To provide practitioners with useful information about how to promote proenvironmental behavior (PEB), a meta-analysis was performed on 87 published reports containing 253 experimental treatments that measured an observed, not self-reported, behavioral outcome. Most studies combined multiple treatments, and this confounding precluded definitive conclusions about which individual treatments are most effective. Treatments that included cognitive dissonance, goal setting, social modeling, and prompts provided the overall largest effect sizes (Hedge’s g > 0.60). Further analyses indicated that different treatments have been more effective for certain behaviors. Although average effect sizes are based on small numbers of studies, effective combinations of treatments and behaviors are making it easy to recycle, setting goals for conserving gasoline, and modeling home energy conservation. The results also reveal several gaps in the literature that should guide further research, including both treatments and PEB that have not been tested.

The experimental manipulation of mortality salience (MS) represents one of the most widely used methodological procedures in social psychology, having been employed by terror management researchers in hundreds of studies over the last 20 years. One of the more provocative conclusions regarding this task is that it does not produce any reliable changes in self-reported affect, a view that we refer to as the affect-free claim. After reviewing 336 published studies that used the standard version of the MS task, we suggest that the evidence on which this claim is based may be less definitive than is commonly supposed. Moreover, we propose that the MS manipulation can, in fact, produce significant and meaningful changes in affect once one employs the appropriate measures and experimental design. In support of this position, we report 4 experiments, each of which demonstrates reliable activation of negative affect, especially with respect to fear-/terror-related sentiments. We discuss the implications of our findings for terror management theory as well as for research and theory on the measurement of mood and emotion.

Rally 'round the flag effects (J. E. Mueller, 1970) represent sudden and dramatically powerful situation-specific shifts in attitudes toward the American president. However, the extant literature has yet to fully clarify the nature of the psychological dynamics associated with this effect. These ambiguities reflect fundamental differences of opinion among scholars on some very basic questions such as whether overtly experienced emotion should mediate these attitudinal shifts or whether these changes reflect more general shifts in conservative ideology. Across 4 experiments, the authors sought to gain greater clarity on these and other important matters using a multimethod approach in which the authors varied whether participants viewed documentary footage of the 9/11 attacks (Experiments 1-2), generated autobiographical memories of that event (Experiment 3), or retrieved nonpolitical memories from their past (Experiment 4). The authors discuss the relevance of the present findings for theory and research across a variety of different theoretical and methodological paradigms, including social psychological models of threat, emotional appraisal models, and the political science literature.

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Social scientists have long known that threatening situations can have a powerful effect on sociopolitical attitudes. One of the more dramatic examples of this phenomenon is the “rally ’round the flag effect,” characterized by dramatic spikes in popularity of the American president. Previous models of rally effects have strongly emphasized the role of anxiety and the desire for security as explanations for these changes in support. In this article, we present a contrasting view, showing support for an anger-based conceptualization that builds upon earlier research on emotional appraisal. We discuss the relevance of our findings for theory and research across a variety of different paradigms in the social psychological and political science literature.