Preventing the negative impacts of major, intersectional social issues hinges on personal concern and willingness to take action. This research examines social comparison in the context of climate change, racial injustice, and COVID‐19 during Fall 2020. Participants in a U.S. university sample ( n = 288), reported personal levels of concern and action and estimated peers' concern and action regarding these three issues. Participants estimated that they were more concerned than peers for all three issues and took more action than peers regarding COVID‐19 and climate change. Participants who reported higher levels of personal concern also estimated that they took greater action than peers (relative to participants who reported lower levels of concern). Exploratory analyses found that perceived personal control over social issues were associated with greater concern and action for racial injustice and climate change but not for COVID‐19. This indicates that issue‐specific features, including perceived controllability, may drive people to differently assess their experiences of distinct social issues.
We propose a cognitive and neurobiological model by which curiosity aids emotion regulation through abstract and flexible information-processing, which may positively bias memory. We begin with an overview of curiosity's emotional effects. Then we introduce models of affective memory encoding to suggest that the dopaminergic modulation of encoding associated with curiosity may positively bias these processes. Next, we identify how neural processes underlying curiosity in the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG), the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), and the lateral pre-frontal cortex (LPFC) address mechanisms underlying our framework. Specifically, we argue that curiosity's regulatory mechanisms of abstraction and cognitive flexibility, in combination with its memory mechanisms, predict that curiosity is likely to encode arousing information through positively biased neurobiological pathways.
The present research examines how individuals predict the influence that future life events will have on their self-concept, or what we term self-concept forecasting, across 5 studies (N = 935). Individuals are motivated to maintain self-concept clarity and continuity, but these motivations may lead to systematic underestimation of self-concept change. In Study 1, we found that individuals predicted that life events would be more central to their self-concept than an average other. In Study 2, participants predicted that the average person would be more vulnerable to self-concept change than the self. We also found that having previously experienced the life event reduced self-other differences. In Study 3, we found the reverse for individuated others, such that experience with the life event increased differences in prediction. In Studies 4 and 5, we examine why experience appears to provide information that predicts similarity relative to an average other and difference relative to an individuated other. We found that manipulating the salience of changeability reduced self-other asymmetries in self-concept forecasting, but considering the passage of time did not. Taken together, this suggests that there are motivated biases underlying self-concept forecasts that are applied differently for the self, average others, and individuated others, and that these biases may be reduced through recall of past experiences or previous disruptions to self-concept.
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