Can Information about Pandemics Increase Negative Attitudes toward Foreign Groups? A Case of COVID-19 Outbreak

Pathogen threat can translate into a willingness to distance oneself from others on a psychological level. Building on this notion, we predicted that the ongoing coronavirus pandemic can affect attitudes toward foreign nationalities. We explored the intergroup consequences of the current epidemiological situation in two studies involving a total of 652 participants. In correlational Study 1, we showed a positive relationship between media exposure in the United Kingdom (UK) and in Poland, and prejudice to four foreign nationalities. Study 2 showed that negative affect toward Italians (i.e., a nation struggling with the most severe COVID-19 outbreak at the time of the study) was indirectly p…

Future anxiety as a predictor of the fear of childbirth

Are Online Haters Psychopaths? Psychological Predictors of Online Hating Behavior

Despite growing prevalence of derogatory online behaviors, still little is known about psychological factors underlying this negative phenomenon. In the present study, we aimed to compare characteristics of persons who post hating and non-hating comments about Polish sports players during Winter Olympic Games in Pyeongchang (2018) on the Internet. Ninety-four Internet users (41% women) participated in the study, among which 46 posted hating comments. After one month, participants were invited to take part in a psychological survey, and filled the Dark Triad questionnaire, the Satisfaction with Life Scale, the Scale of Frustration, and the Scale of Envy. Results showed that high scores in Ps…

Testing psychological (GAM) model of aggression on the men’s sample

The study was carried out to verify how psychological models are able to explain the phenomenon of aggression among men. There is a lack of research that try to test in holistic way many factors of aggression. We try to enrich the results of research on male aggression by recognizing to what extent factors that have not been studied so far, such as willpower, temporal orientation, or the use of drugs or steroids, explain aggression in the group of men. The sample of men (N = 131) was selected deliberately in terms of substance dependence, steroid use and a free substance-free howl. Ten Item Personality Inventory (TIPI) was used to measure five personality factors. The Zimbardo Time Percepti…

A multi-country test of brief reappraisal interventions on emotions during the COVID-19 pandemic

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2021, corrected publication 2022

The Bias toward the Right Side of Others Is Stronger for Hands than for Feet

As shown by a series of previous studies, ambiguous human bodies performing unimanual or unipedal actions tend to be perceived more frequently as right-handed or right-footed rather than left-handed or left-footed, which indicates a perceptual and attentional bias toward the right side of others&rsquo

How Much Money Do You Need to Feel Taller? Impact of Money on Perception of Body Height

Body height is considered to be one of the most important reproductive signals. However, there are only a few publications on what influences the sense of whether we assess ourselves as tall or short. In the present contribution, the psychological impact of money on the evaluation of a person’s own height was tested. We performed two experimental studies in which the respondents had contact with different amounts of money and were asked to evaluate their body height with the use of a laser pointer. The first experiment (N = 61) showed that contact with money significantly increased subjective height evaluation, and the effect was independent of participants’ real body height. The second exp…

Guessing Meaning From Word Sounds of Unfamiliar Languages: A Cross-Cultural Sound Symbolism Study

Sound symbolism refers to a non-arbitrary relationship between the sound of a word and its meaning. With the aim to better investigate this relationship by using natural languages, in the present cross-linguistic study 215 Italian and Polish participants were asked to listen to words pronounced in 4 unknown non-indo-European languages (Finnish, Japanese, Swahili, Tamil) and to try to guess the correct meaning of each word, by choosing among 3 alternatives visualized on a computer screen. The alternatives were presented in the mother tongue of participants. Three different word categories were presented: nouns, verbs and adjectives. A first overall analysis confirmed a semantic role of sound…