The Great Escape: The Role of Self-esteem and Self-related Cognition in Terror Management

Integrating terror management theory and objective self-awareness theory, we propose the existential escape hypothesis, which states that people with low self-esteem should be especially prone to escaping self-awareness as a distal response to thoughts of death. This is because they lack the means to bolster the self as a defense, and the propensity to bolster the self reduces the motivation to escape from self-awareness. Five studies supported this hypothesis. Individuals low, but not high, in self-esteem scored lower on a measure of private self-awareness (Study 1), showed less implicit self-activation (Studies 2 & 3), were more likely to choose to write about others than themselves (Study 4), and consumed more alcohol in a field study at a nightclub (Study 5) in response to mortality reminders. Implications for terror management theory (highlighting an additional route to defend against mortality awareness), self-regulation, physical health and well-being are discussed

Protecting the environment for self-interested reasons. Altruism is not the only pathway to sustainability

Concerns for environmental issues are important drivers of sustainable and pro-environmental behaviors, and can be differentiated between those with a self-enhancing (egoistic) vs. self-transcendent (biospheric) psychological foundation. Yet to date, the dominant approach for promoting pro-environmental behavior has focused on highlighting the benefits to others or nature, rather than appealing to self-interest. Building on the Inclusion Model for Environmental Concern, we argue that egoistic and biospheric environmental concerns, respectively, conceptualized as self-interest and altruism, are hierarchically structured, such that altruism is inclusive of self-interest. Three studies show that self-interested individuals will behave more pro-environmentally when the behavior results in a personal benefit (but not when there is exclusively an environmental benefit), while altruistic individuals will engage in pro-environmental behaviors when there are environmental benefits, and critically, also when there are personal benefits. The reported findings have implications for programs and policies designed to promote pro-environmental behavior, and for social science research aimed at understanding human responses to a changing environmen

Right here, right now: situated interventions to change consumer habits

Consumer behavior-change interventions have traditionally encouraged consumers to form conscious intentions, but in the past decade it has been shown that while these interventions have a medium-to-large effect in changing intentions, they have a much smaller effect in changing behavior. Consumers often do not act in accordance with their conscious intentions because situational cues in the immediate environment automatically elicit learned, habitual behaviors. It has therefore been suggested that researchers refocus their efforts on developing interventions that target unconscious, unintentional influences on behavior, such as cue-behavior (“habit”) associations. To develop effective consumer behavior-change interventions, however, we argue that it is first important to understand how consumer experiences are represented in memory, in order to successfully target the situational cues that most strongly predict engagement in habitual behavior. In this article, we present a situated cognition perspective of habits and discuss how the situated cognition perspective extends our understanding of how consumer experiences are represented in memory, and the processes through which these situational representations can be retrieved in order to elicit habitual consumer behaviors. Based on the principles of situated cognition, we then discuss five ways that interventions could change consumer habits by targeting situational cues in the consumer environment and suggest how existing interventions utilizing these behavior-change strategies could be improved by integrating the principles of the situated cognition approach

Aerospace medicine and biology: A continuing bibliography with indexes (supplement 320)

This bibliography lists 125 reports, articles and other documents introduced into the NASA Scientific and Technical Information System during January, 1989. Subject coverage includes: aerospace medicine and psychology, life support systems and controlled environments, safety equipment, exobiology and extraterrestrial life, and flight crew behavior and performance

Deception in context: coding nonverbal cues, situational variables and risk of detection

There are many situations in which deception may arise and understanding the behaviors associated with it are compounded by various contexts in which it may occur. This paper sets out a coding protocol for identifying cues to deception and reports on three studies, in which deception was studied in different contexts. The contexts involved manipulating risks (i.e., probability) of being detected and reconnaissance, both of which are related to terrorist activities. Two of the studies examined the impact of changing the risks of deception detection, whilst the third investigated increased cognitive demand of duplex deception tasks including reconnaissance and deception. In all three studies, cues to deception were analyzed in relation to observable body movements and subjective impressions given by participants. In general, the results indicate a pattern of hand movement reduction by deceivers, and suggest the notion that raising the risk of detection influences deceivers? behaviors. Participants in the higher risk condition displayed increased negative affect (found in deceivers) and tension (found in both deceivers and truth-tellers) than those in lower risk conditions

Development and validation of the Spanish hazard perception test

Objective: The aim of the current study is to develop and obtain validity evidence for a Hazard Perception test suitable for the Spanish driving population. To obtain validity evidence to support the use of the test, the effect of hazardous and quasi-hazardous situations on the participants’ Hazard Prediction is analysed and the pattern of results of drivers of different driving experience: learner, novice and expert drivers and re-offender vs. non-offender drivers, is compared. Potentially hazardous situations are those that develop without involving any real hazard (i.e., the driver didn’t actually have to decelerate or make any evasive manoeuvre to avoid a potential collision). The current study analysed multiple offender drivers attending compulsory re-education programmes as a result of reaching the maximum number of penalty points on their driving licence, due to repeated violations of traffic laws. Method: A new video-based hazard perception test was developed, using a total of 20 hazardous situation videos plus 8 quasi-hazardous situation videos. They were selected from 167 recordings of natural hazards in real Spanish driving settings