Conclusion. The JAS with the Russian employees is psychometrically reliable and valid, which argues for its scientifc and practice-oriented applications.

There is ample evidence that morphological and social cues in a human face provide signals of human personality and behaviour. Previous studies have discovered associations between the features of artificial composite facial images and attributions of personality traits by human experts. We present new findings demonstrating the statistically significant prediction of a wider set of personality features (all the Big Five personality traits) for both men and women using real-life static facial images. Volunteer participants (N = 12,447) provided their face photographs (31,367 images) and completed a self-report measure of the Big Five traits. We trained a cascade of artificial neural networks (ANNs) on a large labelled dataset to predict self-reported Big Five scores. The highest correlations between observed and predicted personality scores were found for conscientiousness (0.360 for men and 0.335 for women) and the mean effect size was 0.243, exceeding the results obtained in prior studies using ‘selfies’. The findings strongly support the possibility of predicting multidimensional personality profiles from static facial images using ANNs trained on large labelled datasets. Future research could investigate the relative contribution of morphological features of the face and other characteristics of facial images to predicting personality.

Reward processing is a fundamental human activity. The basal ganglia are recognized for their role in reward processes; however, specific roles of the different nuclei (e.g., nucleus accumbens, caudate, putamen and globus pallidus) remain unclear. Using quantitative meta-analyses we assessed whole-brain and basal ganglia specific contributions to money, erotic, and food reward processing. We analyzed data from 190 fMRI studies which reported stereotaxic coordinates of whole-brain, within-group results from healthy, adult participants. Results showed concordance in overlapping and distinct cortical and sub-cortical brain regions as a function of reward type. Common to all reward types was concordance in basal ganglia nuclei, with distinct differences in hemispheric dominance and spatial extent in response to the different reward types. Food reward processing favored the right hemisphere; erotic rewards favored the right lateral globus pallidus and left caudate body. Money rewards engaged the basal ganglia bilaterally including its most anterior part, nucleus accumbens. We conclude by proposing a model of common reward processing in the basal ganglia and separate models for money, erotic, and food rewards.

Deficits in cognitive function are a major characteristic of schizophrenia. Many functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies examine brain correlates of cognitive function in adults with schizophrenia, showing altered implication of associative areas such as the prefrontal cortex and temporal cortex. fMRI studies also examine brain representation of cognitive function in adolescents with early onset schizophrenia and those at risk of the disorder, yet results are often inconsistent. We compile and analyze data from eligible fMRI studies using quantitative meta-analyses to reveal concordant brain activity associated with adolescent relatives of patients with schizophrenia and those with early onset schizophrenia. Results show similar functional hubs of brain activity (eg, precuneus) yet in opposite hemispheres and clusters in ventrolateral rather than dorsolateral prefrontal cortices. Other areas of altered implication include the middle temporal gyrus, and insula. We discuss findings in reference to the protracted maturation of the prefrontal cortex and possible effects due to medication status of the two groups. 

Drawing on the concept of a gale of creative destruction in a capitalistic economy, we argue that initiatives to assess the robustness of findings in the organizational literature should aim to simultaneously test competing ideas operating in the same theoretical space. In other words, replication efforts should seek not just to support or question the original findings, but also to replace them with revised, stronger theories with greater explanatory power. Achieving this will typically require adding new measures, conditions, and subject populations to research designs, in order to carry out conceptual tests of multiple theories in addition to directly replicating the original findings. To illustrate the value of the creative destruction approach for theory pruning in organizational scholarship, we describe recent replication initiatives re-examining culture and work morality, working parents’ reasoning about day care options, and gender discrimination in hiring decisions. 

A vast amount of research has been carried out to understand how humans visually search for targets in their environment. However, this research has typically involved search for one unique target among several distractors. Although this line of research has yielded important insights into the basic characteristics of how humans explore their visual environment, this may not be a very realistic model for everyday visual orientation. Recently, researchers have used multi-target displays to assess orienting in the visual field. Eye movements in such tasks are, however, less well understood. Here, we investigated oculomotor dynamics during four visual foraging tasks differing in target crypticity (feature-based foraging vs. conjunction-based foraging) and the effector type being used for target selection (mouse foraging vs. gaze foraging). Our results show that both target crypticity and effector type affect foraging strategies. These changes are reflected in oculomotor dynamics, feature foraging being associated with focal exploration (long fixations and short-amplitude saccades), and conjunction foraging with ambient exploration (short fixations and high-amplitude saccades). These results provide important new information for existing accounts of visual attention and oculomotor control and emphasise the usefulness of foraging tasks for a better understanding of how humans orient in the visual environment.

Visual search tasks play a key role in theories of visual attention. But single-target search tasks may provide only a snapshot of attentional orienting. Foraging tasks with multiple targets of different types arguably provide a closer analogy to everyday attentional processing. Set-size effects have in the literature formed the basis for inferring how attention operates during visual search. We therefore measured the effects of absolute set-size (constant target-distractor ratio) and relative set-size (constant set-size but target-distractor ratio varies) on foraging patterns during “feature” foraging (targets differed from distractors on a single feature) and “conjunction” foraging (targets differed from distractors on a combination of two features). Patterns of runs of same target-type selection were similar regardless of whether absolute or relative set-size varied: long sequential runs during conjunction foraging but rapid switching between target types during feature foraging. But although foraging strategies differed between feature and conjunction foraging, surprisingly, intertarget times throughout foraging trials did not differ much between the conditions. Typical response time by set-size patterns for single-target visual search tasks were only observed for the last target during foraging. Furthermore, the foraging patterns within trials involved several distinct phases, that may serve as markers of particular attentional operations. Foraging tasks provide a remarkably intricate picture of attentional selection, far more detailed than traditional single-target visual search tasks, and well-known theories of visual attention have difficulty accounting for key aspects of the observed foraging patterns. Finally, we discuss how theoretical conceptions of attention could be modified to account for these effects.

Visual search tasks play a key role in theories of visual attention. But single-target search tasks may provide only a snapshot of attentional orienting. Foraging tasks with multiple targets of different types arguably provide a closer analogy to everyday attentional processing. Set-size effects have in the literature formed the basis for inferring how attention operates during visual search. We therefore measured the effects of absolute set-size (constant target-distractor ratio) and relative set-size (constant set-size but target-distractor ratio varies) on foraging patterns during “feature” foraging (targets differed from distractors on a single feature) and “conjunction” foraging (targets differed from distractors on a combination of two features). Patterns of runs of same target-type selection were similar regardless of whether absolute or relative set-size varied: long sequential runs during conjunction foraging but rapid switching between target types during feature foraging. But although foraging strategies differed between feature and conjunction foraging, surprisingly, intertarget times throughout foraging trials did not differ much between the conditions. Typical response time by set-size patterns for single-target visual search tasks were only observed for the last target during foraging. Furthermore, the foraging patterns within trials involved several distinct phases, that may serve as markers of particular attentional operations. Foraging tasks provide a remarkably intricate picture of attentional selection, far more detailed than traditional single-target visual search tasks, and well-known theories of visual attention have difficulty accounting for key aspects of the observed foraging patterns. Finally, we discuss how theoretical conceptions of attention could be modified to account for these effects.