Public acceptance of Covid-19 lockdown scenarios.

By mid-March 2020, most countries had implemented nationwide lockdown policies aimed at decelerating the spread of SARS-CoV-2. At that time, nobody knew how long these policies would have to remain in force and whether they would have to be extended, intensified or made more flexible. The present study aimed to illuminate how the general public in Germany reacted to the prospect of increasing the length, the intensity and/or the flexibility of distancing rules implied by different lockdown scenarios. Endorsement of and compliance with five specific lockdown scenarios were assessed in a large (N = 14,433) German sample. Results showed that lockdown length affected respondents' reactions much more strongly than intensity or flexibility. Additional analyses (i.e., mixture distribution modelling) showed that half of the respondents rejected any further extensions or intensifications, while 20% would endorse long-term strategies if necessary. We argue that policy-makers and political communicators should take the public's endorsement of and compliance with such scenarios into account, as should simulations predicting the effects of different lockdown scenarios.

Oxytocin blurs the self-other distinction implicitly but not explicitly.

Previous research has shown an inconsistent pattern of how oxytocin (OT) affects the distinction between self and others: whereas one line of studies has revealed that OT blurs the self-other distinction, other studies have not. In an attempt to solve these inconsistencies, we hypothesized that OT blurs the boundary between self and other implicitly but not explicitly. To test this assumption, we used two experimental approaches. After participants intranasally self-administered OT or placebo, they were eye-tracked while conducting a prediction task (Study 1) or they were video-recorded while conducting a distraction task with a human counterpart (Study 2). The findings confirmed the hypothesis. People usually show a distinct eye movement pattern when making self and other predictions. OT changed this pattern: the eye movement behavior during other predictions approached the eye movement behavior during selfpredictions under OT in Study 1. In Study 2, OT made the participants to mimic their confederates' mannerisms more strongly, displaying a behavioral self-other merge. Importantly, these incidents of self-other blurring only emerged implicitly. In Study 1, conscious likelihood estimates sharply differentiated between other and selfpredictions, and participants in Study 2 were not aware of mimicking the others' behaviors. Thus, a self-other merge did not occur explicitly. These findings provide some insights into recent inconsistencies of OT research and add to the understanding of the nonapeptide itself.

Oxytocin promotes attention to social cues regardless of group membership.

The social saliency account proposes that oxytocin (OT) plays a major role in modulating attentional shifts toward social cues at early stages of processing. We investigated how OT promotes early attention toward nonsocial and social stimuli and explored differences between in-group- and out-group-related social cues. After participants intranasally self-administered OT or placebo, they were eye-tracked while observing a nonsocial and social cues that were assigned to the in- or out-group by a minimal group paradigm. Participants under placebo did not differ in their fixation durations between stimuli, whereas participants administered OT increased gaze durations toward social but not nonsocial stimuli. In this early stage of processing, no in-group bias occurred: in-group- and out-group-related social cues were fixated equally long. These findings support that OT works by a simple illumination of social cues that seem to be processed regardless of social identity aspects at early stages of attention.