Lea Boecker

On the basis of two social‐affective frameworks, we posited that national football team performance (winning vs. losing) would impact spectators’ identities, affect and sociopolitical attitudes—including their intergroup attitudes (i.e., in‐group favouritism and multiculturalism) and societal perceptions (i.e., national optimism, perceived crisis severity, political trust and perceived racism). During the UEFA EURO 2024 tournament in Germany, we assessed residents ( N = 1012) from five participating countries before the tournament (baseline) and after each game. Confirming our preregistered hypotheses, national team wins led to stronger national identification, which, in turn, predicted more in‐group favouritism and less support for multiculturalism. Wins also predicted more positive affect, which then coincided with stronger national optimism. Contrary to our hypotheses, however, no direct effects emerged for spectators’ political trust, nor their perceptions of crisis severity and racism. These findings highlight ways in which national sports experiences can predict spectators’ collective identities, emotions and selected sociopolitical attitudes.

Major sporting events exert manifold influences on people’s intra- and interpersonal experiences. Preliminary findings suggest that they affect sexuality, but the evidence has been limited to population-level outcomes such as birth rates. Direct, individual-level evidence and research on underlying processes are missing. In this preregistered study, we investigated the relationship between the success of national men’s soccer teams during the UEFA EURO 2024 tournament and the frequency of sexual events in daily life, with match results serving as natural within-person, quasi-experimental manipulations. Participants from five European countries ( N = 952, k = 3,627 reports) reported more cognitive, affective, and behavioral sexual events following their national teams’ wins (vs. losses). These effects were particularly pronounced among participants who identified more strongly as fans and were partly explained by higher well-being after wins. We discuss the far-reaching impact of sporting events on sexuality in daily life and future research directions.

In an experience-sampling study, we examined how emotions stemming from social comparisons influence daily motivation. Analyzing 2,976 daily real-world social comparisons, we examined the interplay of comparison direction (upward vs. downward) and extremity (from moderate to extreme), two pleasant emotions (schadenfreude and happy-for-ness), two unpleasant emotions (benign envy, malicious envy), three motivational tendencies (pushing, coasting, and disengagement), and effort intentions. The relationships between comparison extremity and emotions were characterized by nonlinearity: Benign envy and happy-for-ness peaked with moderate upward comparisons, whereas malicious envy and schadenfreude increased especially with extreme upward and downward comparisons. Concerning motivational functioning, results suggest that benign envy and happy-for-ness promote motivation (i.e., associated with pushing and effort), whereas malicious envy and schadenfreude do not (i.e., linked to disengagement and coasting), with effects contingent on comparison extremity. This work emphasizes how distinct social emotions emerge as a function of social comparison extremity and their dynamic role in everyday motivation.

The outcome of the 2020 U.S. election between Trump and Biden evoked strong emotions. In U.S. American (Study 1; N = 405) and German (Study 2; N = 123) samples, we investigated how observers' group membership (i.e. political orientation) and the social rank attainment of both candidates (i.e. dominance vs. prestige) predicted emotional reactions. Trump was generally perceived as more dominant, and Biden as more prestigious. However, perceptions of social rank attainment differed depending on the observers' political orientation, either matching or not matching with the leaders (i.e. Republicans and Democrats, respectively). The candidate who did not share the participants' political orientation was perceived as less prestigious and more dominant and elicited stronger contrastive emotions (i.e. schadenfreude, malicious envy) and weaker assimilative emotions (i.e. happy-for-ness, sympathy, anger), and vice versa. Crucially, dominance and prestige perceptions explained variance in the emotional reactions of more conservative and more liberal participants. Prestige positively predicted assimilative emotions and dominance contrastive emotions. Our work advances theorising by providing evidence that dominance and prestige perceptions contribute to the elicitation of various emotions. Furthermore, it suggests that prestige and dominance are not fixed characteristics of liberal and conservative leaders but depend on the observers' group membership.

Effectively reducing climate change requires marked, global behavior change. However, it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and an effortful tree-planting behavioral task. Across 59,440 participants from 63 countries, the interventions’ effectiveness was small, largely limited to nonclimate skeptics, and differed across outcomes: Beliefs were strengthened mostly by decreasing psychological distance (by 2.3%), policy support by writing a letter to a future-generation member (2.6%), information sharing by negative emotion induction (12.1%), and no intervention increased the more effortful behavior—several interventions even reduced tree planting. Last, the effects of each intervention differed depending on people’s initial climate beliefs. These findings suggest that the impact of behavioral climate interventions varies across audiences and target behaviors.

Objective: Maintaining safe physical distance is paramount to slowing the spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)/coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), particularly indoors (e.g., while shopping). We used a health message intervention to motivate grocery store customers to engage in distancing behavior. Method: In an online experiment (N = 206) and a field experiment (N = 268; preregistered on OSF), we used a 2 x 2 between-subjects design and manipulated health messages (a) as gain-framed ("to foster health") versus loss-framed ("it could be deadly") and (b) as targeting different beneficiaries (customers themselves versus fellow citizens). In the field experiment, observers rated customers' distancing behavior during a random confederate encounter and a subsequent interview. We assessed customers' perceptions of risk and worry, perspective-taking, and state optimism as concurrent psychological processes to investigate customers' distancing behavior in correlational mediation analyses. Results: Contrary to previous research, the intervention was more effective when pertaining to customers themselves than to their fellow citizens (Experiments 1-2). In addition, loss-framed messages were more effective than gain-framed ones (Experiment 2). The former behavioral effect was accompanied (and statistically mediated) by a concurrent psychological increase in customers' perceived risk and worry. Conclusions: Owing to their low cost and easy implementation, health messages constitute a promising means to promote physical distancing. Our results show that their effectiveness significantly depends on the framing and target of the health behavior.

Individuals prefer letter strings whose consonantal articulation spots move from the front of the mouth to the back (e.g., BAKA, inward) over those with a reversed consonant order (e.g., KABA, outward), the so-called in–out effect. The present research explores whether individuals hold an internal standard or scheme of consonant order that triggers this effect. If this were the case, the in–out effect should already occur in one-trial between-subjects designs. If not, the in–out effect should emerge over the course of trials in within-subjects designs. In Experiments 1a–e (1b–e preregistered; total N = 2973; German, English, and Portuguese samples) employing a one-trial between-subjects design, no in–out effect was found. In Experiment 2 (N = 253), employing within-subjects designs with either 1, 5, 10, 30, or 50 trials per consonant order category (inward vs. outward), the in–out effect was absent in the first trial, but already surfaced for the first 2 trials, reached significance within the first 10 trials and a solid plateau within the first 20 trials. Of the four theoretical explanations, the present evidence favors the fluency/frequency and letter-position accounts and is at odds with the eating-related embodiment and easy-first accounts.

When confronted with others' fortunes and misfortunes, emotional reactions can take various forms-ranging from assimilative (happy-for-ness, sympathy) to contrastive emotions (envy, schadenfreude) and from prosocial (reward) to antisocial behavior (punish). We systematically tested how social comparisons shape reactions to others' (mis)fortunes with a newly developed paradigm with which we investigated envy, happy-for-ness, schadenfreude, and sympathy in a joint rigorous experimental setup, along with individuals' ensuing behavioral reactions. In nine experiments (N_total = 1,827), (a) participants' rankings on a comparison dimension relative to other people and (b) others' (mis)fortunes (changes in relative rankings) jointly determined how much individuals experienced the emotions. Upward comparisons increased envy and schadenfreude, and downward comparisons increased sympathy and happy-for-ness, relative to lateral comparisons. When the relevance of comparison standards (Experiment 4a) or the comparison domain (Experiment 4b) was low, or when participants did not have their own reference point for comparison (Experiment 4c), the effect of comparison direction on emotions was attenuated. Emotions also predicted the ensuing behavior: Envy and schadenfreude predicted less, whereas happy-for-ness and sympathy predicted more prosocial behavior (Experiments 5 and 6). Overall, the strongest social comparison effects occurred for envy and sympathy, followed by schadenfreude and happy-for-ness. The data suggest that envy and sympathy arise when comparative concerns are threatened, and happy-for-ness and schadenfreude arise when they are satisfied (because inequality increases vs. decreases, respectively) and predict behavior aimed at dealing with these concerns. We discuss implications for the function of fortunes-of-others emotions, social comparison theory, inequity aversion, and prospect theory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).