Impossible Hypotheses and Effect Size Limits

Psychological science is moving toward further specification of effect sizes when formulating hypotheses, performing power-analyses, and considering the relevance of findings. This development has sparked an appreciation for the wider context in which such effect sizes are found, as the importance assigned to specific sizes may vary from situation to situation. We add to this development a crucial, but in psychology hitherto underappreciated, contingency: there are mathematical limits to the magnitudes that population effect sizes can take within the common multivariate context in which psychology is situated, and these limits can be far more restrictive than typically assumed. The implication is that some hypothesized or pre-registered effect sizes may be impossible. At the same time, these restrictions offer a way of statistically triangulating the plausible range of unknown effect sizes. We explain the reason for the existence of these limits, illustrate how to identify them, and offer recommendations and tools for improving hypothesized effect sizes by exploiting the broader multivariate context in which they occur

Locating nostalgia among the emotions: A bridge from loss to love

An effective way of identifying the psychological role of an emotion is by probing its position relative to other emotions, such as in terms of appraisals, occurrence, lay conceptualization, and consequences. A set of recent studies offer such comparisons for nostalgia against a backdrop of many other emotions. These studies depict nostalgia as an approach-oriented emotion that resembles positive emotions more closely than negative ones, and place nostalgia especially close to positive social emotions. A complementary new analysis of the correlations between nostalgia and 31 other emotions furthermore locates nostalgia between experiences related to loss and love. Altogether, recent work on nostalgia among the emotions portrays it as a psychological bridge from loss toward love

It's not unusual to be unusual (or: A different take on multivariate distributions of personality)

Personality, and many other psychological constructs, are assumed to be distributed along multiple dimensions. The current research demonstrates an intriguing implication that these multidimensional distributions hold: as dimensionality increases, people are located progressively further away from the average. In other words, multivariate models of personality render people to be rather ‘unusual.’ I review the geometric and statistical basis for this phenomenon and then illustrate its occurrence in real life using large, open-source personality data. This research offers a fresh perspective on the behavior of multivariate distributions for those who are interested in personality, psychological testing, or enjoy a lighthearted (but substantial) take on statistics

Collective nostalgia: a group-level emotion that confers unique benefits on the group

This research established collective nostalgia as a group-level emotion and ascertained the benefits it confers on the group. In Study 1, participants who reflected on a nostalgic event they had experienced together with ingroup members (collective nostalgia) evaluated the ingroup more positively and reported stronger intentions to approach (and not avoid) ingroup members than those who recalled a nostalgic event they had experienced individually (personal nostalgia), those who reflected on a lucky event they had experienced together with ingroup members (collective positive), and those who did not recall an event (no recall). In Study 2, collective (vs. personal) nostalgia strengthened behavioral intentions to support the ingroup more so than did recalling an ordinary collective (vs. personal) event. Increased collective self-esteem mediated this effect. In Study 3, collective nostalgia (compared with recall of an ordinary collective event) led participants to sacrifice money in order to punish a transgression perpetrated against an ingroup member. This effect of collective nostalgia was more pronounced when social identification was high (compared with low). Finally, in Study 4, collective nostalgia converged toward the group average (i.e., was socially shared) when participants thought of themselves in terms of their group membership. The findings underscore the viability of studying nostalgia at multiple levels of analysis and highlight the significance of collective nostalgia for understanding group-level attitudes, global action tendencies, specific behavioral intentions, and behavior

Staff and student views of lecture capture: a qualitative study

Many universities now use lecture capture. We used focus groups to investigate perceptions of lectures and their capture in staff (N = 8) and students (N = 17). We found that staff and students held different views of lectures and this impacted on their perceptions of lecture capture. Our findings confirmed a range of previously identified uses of lecture capture and additionally demonstrated its use to model expert behaviour. Furthermore, we report here that students felt lecture capture reduced anxiety, particularly for those with disabilities, indicating that lecture capture may be a useful tool in creating an environment that supports mental wellbeing. Despite this potential value of lecture capture, it was still perceived to have some negative impact on the live lecture; reducing the interaction with students and prevent staff using anecdotes and humour in their teaching, which could reduce the value of the lecture capture

The aesthetic quality model: Complexity and randomness as foundations of visual beauty by signaling quality

Visual complexity has been identified as a fundamental property that shapes the beauty of visual images. However, its exact influence on beauty judgments, and the mechanism behind this influence, remain a conundrum. In the present article, we developed and empirically evaluated the Aesthetic Quality Model, which proposes that the link between complexity and beauty depends on another key visual property—randomness. According to the model, beauty judgements are determined by an interaction between these two properties, with more beautiful patterns featuring comparatively high complexity and low randomness. The model further posits that this configuration of complexity and randomness leads to higher beauty because it signals quality (i.e., creativity and skill). Study 1 confirmed that black and white binary patterns were judged as more beautiful when they combined high complexity with low randomness. Study 2 replicated these findings using an experimental method and with a more representative set of patterns, and it pointed to quality attribution as a candidate mechanism underlying the beauty judgements. Studies 3 and 4 confirmed these findings using experimental manipulation of the mechanism. Overall, the present research supports the aesthetic quality model, breaking new ground in understanding the fundamentals of beauty judgement

Other- (vs. self-) oriented meaning interventions enhance momentary work engagement through changes in work meaningfulness.

We tested whether a short, online meaning intervention boosts momentary work engagement through an increase in perceived work meaningfulness. In Study 1 (N = 227) employees who were asked to write why their work was meaningful subsequently experienced higher work meaningfulness and higher momentary work engagement (MWE) compared to a control group. Work meaningfulness mediated the relationship between the intervention and MWE. Study 2, conducted among employees (N = 254), found that writing about how one’s work serves a greater good (vs. how it advances personal career, vs. control) led to an increase in work meaningfulness, which consequently predicted MWE. The research examines a new tool to enhance work meaningfulness that can be easily and widely applied and that provides insight into how sources of meaningful work are related to work meaningfulness and to important occupational outcomes