Matteo Maria Galizzi

Personalised normative feedback (PNF) is a form of social comparison intervention that is frequently applied across policy domains and in smartphone applications. However, despite the increasingly widespread adoption of this intervention typology, little is known about its detrimental emotional effects.In this large within-subject online experiment, we applied automatic facial coding to measure the short-run emotional impact of three PNF interventions similar to those implemented in the ‘wild’. Using pre-registered mixed-effects logistic regression models, we observed that the receipt of information that one’s behaviour is more negative than the norm is associated with more visible negative emotion. Moderation analysis suggested that these effects are no more pronounced for those who are sensitive to social comparison information, nor those who consider the interventions’ policy domains to be implicitly important.Notably, the evidence provided by this study may enhance social planners’ appreciation of the potential harmful impacts of PNF interventions, including distributional effects. Such enhanced appreciation may lead to more informed decisions about the situations in which PNF should or should not be implemented. Nonetheless, additional research is required to augment understanding of the psychological and demographic determinants of individual heterogeneity in emotional response to PNF interventions.

Introduction Relational agents are an innovative form of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that can help address waiting times for mental health services. They often appear in the form of chatbots that provide responses to patient questions via web or mobile interfaces, and they seek to build long-term relationships with patients. Effective self-disclosure is key for therapeutic outcomes, and we are therefore conducting a scoping review to map the literature on self-disclosure to relational agents for mental health. Methods Our work will follow guidance by the Joanna Briggs Institute and the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) Extension for Scoping Reviews. We will systematically search Ovid Medline, Ovid Embase, Ovid Emcare, Ovid PsycINFO, Ovid Global Health, EBSCO CINAHL, Scopus, Web of Science and ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Two reviewers will independently screen titles and abstracts as well as full texts of potential studies in Covidence. Both qualitative and quantitative studies from all countries published in English will be eligible. We will then provide a narrative synthesis of the results along with data tables. Ethics and dissemination Our scoping review does not require ethical approval. We will publish results in a peer-reviewed journal and during conference presentations. Trial registration number Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/wf4aq).

Community mobilisation efforts to prevent violence against women (VAW) in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are often premised on the idea that raising awareness of structural gender inequality motivates collective action. Experimental evidence for this assumption in LMICs remains scarce. We conducted a randomized field experiment with 720 women in informal settlements in Mumbai, India, embedded within the larger SNEHA-TARA trial of community mobilisation, which combined regular local group meetings of women, men, and adolescents with volunteer training over a three-to-four-year period. In our field experiment, participants were randomly assigned to one of three 30-45 minutes reflective sessions: on structural injustice, types of violence (control 1), or child nutrition (control 2). In the session on structural injustice, we used a game to stimulate discussion and reflection on gender inequality and its connection to VAW. We measured participant performance of three real-time collective action behaviours addressing VAW: contribution of a face photo to a poster campaign, contribution of a hand photo to the same campaign, or discussing VAW with a neighbour. Despite increasing recognition of gender inequality as a cause of VAW, the structural injustice session had no statistically significant impact on collective action relative to controls. By contrast, participation in NGO-led groups and volunteering was strongly associated with action, mediated by perceived efficacy and activist identity. Our findings challenge the assumption that awareness of injustice alone is sufficient to spark collective action and suggest the importance of fostering community identity and self-efficacy in mobilisation programmes. In contexts of entrenched patriarchy and normalisation of VAW, merely recognising injustice may be insufficient to catalyse collective action.

As societies transition towards a reduction of meat consumption and a shift to plant-based diets to address sustainability challenges, several studies highlight the importance of social norm interventions in promoting sustainable food choices. Nonetheless, syntheses of research on the effectiveness of such interventions are currently lacking, hampering our ability to inform and propose new research directions to increase sustainability in real-world contexts. In this paper, we review and evaluate the current body of evidence, focusing on studies targeting a reduction in animal-based food consumption and/or an increase in plant-based consumption, and specifically motivated as contributing to the climate change discourse. We searched five databases, theses repositories, and grey literature and contacted authors in the field to obtain manuscripts and pre-prints. Our search identified 23 articles including 34 separate studies meeting our eligibility criteria. Since 2017, we witnessed a rapid increase in research interest for trials exploring the effect of social norms to nudge individuals towards sustainable food choices. Overall, based on the results of this review, we conclude these interventions have had limited success and we identify opportunities for future research on this topic, such as identifying the most relevant referent group for various segments of the population.

Understanding risk tolerance is crucial for predicting and changing behavior across various domains, including health and safety, finance, and ethics. This remains true during a crisis, such as the COVID‐19 pandemic, and leads to a key question: Do current risk measures reliably predict risk‐taking in the drastically different context of a pandemic? The Domain Specific Risk‐Taking (DOSPERT) scale, one of the most widely used risk‐taking measures, assesses self‐reported risk‐taking in response to 30 risky situations across five domains. With the hypothetical risks of the DOSPERT being based on prepandemic circumstances, we estimate that three out of four of its risk‐taking situations were not possible due to preventive measures or did not reflect risk‐taking in times of COVID‐19. In addition, COVID‐19 brought forth new behaviors deemed risky. With an aim to better predict risk‐taking in times of a pandemic, we introduce the Pandemic DOSPERT (PDOSPERT). We summarize three preregistered online studies with 1254 UK participants to validate the scale against the original DOSPERT and three other common risk‐taking measures. We also test its ability to predict pandemic risk‐related behaviors at three points in time over 2 years. Overall, we find that the PDOSPERT scale significantly improves predictions for pandemic‐related risk behavior as compared to the original DOSPERT. In particular, the health/safety subscale is significantly and strongly associated with pandemic‐related risk behavior. We not only validate a pandemic‐specific risk task but also introduce a template for developing context‐ and domain‐sensitive measures for risk‐taking in the future.

Effective communication is essential for delivering public health messages and enabling behaviour change. Little is known about possible backfiring, or spillover effects, of COVID-19 vaccine messaging. In a study with n = 1,848 United Kingdom (UK) adults, we assess whether communication strategies that target vaccine hesitancy have any unintended, positive or negative, spillover effects on people's intention to engage in protective, compliance and prosocial behaviours. In June–July 2021, we conducted an online experiment to assess the potential spillover effects of three messages, emphasising (a) the medical benefits of COVID-19 vaccination, (b) the non-medical collective benefits of vaccination or (c) the non-medical individual benefits of holding a vaccination certificate. Exposure to different messages did not significantly affect people's intention to engage in protective, compliance, or prosocial behaviours. Instead, vaccination status (being vaccinated vs not) was positively associated with intentions to engage in protective, compliance and prosocial behaviours. Our results suggest that communication strategies that aim to increase vaccination uptake do not have any unintended effects on other health behaviours and vaccination campaigns can be tailored to specific populations to increase uptake and compliance.

Thoughts shape our experience, choice, and behaviour throughout the day. Yet the content of ‘penumbral thoughts’—first thoughts upon waking—has received very little research attention. Across seven independent samples (total N = 829), we used recall and reflection methods, solicited the same day, to understand what individuals think as they regain consciousness. These penumbral thoughts show remarkable thematic consistency: individuals were most likely to reflect on their somatic or psychological state, focus on temporal orientation, and prioritise waking actions. Survey results demonstrate that temporal and spatial orientation are dominated by the current time and the day ahead, rather than the past or other future timescales. Our results provide some insight into the order of priority in consciousness. We conclude that establishing one’s temporal position is important to the daily process of ‘rebooting’ conscious awareness.