Unpredictable benefits of social information can lead to the evolution of individual differences in social learning.

Human ecological success is often attributed to our capacity for social learning, which facilitates the spread of adaptive behaviours through populations. All humans rely on social learning to acquire culture, but there is substantial variation across societies, between individuals and over developmental time. However, it is unclear why these differences exist. Here, we present an evolutionary model showing that individual variation in social learning can emerge if the benefits of social learning are unpredictable. Unpredictability selects for flexible developmental programmes that allow individuals to update their reliance on social learning based on previous experiences. This developmental flexibility, in turn, causes some individuals in a population to end up consistently relying more heavily on social learning than others. We demonstrate this core evolutionary mechanism across three scenarios of increasing complexity, investigating the impact of different sources of uncertainty about the usefulness of social learning. Our results show how evolution can shape how individuals learn to learn from others, with potentially profound effects on cultural diversity.

Emotional experiences and psychological well-being in 51 countries during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic presents challenges to psychological well-being, but how can we predict when people suffer or cope during sustained stress? Here, we test the prediction that specific types of momentary emotional experiences are differently linked to psychological well-being during the pandemic. Study 1 used survey data collected from 24,221 participants in 51 countries during the COVID-19 outbreak. We show that, across countries, well-being is linked to individuals' recent emotional experiences, including calm, hope, anxiety, loneliness, and sadness. Consistent results are found in two age, sex, and ethnicity-representative samples in the United Kingdom (n = 971) and the United States (n = 961) with preregistered analyses (Study 2). A prospective 30-day daily diary study conducted in the United Kingdom (n = 110) confirms the key role of these five emotions and demonstrates that emotional experiences precede changes in well-being (Study 3). Our findings highlight differential relationships between specific types of momentary emotional experiences and well-being and point to the cultivation of calm and hope as candidate routes for well-being interventions during periods of sustained stress. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Testing the Reciprocal Effect between Value of Education, Time Investment, and Academic Achievement in a Large Non-Western Sample.

Many theories of motivation suggest that motivation and academic achievement reinforce each other over time, yet few longitudinal studies have examined behavioral pathways that may mediate interplay from motivation to achievement. Moreover, empirical studies so far have mostly focused on Western countries. In this study, we first examined whether students' value of education, as a measure of motivation, is reciprocally related to achievement (class rank and self-rated performance) in a sample of junior high schoolers in an East-Asian country (N = 3445, Korean Youth Panel Study). We tested this reciprocity using different statistical models. Second, we investigated whether the relation between motivation and achievement was mediated by time invested in learning. Reciprocal effects between value of education and academic achievement were found in classic cross-lagged panel models, but only unilateral effects (from achievement to value of education) were found when we used random-intercept and random-curve cross-lagged panel models. Adding the time investment variable, the reciprocal effect between value of education, time investment, and academic achievement was found with the random intercept model. In conclusion, the reciprocity between of motivation and achievement are more elusive than previous research suggested; further studies should be dedicated to scrutinizing its existence with various statistical models.

Trajectories of early adolescents' perceptions of school motivation and effort during the pandemic in Perú: A four time point longitudinal observational study.

In this longitudinal, observational study, following 883 adolescents (aged 11-15 years, grades 6th - 8th) we tracked changes in perceived school motivation and effort across four time points during the two years of remote education in Perú as a consequence of COVID-19 (retrospective reports before the pandemic, May 2020, July 2021, and November 2021). Compared to before the pandemic, levels of perceived school motivation and effort dropped sharply in May 2020 and continued to decrease across 2 years. Perceived school motivation was positively associated with perceived school effort at almost all time points. Furthermore, students with lower levels of perceived school motivation had a steeper decline in perceived school effort. In a subsample of 380 students in 8th grade, perceived school effort in July 2021 predicted objective math performance in November 2021. Our findings suggest that COVID-19 has further compounded decreases in subjective and objective indices of school engagement and performance that are typically observed in early adolescence. Our results from a large sample of low- to middle-class Peruvian adolescents highlight the experiences of youth in a country that had particularly long school closures, and that is under-represented in the literature.

Neural Correlates of Self-Construal Priming in the Ultimatum Game.

Research from cultural and social psychology has identified a central role of self-construal, or the way one views themselves in relation to others, in social cognition. Accordingly, it is plausible that self-construal plays an instrumental role in important aspects of decision-making relating to fairness considerations. Prior research has shown that priming methodology is a useful tool to experimentally isolate the effect of self-construal on social decision-making processes. In the current study we investigated the neural effects of self-construal priming on fairness considerations, using an Ultimatum Game setup (N = 97). Based on previous findings, we predicted an interaction between the self-construal prime and gender on Ultimatum Game behavior; males primed with interdependence would reject the offer relatively more compared to independence, and vice versa for females. As previous neuro-imaging research has established an instrumental role of the anterior insula (AI) and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) in the rejection of unfair offers, we expected higher rejection rates to be mirrored by increased activity in these regions. However, the analyses did not confirm these predictions. As further inspection of the data revealed a habituation effect, we performed a follow-up analysis on the first block (N = 59). This subsequent analysis revealed that priming interdependence resulted in reduced AI activity compared to priming independence, although no behavioral differences were observed. The difference was theorized to result from motivations as conflict avoidance and harmony maintenance, commonly associated with interdependence. Furthermore, the analysis revealed greater vmPFC activity for females compared to males for rejected offers, although this effect was not robust when controlled for trait self-construal. These follow-up analyses suggest that self-construal priming influences insula activity, as well as implicating an underlying role of trait self-construal in observed gender differences in vmPFC activity relating to fairness considerations.

Do individualism and collectivism on three levels (country, individual, and situation) influence theory-of-mind efficiency? A cross-country study.

This study investigated whether individualism and collectivism (IC) at country, individual, and situational level influence how quickly and accurately people can infer mental states (i.e. theory of mind, or ToM), indexed by accuracy and reaction time in a ToM task. We hypothesized that collectivism (having an interdependent self and valuing group concerns), compared to individualism (having an independent self and valuing personal concerns), is associated with greater accuracy and speed in recognizing and understanding the thoughts and feelings of others. Students (N = 207) from individualism-representative (the Netherlands) and collectivism-representative (Vietnam) countries (Country IC) answered an individualism-collectivism questionnaire (Individual IC) and were randomly assigned to an individualism-primed, collectivism-primed, or no-prime task (Situational IC) before performing a ToM task. The data showed vast differences between the Dutch and Vietnamese groups that might not be attributable to experimental manipulation. Therefore, we analyzed the data for the groups separately and found that Individual IC did not predict ToM accuracy or reaction time performance. Regarding Situational IC, when primed with individualism, the accuracy performance of Vietnamese participants in affective ToM trials decreased compared to when primed with collectivism and when no prime was used. However, an interesting pattern emerged: Dutch participants were least accurate in affective ToM trials, while Vietnamese participants were quickest in affective ToM trials. Our research also highlights a dilemma faced by cross-cultural researchers who use hard-to-reach populations but face the challenge of disentangling experimental effects from biases that might emerge due to an interaction between cultural differences and experimental settings. We propose suggestions for overcoming such challenges.