As the COVID-19 pandemic and interventions intended to minimize its spread continue to impact daily life, personality research may help to address the different ways in which people respond to a major global health crisis. The present study assessed the role of dark personality traits in predicting different responses to the pandemic. A nationally representative sample of 412 Americans completed measures of the Dark Tetrad as well as perceptions of COVID-19 threat, emergency beliefs, and positive and negative affect in response to COVID-19. Narcissism and Machiavellianism predicted greater negative affect and perceptions of threat during the pandemic, while psychopathy predicted positive affect. Conversely, sadism predicted greater positive affect. Dark personality also showed some predictive ability in explaining pandemic-related behaviors (e.g., more frequent cleaning) but not others (e.g., social distancing). Our findings provide evidence for differences in how dark personality traits predict individual responses to global crises.

In a now-classic study by Srull and Wyer (1979), people who were exposed to phrases with hostile content subsequently judged a man as being more hostile. And this “hostile priming effect” has had a significant influence on the field of social cognition over the subsequent decades. However, a recent multi-lab collaborative study (McCarthy et al., 2018) that closely followed the methods described by Srull and Wyer (1979) found a hostile priming effect that was nearly zero, which casts doubt on whether these methods reliably produce an effect. To address some limitations with McCarthy et al. (2018), the current multi-site collaborative study included data collected from 29 labs. Each lab conducted a close replication (total N = 2,123) and a conceptual replication (total N = 2,579) of Srull and Wyer’s methods. The hostile priming effect for both the close replication (d = 0.09, 95% CI [-0.04, 0.22], z = 1.34, p = .16) and the conceptual replication (d = 0.05, 95% CI [-0.04, 0.15], z = 1.15, p = .58) were not significantly different from zero and, if the true effects are non-zero, were smaller than what most labs could feasibly and routinely detect. Despite our best efforts to produce favorable conditions for the effect to emerge, we did not detect a hostile priming effect. We suggest that researchers should not invest more resources into trying to detect a hostile priming effect using methods like those described in Srull and Wyer (1979).

To better understand the content and process of family building blogging, two interrelated studies took place. First, blogs with posts during a designated week were analyzed for content. Then, hosts of active blogs were invited to complete a survey on their blog content and reasons for blogging. Results of both content analysis and survey indicated a variety of content appearing in such blogs, with children, pregnancy, attempts to conceive, and negative emotional experiences related to those emerging as popular topics. To identify motivations for blogging about such content, a principal components analysis (PCA) suggested seven different blogging motivations: gaining attention, benefitting others, becoming a career blogger, entertaining others, documenting life events, self-expression, and forming an online social support network. To further explore blogging motivations, subgroups of bloggers (those having experienced infertility, those having experienced pregnancy loss, and those already parenting) were compared on their ratings of the seven blogging motivations with multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA). While results mostly supported consistency across subgroups in motivations, there was a significant effect for infertility experience on ratings for educating others and self-expression. This investigation represents the first known attempt to capture what information is included in the growing subgenre of family building blogs and what reasons inspire bloggers to create and maintain them.

No abstract

Objectives: The COVID-19 pandemic is an international health crisis that has caused unprecedented shifts in people’s environments and has threatened people’s wellbeing. The current study uses self-determination theory (SDT: 10) to understand how people were handling the pandemic, which proposes three basic psychological needs (autonomy, competence, and relatedness) are vital for human growth and thriving. Furthermore, we examined how people’s wellbeing and ill-being changed over the course of the pandemic.Methods: A sample of 193 American adults from around the country reported on their need satisfaction and frustration as well as well and ill-being at three time periods during the pandemic (April 2020, late July/early August 2020, and late January/early February 2021).Results: There was much variability in how people were handling the pandemic, but on average, wellbeing increased, and ill-being decreased over time. Consistent with SDT, the basic needs significantly predicted well and ill-being even during such unprecedented times of disruption.Conclusion: Our results suggest that public health officials should help individuals to focus on autonomy, competence, and relatedness behaviors during times of upheaval.