Animal Welfare Attitudes: Effects of Gender and Diet in University Samples from 22 Countries

Animal Welfare Attitudes (AWA) are defined as human attitudes towards the welfare of animals in different dimensions and settings. Demographic factors, such as age and gender are associated with AWA. The aim of this study was to assess gender differences among university students in a large convenience sample from twenty-two nations in AWA. A total of 7914 people participated in the study (5155 women, 2711 men, 48 diverse). Participants completed a questionnaire that collected demographic data, typical diet and responses to the Composite Respect for Animals Scale Short version (CRAS-S). In addition, we used a measure of gender empowerment from the Human Development Report. The largest variance in AWA was explained by diet, followed by country and gender. In terms of diet, 6385 participants reported to be omnivores, 296 as pescatarian, 637 ate a vegetarian diet and 434 were vegans (n = 162 without answer). Diet was related with CRAS-S scores; people with a vegan diet scored higher in AWA than omnivores. Women scored significantly higher on AWA than men. Furthermore, gender differences in AWA increased as gender inequality decreased

Does How You Feel Depend on Who You Are? The Moderating Role of Personality on Emotional Context Effects

There is a plethora of literature linking Extraversion to the experience of positive emotions and Neuroticism to the experience of negative emotions. Further, it has been argued that these relationships have important consequences for well-being. In addition to these main effects of the trait, research on person-situation interactions has shown that individuals have differential reactivity to emotional situations, even identifying some direct causal links using experiments, based on their underlying Extraversion and Neuroticism. However, much less is known about how this differential reactivity might generalize outside of the lab, to naturalistic situations. In Study 1, we test this claim by capitalizing on the natural lockdown that occurred as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, asking how emotion experience changed due to this lockdown, and whether these changes were moderated by Extraversion, Neuroticism, and the less studied but important trait of Agreeableness. Further, we add an investigation of these potential interactions using facet-level personality. These constructs represent a more specific level of personality analysis than personality traits and have received almost no attention in the literature on the relationships between personality and emotion. However, this increased specificity allows for important clarifying hypotheses about the relationships between personality and emotion to be tested, such as whether the associations between Extraversion and positive emotions are due more to social contact or behavioral activation. In Study 1, we showed that individuals did respond differently to the lockdown based on their underlying Extraversion, Neuroticism and (to a lesser extent) Agreeableness. Further, we showed that the relationship between Extraversion and positive emotions is likely due to behavioral activation more so, or even in place of, social contact. In Study 2, we ask whether these results generalize to a more traditional in lab emotional situation manipulation, using a sad film clip. We capitalize on modern statistical techniques, namely multilevel modelling, to advance the existing work in this area and show that both our results from Study 1, as well as the findings from previous work, which made use of difference scores as dependent variables instead of multilevel models, both generalized well. We discuss the implications of these findings for personality theory, emotion theory, and person by situation interactions, as well as highlight some suggestions for future research

Empirical audit and review and an assessment of evidentiary value in research on the psychological consequences of scarcity

Empirical audit and review is an approach to assessing the evidentiary value of a research area. It involves identifying a topic and selecting a cross-section of studies for replication. We apply the method to research on the psychological consequences of scarcity. Starting with the papers citing a seminal publication in the field, we conducted replications of 20 studies that evaluate the role of scarcity priming in pain sensitivity, resource allocation, materialism, and many other domains. There was considerable variability in the replicability, with some strong successes and other undeniable failures. Empirical audit and review does not attempt to assign an overall replication rate for a heterogeneous field, but rather facilitates researchers seeking to incorporate strength of evidence as they refine theories and plan new investigations in the research area. This method allows for an integration of qualitative and quantitative approaches to review and enables the growth of a cumulative science