Publications

This study examined the role of different psychological coping mechanisms in mental and physical health during the initial phases of the COVID-19 crisis with an emphasis on meaning-centered coping.

Method

A total of 11,227 people from 30 countries across all continents participated in the study and completed measures of psychological distress (depression, stress, and anxiety), loneliness, well-being, and physical health, together with measures of problem-focused and emotion-focused coping, and a measure called the Meaning-centered Coping Scale (MCCS) that was developed in the present study. Validation analyses of the MCCS were performed in all countries, and data were assessed by multilevel modeling (MLM).

Results

The MCCS showed a robust one-factor structure in 30 countries with good test-retest, concurrent and divergent validity results. MLM analyses showed mixed results regarding emotion and problem-focused coping strategies. However, the MCCS was the strongest positive predictor of physical and mental health among all coping strategies, independently of demographic characteristics and country-level variables.

Conclusions

The findings suggest that the MCCS is a valid measure to assess meaning-centered coping. The results also call for policies promoting effective coping to mitigate collective suffering during the pandemic.

Objective

Changeability of personality over short-term intervals has increasingly become a focus of research. However, the role played by argumentation interventions in short-term variations has scarcely been examined. 

Methods

In two experiments (Ns = 363 and 320), we investigated how processing positive and negative argumentation regarding extraversion (Study 1: watching a lecture; Study 2: elaborating self-invented arguments) affects self-reports on this trait and attitude towards it. The experiments included three waves of measurements with argument manipulation (in favour of or against extraversion) immediately prior to Time 2 (Study 2 also included a control group). 

Results

Mean-level changes in extraversion across time moments, measured with the longitudinal confirmatory factor analysis, were consistently negligible. Conversely, there were some indications that argumentation about extraversion could have immediate short-term effects on attitudes towards this trait. The random-intercept cross-lagged model showed that rank-order consistency stemmed from a trait-like intercept, which was particularly large for trait extraversion compared to the attitude. The autoregressive and cross-lagged effects of residual within-person variation were consistently small and mostly non-significant. 

Conclusion

Our findings suggest that extraversion and the attitude towards it maintained their temporal continuity within three months, even under a single exposure to arguments pro and contra this trait.

Cross-national research claims that the crime-and-corruption gap between relatively poor and relatively rich countries is larger in more demanding climates that require more capital to cope with the climate.  However, this claim is premature because countries differ in a many confounding ways including histories and politics. We, therefore, re-tested the climato-economic context of violent crime and corruption within Russia, a country with considerable regional differences in climate and income. Across the eighty-five administrative units of Russia, the crime-and-corruption gap between relatively poor and relatively rich regions is smaller in more demanding climates. Harsher climates are so strongly associated with higher crime levels that the potential influence of differences in wealth becomes negligible. Furthermore, harsher climates are so strongly associated with higher corruption rates in poorer regions but lower corruption rates in richer regions that the potential influence of the climatic demands as such becomes negligible.

This study is devoted to the search and analysis of the relationship between the personal authenticity of working specialists and the burnout syndrome. The problem is caused by the poorly studied and unclear nature of the possibility of attributing authenticity to the system of psychological resources that help in coping with burnout. The aim of the study was to determine the type and direction of the relationship between personal authenticity and professional burnout in the structure of psychological well-being of representatives of different professions: doctors, military personnel and sport coaches. The main hypothesis: personal authenticity acts as a negative predictor of professional burnout; particular hypotheses suggest that the severity of indicators of professional burnout is moderated by the type of profession, and authenticity contributes to the manifestations of professional burnout in representatives of all the studied professional groups, but to a different extent. The study was conducted using two diagnostic methods: the Maslach Burnout Inventory and the Authenticity Scale by A. Wood. The sample consisted of 502 people, including 206 doctors, 123 sport coaches and 173 military personnel. The results showed the presence of a reliable correlation composition, in which authenticity (the Authentic Living subscale) is reliably and negatively associated with the components of burnout syndrome (Emotional exhaustion, Depersonalization, Reduction of achievements), and the «reverse side» of authenticity – Self-Alienation and Accepting External Influences – is positively associated with burnout. Regression analysis showed that in all three groups, authenticity is indeed a negative predictor of burnout, but in different ways. The strongest influence was found in the group of doctors who have the greatest contribution to the experience of burnout is Self-Alienation. In the group of coaches, only Authentic Living makes a negative contribution to the manifestations of professional burnout. Similar patterns were found in the group of military personnel, but the determination of connections was higher than that of the coaches, but still lower than that of the doctors. The hypotheses of the study were confirmed, and authenticity can be reasonably considered a psychological resource of coping with professional burnout.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers recorded the growth of cyberchondria as a tendency to excessive and repetitive search for information about the symptoms of various diseases on the Internet. The aim of this study was to adapt the Russian version of the Cyberchondria Severity Scale-12 (CSS-12). The cross-sectional study involved 624 respondents who completed the Russian-language versions of the CSS-12 and the Symptom Check List-90-Revised (SCL-90-R). The confirmatory factor analysis revealed the bifactor structure of the Russian CSS-12, suggesting both the general factor of cyberchondria and specific factors of excessiveness, distress, reassurance, and compulsion. The Russian CSS-12 demonstrated high internal reliability with an α-Cronbach coefficient of 0.95 for the total score. The convergent validity of the Russian CSS-12 was confirmed due to its correlations with psychopathology scores according to the SCL-90-R. The analysis of socio-demographic differences in the Russian CSS-12 indicated the absence of gender specificity of cyberchondria, but emphasized the negative links between cyberchondria and the age of respondents. The findings showed that the Russian CSS-12 is a reliable and valid instrument for population-based research of cyberchondria and needs further psychometric examination on various clinical samples.

Primary school age, which precedes adolescence, still remains a "white spot" of developmental psychology. Meanwhile, the level of resilience that will be achieved at this age will determine the intensity of the adolescent crisis. Difficult life situations of primary school children have their own specifics and require a special set of copings due to age-related tasks and integration into a new social environment. The focus of the present study is on the primary school child in the process of adapting to the school environment, to the new status of the student, to the surrounding reality outside of school, to the presence of a number of challenges and ways to cope with them. The article analyzes the theoretical and empirical modern research in the field of coping behavior, difficult life situations and psychological well-being of children of primary school age. The results of domestic and foreign studies that determine the relevance of the studied definitions and the need for their differentiation into groups are presented. The modern works of the past decade on the thematic areas of occurrence of difficult life situations, stress factors and ways of coping with them were systematized. The review paper results are presented by external and internal conditionality of coping behavior and recommendations for the provision of psychological assistance to cope with difficulties and stress in primary school age. Externalization is represented by a pool of studies that characterize externally determined difficult life situations, stress factors, and the corresponding coping strategies of primary school students: a) academic environment (educational activities, learning conditions, school rules, schedule); b) socio-economic situation (home environment, living conditions, territoriality, financial situation of the family); c) environment (nature, school yard, playgrounds); d) digital devices and technologies (digital tools, Internet, modern gadgets). In the internal genesis of stressors and difficult situations, coping strategies mainly occur in the context of interpersonal relationships: a) relationships with peers (bullying, conflicts); b) relationships with teachers/class teacher (trust/distrust, desire for approval, encouragement, search for protection); c) relationships with parents/close relatives (conflicts, misunderstandings, situations of deprivation). This analysis allows us to focus on the importance of highlighting the problem of coping behavior in primary school age, on age-related tasks, stressful conditions, difficulties, experiences, and corresponding adaptive and non-adaptive coping strategies.

Access to time words engage a complex spatial mapping where individual concepts are represented along horizontal, vertical, and sagittal axes. However, most existing studies demonstrate spatial biases in individual time units (i.e., months, days of the week, or hours of the day) using different experimental tasks and paradigms while few studies attempt to compare access to the distinct time concepts within a single study by using a uniform and comparable experimental protocol. Here, we used time units (days, months, hours) with hypothesized left (e.g., Monday) and right (e.g., Saturday) spatial biases in a horizontal line bisection study. We investigated whether horizontal time flow is perceived uniformly across different mea- surement units. Fifty-seven native Russian speakers (37 females, age 21.5 ± 4.1 years) listened to time words before using mouse cursor to indicate where that unit may be located on a horizontal line with extreme points biasing left, right, or central positioning of the pro- cessed word. Task-related reaction times (RTs) and response coordinates were recorded and analyzed using ANOVAs. Our anal- yses revealed (1) direction-congruent shift in participants’ responses (x-coordinates, mouse endpoint) as well as (2) faster RTs in congruent conditions (e.g., left semantic bias ? left position) for all time units. However, a reliable main effect of Unit Type indicated that RTs were graded in the following order: hours \ days \ months. We conclude that while left-to-right mapping of time concepts is relatively uni- versal, the horizontal mapping is stronger for hours and days of the week, as compared to months.

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.

Value-based decision making in complex environments, such as those with uncertain and volatile mapping of reward probabilities onto options, may engender computational strategies that are not necessarily optimal in terms of normative frameworks but may ensure effective learning and behavioral flexibility in conditions of limited neural computational resources. In this article, we review a suboptimal strategy – additively combining reward magnitude and reward probability attributes of options for value-based decision making. In addition, we present computational intricacies of a recently developed model (named MIX model) representing an algorithmic implementation of the additive strategy in sequential decision-making with two options. We also discuss its opportunities; and conceptual, inferential, and generalization issues. Furthermore, we suggest future studies that will reveal the potential and serve the further development of the MIX model as a general model of value-based choice making.

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased negative emotions and decreased positive emotions globally. Left unchecked, these emotional changes might have a wide array of adverse impacts. To reduce negative emotions and increase positive emotions, we tested the effectiveness of reappraisal, an emotion regulation strategy which modifies how one thinks about a situation. Participants from 87 countries/regions (N = 21,644) were randomly assigned to one of two brief reappraisal interventions (reconstrual or repurposing) or one of two control conditions (active or passive). Results revealed that both reappraisal interventions (vs. both control conditions) consistently reduced negative emotions and increased positive emotions across different measures. Reconstrual and repurposing had similar effects. Importantly, planned exploratory analyses indicated that reappraisal interventions did not reduce intentions to practice preventive health behaviours. The findings demonstrate the viability of creating scalable, low-cost interventions for use around the world. 

The current state of technology means people find themselves interacting with and having to trust artificial intelligent agents. However, despite the considerable history of trust studies, there is no agreement on what trust is and what this construct consists of. The study elaborates on the construct of trust in artificial intelligent agents and develops a questionnaire to assess this construct. Reliability, validity, internal consistency, and other essential statistical parameters of the scale are examined. In addition, difficulty and discrimination coefficients analysed to measure their properties. Confirmatory factor analysis is used to verify the theoretical structure of the developed construct on empirical data. As a result, the conclusion about the applicability of the developed scale is made.

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.

Previous studies have shown that ambivalent gender attitudes are associated with attitudes toward homosexuals. However, most of these studies have primarily considered ambivalent attitudes toward women and attitudes toward gay men, and have been carried out in countries with progressive laws regarding homosexuality. In this study, we examined the connection between ambivalent attitudes toward men and women and attitudes toward gay men and lesbian women in countries with conservative sexual legislation. In the first study, participants were residents of Russia (N = 163) and Kazakhstan (N = 194), while the second study used residents of Russia (N = 496) and Belarus (N = 123). Results indicated that benevolent attitudes predicted attitudes toward gays and lesbians better than the hostile ones. At the same time, attitudes toward men and women similarly predicted attitudes toward gays and lesbians. These patterns were manifested among different components of attitudes toward homosexuals. The results are discussed within the social context of the countries.

Background: Although there are increasing concerns on mental health consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, no large-scale population-based studies have examined the associations of risk perception of COVID-19 with emotion and subsequent mental health. Methods: This study analysed cross-sectional and longitudinal data from the PsyCorona Survey that included 54,845 participants from 112 countries, of which 23,278 participants are representative samples of 24 countries in terms of gender and age. Specification curve analysis (SCA) was used to examine associations of risk perception of COVID-19 with emotion and self-rated mental health. This robust method considers all reasonable model specifications to avoid subjective analytical decisions while accounting for multiple testing. Results: All 162 multilevel linear regressions in the SCA indicated that higher risk perception of COVID-19 was significantly associated with less positive or more negative emotions (median standardised β=-0.171, median SE=0.004, P<0.001). Specifically, regressions involving economic risk perception and negative emotions revealed stronger associations. Moreover, risk perception at baseline survey was inversely associated with subsequent mental health (standardised β=-0.214, SE=0.029, P<0.001). We further used SCA to explore whether this inverse association was mediated by emotional distress. Among the 54 multilevel linear regressions of mental health on risk perception and emotion, 42 models showed a strong mediation effect, where no significant direct effect of risk perception was found after controlling for emotion (P>0.05). Limitations: Reliance on self-reported data. Conclusions: Risk perception of COVID-19 was associated with emotion and ultimately mental health. Interventions on reducing excessive risk perception and managing emotional distress could promote mental health.  

В данной статье представлен анализ и общая таксономия межгрупповых идеологий, а также представлен список их индикаторов. Эта таксономия связана с восемью идеологиями, которые первоначально были изложены в ранних работах. Эти идеологии были созданы на основе трех измерений межкультурных отношений: сохранение культуры; социальное участие; и относительная власть. Предлагаемая здесь таксономия межгрупповых идеологий следует этим трем измерениям, которые связаны с двумя проблемами: (i) отношение к культурному многообразию; и (ii) формы инклюзии этнокультурных групп в более широкое общество (включая вопрос о групповой иерархии). Можно оценить, как эти проблемы решаются, используя четыре индикатора: (1) приветствие различий, (2) статус групп, (3) возможности для социальной интеракции и (4) способ обеспечения единства общества. Ориентация на эти индикаторы позволяет понять, какие межгрупповые идеологии, охватывающие межкультурные установки и межгрупповые отношения, существуют в странах, и описать их.

Eye-tracking is widely used in research of attentional strategies in tasks with visual representations. Strategies improve with learning and many have examined differences in attention allocation between experts and novices. Research show that when math problems are presented on the screen with response options, novices fixated more on response options that included distractors, whereas experts fixated more on the math problem and the correct answer. If experts and novices apply their attention on different parts of the scree these strategy differences would also be observable when comparing high and low performers. Participants (N = 26; 20-30 years), were non-math university majors who completed the Parametric Math Task (PMT; Konopkina, 2019) while their eye movements were recorded in a remote head-free-to-move mode. The PMT contains mathematical problems of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division with three levels of difficulty. Individuals who scored above median were high performers and below were considered as low performers. Data were analyzed by evaluating dwell time (total duration of fixation) to the math problem area (top of screen) and response options areas (bottom of screen). Results showed that high performers and low performers were significantly different in their dwell times for two interest areas: problem area and distractor responses (problem area: p = 0.029, Cohen's d = 0.92; distractor responses: p = 0.018, Cohen's d = 0.99) ... Findings indicate that high performers spent significantly more time on the math problem area of ​​the screen whereas low performers spent more time on distractor options. In educational practice,

Predictive remapping may be the principal mechanism of maintaining visual stability, and attention is crucial for this process. We aimed to investigate the role of attention in predictive remapping in a dual task paradigm with two conditions, with and without saccadic remapping. The first task was to remember the clock hand position either after a saccade to the clock face (saccade condition requiring remapping) or after the clock being displaced to the fixation point (fixation condition with no saccade). The second task was to report the remembered location of a dot shown peripherally in the upper screen for 1 s. We predicted that performance in the two tasks would interfere in the saccade condition, but not in the fixation condition, because of the attentional demands needed for remapping with the saccade. For the clock estimation task, answers in the saccadic trials tended to underestimate the actual position by approximately 37 ms while responses in the fixation trials were closer to veridical. As predicted, the findings also revealed significant interaction between the two tasks showing decreased predicted accuracy in the clock task for increased error in the localization task, but only for the saccadic condition. Taken together, these results point at the key role of attention in predictive remapping. 

The use of language as a universal tool for communication and interaction is the backbone of human society. General sociocultural milieu and specific contextual factors can strongly influence various aspects of linguistic experience, including language acquisition and use and the respective internal neurolinguistic processes. This is particularly relevant in the case of bilingualism, which encompasses a diverse set of linguistic experiences, greatly influenced by societal, cultural, educational, and personal factors. In this perspective piece, we focus on a specific type of linguistic experience: non-pathological first-language (L1) attrition - a phenomenon that is strongly tied to immersion in non-L1 environments. We present our view on what may be the essence of L1 attrition and suggest ways of examining it as a type of bilingual experience,

Visual inputs are often obscured, distorted, or ambivalent, and to form meaningful representations of incoming information, our visual system relies not only on the visual features of the object itself but takes into account the surrounding context. Most studies have focused on how visual context influences visual object perception, and it is less clear how concurrent auditory information about objects—the sound of a lawnmower, or the whistling of a tea kettle—influences what objects we see and how we experience them. Here, we investigate whether naturalistic sounds modulate the representation of visual objects. We used a visual discrimination task and a novel set of ambiguous object stimuli that were paired at random with related or unrelated sounds. Specifically, we created ambiguous stimuli by morphing together the features of two objects (Object A, Object B, e.g., a hammer and a seal), and presented these ambiguous morph stimuli with naturalistic sounds that were related to either Object A or B. Visual objects and sounds were presented simultaneously, and at the end of each trial, participants indicated what object they saw using continuous report. Overall, we found that sounds biased visual object recognition, such that the perceptual representation was pulled towards the object features that matched the sound (Exp. 1a-1b). For example, the same ambiguous hammer-seal object would appear more seal-like when paired with the sound of seal barking, but more hammer-like when paired with the sound of a hammer hitting. In various control experiments, we show that this effect is not driven by response bias (Exp. 2a-2b), and not due to a general effect of expectation (Exp.3). These results indicate that visual object representations are biased by contextual auditory information due to the continuous integration of auditory and visual information during real-world perception.