What Do We Envy? How Internal and External Self-Relevance Shape Envious Reactions to Upward Comparisons

What do people envy? According to emotion theory, people envy what is self-relevant to them, because self-relevance of a situation is a necessary precondition for every emotion to arise. However, self-relevance is vaguely defined. Self-relevance can be defined by what is important to people themselves, i.e. internally self-relevant, and by what is important to people’s social groups, i.e. externally self-relevant. Both forms of self-relevance should influence envy. Envy comes in two distinct forms: benign envy, promoting upward motivation, and malicious envy, promoting hostility. I predicted that internal and external self-relevance would differentially shape benign and malicious envy. Internal self-relevance should increase benign envy and decrease malicious envy. External self-relevance should decrease benign envy and increase malicious envy. I conducted seven studies to test these hypotheses. In all studies, values, as prototypes of what is self-relevant to people, operationalized self-relevance. In the first set of studies, I measured internal and external self-relevance of values in a within-subjects design. In the second set of studies, I manipulated internal and external self-relevance of a value in a between-subjects design. In every study, I then measured participants’ envious reactions towards an ideal person who embodied a certain value. The data consistently showed that high internal self-relevance leads to more benign envy and low internal self-relevance leads to more malicious envy. In sum, people envy what is important to them, but they also envy what is not important to them. More precisely, when people envy what is important to them, benign envy arises fostering upward motivation. When people envy what is not important to them, malicious envy arises fostering harmful behavior, probably because it implies external self-relevance. A more detailed understanding of self-relevance is necessary for a comprehensive understanding of emotions. My research thus provides important implications for emotion research and beyond

Challenges and Influencial Factors in Autism-Specific Diagnostics in Toddlers

Challenges and Influencial Factors in Autism-Specific Diagnostics in Toddlers Abstract. Objective: What are the particular challenges that make early diagnosis of young children difficult in the clinical routine? What recommendations can be derived from this in practice? Methods: Our interdisciplinary social pediatric team examined 31 toddlers aged 2 to 3 years twice in intervals of 6-9 months in the for outpatient diagnostics regarding suspected autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In addition, we conducted an online survey with further experts. Results: After the first anamnestic interview, 8 of the 31 (26 %) children were diagnosed with a differential diagnosis of ASD. Comorbid disorders, familial peculiarities, and challenges posed by the examination setting and anamnesis made a reliable clinical classification difficult. Conclusion: In our experience, many toddlers can only receive a valid diagnosis after a follow-up examination after starting one or more therapies and regularly carrying out these therapies over a period of 6-9 months and possibly also after structural changes have taken place (care in nursery, implementation of youth welfare measures, or similar)

Registered Replication Report on Srull and Wyer (1979)

Srull and Wyer (1979) demonstrated that exposing participants to more hostility-related stimuli caused them subsequently to interpret ambiguous behaviors as more hostile. In their Experiment 1, participants descrambled sets of words to form sentences. In one condition, 80% of the descrambled sentences described hostile behaviors, and in another condition, 20% described hostile behaviors. Following the descrambling task, all participants read a vignette about a man named Donald who behaved in an ambiguously hostile manner and then rated him on a set of personality traits. Next, participants rated the hostility of various ambiguously hostile behaviors (all ratings on scales from 0 to 10). Participants who descrambled mostly hostile sentences rated Donald and the ambiguous behaviors as approximately 3 scale points more hostile than did those who descrambled mostly neutral sentences. This Registered Replication Report describes the results of 26 independent replications (N = 7,373 in the total sample; k = 22 labs and N = 5,610 in the primary analyses) of Srull and Wyer?s Experiment 1, each of which followed a preregistered and vetted protocol. A random-effects meta-analysis showed that the protagonist was seen as 0.08 scale points more hostile when participants were primed with 80% hostile sentences than when they were primed with 20% hostile sentences (95% confidence interval, CI = [0.004, 0.16]). The ambiguously hostile behaviors were seen as 0.08 points less hostile when participants were primed with 80% hostile sentences than when they were primed with 20% hostile sentences (95% CI = [?0.18, 0.01]). Although the confidence interval for one outcome excluded zero and the observed effect was in the predicted direction, these results suggest that the currently used methods do not produce an assimilative priming effect that is practically and routinely detectable