In this commentary, I express my concern that the special issue focuses too much on the added value of AI for psychology, while psychological research also has much to offer, such as the operationalization of variables based on theory, validation tools and the statistical evaluation of information generated by AI systems.

Rapid advances in AI technology are fuelling the proliferation of AI applications across industries, including educational services. With the allure of intelligent tutoring, individuals now face the choice of their educational approach-either parental engagement or utilizing AI educational services. This research employs an experimental design approach to examine individuals' decision-making processes involving AI educational services. Across five studies, we observe that, relative to AI educational services, parental engagement induces less guilt, receives a higher valuation and increases individuals' willingness to recommend it to others. We attribute these preferences to a perceived parental responsibility. Intrinsic attribution and conformity promote individuals' WOM. This research is the first to uncover the impact of educational approaches on individuals' guilt and downstream behaviours in the AI-in-Education field, shedding light on attribution as its underlying mechanism and offering actionable strategies to enhance individuals' WOM. The findings offer novel insights to AI-human interaction psychological research and hold practical implications for AI-in-Education industry practitioners.

This study investigated the relationship between parental control types and mental health categories among Chinese adolescents. About 2240 adolescents (1267 males; M = 14.09) were recruited and completed the Parental Control Scale, Patient Health Questionnaire-9, Life Satisfaction Scale at two time points. Results revealed that adolescents' parental control could be classified into seven types, while mental health could be classified into three types. The key finding demonstrates significant dynamic interactions between these variables: at T1, the "high behavioral control-low psychological control" parental control type (e.g., behavioural guidance type) significantly promoted adolescents' transition towards more optimal mental health categories; conversely, adolescents classified in the "complete mental health" category at T1 were more likely to have parents exhibiting the "high behavioural control-low psychological control" positive parenting pattern at T2. This "virtuous cycle" pattern was confirmed, although the "vicious cycle" commonly observed in variable-centred research between psychological control and poor mental health did not fully emerge in this study. These findings elucidate the complex bidirectional relationships between perceived parental control and mental health development among Chinese adolescents.

Since antiquity humans have been fascinated by mirrors; yet, when asked to predict what is made visible in the reflection, or to interpret a scene with a mirror, observers make systematic errors. Many observers claim that a character in a scene is looking at themselves when their reflection is visible, despite not sharing the same viewpoint. The first part of the study consisted of a survey of artworks containing mirrors, and the creation of a catalogue. The second part, using 21 artworks and an online methodology (N = 97), confirmed that the Venus effect impacts most participants. The third part (N = 101) tested whether the effect relates to cognitive/emotional perspective-taking - taking the perspective of someone else - or visual perspective-taking - understanding what can be seen from a certain viewpoint. We related the magnitude of the Venus effect to scores on the AQ test (as a measure of cognitive/emotional perspective-taking) and the ROMP test (as a measure of visual perspective-taking). AQ scores did not predict the Venus effect, and ROMP scores did. We conclude that the Venus effect is likely to occur because people fail to understand what can be seen from a given viewpoint.

The Tower of London (TOL) is a planning task frequently used in clinical settings and research. Planning and execution times are the most common outcome variables despite yielding lower effect sizes in clinical group comparisons and lower test-retest reliability than planning accuracy. Here, it is proposed that planning time be analysed not in isolation, but in relation to the combined duration of planning and execution, yielding a novel pre-planning index (PPI). In N = 179 healthy participants, test-retest reliability analyses yielded higher absolute agreement and less intra-individual variability over two sessions for PPI than for planning and execution times. The clinical validity of PPI was probed by comparing patients known to exhibit planning deficits and healthy controls. Stroke and Parkinson's patients showed significantly lower PPI than controls, driven by reduced planning and longer execution times. There was no difference in PPI between patients with mild cognitive impairment and controls. Consistently across healthy participants and patients, the positive correlation of PPI with planning accuracy exceeded that of planning times with accuracy. Thus, this pre-planning index can enhance both the reliability and clinical validity of TOL latency variables and represents a useful complement to accuracy for measuring planning performance in health and disease.

The success of the true crime media genre reflects humanity's avid curiosity about violence, deviance, and murder, yet psychological research on this phenomenon is lacking. In this article, we highlight why true crime consumption may be relevant to various research fields that go beyond simple media preferences. Additionally, we present a large-scale behavioural investigation for comprehensive empirical insights into motives, and behavioural and well-being correlates of true crime consumption. In n = 307-571 participants, we (a) confirm a robust gender difference in true crime consumption in favour of women, and (b) find more general (morbid curiosity) and distinct motives (defensive vigilance, excitement) for true crime consumption. Additionally, (c) through principal component analysis, we extract five components from numerous variables (negative affectivity, antagonism, fear of crime, self-focused adaptive regulation, and affective creativity) to test for contributions to true crime consumption. Ultimately, (d) in multiple regression models, gender, income, fear of crime, and antagonism emerged as unique predictors of overall true crime consumption, though results varied for different formats (e.g., podcasts) and motives. Notably, defensive vigilance motivation (higher in women) was linked to more adaptive self-regulation. Our investigation adds to the emerging body of research on negative crime-related information seeking.

Visual complexity is a key factor in perceptual and evaluative judgments. People's representation of visual complexity is constructed from quantitative and structural image features, but it is also influenced by familiarity and expertise. We examined how people represent visual complexity and its impact on perception and evaluation, focusing on information about paintings and their affective valence on judgments of visual complexity, liking and understanding. Seventy-six participants rated 60 representational artworks of negative, neutral, and positive valence on complexity, beauty and understanding. Half of the participants received written information about each artwork. Results showed that negative artworks were judged as more complex than neutral artworks and positive ones, but this effect was attenuated by the provided information. Liking judgments increased with judged complexity, were higher for positive artworks than neutral ones, for neutral than negative ones, and were higher when information was provided. Understanding judgments were higher for positive artworks than neutral ones, and higher for neutral artworks than negatively valenced ones. Information increased understanding only for negative artworks, and judged complexity did not affect these judgments. In sum, the representation of the visual complexity of an image is influenced by its valence and the available information, modulating judgments of complexity and liking, but not of understanding.

Humans are highly adept at utilizing various social signals, such as eye gaze and biological motion (BM), to detect important events (e.g. threat, reward) in the environment, a phenomenon termed social attention. Here we investigated whether the affective information carried by the contextual event would modulate this social attention behaviour. By introducing natural emotional pictures (negative, neutral and positive) as peripheral probing targets within the modified central cueing paradigm, we found that central BM induced a stronger attentional orienting effect towards negative targets than neutral and positive ones. Moreover, this modulation was observed in attentional effects induced by another well-known social cue (i.e. eye gaze), whereas no such effect was obtained with the non-social arrow cues. Importantly, this negativity bias persisted at the subliminal level, as shown by the significant attentional effects towards negative targets induced by unconscious social cues (i.e. BM, eye gaze). In contrast, no attentional effects were obtained with non-conscious arrow cues. Overall, these findings reveal a general enhancement of negative targets on conscious and unconscious social attention induced by different types of social signals (i.e. BM, eye gaze) and highlight the distinction of social attention compared to non-social attention in detecting potentially detrimental events.

In the current research, we use network analysis to examine the structure, ideological foundations and correlates of climate change conspiracy theories, distinguishing between denialist and warmist beliefs. Denialist beliefs, typically endorsed on the political right, claim that climate change is exaggerated, whereas warmist beliefs, more prevalent on the left, allege the suppression of climate science and the downplaying of climate change. Across four studies, these beliefs showed a weak and unstable positive correlation but were reliably connected via indirect associations with general conspiracy beliefs and negatively through opposing relationships with denial of anthropogenic climate change (ACC) and conservatism. General conspiracy beliefs and denial of ACC were not directly connected but were instead related indirectly through climate-specific conspiracy beliefs: positively via denialist and negatively via warmist. We found no evidence across studies for an association between climate change conspiracy beliefs and indices of non-rational thinking. Finally, denialist beliefs were negatively associated with pro-environmental intentions, environmental concern, policy support and collective guilt, whereas warmist beliefs were positively related to these outcomes, except for environmental concern, where no significant relationship emerged. These findings highlight the importance of distinguishing ideological variants of climate change conspiracy beliefs to contextualize their psychological significance and potential impacts.

Cue integration theory suggests that the sense of agency arises from the interaction of multiple cues, weighted by their reliability and availability. However, whether this integration is dynamic or static remains unclear. This study explored the potential dynamics of cue integration by examining the interplay between internal and external cues in social comparison contexts. Participants in the two experiments controlled a circle to a target location, with the circle's motion either fluent or disfluent. After completing the task, the participants received feedback on their performance relative to others, delivered in either a social (hand gestures in Experiment 1) or non-social format (arrow symbols in Experiment 2), presented either before or after they provided agency ratings. Results revealed that both socially and non-socially formatted feedback influenced agency ratings for future actions (forward modulation) as well as for past actions (backward modulation). Notably, a dynamic pattern of integration was evident only between socially formatted feedback and motion fluency: under disfluent motion, forward and backward effects of socially formatted feedback intensified over time. Conversely, with fluent motion, the impact of socially formatted feedback diminished over time. These findings underscore the complexity of cue integration, indicating a need to incorporate temporal dynamics into cue integration theory.

Evidence shows that social exclusion motivates to paying attention to the situation to reconnect with others or to protect oneself from further exclusion. However, it is unclear how social attention is affected by who offers an opportunity to reconnect. Two studies filled this gap by assessing whether being excluded affects our propensity to share attention with another individual (seen or novel) with a happy or a neutral expression. Findings show a significant three-way interaction with differences in gaze cueing between groups only for seen faces with a neutral expression. Gaze-cueing effects for seen (excluders) faces with a neutral expression occurred in 73% of socially excluded individuals - this was 33% for seen (includers) faces for socially included. There were no differences in gaze cueing for novel faces with happy or neutral expressions. In Study 2, social information about faces was learned without direct exclusion. Here, the proportion of participants showing the effect observed in Study 1 and the associations between gaze cueing and emotional expressions differed. In line with the social monitoring system theory, individuals in the immediate aftermath of exclusion remain socially engaged, displaying a dual attentional strategy: vigilance towards the excluder and openness to affiliative signals from novel others.

In this pre-registered experiment conducted in the Netherlands and Türkiye (N = 550), we investigated how the source of advice (peer vs. expert) influences people's decision-making when assessing the carbon footprint of a flight between two cities. We also examined whether this effect was influenced by their conspiracy mentality, collective narcissism, epistemic individualism, and climate change scepticism. Our findings suggest that people overall rely more on experts' advice than peers', especially in the Netherlands compared with Türkiye. Moreover, individuals high in conspiracy beliefs, epistemic individualism, and collective narcissism reduced the weight advantage typically given to expert advice over peer advice. Only a specific form of climate change scepticism (i.e., trend scepticism) showed similar effects. Overall, our results indicate that individuals who value their own opinion and harbour distrust towards experts or science tend to discount expert advice.

Misophonia is a disorder involving sensitivity to certain sounds and related stimuli. Here, we explore the relationship between misophonia and affective flexibility, which describes cognitive shifting abilities in the face of emotion-evoking stimuli. The secondary aim of this study is to test the potential association between misophonia and cognitive flexibility, building upon findings from previous research. The third objective is to examine the relationship between misophonia and rumination. One hundred and forty participants completed the Memory and Affective Flexibility Task (MAFT), designed to assess affective flexibility, as well as a battery of self-report measures to evaluate misophonia severity, cognitive flexibility, and rumination. Results suggested an inverse relationship between affective flexibility as measured by switch accuracy, but not reaction time, and misophonia severity. Cognitive flexibility was also inversely associated with misophonia severity, but was not attributed to task-based affective flexibility, suggesting two independent constructs both involved in misophonia manifestation. Rumination associated positively with misophonia severity and inversely with cognitive flexibility, but not affective flexibility. Taken together, these findings highlight a unique cognitive profile of misophonia, characterized by rigidity at the psychological level through cognitive inflexibility and rumination, as well as at the executive function level in terms of affective switching difficulties.

This study investigated factors associated with post-traumatic growth (PTG) after severe traumatic societal events. Utilizing a quota-representative sample of 931 Israeli Jews, we assessed individual and community PTG following the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023, alongside a range of factors guided by Bronfenbrenner's Process-Person-Context-Time (PPCT) model. Using data-driven techniques, we identified three distinct growth profiles: relatively high individual and collective PTG (n = 354), high PTG on all dimensions (n = 273), and secular growth showing high PTG in general but not in spiritual terms (n = 322). Higher levels of religious identification, involvement, and coping, altruistic behaviour, social support, optimism, and mindfulness, as well as lower levels of pessimism, were found in the group(s) with the highest PTG. This research highlights the potentially high societal resilience reported after a large-scale traumatic event, identifying factors that may be tested for their potential to maximize growth in the aftermath of trauma.

The temporal relationship between incoming signals is crucial in determining whether multisensory information is integrated into unitary percepts. Temporal binding windows (TBWs) define the time range within which multisensory inputs are highly likely to be perceptually integrated, even if asynchronous. TBWs widen with stimulus complexity and neurodevelopmental conditions (e.g., autism and schizophrenia), yet the key factors underlying their malleability remain unclear. The (quasi)rhythmic properties of sensory inputs, frequently embedded in natural stimuli (e.g., speech), are among the possible exogenous modulators. Indeed, stimulus spectral features can influence the alignment of neural excitability across sensory regions, synchronizing brain rhythms with external rhythmic patterns through phase-reset mechanisms and neural entrainment. In a series of psychophysical studies, we presented simultaneity judgement tasks with pulsing audio-visual (AV) streams amplitude-modulated according to different regular frequencies or following purely rhythmic vs. quasi-rhythmic (speech-like) envelopes. Results show that TBWs decrease as the stimulus frequency increases and that speech-like streams are integrated across larger TBWs. These findings highlight the importance of stimulus spectral structure in shaping multisensory perception. Furthermore, they show that quasi-rhythmic spectrotemporal features of speech-like streams induce more tolerant cross-modal temporal processing even when the leading stimulation frequency is controlled for, putatively reflecting an adaptation to the variable rhythmic structure of natural speech. Our results align with neurophysiological accounts of neural entrainment and motivate future research in clinical populations with multisensory processing deficits.

Social norms are powerful predictors of pro-environmental behaviour. At the same time, conspiracy beliefs are prevalent that can reduce individuals' efforts to act pro-environmentally and might impede the influence of social norms. Across three cross-sectional studies in three countries (Germany, UK, US; total N = 1037), we investigated the interplay between different types of social norm perceptions and conspiracy beliefs in predicting everyday pro-environmental behaviour. Against two out of three hypotheses, we found no evidence that conspiracy beliefs moderated the relationship between perceived social norms and self-reported pro-environmental behaviour. Rather, perceiving higher pro-environmental social (especially subjective and injunctive) norms was associated with more frequent pro-environmental behaviour - also among those with stronger conspiracy beliefs. Conspiracy beliefs (especially those related to climate change) were, in turn, related to less pro-environmental behaviour. These findings shed light on the social factors that might influence individuals believing in conspiracy theories and give reason for optimism regarding the possibility to overcome their climate inaction via normative influence.

One of the behaviours associated with Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) is talking in a manner considered to be socially inappropriate. It follows, therefore, that self-directed speech, including inner dialogue, will be particularly prevalent among adults who exhibit traits typical of ADHD. In three experiments, we tested this prediction. Participants completed the ASRS-v1.1 together with either the Self-Talk Scale (Experiment 1; N = 198) or the Varieties of Inner Speech Questionnaire (Experiment 2; N = 198). Results from both experiments revealed that participants with behaviours typical of an ADHD diagnosis reported significantly more self-directed speech than those whose behaviours were not typical of ADHD. A third experiment (N = 198) replicated these findings and also found that the effect does not distinguish between overt and covert speech. Overall, these data suggest that self-talking is more prevalent in individuals with relatively high levels of ADHD traits. We speculate that talking to oneself may represent a useful displacement activity or acts as a camouflage technique for those with the condition.

People form consequential trait judgements from seeing others' faces. The influential dynamic interactive theory suggests that trait judgements reflect the combined use of visual cues from faces (e.g. smiling looks trustworthy) with individuals' own conceptual trait associations (e.g. believing trustworthy people are also kind), thus far supported for impressions of highly constricted neutral faces in the US cultural context. Here, we provide a stringent new test of the dynamic interactive theory by examining whether conceptual trait associations predict impressions of highly variable everyday faces, within and across cultures and individuals. Study 1 shows that conceptual trait associations predict impressions of highly variable everyday faces in British perceivers. Study 2 demonstrates that British and Chinese perceivers' conceptual trait associations (expressed in English and Mandarin, respectively) predict impressions of highly variable White and Asian faces similarly. Study 3 finds that individuals' conceptual trait associations predict their impressions of highly variable face images. Together, we show for the first time that conceptual trait associations predict impressions even when faces provide rich visual cues and extend this understanding beyond Western perceivers, faces and languages. Our findings thus offer independent support for dynamic interactive theory in naturalistic impressions across cultures.

In the media, accurate climate information and climate disinformation often coexist and present competing narratives about climate change. Whereas previous research documented detrimental effects of disinformation on climate beliefs, little is known about how people seek climate-related content and how this varies between cross-cultural contexts. In a preregistered experiment, we studied how individuals sequentially sample and process Pro- and Anti-climate statements across 15 rounds. Participants from the United States, China, and Germany (N = 2226) freely sampled real-world climate-related statements, retrieved from Twitter and validated in previous studies. Overall, reading both Pro- and Anti-climate statements influenced climate concern in all countries. Participants preferred statements that were better aligned with their initial climate beliefs, and this confirmatory tendency intensified the more information had been sampled. Moreover, participants' confirmatory evaluation (i.e., accepting aligned and rejecting opposing messages) increased over time. While climate concern was mostly stable, in the United States, climate concern levels and box choices mutually reinforced each other, leading to greater polarization within the sample over the course of the experiment. The paradigm offers new perspectives on how people process and navigate conflicting narratives about climate change.

Collective narcissism and non-narcissistic ingroup positivity (notably collective self-esteem) are associated differently with conspiracy beliefs. We conducted three cross-sectional surveys in China and the United States that distinguished between ingroup and outgroup conspiracy beliefs, to explore the intricate relationships and underlying mechanisms of these variables. Studies 1 (N = 800) and 2 (N = 385) showed that, in China, collective narcissism was positively associated with outgroup conspiracy belief (partially mediated by increased perceived threat from the outgroup) and with ingroup conspiracy belief (partially mediated by increased instrumental treatment of ingroup members); collective self-esteem was positively associated with outgroup conspiracy belief (fully mediated by increased victim consciousness), but negatively with ingroup conspiracy belief (fully mediated by increased system-justifying belief). Study 3 (N = 397) only replicated the significant positive relationship between collective narcissism and outgroup conspiracy belief in a US sample, and the partial mediating effect of increased perceived threat from the outgroup in it, while the other three paths were not statistically significant. These findings suggest that the association between different forms of ingroup positivity (narcissistic versus non-narcissistic) and conspiracy beliefs is influenced both by the identity of the conspirators (ingroup versus outgroup) and cultural context.

Does moving to a new environment change people's cultural thought style? We tracked the cultural thought style of 1462 university students at 18 sites over time after they moved across China for college. We tested their holistic thought, which is more common in interdependent cultures. One logical prediction is that students would think less holistically after moving to big cities and more economically developed areas, in line with modernization theory. However, moving to bigger cities or more-developed areas did not predict decreases in holistic thought. Instead, regions' history of rice versus wheat farming predicted change in thought style. Within just five months, students who moved to wheat-farming prefectures thought less holistically than people who moved to rice-farming prefectures. This fits with the idea that rice farming required more coordination and interdependence than wheat farming. In a follow-up wave three years later, differences widened between students in rice and wheat areas. This three-wave longitudinal study documents the transmission of cultural differences in cognition, even without personal experience farming. The results suggest that China's farming history is still shaping cultural differences in the modern day.