Recent publications by the School of Psychology
Staff members in the School of Psychology have published research articles in the first four months of the year 2022.
Dr Eun Hee Lee's paper titled “The effect of e-government website evaluation on user satisfaction and intention to use: The mediating role of warmth and competence judgment on government” looks at the relationship between factors predicting the usage of Korean e-government websites and two measures of actual usage of these websites, which were user satisfaction and intention to use. The researchers also looked at social perceptions of warmth and competence towards the government as mediating factors in this study. Using structural equation modelling, the researchers found that, among the factors predicting website usage, information suitability, transparency, and security were positively related to warmth, while service quality was positively related to competence. Warmth was also found to positively correlate with competence, which was found to influence user satisfaction, and in turn influence intention to use. Read on here: https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2022.2041701.
Dr Jessica Price recently contributed to an article titled “What second-language speakers can tell us about pragmatic processing”. The study investigated a linguistic expression known as scalar implicature, which is when an utterance is understood to contain an implicit meaning beyond the literal because the utterer had a reason not to use a more informative or stronger term. One example of this is that when listening to the phrase ‘Some cats meow’, the listener might pragmatically infer that ‘Some but not all cats meow’. Dr Price and her colleagues looked at how second-language (L2) speakers of English process scalar implicatures by getting participants to judge if sentences with scalar implicatures presented to them were logically true. These sentences contained both weak and strong (‘some’ vs ‘all’) forms of scalar implicatures. The researchers also measured the degree to which second-language proficiency and participants’ quantified theory of mind scores would affect these truth judgments. How participants comprehended scalar implicatures was largely predicted by their L2 proficiency and pragmatic-social skills. Read on here: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0263724.
Prof Steve Janssen's latest publication is titled “The eyes of the past: larger pupil size for autobiographical memories retrieved from field perspective”. The study aimed to investigate whether field perspective in memory retrieval, which is when we try to remember an event as if it was seen through our own eyes, can be evaluated with measuring pupil dilations in participants as they recall memories. Using cutting-edge eye-tracking technology, the researchers concluded that pupil dilation could be used as a physiological assessment of visual perspective during memory retrieval. Read on here: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10072-021-05297-w.
In another paper by Prof Steve and our former PhD student, Dr Michele Anne, the researchers shed light on the relationship between several factors that play a role in recollective experience. In a two-part study, they asked participants to recall positive and negative events and rate the intensity of these events. It was found that recollective experience mediates the relation between visual perspective and psychological closeness in autobiographical memory. The findings have useful implications for patients suffering from mental illnesses such as depression and PTSD. Read the paper here: https://doi.org/10.1080/20445911.2021.1936537
Posted on 12th April 2022