"I Did My Own Research": Overconfidence, (Dis)trust in Science, and Endorsement of Conspiracy Theories.

Epistemically suspect beliefs, such as endorsement of conspiracy theories or pseudoscientific claims, are widespread even among highly educated individuals. The phenomenon of conspiratorial thinking is not new, yet the COVID-19 pandemic, causing a global health crisis of an unprecedented scale, facilitated the emergence and rapid spread of some rather radical health-related pseudoscientific fallacies. Numerous correlates of the tendency to endorse conspiracy theories have already been addressed. However, many of them are not subject to an intervention. In this study, we have tested a model that includes predictors ranging from stable characteristics such as demographics (gender, age, education, and size of the place of residence), less stable general traits such as conservatism and overconfidence in one's own reasoning abilities, to relatively changeable worldviews such as trust in science. A hierarchical regression analysis (N = 859 participants) showed that included predictors explained a total of 46% of the variance of believing in COVID-19 conspiracy theories, with only gender, overconfidence, and trust in science yielding significance. Trust in science was the strongest predictor, implying that campaigns aimed at enhancing public trust in both science as a process, and scientists as individuals conducting it, might contribute to the reduction in susceptibility to pseudoscientific claims. Furthermore, overconfidence in one's own reasoning abilities was negatively correlated with an objective measure of reasoning (syllogisms test) and positively correlated with the endorsement of conspiracy theories, indicating that the so-called Dunning-Kruger effect plays a role in pseudoscientific conspiratorial thinking regarding COVID-19.

Who Believes in COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories in Croatia? Prevalence and Predictors of Conspiracy Beliefs.

The COVID-19 pandemic has given rise to numerous new conspiracy theories related to the virus. This study aimed to investigate a range of individual predictors of beliefs in COVID-19 conspiracy theories that account for sociodemographic characteristics (age, gender, education, economic standard, the importance of religion, and political self-identification), distinctive motivational orientations (social dominance and authoritarianism), relevant social attitudes (sense of political powerlessness and trust in science and scientists), and perceived personal risk (perceived risk for self and family members, the concern of being infected, and the expected influence of pandemic on the economic standard of an individual). Participants were 1,060 adults recruited from the general public of Croatia. The sample was a probabilistic quota sample with gender, age, level of education, size of the dwelling, and region of the country as predetermined quotas. The regression model explained 42.2% of the individual differences in beliefs in COVID-19 conspiracy theories. Trust in science and scientists and political powerlessness were the strongest predictors, whereas fear of being infected had the weakest contribution in explaining the variance of the criterion. Additionally, results revealed that the relation of conventionalism (as a proxy of authoritarianism) with belief in COVID-19 conspiracies was mediated by trust in science and scientists. The relation between social dominance and belief in conspiracies was also partially mediated by trust in science. The results suggest that (re)building trust in science and lowering the sense of political helplessness might help in fighting potentially harmful false beliefs about the pandemic.

Trust in Science, Perceived Vulnerability to Disease, and Adherence to Pharmacological and Non-pharmacological COVID-19 Recommendations.

Protection motivation theory (PMT) is a theoretical framework informative for understanding behavioral intentions and choices during exceptional and uncommon circumstances, such as a pandemic of respiratory infectious disease. PMT postulates both the threat appraisal and the coping appraisal as predictors of health behaviors. Recent advances in the field of behavioral immune system (BIS) research suggest that humans are equipped with a set of psychological adaptations enabling them to detect the disease-threat and activate behavioral avoidance of pathogens. The present study, set within PMT framework and informed by the BIS research, aimed to explain and predict voluntary adherence to COVID-19 guidelines by perceived personal risk and vulnerability to disease as threat appraisal variables, and trust in science as the response efficacy element of coping appraisal. Gender, age, belief in the second wave, perceived personal risk, germ aversion, and trust in science were all found to be significant positive predictors of the intent to adhere to non-pharmacological COVID-19 recommendations, with the belief in the second wave, germ aversion, and trust in science being the most important ones. On the other hand, only the belief in the second wave and trust in science were significant positive predictors of the intent to adhere to pharmacological COVID-19 recommendations (i.e., to vaccinate). Interventions aimed at enhancing preventative measures adherence should take into account that the psychological mechanisms underlying adherence to these two types of recommendations are not identical.

The Croatian psycholinguistic database: Estimates for 6000 nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs.

Psycholinguistic databases containing ratings of concreteness, imageability, age of acquisition, and subjective frequency are used in psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic studies which require words as stimuli. Linguistic characteristics (e.g. word length, corpus frequency) are frequently coded, but word class is seldom systematically treated, although there are indications of its significance for imageability and concreteness. This paper presents the Croatian Psycholinguistic Database (CPD; available at: https://doi.org/10.17234/megahr.2019.hpb ), containing 6000 Croatian nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, rated for concreteness, imageability, age of acquisition, and subjective frequency. Moreover, we present computationally obtained extrapolations of concreteness and imageability to the remainder of the Croatian lexicon (available at: https://github.com/megahr/lexicon/blob/master/predictions/hr_c_i.predictions.txt ). In the two studies presented here, we explore the significance of word class for concreteness and imageability in human and computationally obtained ratings. The observed correlations in the CPD indicate correspondences between psycholinguistic measures expected from the literature. Word classes exhibit differences in subjective frequency, age of acquisition, concreteness and imageability, with significant differences between nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. In the computational study which focused on concreteness and imageability, concreteness obtained higher correlations with human ratings than imageability, and the system underpredicted the concreteness of nouns, and overpredicted the concreteness of adjectives and adverbs. Overall, this suggests that word class contains schematic conceptual and distributional information. Schematic conceptual content seems to be more significant in human ratings of concreteness and less significant in computationally obtained ratings, where distributional information seems to play a more significant role. This suggests that word class differences should be theoretically explored.

Functions of Autobiographical Memory in Younger and Older Adults.

Functional approach to autobiographical memory (AM) posits its three broad functions: directive, self, and social. Although these functions are probably universal, life stage and gender variations are expected. This research builds on previous studies investigating the validity of Thinking About Life Experiences Questionnaire (TALE; Bluck and Alea, 2011). A sample of 365 adults (56% female, mean age 43.3 years), divided in 2 age cohorts (young: 18-45 years, old: 46-90 years), used TALE, to rate their tendency of using AM for three different purposes, and measures of self-concept clarity, attachment in close relationships and time perspective. Confirmatory factor analysis of TALE confirmed the tripartite model of AM functions and further analysis showed partial factorial equivalence across age and gender groups. Young tend to use AM more for directing future behavior and social-bonding, while no age differences were found in the use of AM to serve self-function. As for gender variations, women tend to use AM more for directing their behavior, while no other gender differences in the use of AM were found. TALE showed good internal consistency and convergent validity of the three subscales. The theory-driven hypotheses that individuals with low self-concept clarity would use AM more often to serve a self-function, those with higher levels of attachment anxiety would use AM more often to serve a social function, and those past-oriented would use memory more often for directive purpose, were all confirmed. Also confirmed was the notion of Past Negative Orientation to be more related to the directive use of AM than Past Positive Time Orientation. Limitations and future directions are discussed.

Effects of Psychological Distance and Need for Cognitive Closure on Impression Formation.

Based on theoretical and empirical similarities between Construal level theory of psychological distance and the Need for cognitive closure (NFC) theory, it could be hypothesized that psychological distance and NFC represent constructs that overlap to some degree. Since both theories describe judgmental behavior in terms of schematic processing, we hypothesized that primacy effect, a schema-driven phenomenon, is strengthened under the heightened NFC and psychological distance. We tested this hypothesis in an impression formation experiment while manipulating psychological distance and measuring NFC. Low NFC and psychological closeness reflect preference for situationally specific, contextually rich information, and therefore their joint effect resulted in reliance on all available information regardless of their position in a sequence. High NFC and psychological distance produced a preference for clear, schematic, stable knowledge, and therefore weighed first information more, which resulted in the primacy effect.

Multimodal analysis of startle type responses.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: This article presents a multimodal analysis of startle type responses using a variety of physiological, facial, and speech features. These multimodal components of the startle type response reflect complex brain-body reactions to a sudden and intense stimulus. Additionally, the proposed multimodal evaluation of reflexive and emotional reactions associated with the startle eliciting stimuli and underlying neural networks and pathways could be applied in diagnostics of different psychiatric and neurological diseases. Different startle type stimuli can be compared in the strength of their elicitation of startle responses, i.e. their potential to activate stress-related neural pathways, underlying biomarkers and corresponding behavioral reactions. METHODS: An innovative method for measuring startle type responses using multimodal stimuli and multimodal feature analysis has been introduced. Individual's multimodal reflexive and emotional expressions during startle type elicitation have been assessed by corresponding physiological, speech and facial features on ten female students of psychology. Different startle eliciting stimuli like noise and airblast probes, as well as a variety of visual and auditory stimuli of different valence and arousal levels, based on International Affective Picture System (IAPS) images and/or sounds from International Affective Digitized Sounds (IADS) database, have been designed and tested. Combined together into more complex startle type stimuli, such composite stimuli can potentiate the evoked response of underlying neural networks, and corresponding neurotransmitters and neuromodulators as well; this is referred to as increased power of response elicitation. The intensity and magnitude of multimodal responses to selected startle type stimuli have been analyzed using effect sizes and medians of dominant multimodal features, i.e. skin conductance, eye blink, head movement, speech fundamental frequency and energy. The significance of the observed effects and comparisons between paradigms were evaluated using one-tailed t-tests and ANOVA methods, respectively. Skin conductance response habituation was analyzed using ANOVA and post hoc multiple comparison tests with the Dunn-Sidák correction. RESULTS: The results revealed specific physiological, facial and vocal reflexive and emotional responses on selected five stimuli paradigms which included: (1) acoustic startle probes, (2) airblasts, (3) IAPS images, (4) IADS sounds, and (5) image-sound-airblast composite stimuli. Overall, composite and airblast paradigms resulted in the largest responses across all analyzed features, followed by sound and acoustic startle paradigms, while paradigm using images consistently elicited the smallest responses. In this context, power of response elicitation of the selected stimuli paradigms can be described according to the aggregated magnitude of the participants' multimodal responses. We also observed a habituation effect only in skin conductance response to acoustic startle, airblast and sound paradigms. CONCLUSIONS: This study developed a system for paradigm design and stimuli generation, as well as real-time multimodal signal processing and feature calculation. Experimental paradigms for monitoring individual responses to stressful startle type stimuli were designed in order to compare the response elicitation power across various stimuli. The developed system, applied paradigms and obtained results might be useful in further research for evaluation of individuals' multimodal responses when they are faced with a variety of aversive emotional distractors and stressful situations.

Self-evaluation of memory systems: development of the questionnaire.

OBJECTIVES: The term metamemory refers to the knowledge one has about the development and use of memory in general, and one's own memory processes in particular. The current theoretical perspective on memory processes is best described by the memory systems framework which represents a useful tool in specifying different 'kinds' of memory. We present here the Self-evaluation of Memory Systems Questionnaire (SMSQ), which assesses the multidimensional construct of metamemory based on the memory systems framework. METHOD: SMSQ has been developed on a large and heterogeneous sample (N = 3088) via both, web-based and paper-and-pencil form. With the aim of increasing its general utility, we used items referring to situations or materials which are highly likely for everyone to have encountered during their everyday life. RESULTS: Analyses revealed good content validity, factorial validity, internal consistency reliability, and construct validity in terms of expected theoretical group differences. SMSQ is represented by six distinct factors: subjective evaluation, episodic memory, semantic memory, memory for numbers, visuospatial memory, and reminder and aids. Age differences found on SMSQ between young and old adults confirm the well-established empirical findings on the memory and aging. CONCLUSION: SMSQ is a brief, easily administrable, multidimensional metamemory questionnaire, marked with the sound background from the findings on memory systems and cognitive aging.