Cognitions about bodily purity attenuate stress perception

Kaspar, Kai; Cames, Sarah

doi:10.1038/srep38829

Cited by 5 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 54 publications

(78 reference statements)

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“…Similarly, having an opportunity to wash one's hands attenuated the residual influence of a recent academic failure on pessimism about one's future performance (Kaspar, 2012). Similar manipulations of actual or simulated cleansing also attenuated or eliminated the residual influence of recent luck (Xu et al, 2012; also Moscatiello & Nagel, 2014), endowment (Florack, Kleber, Busch, & Stöhr, 2014), ownership (Lee & Ji, 2015), and stress (Kaspar & Cames, 2016), none of which was related to morality or disgust. Instead, cleansing exerts its influence on whatever domain is salient to the person in a given situation.…”

Section: Empirical Support For Grounded Procedures Of Separationmentioning

confidence: 94%

Grounded procedures: A proximate mechanism for the psychology of cleansing and other physical actions

Lee¹,

Schwarz

2020

Behav Brain Sci

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Experimental work has revealed causal links between physical cleansing and various psychological variables. Empirically, how robust are they? Theoretically, how do they operate? Major prevailing accounts focus on morality or disgust, capturing a subset of cleansing effects, but cannot easily handle cleansing effects in non-moral, non-disgusting contexts. Building on grounded views on cognitive processes and known properties of mental procedures, we propose grounded procedures of separation as a proximate mechanism underlying cleansing effects. This account differs from prevailing accounts in terms of explanatory kind, interpretive parsimony, and predictive scope. Its unique and falsifiable predictions have received empirical support: Cleansing attenuates or eliminates otherwise observed influences of prior events (1) across domains and (2) across valences. (3) Cleansing manipulations produce stronger effects the more strongly they engage sensorimotor capacities. (4) Reversing the causal arrow, motivation for cleansing is triggered more readily by negative than positive entities. (5) Conceptually similar effects extend to other physical actions of separation. On the flipside, grounded procedures of connection are also observed. Together, separation and connection organize prior findings relevant to multiple perspectives (e.g., conceptual metaphor, sympathetic magic) and open up new questions. Their predictions are more generalizable than the specific mappings in conceptual metaphors, but more fine-grained than the broad assumptions of grounded cognition. This intermediate level of analysis sheds light on the interplay between mental and physical processes.

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Section: Empirical Support For Grounded Procedures Of Separationmentioning

confidence: 94%

Grounded procedures: A proximate mechanism for the psychology of cleansing and other physical actions

Lee¹,

Schwarz

2020

Behav Brain Sci

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“…Importantly, some authors propose double randomization to investigate a mediation hypothesis in terms of causal direction (e.g., Bullock et al, 2010 ; Green et al, 2010 ), leading to a sequence of experiments (cf. Kaspar and Cames, 2016 ). Here, participants are randomly assigned to levels of the independent variable to examine its effect on the observed mediator.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Personality and Motivation to Comply With COVID-19 Protective Measures in Germany

Kaspar

Nordmeyer

2022

Front. Psychol.

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The COVID-19 pandemic strains the healthcare systems, economy, education, and social life. Governments took several protective measures and formulated behavioral guidelines to prevent individual diseases and the collapse of healthcare systems. However, individual differences in the extent of compliance with the measures are apparent. To shed more light on this issue, the present correlational study examined the joint relation of several personal characteristics to people's motivation to comply with seven protective measures. Personal characteristics included age, gender, risk perception, the Big Five, the Dark Triad, conspiracy mentality, perceived locus of control, and general affect. Protective measures included social distancing, hygiene rules, wearing face masks, using a contact-tracing app, sharing one's infection status via the app, reducing physical contacts, and vaccinations. The study ran from 10 November 2020 to 29 December 2020. Based on a sample of 1,007 German-speaking participants, bivariate correlations and multiple regression analyses showed that personal characteristics are significantly linked to the motivation to comply with these measures. However, general affect, control beliefs, and basic personality traits play only a minor role. Age and gender showed some significant associations with protective measures. In contrast, protection motivation factors, in terms of perceived severity of and vulnerability to infection, and conspiracy mentality appear to be the major correlates of adopting protective behavior. The absolute motivation to comply with the measures also shows that hygiene rules and wearing face masks receive a higher average agreement than more personally intrusive measures such as physical contact restrictions and vaccinations. These results highlight that factors that are relevant to some measures may be irrelevant to other measures. Differences in people's personal characteristics should be considered in the design and communication of measures to support social acceptance and effectiveness. In this context, cognitive variables, which can be addressed by communication and education directly, seem to be more important than general affect and relatively time-invariant personality traits.

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“…First, our research investigated the effect of physical cleanliness on the psychological consequences, but metaphorical effects are often found to be bidirectional (e.g., Lee & Schwarz, ). This invites us in the future to examine whether the effect works vice versa, such as “clean slate effect” (Lee & Schwarz, ), that is, whether after taking or giving a bribe, people will relieve their mental burdens (e.g., guilty of committing a sin) by cleansing themselves (Kaspar & Cames, ). Second, besides metaphoric interpretations, there may be some other alternative explanations.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A clean self reduces bribery intent

Zheng

et al. 2017

Int J Psychol

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The present research aimed at investigating the effect of physical cleanliness on bribery intent and the moderating role of personal need for structure (PNS) on this relationship. In Study 1, we used questionnaires to establish the correlation between bodily cleanliness and bribery intent. In Study 2, we examined the effect by priming sense of self-cleanliness. Study 3 was conducted outside a public bath to test our finding that physical purity decreases bribery intent again; we further found that individuals with high PNS showed no reduction in bribery intent even after cleaning themselves. We thus connected physical cleanliness with the corruption field and improved our understanding of its underlying moderating mechanism.

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Cognitions about bodily purity attenuate stress perception

Cited by 5 publications

References 54 publications

Grounded procedures: A proximate mechanism for the psychology of cleansing and other physical actions

Grounded procedures: A proximate mechanism for the psychology of cleansing and other physical actions

Personality and Motivation to Comply With COVID-19 Protective Measures in Germany

A clean self reduces bribery intent

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