Mobilize Is a Verb: The Use of Verbs and Concrete Language Is Associated With Authors' and Readers' Perceptions of a Text's Action Orientation and Persuasiveness.

In three studies, we investigated the role of linguistic features characterizing texts aiming to mobilize others. In Study 1 (N = 728), participants produced a leaflet either mobilizing others to engage in an action or expressing their thoughts about that action, and evaluated how action-oriented their text was. Mobilizing texts included more verbs and concrete words, and the presence of these linguistic characteristics was positively linked to participants' evaluations of their messages as action-oriented. In Studies 2 and 3 (N = 557 and N = 556), independent groups of participants evaluated texts produced in Study 1. Readers' perceptions of texts as action-oriented were associated with the same linguistic features as in Study 1 and further positively linked to perceived message effectiveness (Study 2) and behavioral intention (Study 3). The studies reveal how encoding and decoding of verbs and concrete words serve as distinct persuasive tools in calls to action.

Can agentic messages help? Linguistic strategies to counteract voice-based sexual orientation discrimination.

Gay men who believe to sound 'gay' expect to be discriminated against because of their voices and gay-sounding men are discriminated against in the hiring process. We examined whether uttering an agency-based message decreased discrimination expectancy and enactment. In Study 1a (N = 256; gay and bisexual men) and Study 1b (N = 216; gay men), speakers uttered agentic (vs. neutral) messages. We assessed their self-perception as gay sounding, agency self-attribution and discrimination expectancy. Uttering agentic (vs. neutral) messages made the speakers self-perceive as more agentic and this decreased discrimination expectancy. Additionally, self-perception as gay sounding predicted discrimination expectancy. In Study 2 (N = 466), heterosexual participants listened to gay- and straight-sounding speakers uttering either neutral or agentic messages and rated them in terms of agency and employability. Gay-sounding speakers uttering agentic messages were less likely to be discriminated against than when uttering neutral messages. Results show the positive impact of linguistic strategies involving agentic messages to reduce discrimination expectancy and hiring biases.

Linguistic and emotional responses evoked by pseudoword presentation: An EEG and behavioral study.

When the semantic properties of words are turned off, such as in pseudowords, the grammatical properties of the stimuli indicated through suffixes may provide cues to the meaning. The application of electroencephalography (EEG), combined with the pseudoword paradigm, allows for evaluating the effects of verbs and nouns as linguistic categories within the time course of processing. To contribute to the ongoing discussion regarding the functional processing of words from different grammatical classes, we conducted an EEG experiment, followed by a behavioral lexical decision task (LDT). The EEG and LDT indicated different neural and behavioral reactions to the presented grammar classes, allowing for a deeper understanding of the neuro- and psycholinguistic dimensions of grammar.

Gender bias in special issues: evidence from a bibliometric analysis.

Even though the majority of psychologists are women, they are outnumbered by men in senior academic ranks. One reason for this representation bias in academia is that men favor other men in decision-making, especially when the stakes are high. We tested the possibility of such bias in a bibliometric analysis, in which we coded editors' and authors' gender in regular and special issues, the latter considered of higher scientific prominence. We examined all special issues from five prominent scientific outlets in the fields of personality and social psychology published in the twenty-first century. Altogether, we analyzed 1911 articles nested in 93 sets comprising a special issue and a neighboring regular issue treated as a control condition. For articles published in special (but not regular) issues, when there were more men editors, more men first-authored and co-authored the work. This pattern suggests how gender bias can be perpetuated within academia and calls for revising the editorial policies of leading psychology journals.

Constructing Pseudowords with Constraints on Morphological Features - Application for Polish Pseudonouns and Pseudoverbs.

Pseudowords allow researchers to investigate multiple grammatical or syntactic aspects of language processing. In order to serve that purpose, pseudoword stimuli need to preserve certain properties of real language. We provide a Python-based pipeline for the generation of pseudoword stimuli that sound/read naturally in a given language. The pseudowords are designed to resemble real words and clearly indicate their grammatical class for languages that use specific suffixes from parts of speech. We also provide two sets of pseudonouns and pseudoverbs in Polish that are outcomes of the applied pipeline. The sets are equipped with psycholinguistically relevant properties of words, such as orthographic Levenshtein distance 20. We also performed two studies (overall N = 640) to test the validity of the algorithmically constructed stimuli in a human sample. Thus, we present stimuli that were deprived of direct meaning yet are clearly classifiable as grammatical categories while being orthographically and phonologically plausible.

The verb-self link: An implicit association test study.

Agency is defined as the ability to assign and pursue goals. Given people's focus on achieving their own goals, agency has been found to be strongly linked to the self. In two studies (N = 168), we examined whether this self-agency link is visible from a linguistic perspective. As the preferred grammatical category to convey agency is verbs, we hypothesize that, in the Implicit Association Test (IAT), verbs (vs. nouns) would be associated more strongly with the self (vs. others). Our results confirmed this hypothesis. Participants exhibited particularly fast responses when reading self-related stimuli (e.g., "me" or "my") and verb stimuli (e.g., "deflect" or "contemplate") both necessitated pressing an identical rather than different response keys in the IAT (d = .25). The finding connects two streams of literature-on the link between agency and verbs and on the link between self and agency-suggesting a triad between self, agency, and verbs. We argue that this verb-self link (1) opens up new perspectives for understanding linguistic expressions of agency and (2) expands our understanding of how word choice impacts socio-cognitive processing.

Trust predicts COVID-19 prescribed and discretionary behavioral intentions in 23 countries.

The worldwide spread of a new coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) since December 2019 has posed a severe threat to individuals' well-being. While the world at large is waiting that the released vaccines immunize most citizens, public health experts suggest that, in the meantime, it is only through behavior change that the spread of COVID-19 can be controlled. Importantly, the required behaviors are aimed not only at safeguarding one's own health. Instead, individuals are asked to adapt their behaviors to protect the community at large. This raises the question of which social concerns and moral principles make people willing to do so. We considered in 23 countries (N = 6948) individuals' willingness to engage in prescribed and discretionary behaviors, as well as country-level and individual-level factors that might drive such behavioral intentions. Results from multilevel multiple regressions, with country as the nesting variable, showed that publicized number of infections were not significantly related to individual intentions to comply with the prescribed measures and intentions to engage in discretionary prosocial behaviors. Instead, psychological differences in terms of trust in government, citizens, and in particular toward science predicted individuals' behavioral intentions across countries. The more people endorsed moral principles of fairness and care (vs. loyalty and authority), the more they were inclined to report trust in science, which, in turn, statistically predicted prescribed and discretionary behavioral intentions. Results have implications for the type of intervention and public communication strategies that should be most effective to induce the behavioral changes that are needed to control the COVID-19 outbreak.

The regulation of recurrent negative emotion in the aftermath of a lost election.

For some American voters, the news of Mr. Trump's victory in the 2016 presidential election caused recurrent emotions that were negative, persistent, and intense enough to elicit repeated attempts at emotion regulation. This afforded a rare opportunity to analyse the regulation of recurrent emotions in a natural, non-laboratory context. The regulation of recurrent emotion involves additional considerations relative to single-instance emotion, such as representations of past and future encounters with the emotion-eliciting variables, ongoing consequences of each regulatory episode, and a tendency to repeatedly deploy emotion regulation strategies that one is most familiar with in the context of the particular recurrent emotion. Despite the ubiquitous nature of recurrent emotions, its associated regulatory processes have been infrequently examined and are not well-understood. Over eight days (11/10/16-11/18/16), we administered four surveys to 202 participants who voted against Mr. Trump. We examined the determinants and outcomes of regulatory strategies in the context of recurrent emotion. We found that (1) reappraisal (compared to distraction and acceptance) was associated with greater decline in emotion intensity, (2) high-intensity emotions were more likely to be distracted, whereas low-intensity emotions were more likely to be reappraised, and (3) strategy variability was associated with greater affective adaptation.

Bias against research on gender bias.

The bias against women in academia is a documented phenomenon that has had detrimental consequences, not only for women, but also for the quality of science. First, gender bias in academia affects female scientists, resulting in their underrepresentation in academic institutions, particularly in higher ranks. The second type of gender bias in science relates to some findings applying only to male participants, which produces biased knowledge. Here, we identify a third potentially powerful source of gender bias in academia: the bias against research on gender bias. In a bibliometric investigation covering a broad range of social sciences, we analyzed published articles on gender bias and race bias and established that articles on gender bias are funded less often and published in journals with a lower Impact Factor than articles on comparable instances of social discrimination. This result suggests the possibility of an underappreciation of the phenomenon of gender bias and related research within the academic community. Addressing this meta-bias is crucial for the further examination of gender inequality, which severely affects many women across the world.

Reconsidering research on self-humanizing: The importance of mean comparative judgments.

Self-humanization is defined as the tendency to view oneself as more essentially human than others. Researchers have claimed that people attribute human nature traits more strongly to themselves than to others, but not uniquely human traits. In this article we suggest that such claims are based on the misinterpretation of results. Most studies have not presented mean comparative judgments, making it impossible to determine whether people thought they possessed characteristics less strongly or more strongly than the average person. We found that people (N = 256) in Poland, Italy, and Korea perceived themselves as possessing desirable human nature and uniquely human characteristics more than others, as possessing undesirable uniquely human traits less than others, and as similar to others in terms of undesirable human nature characteristics. It seems that being more human than others means possessing some traits more than others and possessing some traits less than others.

Definitions need to be precise and consistent: A reply to Haslam with suggestions for the future.

In his reply to our critique of research on self-humanizing, Haslam claims that we used a narrow definition of self-humanizing that ignored the evidence from the correlational research he and his colleagues have done. We disagree. First, we relied upon a definition of self-humanizing based upon comparative judgments that Haslam and colleagues have consistently used. Second, we were well aware of the correlational research he and his colleagues have done. We simply did not think, and do not think, these correlations verified the existence of self-humanizing as defined. In his reply, Haslam offered a new definition of self-humanizing that defines self-humanizing in terms of correlations between comparative judgments and ratings of how much traits reflect human nature. Although we believe this change represents some progress, numerous issues in the study of self-humanizing remain to be resolved. We offer some suggestions for future research on this important topic.

Capturing socially motivated linguistic change: how the use of gender-fair language affects support for social initiatives in Austria and Poland.

Gender-fair language consists of the symmetric linguistic treatment of women and men instead of using masculine forms as generics. In this study, we examine how the use of gender-fair language affects readers' support for social initiatives in Poland and Austria. While gender-fair language is relatively novel in Poland, it is well established in Austria. This difference may lead to different perceptions of gender-fair usage in these speech communities. Two studies conducted in Poland investigate whether the evaluation of social initiatives (Study 1: quotas for women on election lists; Study 2: support for women students or students from countries troubled by war) is affected by how female proponents (lawyers, psychologists, sociologists, and academics) are referred to, with masculine forms (traditional) or with feminine forms (modern, gender-fair). Study 3 replicates Study 2 in Austria. Our results indicate that in Poland, gender-fair language has negative connotations and therefore, detrimental effects particularly when used in gender-related contexts. Conversely, in Austria, where gender-fair language has been implemented and used for some time, there are no such negative effects. This pattern of results may inform the discussion about formal policies regulating the use of gender-fair language.

Salience and asymmetric judgments of physical distance.

Previous research has shown that distance estimates made from memory are often asymmetric. Specifically, when A is a prominent location (a landmark) and B is not, people tend to recall a longer distance from A to B than from B to A. Results of two experiments showed that asymmetric judgments of distance are not restricted to judgments made from memory but occur also for judgments made when all relevant visual cues are still present. Furthermore, results indicated that situational salience is sufficient to produce asymmetric judgments and that distinctiveness (such as in the case of architectural landmarks) is not necessary.