Helmholtz Centre Potsdam - GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences
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Know Thyself: the Role of Personality Discrepancy in predicting Self-Insight and Subjective Well-Being
The Big Five Personality Traits and discrepancies between various self-concepts, such as the Ideal Self and the Actual Self, and Self-Insight, are widely established predictors of Subjective Well-Being (SWB). But how does a discrepancy between the self-perception of the Big Five and the self-reported questionnaire-based Big Five traits relate to SWB? We aim to investigate if a discrepancy between Self-Perceived Personality (SPP) and Self-Reported Personality (SRP), that we call Personality Discrepancy (PD), is associated with SWB and Self-Insight.
We base our theoretical framework on Higgins’ Self-Discrepancy Theory, which claims that the discrepancies between the Actual Self, how one really is, and the Ideal Self, how one wishes to be, or the Ought Self, how one feels one should be, is negatively correlated with SWB. We want to investigate PD, which we operationalise as a discrepancy between two aspects of the Actual Self; first, the SRP, derived from a standard Big Five questionnaire, and second, the SPP, derived from self-judgements of the Big Five traits (as in how extraverted one perceives oneself). Since items of self-judgements capturing the SPP come with clear definitions of the traits, influences of other constructs like low Self-Esteem and the Ideal and Ought Self are expected to influence SPP. Since the SRP is regarded as the less biased part of Higgins’ Actual Self, the PD between SRP and SPP would consequently be an addition to Higgins’ Self-Discrepancy framework. Moreover, we suggest that PD should be related to Self-Insight, the ability to understand one's feelings, thoughts and behaviours, such that high Self-Insight equals low levels of PD. Self-Insight, just as self-discrepancy, has typically been strongly related to SWB. Considering the above introduced theoretical framework, we hypothesize that PD will predict both SWB and Self-Insight
The status quo effect on the justice evaluation of occupational earnings
This study tests the effect of two cognitive anchors that make the actual state of earnings salient on the justice evaluation of the earnings of occupations. The first one is the subjective status quo anchor that makes salient the actual earnings of an occupation perceived by an individual. The second one is the objective status quo anchor, that makes salient the actual state of earnings by providing objective information about the earnings of the occupations. The status quo effect on justice evaluations poses a cognitive mechanism according to which the normative judgments of individuals are driven by what they perceive is the actual state of the object evaluated – occupational earnings in this case. The justice evaluation of earnings is a subjective assessment of an observer who judges to what extent — if so — the earnings of a rewardee are perceived to be unjust or unfair. Past research (e.g., Schröder 2017, Trump, 2018) claims that a relevant factor driving these justice evaluations is the status quo of what is being evaluated, i.e., what is determines what ought to be (Homans 1961). According to this, the justice evaluations should be influenced by the perceived actual state of the earnings, with those conditions where actual earnings are made salient yielding smaller differences between actual and just earnings. There are two challenges for assessing the effect of the actual state of earnings on their justice evaluations. First, there is no perfect knowledge about the earnings of different occupations as people over and underestimate these. Second, earnings vary among people with the same occupation, yet respondents are asked to think about an average case. To account for these challenges, studies typically consider justice evaluations as the difference between respondent’s perceived earnings and the ones considered just
[project name anonymized], study 1: Impact of a professional development intervention on child-language outcomes assessed after one year
[Project name anonymized] is a researcher–sector partnership that will develop, implement, and assess the effects of an intervention aimed at preparing multiethnic ECEC centers to utilize their potential to support children’s language learning. Five city districts in Oslo participate in the project. The present study will examine whether the intervention improves child language outcomes assessed after one year.
Note that we have planned several publications from the project. These will examine additional hypotheses and/or intervention outcomes (e.g. effect of the intervention on the quality of caregiver-child interaction). For an overview of the [project name anonymized] intervention, study samples, and planned assessments, see OSF project page
A Longitudinal Study of Changes in Drinking Pattern during the COVID-19 Pandemic
On March 13th, 2020, the U.S. declared a national emergency concerning the novel coronavirus disease outbreak. Since then, the COVID-19 pandemic has been exerting a significant impact on people’s lives worldwide, leading to concerns about the emergence of mental health crises including increased alcohol use and dependence (Esterwood & Saeed, 2020). More research on alcohol use during the pandemic is much needed to better understand and prevent the development of alcohol use disorders among certain populations. In addition, the pandemic produced a “natural experiment” that would allow researchers to examine important factors related to drinking behaviors that would otherwise be unethical and unfeasible to study on a grand scale, such as prolonged social isolation and distress. Using a two-timepoint longitudinal dataset, the main goal of the current project is to investigate changes in drinking behaviors associated with the COVID-19 pandemic and factors that drive these changes.
The pandemic has caused considerable disruptions in people’s lives across multiple facets such as socioeconomic situations, physical health, psychological well-being, and social support. These disruptions led to changes in drinking behaviors via multiple pathways (Grossman et al., 2020). One of the most significant changes in people’s lives involved the implementation of quarantine and social distancing measures as an effort to stall the spread of the virus. Such efforts, and the closing of restaurants/bars at the earlier stage of the pandemic, could result in shifts in drinking context in terms of where individuals choose to consume alcohol (public vs. private settings) and with whom they drink (alone vs. with other people). Changes in drinking context have several ramifications that may be closely linked to drinking motives. According to findings from a cross-sectional study, heavy drinkers who endorsed higher enhancement and social motives reported lower alcohol consumption during lockdown (Bollen et al., 2021), which might be explained by the reduced availability of social drinking contexts during periods of heightened COVID-19 restrictions. On the other hand, individuals who endorse stronger coping motives are more likely to develop problematic drinking behaviors in solitary drinking context (Cole et al., 2011; Creswell, 2021). Therefore, coping motives might be a special risk factor for certain individuals during the pandemic, due to quarantine and increased stress. A recent study reported that coping motives were significantly greater post-social-distancing compared to pre-social-distancing in a sample of 833 individuals (McPhee et al., 2020). Furthermore, while controlling for pre-COVID drinking levels, people with stronger coping motives reported increased drinking post-COVID.. (Bollen et al., 2021; Wardell et al., 2020). Many studies have also looked at the link between negative affect (e.g., stress, anxiety, and depression) and alcohol intake as it exhibited specifically during the pandemic. Consistent with commonly-held beliefs, there is evidence to support that higher levels of negative affect experienced during the pandemic are linked to increased alcohol consumption (Callinan, Mojica‐Perez, et al., 2021; Callinan, Smit, et al., 2021; Lechner et al., 2020; Rodriguez et al., 2020).
Building on this body of research, the current project intends to investigate changes in drinking behaviors/problems with four themes: (1) overall changes of drinking behaviors pre and post COVID-19 pandemic; (2) social factors in changes in alcohol use; (3) shifts in drinking context; (4) negative affect and changes in alcohol use. Our dataset has multiple qualities that make it suitable for exploring these four themes. First, this is a two-timepoint longitudinal dataset with baseline collected pre-pandemic and follow-up collected both pre and – at various stages – post-pandemic. This would allow us to identify changes over time specifically linked with the pandemic Second, measures included in the study cover a range of variables that assess drinking outcomes, drinking setting, personality characteristics, drinking motives, and affective experience. Finally, during the baseline laboratory session, the study featured alcohol administration among dyads or triads, allowing the direct observation of alcohol’s socially enhancing effects and explore these in relation to longitudinal drinking outcomes both pre and post pandemic.
We hope that this project could (1) help understand and describe pathways that lead to changes in drinking behaviors after a natural disaster; (2) identify personal and environmental risk factors that lead to more problematic drinking behaviors later
Study 2 - replicating study 1
This study 2 is a replication of the registered study 1.
Internet Archive link: https://archive.org/details/osf-registrations-tzydw-v1
Registration DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/TZYDW
Registration document is attached
Children's production of quantifiers as sentence initial subjects in German and Italian
Bill et al. (2019) designed an experiment aimed at eliciting the German versions of the quantifiers "all" (i.e., alle) and "no" (i.e., kein/e) as sentence initial subjects. While German-speaking children produced the quantifier "alle" as a sentence initial subject, they did not produce the quantifier "kein" in the same position. Instead, they produced a sentence with "kein" as a non-sentence initial object. In contrast to children, German-speaking adult controls produced "no/kein" as a sentence initial subject. One way to account for this asymmetry in German-speaking children's negative quantifier productions is to say that producing a negative quantifier in sentence initial subject position involves reconstruction, which children avoid because of the associated processing cost. The aim of this experiment is to test this explanation by extending the experiment conducted by Bill et al. (2019) so that it also includes data from Italian speaking adults and children
Are collectivistic cultures more prosocial? A meta-analytic review on prosociality in the cross-national context (Pre-Analysis)
This document is a pre-analysis report and overview describing the topic and research question of my bachelor's thesis
Instrument to Assess Competencies in Evidence-Based Practice: A Scoping Review.
The evidence-based medicine (EBM) emerged in the 90s as a new tool that proposes medical professionals to make clinical decisions based on the best available scientific evidence, emphasizing the analysis of scientific information over non-systematized medical practice, intuition or pathophysiological reasonin